The audience on the whole thought Maxime looked remarkably good. In making his gesture of refusal, he thrust out his left hip, which drew considerable comment. But the lion’s share of the praise was reserved for the expression on Renée’s face. As M. Hupel de la Noue put it, she represented “the suffering of unsatisfied desire.” She wore an avid smile that she tried to disguise as humble and tracked her prey as hungrily as a she-wolf, her teeth only half-hidden. The first tableau went off well, except that foolish Adeline was fidgety and had a hard time suppressing an overwhelming urge to laugh. Then the curtains closed and the piano fell silent.
The audience applauded discreetly, and conversation resumed. An amorous breeze, a current of suppressed desire, had proceeded from the simulated nudity on the stage into the drawing room, where the women lay back a bit deeper in their chairs and the men exchanged smiles and whispered in one another’s ears. It was the sound of pillow talk, the tasteful hush of refined people whose lips quivered with scarcely formulated desires, and in the mute looks exchanged amidst all this decorous delectation one sensed the shameless frankness of love offered and accepted at a glance.
The ladies’ perfections were subjected to endless appraisals. Their costumes took on an importance almost as great as their shoulders. When Mignon and Charrier turned to ask M. Hupel de la Noue a question, they were surprised that he had already disappeared backstage.
Mme Sidonie had resumed a conversation interrupted by the first tableau. “As I was telling you, my lovely pet, I had received a letter from London concerning the matter of the three billion francs, remember? . . . The person I had asked to look into the matter wrote me that he thought he had located the banker’s receipt. Which would indicate that England must have paid. . . . This news has made me ill since this morning.”
Indeed, she did look more waxen than usual in her star-studded magician’s gown. Since Mme Michelin was paying no attention to her, she lowered her voice even more and muttered to herself that it was impossible that England had paid and therefore there was no choice but for her to go to London herself.
“Narcissus’ costume was awfully pretty, wasn’t it?” Louise asked Mme Michelin.
Mme Michelin smiled. She was looking at Baron Gouraud, who seemed quite recovered in his armchair. Mme Sidonie, noticing the direction of her gaze, leaned toward her and whispered in her ear so that the child would not hear.
“Has he done what he was supposed to do?”
“Yes,” the young woman answered, affecting a wistfully seductive look, playing the part of the Egyptian dancer to perfection. “I chose the house in Louveciennes, and his business agent sent me the deed. . . . But we’ve broken it off. I don’t see him anymore.”
Louise’s ears were particularly sharp when it came to catching things that other people wanted to keep secret. She looked at Baron Gouraud with the impudence of the page whose costume she wore and then casually dropped a remark directed at Mme Michelin: “Don’t you find the baron hideous?”
Then she burst out laughing and added, “You know what? They ought to have had him play the part of Narcissus. He’d be quite something in apple-green tights!”
The elderly senator had in fact been revived by the sight of Venus and of this voluptuous corner of Olympus. He rolled his delighted eyes and turned partway round to compliment Saccard. In the hubbub that filled the room, the group of serious men continued to discuss business and politics. M. Haffner announced that he had just been named chairman of a jury that was to settle questions of indemnities. The conversation then turned to public works in the capital and in particular on the boulevard du Prince-Eugène, which had begun to attract public notice. Saccard seized the opportunity to speak of someone he knew who owned land that would no doubt be expropriated. He looked the assembled gentlemen in the face. The baron gently shook his head. M. Toutin-Laroche went so far as to say that nothing was more unpleasant than to have one’s property confiscated. M. Michelin nodded approvingly while trying even harder to squint at his decoration.
“The indemnities can never be large enough,” M. de Mareuil sagely concluded in an effort to please Saccard.
The two men had reached an understanding. But now Mignon and Charrier turned the conversation to their own affairs. They intended to retire before too long, probably to Langres, they said, although they would continue to maintain a pied-à-terre in Paris. They made the other men smile by saying that after they had built their splendid mansion on the boulevard Malesherbes, they had found it so beautiful that they hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to sell. The diamonds they were wearing must have been consolation for their loss. Saccard laughed ungraciously. His former partners had just reaped enormous profits from a venture in which he had played the role of dupe. As the intermission wore on, speeches in praise of Venus’ bosom and Echo’s gown interrupted the conversation of the serious men.
