Like Death Page 7

  There was laughter at the other end of the salon. Monsieur de Musadieu was telling the Baroness de Corbelle about the presentation of a Negro embassy to the president of the Republic, when the Marquis de Farandal was announced.

  He appeared in the doorway and stopped. By a swift and familiar arm movement he placed a monocle in his right eye as if to reconnoiter the room he was about to enter, but possibly to give the people already there an opportunity to see him and note his entrance. Then, with an imperceptible motion of cheek and eyebrow, he let the little glass circle drop to the end of its black silk chain and quickly advanced toward Madame de Guilleroy, whose outstretched hand he kissed, bowing very low. He greeted his aunt in the same manner and shook hands with the rest, going from one to another with elegant ease.

  He was a big fellow with a red mustache, already a little bald, with the figure of an officer and the gait of an English sportsman. You felt, to look at him, that all his limbs were better trained than his head, and that his tastes lay entirely in the field of athletic development. Yet he had some kind of knowledge, for he had learned and was still learning every day with a great strength of spirit, much that would be very useful later—history, dwelling with emphasis on the dates and gathering the lesson of events and the elementary notions of political economy necessary for a deputy, the ABCs of sociology for the use of the ruling classes.

  Musadieu esteemed him, saying, “He will be a valuable man.” Bertin appreciated his skill and vigor; they frequented the same fencing studio, often hunted together, and met riding in the avenues of the Bois. Hence between them there had sprung up that sympathy of tastes in common, that instinctive freemasonry created between two men by a ready-made subject of conversation, as agreeable to one as to the other.

  When the marquis was presented to Annette de Guilleroy, a suspicion of his aunt’s scheme immediately entered his mind, and after his introductory bows he looked the young girl over like a connoisseur who, when testing a wine a little too new, could almost infallibly predict its ultimate savor.

  He exchanged only a few insignificant remarks with her, and then sat down with the Baroness de Corbelle, chattering in an undertone.

  The party retired early, and when all the guests had left and the child had been put to bed, the lamps extinguished, the servants asleep in their quarters, Count de Guilleroy walked across the salon, lit now by only two candles, to detain the countess a few minutes longer, for she was getting very drowsy in her armchair, to reveal his hopes, to determine the attitudes they would assume, to forecast all the chances and precautions to be taken.

  It was late when he retired, charmed with his evening, and murmuring, “I believe our business is settled.”

  3

  WHEN WILL you come, my friend? I haven’t caught sight of you for three days, which seems a long while to me. My daughter keeps me busy, of course, but you know I can’t do without you any longer.

  The painter, who was making sketches, always looking for a new subject, read the countess’s note over again, then opening a desk drawer, laid it on top of a pile of other communications from her that had accumulated since the beginning of their affair.

  Thanks to the chances afforded by the kind of life they led, they had grown used to seeing each other almost daily. Now and then she came to him, and without interrupting his work would sit for an hour or two in the armchair she had formerly occupied for her portrait. But since she was rather apprehensive about the remarks of his household, she preferred to receive him at her home or to meet him in some salon or other for their daily intercourse, that small change of love affairs. These meetings would be arranged ahead of time, and always seemed quite natural to Monsieur de Guilleroy.

  Twice a week at least, the painter dined at the countess’s with a few friends; Mondays he regularly paid his respects at her box at the Opéra; then they would agree to meet at somebody’s house, where chance brought them at the same hour. He knew which evenings she stayed home and stopped in then for a cup of tea, feeling quite at home so close to her gown, so tenderly and surely lodged in that seasoned affection, so comfortable in the habit of finding her somewhere, of spending a few minutes beside her, exchanging a few words, trading a few thoughts, that although the intense flame of his affection had long since been appeased, he felt an incessant need to be seeing her.

  The longing for family ties, for an animated, tenanted household, for meals together, for evenings of tireless conversation with old and familiar acquaintances, for that intimacy which slumbers in every human heart and which every old bachelor carries from door to door, to the houses of his friends, where he installs a piece of himself, all this adds an element of selfishness to his affection. In this house where he was loved, cherished, and spoiled, where he found everything, he could still rest and indulge his solitude.

  For three days he had seen nothing of his friends, whose daughter’s return must have greatly disorganized them, and he was already feeling lonesome, even a little affronted that they hadn’t summoned him sooner, though reluctant to call their attention to himself.

  The countess’s letter roused him like a whiplash. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he immediately decided to see her before she went out.

  His valet promptly answered the ring of his bell.

  “What’s the weather, Joseph?”

  “Fine, sir, very fine.”

  “Warm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “White waistcoat, blue jacket, gray hat.”

  He invariably dressed with great elegance, and though his tailor was always correct, the very way he wore his clothes, the way he walked, with a white waistcoat tightly buttoned over his belly and a soft gray high-crowned hat tipped back a little, seemed to reveal at once the artist and the bachelor.

  When he arrived at the countess’s he was informed that she was dressing for a drive in the Bois. This annoyed him a bit, but of course he waited.

