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?”
Mr. Simpson, a little slow to take this in, replied that he would take verbena, whereupon M. de Saffré gave him the marquise: “Here is your verbena.”
The guests applauded discreetly. M. de Saffré had solved the problem quite nicely, they judged. As a cotillion leader he was “never at a loss,” as the ladies put it. Meanwhile, the orchestra had struck up the melody again with all instruments, and Mr. Simpson, after waltzing around the room with Mme d’Espanet, led her back to her place.
Renée was now able to pass. At the sight of “all this nonsense” she had bitten her lips until they bled. How stupid these men and women were with their tossing of scarves and naming themselves after flowers. There was a buzzing in her ears, and, furious with impatience, she felt like putting her head down and bulling her way through the crowd. She rapidly made her way across the drawing room, bumping into couples slow to regain their seats, and headed straight for the conservatory. Not having seen Louise or Maxime among the dancers, she told herself that they must be there, in some gap in the foliage, joined by that instinct for humor and ribaldry that led them to look for out-of-the-way places whenever they were together. But a visit to the gloomy conservatory turned up nothing. All she saw was a tall young man in the back of one of the arbors devoutly kissing the hands of little Mme Daste while whispering, “Mme de Lauwerens was right: you are an angel.”
This declaration, in her own house, her own conservatory, shocked her. Mme de Lauwerens really ought to transact her business elsewhere. Renée would have felt relieved if she could have driven all these loud people out of her house. Standing in front of the pool, she looked at the water and asked herself where Louise and Maxime might have gone to hide. The orchestra was still playing the same waltz, whose slow, swaying melody turned her stomach. It was unbearable not to be able to think in one’s own house. She couldn’t think. Forgetting that the young couple weren’t yet married, she decided that the answer really had to be quite simple: they had gone to bed. Then she thought of the dining room and ran hastily back up the stairs to the house. At the door of the large drawing room, however, her path was again blocked by yet another of the cotillion figures.
“This one is called ‘Dark Spots,’ ladies,” M. de Saffré announced in a flirtatious voice. “It’s my own invention, and you’re the first to hear of it.”
There was much laughter. The men explained the allusion to the ladies. The Emperor had just given a speech in which he had noted the presence of certain “dark spots” on the political horizon. For some reason, the phrase “dark spots” had caught on. All the wits of Paris had latched onto it, and for the past week “dark spots” had turned up everywhere. M. de Saffré placed the men at one end of the drawing room and had them turn their backs on the women at the other end. Then he ordered them to pull up their coats so as to hide the backs of their heads. Wild hilarity accompanied this maneuver. Hunchbacked, shoulders scrunched, their coattails up to their waists, the gentlemen looked truly hideous.
“Don’t laugh, ladies,” M. de Saffré shouted in a serious voice that could not have been more comical, “or I’ll make you lift your lace over your heads.”
The gaiety increased. The leader enthusiastically asserted his sovereign authority over several gentlemen who had declined to hide the backs of their necks.
“You are ‘dark spots,’ ” he said. “Cover your heads, show nothing but your backs. The ladies mustn’t see anything but black. . . . Now, move around, mix yourselves up so you can’t be recognized.”
The hilarity was at its height. The “dark spots” teetered to and fro on skinny legs like headless crows. One gentleman’s shirt showed, along with a bit of suspenders. Then the women begged for mercy: they were laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe, so M. de Saffré took pity on them and ordered them each to go over and pick out a “dark spot.” They took off like a covey of young partridges, with much rustling of skirts. Then, at the end of their run, each woman grabbed the man closest to her. The chaos was indescribable. One by one, the impromptu couples split off from the group and danced around the salon as the orchestra played even louder than before.
Renée leaned against the wall. She watched, looking pale, her lips pursed. An elderly gentleman gallantly approached her and asked why she wasn’t dancing. She was obliged to smile and offer some sort of response. Then she fled into the dining room. The room looked empty, but there, among the pillaged sideboards and abandoned dishes and bottles, were Maxime and Louise, dining quietly at one end of the table, side by side, on a napkin they had spread out between them. They seemed relaxed, laughing amid the chaos of dirty glasses, greasy plates, and warm leftovers overlooked by the gluttonous guests in white gloves. The young couple had simply brushed aside the crumbs. Baptiste moved gravely down the length of the table, ignoring the room, which seemed to have been overrun by a pack of wolves. He was waiting for the servants to come tidy up the sideboards.
Maxime had nevertheless managed to put together a very adequate supper. Louise loved nougat with pistachios, a plateful of which had been left on a sideboard. In front of the pair were three partially drunk bottles of champagne.
“Papa may have left,” said the young woman.
“Let’s hope so,” answered Maxime. “I’ll see you home.”
And when she laughed, he continued: “You know, they’ve made up their minds that I am to marry you. It’s not a joke anymore, it’s serious. . . . So what will we do when we’re married?”
“We’ll do what everybody else does, of course!”
