“It’s awfully good of you to concern yourself with that fiasco,” Saccard replied. “After all, you can always point to your great work, the Crédit Viticole, which has emerged triumphant from every crisis it has ever faced.”
“Yes,” Mareuil said quietly, “that’s the answer to all the critics.”
As a matter of fact the Crédit Viticole had just survived some serious difficulties, which had been carefully concealed. A minister with a pronounced weakness for that particular financial institution, which held the City of Paris by the throat, had contrived to drive up the price of its shares, and M. Toutin-Laroche had done a marvelous job of capitalizing on the opportunity. Nothing tickled him more than praise for the prosperity of the Crédit Viticole. As a rule he instigated such praise himself. He thanked M. de Mareuil with a glance and, leaning familiarly on Baron Gouraud’s chair, he bent down and asked, “Are you all right? You’re not too warm?”
The baron gave a slight grunt.
“He’s sinking, he’s sinking day by day,” M. Toutin-Laroche added in an undertone when he had turned back to face the others.
M. Michelin smiled and from time to time gently lowered his eyelids to steal a glance at his red ribbon. Mignon and Charrier, planted firmly on their oversized feet, seemed much more at ease in their dress clothes now that they had taken to wearing sparklers. But it was now almost midnight, and the company was growing impatient. No one went so far as to mutter, but fans had begun to flutter more nervously and conversations were growing louder.
At last M. Hupel de la Noue reappeared. He had one shoulder through the narrow opening when he finally saw Mme d’Espanet mounting the platform. The other ladies, already in place for the first tableau, had only been awaiting her arrival. The prefect turned his back to the audience, which could see him conversing with the marquise, hidden behind the curtains. Blowing kisses from his fingertips, he said in a hushed voice, “My compliments, marquise. Your costume is delightful.”
“I have a much prettier one underneath,” came the young woman’s cavalier reply, and she burst out laughing right in the prefect’s face, because the sight of him stuck in the curtains like that struck her as hilarious.
The gallant M. Hupel de la Noue was momentarily taken aback by the boldness of this reply, but he recovered, and savoring the sally all the more as he pondered all its dimensions, he pronounced it “Charming! Charming!” with an air of delight.
He let the corner of the curtain fall and rejoined the group of serious men, in whose company he planned to enjoy his work. No longer was he the nervous master of ceremonies searching high and low for Echo’s leafy girdle. He was beaming now, breathing hard as he wiped his brow. The sleeve of his coat still bore the small white handprint, and now, in addition, there was a red spot on the tip of the thumb of his right glove, which he had no doubt dipped into a jar of face paint. He smiled, he fanned himself, and then he stammered, “She’s lovely, ravishing, stupendous.”
“Who are you talking about?” Saccard wanted to know.
“The marquise. You’ll never believe what she just said to me.”
And he repeated her repartee. Everyone agreed that it was just right. The men repeated it to one another. M. Haffner had joined the group, and, dignified though he was, even he could not refrain from applauding. Meanwhile, someone seated at a piano that hardly anyone had noticed began to play a waltz. A hush came over the crowd. The waltz wound on through an endless series of variations, all involving a sweet ascending phrase ending in a trill and preceding a return to a slower melody in the bass. It was quite sensual. The ladies, tilting their heads slightly, smiled. In contrast, the piano had abruptly put an end to M. Hupel de la Noue’s gaiety. He gazed anxiously at the red velvet curtain and told himself that he ought to have posed Mme d’Espanet personally, as he had posed the others.
As the curtains slowly parted, the piano, soft-pedaled now, resumed the sensual waltz. A murmur raced through the salon, the ladies leaned forward, and the men craned their necks, while here and there admiration was expressed in the form of a remark uttered in too loud a voice, an unconscious sigh, or a stifled laugh. This went on for a full five minutes under the glare of the three chandeliers.
Reassured, M. Hupel de la Noue gaped in delight at his “poem.” He could not resist the temptation to repeat to everyone in his vicinity what he had been saying for a month: “I had thought of doing it in verse, but this way the lines are nobler, don’t you think?”
Then, as the waltz lulled the audience with its endless ebb and flow, he launched into explanations. Mignon and Charrier moved closer to him and listened attentively.