  As was his habit, he began pacing back and forth across the salon from one chair to another or from the walls to the windows, in the huge room darkened by heavy curtains. The small end tables, all on gilded feet, held a variety of charming and costly bibelots arranged in studied disorder: little antique boxes covered in chiseled gold, miniature snuffboxes, ivory statuettes, modern objects of unpolished silver, severely absurd in the English taste, a tiny kitchen stove with a cat on top of it drinking out of a saucepan, a cigarette case in the shape of a loaf of bread, a coffeepot for matches, and in a casket a complete set of doll jewelry—necklace, bracelets, rings, brooches, and earrings set with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies—a microscopic fantasy apparently executed by Lilliputian jewelers.

  From time to time he touched an object he had given the countess on some anniversary, picked it up, handled it with a dreamy indifference, then put it back in its place.

  In a corner, several luxuriously bound but rarely opened books were at hand on a round tray in front of a cozy sofa. There was also a somewhat rumpled Revue des deux mondes with dog-eared pages, apparently read and reread, as well as other publications like Arts modernes, still uncut and apparently kept solely on account of the yearly subscription price of four hundred francs, as well as a thin blue booklet that launched the latest poets, called Les Énervés.

  Between the windows stood the countess’s writing desk, a coquettish last-century piece at which she wrote her answers to the hurried questions handed to her during calls. Several works remained on this bureau, familiar books, those ensigns of woman’s mind and heart—Musset, Manon Lescaut, Werther—then, to show one was not altogether unacquainted with the complex sensations and the mysteries of psychology, Les Fleurs du mal, Le Rouge et le noir, and also the Goncourts’ La Femme au XVIIIe siècle.

  Beside these volumes lay a charming hand mirror, a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art, the glass of which was fastened to a square of embroidered velvet where you could also admire a curious gold-and-silver design.

  Bertin picked it up and studied his face. In recen
t years he had aged terribly, and although he found his countenance more original than it used to be, he was saddened by his wrinkles and by the weight of his cheeks.

  A door opened behind him.

  “Good morning, Monsieur Bertin,” said Annette.

  “Good morning, child. Are you well?”

  “Very well. And you, monsieur?”

  “Then it’s true, you no longer address me as tu?”

  “Well, it really embarrasses me now.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “No, it’s true. You intimidate me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . because you’re neither young enough nor old enough.”

  The painter laughed. “Against such reasoning I won’t insist.”

  A sudden blush deluged her white skin to the roots of her hair, and she replied with some confusion, “Maman asked me to tell you she would be down right away, and to ask if you’d accompany us to the Bois de Boulogne.”

  “Of course. Just the two of you?”

  “No—with the Duchess de Mortemain.”

  “Certainly, I’ll join you.”

  “Then you’ll let me go and put on my hat?”

  “Go, my child. . . .”

  As she left the room the countess came in, veiled and ready to leave. She held out her hands. “We don’t see you anymore, Olivier. What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you in days like these.”

  The way she said “Olivier” expressed all her reproaches and all her attachment.

  “You’re the best woman in the world,” he said, moved by the sound of his name.

  That little lovers’ quarrel settled, she continued in her usual tone of voice, “We’re to call for the duchess at her place, after which we’ll take a turn around the Bois. We have to show everything to Nanette.”

  The landau was waiting under the porte cochere. Bertin took a seat facing the two ladies, and the carriage set off amid the noise of the horses’ hooves pawing under the echoing archway.

  Along the grand boulevard down toward La Madeleine, all the gaiety of the new springtime seemed to have descended from the sky upon human life. The warm air and the sun gave to men a holiday appearance and to women the look of love, making the urchins caper about with the white-liveried scullions who had left their baskets on the benches for a frolic with their brothers. The dogs seemed in a hurry, the concierges’ canaries were singing wildly, and only the old horses hitched to their cabs continued at their exhausted gait, their moribund trot.

  The countess murmured, “Oh what a lovely day—how good it feels to be alive!”

  The painter was contemplating, under strong daylight, both mother and daughter, one after the other. Certainly they were different, yet at the same time so alike that one was evidently a continuation of the other—the same blood, the same flesh, animated by the same life. Their eyes, especially those blue eyes flecked with tiny black specks—a fresh blue in the daughter, a little faded in the mother—looked at him with such similarity of expression when he spoke to them that he expected to hear them make the same answers. And he was a little surprised to find, as he made them joke and laugh, that here before him were two very distinct women, one who had lived and one who was beginning to live. No, he couldn’t see what would become of that child when her young mind, influenced by tastes and instincts still dormant, had opened and expanded amid the events of the world. Here was a pretty little new person, ready for chances and for love, ignored and ignoring, who sailed out of port like a new vessel, even as her mother was returning, having traversed existence, having loved!

  He was moved by the thought that it was he whom she had chosen and whom she still preferred, this still-lovely woman rocked in that landau, in the warm spring air. As his gratitude sought expression in a glance she surely understood, he believed he felt her thanks in a rustle of her gown. In his turn, he murmured, “Oh yes, such a lovely day!”

  Once they had called for the duchess in the rue de Varenne, they spun along toward Les Invalides, crossed the Seine, and turned into the avenue des Champs-Élysées, heading for the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile amid a flood of carriages.

