Maxime burst out laughing.
“Yes, of course, we were telling each other stories. I had no idea what sort of girl she was. She’s funny. She looks like a boy.”
Since Renée continued to wear an expression of prudish annoyance, the young man, who had never known her to get angry about such things, continued in his joshingly familiar way. “Do you suppose, stepmother dear, that I squeezed her knee under the table? What the devil do you take me for? I know how to behave with a fiancée! . . . Listen, I have something more serious to talk to you about. . . . Are you listening?”
He lowered his voice even more.
“What I came to tell you is that Mussy is very unhappy. He told me so himself just a few minutes ago. Now, if you two have quarreled, I have no intention of patching it up. But I knew him at school, you know, and since he looked truly desperate, I promised him I’d speak to you.”
He stopped. Renée fixed him with a look that was impossible to define.
“You have nothing to say?” he continued. “It makes no difference to me. I’ve done my errand. Settle it as you like. But honestly, I think you’re cruel. It pained me to look at the poor fellow. If I were you, I’d at least send him a nice note.”
At that, Renée, who had not stopped staring at Maxime with fire in her eyes, said, “Tell M. de Mussy that he bores me.”
Then she returned to her guests, smiling, nodding, and shaking hands as she wandered among them. Maxime, looking stunned, stood where she had left him. Then he laughed to himself.
In no haste to deliver Renée’s message to M. de Mussy, Maxime took a turn about the drawing room. The evening, at once marvelous and banal like all such evenings, was drawing to a close. It was close to midnight, and people were slowly making their way out. Not wanting to turn in on an unpleasant note, he decided to look for Louise. While passing the door of the vestibule, he caught sight of Mme Michelin, whose husband was carefully draping a blue-and-pink evening wrap over her shoulders. “He was charming,” the young woman was saying, “simply charming. All through dinner we talked about you. He will speak to the minister. But it’s not his department—”
Near where they were standing, a servant was swaddling Baron Gouraud in a fur greatcoat, so Mme Michelin whispered in her husband’s ear. “The fellow who can seal the deal for you is that fat man over there,” she said, as he tied her hood under her chin. “He can get whatever he wants from the ministry. Tomorrow, at the Mareuils, we must try—”
M. Michelin smiled. He led his wife cautiously away, as if he were holding something precious and fragile. Maxime, after glancing around the vestibule and assuring himself that Louise was not there, headed straight for the small salon. And there he found her, almost alone, waiting for her father, who must have spent the evening in the smoking room with the political men. The marquise, Mme Haffner, and the other ladies had already left. Only Mme Sidonie remained, telling the wives of a couple of bureaucrats how much she loved animals.
“So there you are, my friend,” Louise exclaimed. “Sit down here and tell me what chair my father fell asleep in. He must be under the impression that he’s already made it to the Chamber.”
Maxime responded in kind, and the two young people were soon laughing again as loudly as they had done at dinner. Maxime sat on a very low stool at Louise’s feet, and by and by he took her hands and carried on with her as he would have done with a comrade. In her dress of white foulard with red polka dots and a high bodice, and with her flat chest, small ugly head, and cunning baby face, she looked like a boy disguised as a girl. Yet at times her slender arms and misshapen body assumed some rather provocative poses, ardor flickered in her still childlike eyes, and Maxime’s teasing failed to bring the slightest blush to her face. Both laughed in the belief that they were alone, unaware that Renée, standing half-hidden in the conservatory, was observing them from a distance.
A moment earlier, while crossing one of the conservatory walkways, Renée had caught sight of Maxime and Louise and stopped abruptly behind a bush. The hothouse in which she found herself was like the nave of a church, with thin iron columns soaring upward to support an arched glass roof that sheltered a profusion of lush vegetation, thick layers of leaves, and towering displays of greenery.
In the middle, in an oval pool at ground level, a multitude of aquatic flora from sunnier climes thrived in a watery world of slime and mystery. Green plumes of cyclanthus wound a monumental sash around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end of the pool, huge tornelia lifted their strangely scruffy appendages above the water, their bare, dry branches twisting like ailing serpents as they dropped aerial roots into the pool like fishnets suspended in midair. Near the edge, a pandanus from Java spread its coif of green leaves with white stripes, as thin as fencing foils yet as prickly and serrated as Malayan daggers. And grazing the lukewarm surface of the gently heated stagnant pool, water lilies opened their rosy stars, while euryales let their round, leprous leaves droop into the water, on whose surface they floated like the pustulated backs of monstrous toads.
A wide band of selaginella circled the pool. This dwarf fern created a thick carpet of soft green moss, a lawn of sorts. On the far side of the main circular path, four massive thickets of vegetation sent shoots soaring upward to the arched roof: the palms, leaning slightly in their grace, spread their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, and let their leafy branches droop like oars wearied by their eternal voyage through the blue of the sky; the great bamboo of India stood erect, slender and hard, letting loose a light rain of leaves from on high; a ravenala, or traveler’s tree, put up its bouquet of immense Chinese screens; and in a corner a banana tree, heavy with fruit, reached out in all directions with long horizontal leaves large enough for two lovers to lie beneath if they held each other tight. In the corners the euphorbia from Abyssinia resembled prickly candles, misshapen things whose many ugly protuberances oozed poison. Underneath the trees, providing ground cover, low ferns, the maiden-hair and strap, spread their subtle patterns of delicate lace. Plants of a taller genus, the alsophila, arrayed their branches in symmetrical tiers, hexagons of such regularity that they resembled large pieces of china, fruit bowls intended for some gigantic dessert. The clumps of trees were edged with begonia and caladium, the begonia with their twisted leaves superbly spotted with green and red, and the caladium with leaves shaped like the head of a spear, white with green veins, resembling the wings of a big butterfly—strange plants whose foliage derived an odd vitality from the splendor of poisonous blossoms both light and dark.
Behind the clumps of trees a second, narrower path circled the outer circumference of the conservatory. There, arranged in tiers that partially hid the heating pipes, grew maranta, as soft to the touch as velvet; gloxinia, with its violet blossoms shaped like bells; and dracaena, like strips of old lacquer.
Among the charms of this winter garden were the verdant caverns in each of the four corners, ample arbors sealed off by thick curtains of vine. Here, bits of virgin forest had built leafy walls, impenetrable tangles of stems, of supple shoots clinging to branches, leaping the void with a bold thrust or dropping from the vault like the tassels on sumptuous tapestries. A stalk of vanilla, whose ripe beans exhaled penetrating fragrances, followed the curve of a moss-covered portico. Cocculus from the Levant carpeted the slender columns with their round leaves. Bauhinias with their red seedpods and quisqualis with flowers hanging like necklaces of glass beads crept and oozed and entwined themselves like slender snakes playing endlessly and slithering their way ever deeper into the darkness of the vegetation.