Like Death Page 6

  Tall, strong, heavy, flushed, invariably talking in a loud voice, she was deemed to have a grand manner because nothing disconcerted her; she dared to say anything and to patronize the whole world: dethroned princes with her receptions in their honor and Almighty God by her liberality to the clergy and her gifts to the churches.

  Musadieu resumed. “Is the duchess aware that the murderer of Marie Lambourg has been arrested?”

  Her interest immediately aroused, the duchess replied, “No, tell me about it.” And he related the details. Musadieu was tall, very lean, and wore a white waistcoat with tiny diamonds for shirt buttons; he spoke without making a single gesture, his correct manner allowing him to make the daring observations that were his specialty. Very nearsighted, he seemed, despite his huge pince-nez, never to recognize anyone at all, and when he sat down the entire bone structure of his body accommodated itself to the curves of the armchair he had chosen, so that his folded limbs appeared to sink down as if his spinal column were made of rubber; his crossed legs looked like two rolled ribbons; and from his long arms, supported by those of the chair, dangled the interminable fingers of his pale hands. His artistically dyed hair and mustache, with white locks skillfully untouched, were the subject of countless standing jokes.

  While he was explaining to the duchess that the murdered courtesan’s jewels had been a gift from the presumed murderer to another creature of the same profession, the double doors of the grand salon opened, this time to their full extent in order to display two blond women in identical gowns of cream Mechlin lace, as like as two sisters of quite different ages, one a little too mature, the other a little too young, one a little too rotund, the other a little too thin, their arms encircling each other’s waists as they crossed the room, smiling happily to everyone they passed.

  People exclaimed, people applauded. No one except Olivier Bertin had been aware of Annette de Guilleroy’s return, and the young girl’s appearance beside her mother, who at a little distance seemed almost as fresh and even more beautiful—for like a flower in full bloom she hadn’t yet lost her brilliance, while the child, just blossoming, was only beginning to be pretty—made them both look charming. The duchess was delighted, clapping her hands and exclaiming, “Lord! How lovely they are, and how enchanting to see them together like that! Do look, Monsieur de Musadieu, see how closely they resemble each other!”

  People made comparisons; two versions were insisted on almost immediately. According to Musadieu and the Corbelles and Count de Guilleroy, the countess and her daughter resembled each other only in complexion, hair, and especially the eyes, which showed the same black specks, as if infinitesimal drops of ink had spattered the blue iris—but soon, when the girl had become a woman, the great resemblance would almost disappear.

  According to the duchess and Olivier Bertin, on the contrary, the two women were alike in every detail, the disparity in their ages constituting the only difference. As the painter kept insisting, “Can’t you see how the child’s changed in the last three years? I’d never have recognized her—I’ll have to stop saying tu to her.”

  The countess laughed. “Ah, that’ll be the day, when I hear you say vous to Annette.”

  The young lady, whose future wickedness was already perceptible under her timidly saucy airs, replied, “It’s I who’ll no longer dare say tu to monsieur.”

  Her mother smiled. “That’s a bad habit worth keeping. It’s one I’ll permit. You’ll become acquainted again soon enough.”

  But Annette shook her head. “No, no. I’d be embarrassed.”

  The duchess gave her a hug and examined the girl like an interested expert. “Look at me, child. Yes, just like that. The same way your mother does it. You’ll be just as good soon enough, once you’ve acquired some . . . brilliance. You must gain a certain roundness—not much, but a little: you’re a tiny bit skinny.”

  The countess exclaimed, “Oh, don’t tell her that!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so pleasant being thin. I’m going to diet for that very reason.”

  But Madame de Mortemain was annoyed at being contradicted, forgetting in the heat of her righteousness the presence of a little girl. “Oh yes, it’s always like that. You’re always in fashion with bones, because they look better in clothes than flesh does. I belong to the generation of fat women. Today’s the generation of lean women. It always makes me think of the cows in Egypt. I really don’t understand men who put up with your carcasses. In my day, they demanded something better, but nowadays it’s everything for the dressmaker, nothing for intimacy.”