This jest had escaped her rather quickly. As if to withdraw it, she hastily added, “We’ll go to Italy. It will be good for my lungs. I’m very sick. . . . Oh, my poor Maxime, what a strange wife you’re going to have! I weigh about as much as two sous’ worth of butter.”
She smiled with a touch of sadness in her pageboy costume. A dry cough turned her cheeks a glowing red.
“It’s the nougat,” she said. “At home I’m not allowed to eat it. . . . Pass me the plate. I’m going to stick the rest of it in my pocket.”
And she was emptying the plate when Renée walked in. She went straight over to Maxime, making an extraordinary effort not to swear, not to thrash the little hunchback who was sitting there next to her lover.
“I want to speak to you,
” she stammered in a hollow voice.
He hesitated, in the grip of fear, dreading being alone with her.
“To you alone, right away,” Renée repeated.
“Why don’t you go, Maxime?” said Louise with an inscrutable look. “And while you’re at it, try to find my father. I lose him at every party.”
He got up and tried to stop Renée in the middle of the dining room by asking her what she had to say to him that was so urgent. But she muttered between her teeth: “Follow me, or I’ll tell all in front of everyone.”
He turned white and followed along behind her as docilely as a beaten animal. She suspected that Baptiste was staring at them, but just then she couldn’t have cared less about the butler’s piercing eyes. At the door, the cotillion delayed her for the third time.
“Wait,” she muttered. “Will these imbeciles ever be done?”
And she took him by the hand so that he would not try to escape.
M. de Saffré placed the duc de Rozan with his back to the wall in a corner of the drawing room, next to the dining room door. Then he placed a lady in front of him and, after that, a gentleman back-to-back with the lady, followed by another lady in front of the gentleman and so on, couple by couple, in a long serpent. But the dancers went on talking, dawdling instead of taking their places, so he shouted, “Now, ladies, everyone in position for ‘The Columns.’ ”
They came and formed “columns.” The indecency of being caught between two men, leaning against the back of one while pressed up against the chest of the other, filled the ladies with merriment. The tips of the women’s breasts rubbed the lapels of the men’s jackets, the gentlemen’s legs disappeared into their partners’ skirts, and when a woman, laughing suddenly, leaned forward, the mustache opposite was obliged to tilt to one side to avoid stepping over the line and planting a kiss. At one point a prankster must have given a slight push. The line tightened up, and coats pressed a little more deeply into skirts. There were little shouts and laughs—endless laughs. Baroness von Meinhold was heard to say, “But sir, I can’t breathe. Don’t hold me so tight!” which was so funny and made the whole line laugh so madly that the “columns,” shaken by all the hilarity, staggered, crashed into each other, and had to hold each other up to keep from falling. M. de Saffré waited with raised hands, ready to clap. Then he did clap, and at this signal each dancer suddenly turned around. The new partners, finding themselves face-to-face, took each other by the waist, and the line of waltzers then spread out around the room. The only one left out was the poor duc de Rozan, who on turning around found himself with his nose up against the wall. Everyone laughed at him.
“Come,” said Renée to Maxime.
The orchestra was still playing the waltz. The soft music, whose monotonous rhythm became insipid in the end, heightened the young woman’s exasperation. She made her way to the small salon, still holding Maxime by the hand, and pushed him into the stairway leading up to the dressing room.
“Go on up,” she ordered.
She followed. At that moment, Mme Sidonie, who had been prowling around her sister-in-law all evening, astonished by her restless scouting of all the rooms, happened to be coming up the conservatory steps. She saw a man’s legs disappear into the darkness of the small staircase. A pale smile lit up her waxen face, and, hiking up her magician’s skirt in order to move more quickly, she went looking for her brother, disrupting a figure of the cotillion along the way and questioning any servants she ran into. She finally found Saccard with M. de Mareuil in a room off the dining room that had been converted into a temporary smoking room. The two fathers were discussing dowries and marriage contracts. But after Saccard’s sister whispered something in his ear, he got up, excused himself, and disappeared.
Upstairs, the dressing room was in total disarray. Tossed aside and left lying on the chairs were the nymph Echo’s costume, the torn tights, bits of crumpled lace, and balled-up underthings—the kinds of things a woman urgently expected elsewhere leaves behind in her haste. Little silver and ivory implements lay strewn about. Brushes and files had fallen onto the carpet; and the still-damp towels, the cakes of soap forgotten on the marble, the perfume bottles left unstoppered filled the flesh-colored tent with a strong, penetrating odor. In order to remove the white powder from her arms and shoulders, the young woman had soaked in the pink marble bathtub after the tableaux vivants. An iridescent film of soap spread in patches over the surface of the bathwater now grown cold.
Maxime tripped over a corset, nearly fell, and tried to laugh. But he was shivering at the sight of Renée’s severe countenance. She walked over to him, pushed him, and said in an undertone, “So, you’re going to marry the hunchback?”
“Why, not at all,” he murmured. “Who told you that?”
