Saccard, followed by MM Toutin-Laroche, de Mareuil, and Haffner, had taken possession of one of the sideboards. The table was full, and as M. de Saffré happened to pass by with Mme Michelin on his arm, he detained them and insisted that the pretty brunette share their food. She nibbled some pastry, smiled, and raised her bright eyes to take in the five men gathered around her. They leaned toward her, fingered her belly dancer’s veils woven of golden thread, and backed her up against the sideboard, so that in the end she was supporting herself against it as she took petits fours from the very gentle and caressing hands of all the gentlemen with the amorous docility of a slave among lords. At the other end of the room, M. Michelin was single-handedly finishing off a terrine of foie gras that he had managed to get hold of.
Meanwhile, Mme Sidonie, who had been roaming among the dancers since the first strokes of the violinists’ bows, had entered the dining room and was beckoning to Saccard with her eyes.
“She’s not dancing,” she whispered to him. “She seems anxious. I think she may try something rash. . . . But I haven’t been able to find out who the lucky fellow is yet. . . . I’m going to have something to eat and then go back to nosing about.”
She ate standing up, like a man, devouring a chicken wing that she got M. Michelin to serve her after he finished his pâté. She poured some Malaga into a large champagne glass. Then, after wiping her lips with her fingertips, she returned to the drawing room. The train of her magician’s robe already seemed to have picked up all the dust from the carpets.
The ball was languishing and the orchestra showing signs of flagging when a murmur raced through the room: “The cotillion, the cotillion!” This revived the dancers and the brass. Couples emerged from behind the shrubbery in the conservatory. The large drawing room filled up, as it had before the first quadrille, and as the crowd revived, so did the conversation. It was the ball’s final flicker. The men who weren’t dancing stared indulgently from the embrasures at the chatty group growing steadily in size in the middle of the room, while those still eating in the dining room craned their necks to see without putting down their bread.
“M. de Mussy won’t do it,” said one of the ladies. “He swears he’s done with conducting. . . . Please, M. de Mussy, just one more time. Do it for us, won’t you?”
But the young embassy attaché stood stiff-necked in his high starched collar turned town at the corners. It was really quite impossible; he had given his word. Disappointment greeted this refusal. Maxime also refused, saying that he was all worn out and couldn’t do it. M. Hupel de la Noue didn’t dare volunteer; poetry was as low as he would go. When one of the ladies mentioned Mr. Simpson, the others told her to hold her tongue. Mr. Simpson was the oddest cotillion leader one could imagine. Fantastic and nasty ideas were his specialty. In one drawing room where the guests had been incautious enough to choose him, he had forced the ladies to jump over chairs, and one of his favorite maneuvers was to make everybody get down on all fours and crawl around the room.
“Has M. de Saffré left?” asked a childlike voice.
He was just leaving, in fact he was saying good-bye to beautiful Mme Saccard, with whom he was on the best of terms now that she wanted nothing more to do with him. An amiable skeptic, Saffré admired unpredictability in others. The guests brought him back from the vestibule in triumph. He resisted and, smiling, said that he was a serious man and that they were putting him in an awkward position. But then, with so many white hands reaching out to him, he gave in and said, “Go now, take your places. . . . But I’m warning you, I’m from the old school. I haven’t two cents’ worth of imagination.”
The couples, using all the chairs they could find, arrayed themselves around the drawing room. Some of the young men even went to the conservatory in search of metal garden chairs. It was a monster cotillion. M. de Saffré, who wore the rapt expression of an officiating priest, chose as his partner Countess Wanska, whose Coral costume fascinated him. When everybody was in place, he stared for quite some time at the circle of skirts, each flanked by a dark frock coat. Then he signaled the orchestra, and the brass rang out. Heads leaned forward along the smiling ribbon of faces.
Renée had refused to take part in the cotillion. She had seemed giddy from the moment the ball began, dancing hardly at all, mingling with various groups, and unable to remain in one place. Her friends found her mood odd. Earlier in the evening she had mentioned the possibility of going up in a balloon with a celebrated aeronaut who was the talk of Paris. When the cotillion began, she was irritated that she could no longer move freely about the room and stationed herself next to the door of the vestibule, where she shook hands with the men who were leaving and chatted with her husband’s close friends. Baron Gouraud, wrapped in a fur coat as he was carried out by a servant, managed to offer her one last compliment on her Tahitian costume.
Meanwhile, M. Toutin-Laroche shook Saccard’s hand.
“Maxime is counting on you,” said Saccard.
“Absolutely,” answered the new senator.
Then he turned toward Renée: “Madame, I haven’t congratulated you. . . . So the dear boy’s future is now assured.”
Since her smile expressed surprise, Saccard spoke up. “My wife doesn’t know yet. Tonight we settled the matter of Mlle de Mareuil’s wedding to Maxime.”
She kept on smiling and bowed to M. Toutin-Laroche, who left with these parting words: “You sign the contract on Sunday, do you not? I’m off to Nevers to see about some mines, but I’ll be back.”
For a moment she remained alone in the middle of the vestibule. She had stopped smiling, and the more she fathomed the enormity of what she had just heard, the more she shivered. She stared fixedly at the red velvet wall hangings, the rare plants, and the majolica pots, and then she said out loud, “I must speak to him.”
And she returned to the drawing room but was obliged to stand in the doorway, because a figure of the cotillion blocked the way. The orchestra was playing a quiet section of a waltz. The ladies, holding hands, formed a circle, like a circle of little girls playing Ring Around a Rosie, and whirled around as rapidly as possible, pulling on each other’s arms, laughing, and sliding. In the center, a gentleman—it was the naughty Mr. Simpson—held a long pink scarf in his hand. He raised it up with the gesture of a fisherman about to cast a net. But he was in no hurry, no doubt because he found it amusing to allow the women to dance around him and wear themselves out. They panted and begged for mercy. Then he threw the scarf, aiming it so skillfully that it wrapped itself around the shoulders of Mme d’Espanet and Mme Haffner, who were whirling around side by side. This was the American’s little joke. He then tried to dance with both women at once, and had seized the two of them around the waist, one with his left arm, the other with his right, when M. de Saffré, as king of the cotillion, scolded him in a severe voice: “Dancing with two ladies is not allowed.”
Mr. Simpson, however, was unwilling to let go of the two women’s waists. Adeline and Suzanne wriggled in his arms, threw their heads back, and laughed. The case was argued, the ladies grew angry, the uproar continued, and the dark coats in the embrasures wondered how Saffré was going to extricate himself from this ticklish predicament without losing face. Indeed, he seemed perplexed for a moment as he cast about for a graceful way to enlist humor on his side. Then he smiled, took first Mme d’Espanet and then Mme Haffner by the hand and whispered a question in each woman’s ear, heard their answers, and turned to Mr. Simpson: “Which would you pluck, verbena or periwinkle?”