  She paused, amid the smiles, and then continued, “Look at your mama, child. She looks just right. Imitate her.”

  They passed into the dining room. When everyone was seated, Musadieu continued the discussion. “I’d say that men ought to be thin because they’re made for exercises that require skill and agility, incompatible with bellies. Women’s situation is somewhat different. Don’t you think so, Corbelle?”

  Corbelle was confused. The duchess was stout and his own wife more than thin. But the baroness took her husband’s side and resolutely pronounced in favor of sveltesse. Last year she’d been obliged to struggle against an opposite tendency, which she soon brought under control.

  “Tell us what you did,” urged Madame de Guilleroy.

  And the baroness explained the method used by elegant women of the day. No drinking while eating. One hour after meals only, a cup of tea, very hot, may be taken. This succeeds in every case, and she cited astonishing examples of large women who in three months had become thinner than knife blades.

  Exasperated, the duchess exclaimed, “Heavens! How foolish to torture oneself like that! You may drink nothing, absolutely nothing, not even champagne! Now, Bertin, you’re an artist, what do you think?”

  “Lord, madame! I’m a painter, I drape materials, fat or thin makes no difference to me. If I were a sculptor, I might complain.”

  “But you’re a man. Which do you prefer?”

  “I? A certain elegance . . . rather well fed. What my cook calls a good little corn-fed chicken. Not fat, but full and fine.”

  The comparison produced laughter; but the countess, incredulous, looked at her daughter and murmured, “No, it’s fine to be thin. Women who keep thin don’t grow old.”

  Which point was further discussed, and the company was divided. Almost everyone, however, more or less agreed on this: A person who was very fat must not grow thin too quickly.

  This observation produced a review of women known in society, and to further debates on their grace, their chic, and their beauty. Musadieu considered the blond Marquise de Lochrist incomparably charming, while Bertin esteemed without rival Madame de Mandelière, a brunette with a low forehead, dark eyes, and a rather large mouth in which her teeth seemed to shine. He was sitting beside the young girl, and suddenly turning toward her said, “Listen carefully, Nanette. You’ll hear everything we’re saying at least once a week until you’re old. In eight days you’ll know by heart everything society thinks about politics, women, theater, and all the rest. All it takes is an occasional change of names, of persons, and of titles of works from time to time. Once you’ve heard us disclose and defend our opinions, you’ll quietly choose your own from among those one must have, and then you’ll have no need to think of anything, ever. All you’ll have to do is rest.”

  The girl, without replying, looked up at him with a mischievous glance that revealed a young, active intelligence held in check and ready to escape.

  But the duchess and Musadieu, who played with ideas as one plays ball, did not perceive that they kept the same ones constantly rebounding in the name of human thought.

  Then Bertin tried to prove how valueless, stale, and indifferent the intelligence of fashionable people was, and how shallow their beliefs were, and how questionable their tastes.

  Carried away by one of those outbursts of indignation, half sincere and half factitious, induced originally by a desire to be e
loquent and suddenly aroused by the stirring of a clear judgment ordinarily obscured by benevolence, he demonstrated how people whose sole occupation in life is to pay visits and dine in town find themselves becoming, by irresistible fatality, graceful but commonplace beings, vaguely agitated by superficial cares, beliefs, and appetites.

  He showed that they had no depth, no seriousness or sincerity, that their intellectual culture is just a name and their erudition a kind of varnish; that they remain, in short, manikins who give the illusion and imitate the gestures of superior beings—which they are not. He proved that the frail roots of their instincts fed on conventions instead of truths, and that they really loved nothing, that the luxury of their existence was the satisfaction of vanity and not the indulgence of some exquisite need of their bodies, for their kitchens were mediocre, their wines bad and very expensive.