More than half an hour later, M. Hupel de la Noue reappeared. He was basking in his success, as the growing disorder of his attire indicated. As he was returning to his place, he encountered M. de Mussy. After shaking his hand in passing, he turned around. “Have you heard the marquise’s witty repartee?” he asked.
And without waiting for Mussy’s answer, he repeated it. His appreciation of the lady’s wit had only increased in the interim. He offered his own commentary, ending with the compliment that the remark was exquisite in its simplicity. “I have a much prettier one underneath.” It was a cry from the heart.
M. de Mussy did not share that opinion, however. He deemed the lady’s remark indecent. He had just been assigned to the embassy in London, and the minister had warned him that sober attire was de rigueur. He now refused to lead the cotillion,7 tried to look older than he was, and no longer spoke of his love for Renée, to whom he bowed gravely whenever they chanced to meet.
As M. Hupel de la Noue rejoined the group that had gathered behind the baron’s chair, the piano struck up a triumphal march. The chords were laid on thick, struck with the fingers vertical on the keys, leading into an expansive melody punctuated at intervals by tinkling metallic sounds. After each phrase, a new voice took up the melody in a higher register, accentuating the beat. The composition was at once aggressive and joyful.
“As you are about to see,” M. Hupel de la Noue murmured. “I may have carried poetic license a bit far, but I believe that my audacity has been rewarded. . . . The nymph Echo, seeing that Venus can do nothing with handsome Narcissus, takes him to Plutus, the god of riches and precious metals. . . . After the temptation of the flesh, the temptation of gold.”
“A stroke worthy of the classics,” replied the wizened M. Toutin-Laroche, with an amiable smile. “You know your period, Monsieur le Préfet.”
The curtains opened; the piano played louder. The scene was dazzling. The electric light revealed a stage ablaze in splendor, which the audience at first took to be a brazier filled with gold bars and precious gems that seemed to melt into one another. Another grotto loomed before them, but this time not the cool lair in which Venus lived on sands strewn with pearls and lapped by the ebbing tide. This second grotto was supposed to be located at the center of the earth, in a fiery region of the underworld, a fissure of Hades, a crevice in a mine of molten metal inhabited by Plutus. The silk that stood for rock revealed broad seams of metal, great flows that were like the veins of the primeval world, bearing incalculable riches and the eternal essence of earth. In M. Hupel de la Noue’s boldly anachronistic vision, the ground was covered with an avalanche of twenty-franc coins, rivers and heaps and swelling mounds of gold louis. Atop this pile of gold sat Mme de Guende as Plutus—a female Plutus, a Plutus who showed her bosom through the strands of a gown woven of every metal imaginable. Arrayed around this god, either standing erect or slightly reclining, clustered together or set apart, were the fantastic effusions of a grotto into which the caliphs of A Thousand and One Nights had poured their treasure: Mme Haffner as Gold, wearing a gown as stiff and resplendent as a bishop’s robes; Mme d’Espanet as Silver, shimmering like a moonbeam; Mme de Lauwerens, all fiery blue, as Sapphire, with little Mme Daste at her side, a smiling Turquoise with a tender bluish tinge. Away from the center of the stage were Emerald, Mme von Meinhold, and Topaz, Mme Teissière, while downstage Countess Wanska lent her somber passion to Coral even as she lay with upraised arms weighed down by red pendants like some monstrous but fascinating polyp exhibiting a woman’s flesh in the gap between nacreous pink shells. Each of the ladies wore necklaces, bracelets, and complete sets of jewelry made of the precious stone her character represented. The novel ornaments worn by Mme d’Espanet and Mme Haffner attracted a great deal of comment, being composed solely of small gold and silver coins fresh from the mint. The foreground drama remained the same: the nymph Echo tempting handsome Narcissus, who again indicated his refusal with a wave. The delighted eyes of the spectators slowly adjusted to this dazzling glimpse of the earth’s blazing entrails, this heap of gold upon which the wealth of a certain society lay sprawled.