From the moment dinner began Renée had seemed distracted. She had done her duty as mistress of the house with a mechanical smile. With each gale of merriment from the end of the table where Maxime and Louise were sitting side by side and bantering like old friends, she glared in their direction. She was bored. The serious men were deadly. Mme d’Espanet and Mme Haffner shot desperate glances in her direction.
“How do things look for the upcoming elections?” Saccard abruptly asked Hupel de la Noue.
“Very good,” came the answer from the prefect, who coupled it with a smile. “Only I still have no candidates designated for my département. The ministry apparently hasn’t made up its mind.”
M. de Mareuil, who had glanced at Saccard to thank him for broaching this subject, looked as though he was walking on hot coals. He blushed slightly and waved his hands with some embarrassment. The prefect, turning now to address him, continued: “Many people in the district have spoken to me about you, sir. Your large estates in the region have won you many friends, and your devotion to the Emperor is well-known. Your prospects are excellent.”
At that moment Maxime shouted to his father from his end of the table. “Papa, isn’t it true that little Sylvia used to sell cigarettes in Marseilles in 1849?”
But Saccard pretended not to hear him, so the young man continued in a lower tone of voice: “My father was a particular friend of hers.”
Muffled laughs were heard. Meanwhile, as M. de Mareuil continued to wave his hands, M. Haffner began to speak in a sententious tone. “Devotion to the Emperor is the only virtue, the only form of patriotism, in this age of self-interested democracy. Whoever loves the Emperor loves France. We would welcome you as a colleague, sir, with sincere pleasure.”
“You will win, sir,” Toutin-Laroche put in. “Men of substantial wealth have to rally round the throne.”
Renée could stand no more. Across from her, the marquise stifled a yawn. As Saccard was about to hold forth once again, she interrupted. “Please, dear, show us a little pity,” she said with a pretty smile. “Enough of your wretched politics.”
At that point, M. Hupel de la Noue, displaying a gallantry befitting a prefect, exclaimed that the ladies were absolutely right and launched into an indecent story about something that had happened in the capital of his district. The marquise, Mme Haffner, and the other ladies laughed uproariously at certain details. The prefect told the story in a most titillating way, with winks and nudges and inflections of his voice that imparted a very nasty connotation to the most innocuous of words. The talk then turned to the duchess’s first Tuesday, to a farce that had been performed the night before, to the death of a poet, and to the last races of the autumn season. M. Toutin-Laroche, who could be pleasant when he chose, compared the women to roses, and M. de Mareuil, still in a tizzy about his electoral prospects, came up with profound things to say about the new shape of hats. Renée’s mind continued to wander.
Meanwhile the guests had stopped eating. A hot wind seemed to have grazed the table, clouding the glasses, leaving the bread in crumbs, darkening the skins of the fruits on their plates, and disrupting the pleasing symmetry of the settings. The flowers spilling out of the great cornucopias of chased silver wilted. And for a moment, the guests, staring vacantly at what was left of dessert, forgot themselves and remained seated, lacking the heart to get up. Leaning on one elbow, they sat with the blank faces and vague lassitude of fashionable people whose drunkenness takes a measured and respectable form, who get sloshed one sip at a time. The laughs had subsided, and talk had become rare. Having drunk and eaten a good deal, the group of bemedaled gentlemen seemed graver than ever. In the heavy air of the dining room, the ladies felt their foreheads and the backs of their necks grow moist. Waiting to move into the drawing room, they seemed serious and a little pale, as though they felt a bit faint. Mme d’Espanet had turned quite pink, while Mme Haffner’s shoulders had taken on a waxy white sheen. Meanwhile, M. Hupel de la Noue examined the handle of a knife; M. Toutin-Laroche continued to spit fragmentary comments at M. Haffner, who received them with much nodding of his head; M. de Mareuil stared dreamily at M. Michelin, who returned the look with an arch smile. As for the delectable Mme Michelin, she had long since stopped talking. Looking quite flushed, she had allowed one of her hands to dangle beneath the tablecloth, where M. de Saffré was no doubt holding it in his as he leaned awkwardly against the table’s edge, his eyebrows knit with the grimace of a man solving a problem in algebra. Mme Sidonie had also made a conquest. Mignon and Charrier, both leaning on their elbows and facing her, seemed delighted to share her confidences. She confessed that she adored dairy products and was afraid of ghosts. And Aristide Saccard himself, eyes half-closed, reveled in the smug satisfaction of a host confident of having properly lubricated his guests and gave no thought to leaving the table. With a respectfully affectionate eye he contemplated Baron Gouraud, who was ponderously digesting his dinner while his right hand lay splayed across the white tablecloth— the hand of a sensual old man, small, thick-fingered, discolored by purple blotches, and covered with red hair.
Renée mechanically finished off the few drops of Tokay that remained in the bottom of her glass. Her face tingled. The short, pale hairs on her forehead and the back of her neck stood out in unruly display as if moistened by a humid breeze. Her lips and nose were pinched by nervous tension, and her face was as expressionless as that of a child who has drunk undiluted wine. If her mind had been filled with nice bourgeois thoughts while staring into the shadows of the Parc Monceau, those thoughts were now drowned out by the excitement induced by the food, wine, and light and the stimuli of unsettling surroundings rife with warm exhalations and raucous laughter. She was no longer exchanging quiet smiles with her sister Christine and Aunt Elisabeth—both modest, self-effacing women not much given to talk. With a sharp glance she had forced poor M. de Mussy to lower his eyes. Though still apparently lost in thought, she leaned against the back of her chair, causing the satin of her bodice to crinkle softly, and although she avoided turning toward the corner of the table where Maxime and Louise continued to banter as loudly as ever despite the waning buzz of conversation, her shoulders quivered imperceptibly with each fresh burst of laughter from their direction.
And behind her, at the edge of the darkness, his tall silhouette looming large over the chaotic table and drowsy guests, stood Baptiste, his flesh pallid and his face grave, with the disdainful attitude of a lackey who has just fed his masters their fill. In the drunken atmosphere suffused with garish light from the chandelier, which cast a yellow pall over everything, he alone maintained his aplomb, with his silver chain around his neck, his cold eyes in which the bare shoulders of the women kindled no flame, and his air of a eunuch serving Parisians of the decadent era without forfeiting his dignity.
At last Renée rose uneasily to her feet. Everyone else followed suit. The guests adjourned to the drawing room, where coffee was served.
The main salon was a long vast room, a sort of gallery extending from one pavilion to the other and occupying the entire façade on the garden side. A wide French door opened onto the terrace. The gallery was resplendent with gold. The ceiling, slightly arched, was decorated with whimsical scrolls wound around huge gilt medallions that gleamed like shields. Splendid rosettes and garlands lined the edge of the arch. Sprays of gold, like jets of molten metal, ran along the walls, framing the panels, which were covered with red silk. Plaited stems topped by bouquets of rose blossoms hung beside mirrors. An Aubusson carpet covering the parquet showed off its purple flowers. The damasked red silk upholstery, door curtains, and drapes; the enormous rockwork clock on the fireplace; the Chinese vases on their consoles; the feet of the two long tables embellished with Florentine mosaics; and even the jardinières in the embrasures next to the windows—all of these things sweated and dripped with gold. In the four corners of the room, four large lamps stood on pedestals of red marble from which chains of gilded bronze were draped with symmetrical grace. And from the ceiling hung three crystal chandeliers, shedding droplets of blue and pink light whose ardent glow set all the gold in the salon ablaze.