  They live, he said, aside from everything, seeing nothing, penetrating nothing, ignorant of science they’ve never studied, ignorant of nature at which they don’t know how to look, remote from happiness and incapable of seizing enjoyment; remote from art which they discuss without having discovered it and even without believing in it, for they’re quite ignorant of the intoxication that comes from tasting the joys of life and intelligence. They’re quite incapable of a supreme love for anything, or of an interest in any pursuit deep enough to be ultimately illuminated by the joy of comprehension.

  Baron de Corbelle decided it devolved upon him to undertake the defense of good company. He did so with inconsistent and irrefutable arguments that melted in the presence of reason like snow before the fire, the absurd and triumphant arguments of a country curate convinced he’s proving the existence of God. Finally he compared fashionable society to racehorses, which are quite useless, it’s true, but are nevertheless the glory of horseflesh.

  Bertin, uncomfortable in this adversary’s presence, was disdainfully and politely silent. But finally the baron’s inanity triumphed, and adroitly interrupting the discourse, he recounted, from waking to sleeping, the life of a society man, without omitting anything.

  All the details, skillfully put together, created an irresistibly comic silhouette. You saw the gentleman dressed by his valet, expressing first of all to the hairdresser who had come to shave him a few general ideas, then, taking his morning walk, questioning the grooms about the health of the horses, then rotating through the avenues of the Bois, oppressed with the one task of exchanging salutations, then breakfasting opposite his wife and breaking silence only to enumerate the names of the persons met that morning, continuing till evening from drawing room to drawing room, refreshing his intelligence by contact with his fellows and dining at last with a prince with whom the temperature of the whole of Europe was discussed, to finish the evening in the greenroom at the opera, where his timid pretensions of excess were innocently satisfied by the appearance of very questionable surroundings.

  The portrait was so accurate, without the irony offending anyone, that laughter convulsed the table. The duchess, her corpulence shaken by suppressed mirth, let her amusement escape in discrete little shudders. “No, really, you’re too funny, you’ll make me die laughing.”

  Bertin, thoroughly aroused, answered, “Oh, madame, in society no one dies of laughter. One scarcely laughs. One condescends, in good taste, to appear amused and to pretend to laugh. The appearance is imitated pretty well, but the thing is never done. Go to the people’s theaters; there you’ll see laughter. Go to the bourgeois, who enjoy themselves; you’ll see them choke with laughter. Go to the soldiers’ dormitories; there you’ll see men choking, eyes full of tears, rolling on their beds and splitting their sides at some wag’s jokes. But in our drawing rooms no one laughs. I promise you we simulate everything, even laughter.”

  Musadieu stopped him. “Excuse me, you are severe. After all, you yourself don’t seem to despise this society you scoff at so readily.”

  Bertin smiled. “Why, I love it.”

  “How then?”

  “I despise myself a bit—like a mongrel of doubtful breeding.”

  “That’s all just posing,” said the duchess.

  And as he disclaimed posing, she ended the discussion by declaring that all artists want everyone to believe that the moon’s made of green cheese. Whereupon the conversation became general, touching upon everything, banal and good-natured, friendly and discriminating, and as the dinner came to an end, the countess suddenly exclaimed, pointing to the full glasses in front of her, “There. I’ve drunk nothing, absolutely nothing, not a drop. Let’s see if I grow thin.”

  The duchess, furious, tried to make her drink a glass or two of mineral water, to no avail, and she exclaimed, “What nonsense! Her daughter’s going to turn her head. I beg of you, Guilleroy, save your wife from such folly!”

  The count, who was explaining to Musadieu the system of a threshing machine invented in America, hadn’t heard. “What folly is that, duchess?”

  “The folly of wanting to be thin.”

  He gave his wife a glance of benevolent indifference. “You know, I’ve never contracted the habit of thwarting her.”

  The countess had stood up, taking her neighbor’s arm; the count offered his to the duchess, and they passed into the grand salon, the boudoir at the end being reserved for daily use.