“You are of course familiar with the subject. Handsome Narcissus, son of the river Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, scorns the love of the nymph Echo. . . . Echo was part of the retinue of Juno,4 whom she amused with her speeches while Jupiter roamed the world. . . . Echo, as you know, was the daughter of Air and Earth. . . .”
He waxed rapturous about the poetry of the ancients. Then, in a more intimate tone, he said, “I felt I could give free rein to my imagination. . . . The nymph Echo takes handsome Narcissus to visit Venus in a seaside grotto, where the goddess is to kindle his love with her fire. But Venus proves powerless. From the youth’s pose one can see that he has not been touched.”
This explanation was by no means superfluous, for few of the spectators in the room grasped the precise significance of the various groups. By the time the prefect, speaking in a hushed voice, had finished identifying all the characters, the audience admired his work even more. Mignon and Charrier continued to gaze wide-eyed at the tableau, however. Its meaning still eluded them.
A grotto had been fashioned on the stage between the red velvet curtains. The silk backdrop had been arranged with large jagged folds imitating the contours of rocks, on which images of shells, fish, and aquatic vegetation had been painted. The platform itself was uneven, a small mound having been set in place and covered with the same silk fabric, upon which the decorator had painted a bed of fine sand strewn with pearls and flecks of silver. It was the lair of a goddess. There, atop the little hillock, stood Mme de Lauwerens, dressed as Venus. A little stout for the part, she wore her pink tights with the dignity of a duchess of Olympus. She interpreted her character as the Queen of Love, whom she played with severe, wide-open, all-devouring eyes. Behind her, revealing only her mischievous face, her wings, and her quiver, little Mme Daste lent her amiable smile to the character of Cupid. Arrayed alongside the mound were the Three Graces, Mmes de Guende, Teissière, and von Meinhold, all wrapped in muslin, smiling, and laced together as in the sculpture by Pradier.5 On the other side of the mound, the marquise d’Espanet and Mme Haffner stood wrapped in a single cascade of lace, their arms around each other’s waists, their hair entwined, lending a risqué note to the tableau, a hint of Lesbos,6 which M. Hupel de la Noue explained in an even lower voice meant to be heard only by the men: his intention, he said, had been to use this example to demonstrate the power of Venus. At the foot of the mound Countess Wanska portrayed Voluptuousness. She lay stretched out, her body contorted by an ultimate spasm of pleasure, her eyes lifeless and half-closed as though she were about to lose consciousness. Of dark complexion, she had let down her black hair, and her bodice, streaked with tawny flames, revealed patches of flushed skin. The colors of the costumes, ranging from the snowy white of the veil of Venus to the dark red of the tunic of Voluptuousness, defined a restrained palette in which flesh tones dominated. And beneath the electric light, ingeniously directed onto the scene through one of the garden windows, all that gauze and lace and other diaphanous fabric blended so well with the shoulders and tights that those flesh tones came alive, and it was hard to be sure that these ladies had not carried their pursuit of artistic truth to the point of appearing on stage completely naked. This was merely the apotheosis; the drama unfolded in the foreground. On the left Renée, portraying the nymph Echo, reached out her arms toward the great goddess, her head half-turned toward Narcissus as if begging him to gaze upon Venus, the mere sight of whom was supposed to be enough to kindle an irresistible flame in his breast. But Narcissus, on the right, made a gesture of refusal, hid his eyes with his hand, and remained as cold as ice. The costumes for these two characters had taxed M. Hupel de la Noue’s imagination to the utmost. Narcissus, a demigod who roamed the forests, was dressed as an idealized hunter, in green tights with a short, close-fitting jacket and a sprig of oak in his hair. Nymph Echo’s gown was a whole allegory unto itself. It hinted at tall trees and tall mountains, at reverberant places where Earth and Air echo each other’s cries. The white satin of the skirt symbolized rock, the green foliage of the girdle stood for forest, and the cloud of blue gauze in the bodice represented the purity of the sky. The groups stood as still as statues in the dazzling light from the broad beam of the arc light, which hummed with the carnal note of Olympus, while the piano continued with its piercing plaint of love, punctuated by deep sighs.