  The young girl had taken a seat beside Olivier, riding backward, her eyes wide in eager wonder at the stream of vehicles surrounding them. From time to time, when the duchess and the countess responded to a salutation by nodding their heads, she asked, “Who was that?” and Olivier would say, “the Pontaiglins,” or “the Puicelci,” or “the Countess of Lochrist,” or “the beautiful Madame de Mandelière.”

  Then they were on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne in terrible traffic. The carriages, a little less crowded than in front of the Arc de Triomphe, seemed to be struggling in an endless race. The cabs, the heavy landaus, the solemn eight-spring wagons passed each other again and again, abruptly outdistanced by a rapid victoria drawn by a single trotter proceeding at a thunderous pace, through all that rolling crowd, bourgeois and aristocratic, through all societies, all classes, all hierarchies, an indolent young woman whose bold and brilliant eau de toilette cast into the carriages she grazed a strange perfume of some unknown flower.

  “Now who is that lady?” asked Annette.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” replied Bertin, while the duchess and the countess exchanged smiles.

  The leaves were unfolding, the familiar nightingales of that particular Parisian garden were already singing in the young verdure, and as they neared the lake where they fell into line at a walk, there occurred from carriage to carriage an incessant exchange of greetings, smiles, and immediate recognitions as the wheels touched. It seemed now like the passage of a fleet of boats in which were seated clusters of extremely well-behaved ladies and gentlemen. The duchess, who kept bowing ahead of all the raised hats or lowered heads, seemed to be passing in review the whole occasion and recalling whom she knew, whom she thought she knew, and whom she ought to have known as the ladies and gentlemen passed before her.

  “There, child! Have another look at Madame de Mandelière, the beauty of the Republic!”

  In a light, rather coquettish carriage, the beauty of the Republic, with apparent indifference to the indisputable glory of the occasion, revealed her huge dark eyes, her low forehead under a helm of dark hair, and her willful mouth, perhaps just a trifle too large.

  “Very beautiful, all the same,” observed Bertin.

  The countess, who did not enjoy hearing him praise other women, shrugged her shoulders and made no response.

  But our jeune fille, in whom the instinct of rivalry had suddenly wakened, ventured to say, “I don’t think so.”

  The painter turned around. “What, you don’t think she’s beautiful?”

  “No, she looks as though she’s just been dipped in ink.”

  The duchess, delighted, produced a stream of laughter. “Bravo, petite! For six years now, half the men in Paris have been prostrating themselves over that Negress! I suspect they’re making fun of us. Here! Have a good look at the Marquise de Lochrist instead.”

  Alone in a landau with her white poodle, the marquise, delicate as a miniature, fair-haired with brown eyes, who for the last five or six years had also served as a theme for the panegyrics of her admirers, was bowing gracefully, a set smile on her lips.

  But Nanette still showed no enthusiasm. “Oh,” she said and sighed, “she’s not really so fresh anymore.”

  Bertin, who ordinarily in the daily discussions of these two rivals was careful not to agree with the countess, was suddenly offended by the young girl’s intolerance. “Bigre,” he said, “whether she’s been loved a lot or a little, she’s charming, and I only hope that one day you’ll become as attractive as she is.”

  “Never mind,” the duchess rejoined, “you notice women when they’re past thirty. The child’s quite correct: there’s nothing you can praise them for until they’re overdue.”

  “If you ask me,” Bertin clamored, “a woman’s really beautiful only late in the day, once her . . . h
er expression’s over and done with.” Nor could he stop there, insisting that what we first respond to is only initiation taking hold and not worth much until it’s over and done with, insisting that men of the world are right not to consider a woman “beautiful” except in the last period of her bloom. . . .

  The countess, properly flattered, murmured, “He’s on the side of truth, you know, he’s the artist judging. . . . Young faces are pretty enough, but always a little commonplace.”

  And the painter insisted, indicating at what moment a face, losing by degrees the unsettled grace of youth, assumes its true shape, its character, its physiognomy.

  With a little motion of her head, indicating conviction, the countess assented to every word; and the more Bertin affirmed, with all the earnestness of an interceding advocate, the animation of a disputed critic defending his cause, the more emphatic became the countess’s approval with each glance and gesture, as though the two of them were now allied in resisting a common danger in order to defend themselves against a false and threatening opinion. Annette scarcely heard them, occupied as she was with watching. Her usually smiling countenance had become grave, and she no longer spoke a word, giddy with joy in all this commotion. This sun, this foliage, these carriages, all this beautiful life, so rich and gay, was for her—was hers.

  Every day she could come like this, known in her turn, saluted, envied; and men, pointing to her, might even say how pretty she was. She sought out those men and women who seemed most elegant to her, and kept asking their names, not troubling herself with more than a collection of syllables that occasionally awakened within her an echo of respect and admiration when she happened to have read them in newspapers or in history books. She could hardly get used to this parade of celebrities or even quite believe that they were actual, as if she had been watching some kind of performance. The cabs inspired her with scorn tinged with disgust, embarrassing and irritating her, and she suddenly exclaimed, “It seems to me they should allow only liveried carriages here.”