  It was a vast and brightly lit apartment; on all four walls the large pale blue silk panels in antique patterns, enclosed in gold and white frames, took on a soft, lunar tint under the light of the lamps and the chandelier. In the center of the principal panel, Olivier Bertin’s portrait of the countess seemed to inhabit, indeed to animate, the apartment. It was at home there, mingling with the very air of the room its youthful smile, the charm of its glance, the airy grace of its fair hair. It had become almost a custom, a sort of ceremonial of courtesy—like the sign of the cross on entering a church—to compliment the model on the painter’s work whenever anyone passed in front of it.

  Musadieu never failed. The opinion of a connoisseur commissioned by the state having the value of official sanction, he made it his duty to affirm with frequency and emphasis the superiority of the painting. “Really,” he said, “that’s the most beautiful portrait I know. It contains prodigious life.”

  The Count de Guilleroy, convinced by the habit of hearing the canvas praised that he possessed a masterpiece, approached his guest to supplement his view, and for several minutes they concentrated all the current formulas and techniques that celebrated the apparent and intentional qualities of this painting sacred to the description of its apparent and intentional merits.

  All eyes, raised toward the wall, appeared ravished with admiration, and Olivier Bertin, accustomed to these praises to which he no longer paid more attention than to questions of health at a chance meeting in the street, nevertheless adjusted the reflector lamp set in front of the painting to throw more light upon it, since it had been placed slightly askew.

  Then they sat down, and as the count approached the duchess she said to him, “I believe my nephew is calling for me, but meanwhile may I ask you for a cup of tea.”

  Their wishes had for some time past been mutually understood, without any exchange of confidence or even an insinuation.

  The brother of the Duchess de Mortemain, the Marquis de Farandal, after having nearly ruined himself gambling, had died in consequence of a fall from a horse, leaving a widow and a son. This young man was now twenty-eight years old, and was one of the most coveted leaders of the cotillion in Europe, for he was sometimes summoned to Vienna or London to crown with a waltz some princely ball. Although possessing scarcely any fortune, he remained by his position, his family, his name, and his almost royal connections one of the most popular and envied men in Paris.

  It was necessary to end this reveling stage of youthful glory, dancing and sportive, and after accomplishing a rich, a very rich marriage, to let political succeed social successes. As soon as he should be a deputy the marquis would become, ipso facto, one of the pillars of the futu
re throne, one of the counselors of the king, one of the leaders of the party.

  The duchess, who was well informed, knew the extent of Count de Guilleroy’s enormous fortune, as he had been prudently hoarding it, living in a simple apartment when he might have existed en grand seigneur in one of the finest mansions of Paris. She knew about his always successful speculations, his keen scent as a financier, his share in the most fruitful operations of the past ten years, and she had lately thought of effecting the union of her nephew to the daughter of the Norman deputy, to whom this marriage would have an overwhelming influence with the princely contingent of the aristocratic class. Guilleroy, who had made a rich marriage and greatly increased a large personal fortune by his skill, was now nursing other ambitions.

  He believed in the return of the king, and intended on that day to be in a position to derive the highest personal advantage from that event.

  As a simple deputy, he counted for little enough. As the father-in-law of the Marquis de Farandal, whose ancestors had been faithful and chosen familiars of the royal house of France, he rose to first rank.

  Furthermore the duchess’s friendship with his wife gave to that union a character of intimacy, and lest some other young girl be found who suddenly pleased the marquis, he had brought his own daughter home in order to hasten events.

  Madame de Mortemain, foreseeing and guessing his plans, lent them a silent complicity, and on that very day, though she had not been forewarned of Annette’s expected return, had asked her nephew to meet her at the Guilleroys’ so that he might become gradually accustomed to crossing that threshold frequently.

  For the first time the count and the duchess referred to their desires in ambiguous words, and when they separated a treaty had been concluded.