“Look, don’t lie. It’s pointless.”
A rebellious feeling rose within him. She made him anxious. He wanted to be rid of her.
“All right, yes, I’m marrying her. So what? . . . I’m in charge of my own life, am I not?”
She moved toward him, her head bowed slightly, and with a wicked laugh took him by the wrists: “In charge! You, in charge! . . . You know you’re not. I’m in charge. If I were a mean woman, I’d break your arm. You have no more strength than a girl.”
And since he struggled, she twisted his arms with a violent force that came from anger. He gave a feeble cry. Then she let him go and resumed her train of thought: “Let’s not fight. As you see, I’m stronger than you are.”
His pallor remained, and he felt ashamed of the pain in his wrists. He watched her move about the dressing room, pushing furniture around, meditating, pondering the plan that she had been turning over in her mind ever since her husband had told her of the marriage.
“I’m going to lock you up here,” she said at last, “and when day comes we’ll leave for Le Havre.”
He went white again with alarm and stupor.
“But that’s crazy!” he shouted. “We can’t run off together. You’re out of your mind.”
“That may be. In any case, it’s your fault and your father’s if I’ve lost my mind. . . . I need you, and I’m taking you. Too bad for the imbeciles.”
There was a red glow in her eyes. She approached Maxime again, scorching his face with her breath: “What would become of me if you married the hunchback? You’d all laugh at me, and I might be forced to take back that big lump Mussy, who can’t even keep my feet warm. . . . When you’ve done what we’ve done, you stay together. In any case, it’s perfectly clear, I’m bored when you’re not around, and since I’m leaving, I’m taking you with me. . . . You can tell Céleste what you need and she’ll go to your apartment and fetch it.”
The poor wretch held out his hands and begged: “Listen, my dear sweet Renée, don’t do anything foolish. Calm down. . . . Think a little about the scandal.”
“I don’t give a damn about the scandal! If you refuse, I’ll go down to the drawing room and shout out that I’ve slept with you and that you’re such a coward that now you want to marry the hunchback.”
He heard her and bowed his head, giving in already to this willful woman, who imposed herself on him so heedlessly.
“We’ll be going to Le Havre,” she resumed in a lower voice, savoring her dream, “and from there we’ll sail for England. Nobody will bother us anymore. If that isn’t far enough, we’ll go to America. Since I’m always cold, I’ll be better off there. I’ve often envied the Creoles.”
But as her plans for the future grew more grandiose by the minute, terror again took hold of Maxime. To leave Paris, to go so far with a woman who was assuredly mad, and to leave in his wake a scandal so shameful that he would be obliged to remain in exile forever—it was like a horrible nightmare snuffing the life out of him. He desperately sought a way out of that dressing room, that pink fortress in which he could hear the tolling of the madhouse bell at Charenton.9
Then he thought he saw a ray of hope. “The problem is that I have no money,” he said soft
ly, so as not to set her off. “If you lock me up, I won’t be able to get any.”
“But I have money,” she replied triumphantly. “I have a hundred thousand francs. It’s all coming together quite nicely.”
She took from the mirror-front wardrobe the purchase-and-sale agreement that her husband had left her in the vague hope that she might change her mind. She brought it to the dressing table, ordered Maxime to fetch pen and ink from the bedroom, pushed the soap aside, and signed the document.
“There,” she said, “the foolish thing is done. If I’m being robbed, it’s because I want to be robbed. . . . We’ll stop by Larsonneau’s office on the way to the railway station. . . . Now, my darling Maxime, I’m going to lock you up, and we’ll make our getaway through the garden when I’ve sent everyone home. We don’t even need to take any luggage.”
She was gay again. This madcap adventure delighted her. It was the ultimate eccentricity, an altogether original ending to the story, or so it seemed to Renée in the throes of her fever. It far surpassed her wish to take a trip in a balloon. She went and took Maxime in her arms, whispering, “I hurt you before, my poor darling. So you refused. . . . You’ll see how nice it will be. Would your hunchback love you as I love you? . . . That little half-breed isn’t a woman.”
She laughed, drew him toward her, and was kissing him on the lips when a noise made both of them turn their heads. Saccard was standing in the doorway.
A terrible silence ensued. Slowly, Renée removed her arms from around Maxime’s neck. She did not lower her brow but continued to stare at her husband with big eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a corpse. Meanwhile, Maxime, his head bowed, looking stunned and terrified, wobbled unsteadily now that he was no longer supported by her embrace. Saccard, thunderstruck by this ultimate blow, which at last drew a cry of pain from the husband and father in him, turned white as a sheet and did not move, but the fire in his eyes singed them from afar. In the moist and pungent air of the dressing room, the three candles burned quite high, their flames steady and erect, like glowing tears. And the only thing that broke the silence—the terrible silence—was the faint music that floated up the narrow staircase. The waltz, with its serpentine undulations, slithered and coiled and came to rest on the snowy-white carpet, amid the torn tights and discarded petticoats.