LITMIR.BIZ

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coming…. Your father wishes you to pay Louise every attention.” Maxime shrugged his shoulders.

      “What a bore!” he murmured, peevishly. “I don’t mind marrying, but wooing is too silly…. Ah! how nice it would be of you, Renée, if you would rescue me from Louise this evening.”

      He put on his comedy look, the accent and grimace which he borrowed from Lassouche whenever he was about to launch one of his constant conceits:

      “Will you, stepmother dear?”

      Renée shook hands with him in masculine fashion. And quickly, with nervous, jesting boldness:

      “If I had not married your father, I believe you would have made love to me.”

      The young man appeared to think the idea very funny, for he was still laughing when he turned the corner of the Boulevard Malesherbes.

      The calash entered and drew up before the steps.

      These steps, which were broad and shallow, were sheltered by a great glass awning, with a scalloped bordering of golden fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose up above the servants’ offices, whose square windows, glazed with frosted glass, appeared just above the level of the ground. At the top of the steps the hall-door projected, flanked by slender columns recessed into the wall, thus forming a slight break, marked at each story by a bay-window, and ascending to the roof, where it finished in a pediment. The stories had five windows on each side, placed at regular intervals along the façade, and simply framed in stone. The roof was cut off square above the attic windows, with broad and almost perpendicular sides.

      But on the garden side the façade was far more sumptuous. A regal flight of steps led to a narrow terrace which skirted the whole length of the ground-floor; the balustrade of this terrace, designed to match the railings of the Parc Monceau, was even more heavily gilded than the awning or the lamps in the courtyard. Above this rose the mansion, having at either corner a pavilion, a sort of tower half enclosed in the body of the building, and containing rooms of a circular form. In the centre there bulged out slightly a third turret, more deeply contained in the building. The windows, tall and narrow in the turrets, wider apart and almost square on the flat portions of the façade, had on the ground-floor stone balustrades and on the upper stories gilded wrought-iron railings. The display of decoration was profuse to oppressiveness. The house was hidden under its sculpture. Around the windows and along the cornices ran swags of flowers and branches; there were balconies shaped like baskets full of blossoms, and supported by great naked women with straining hips, with breasts jutting out before them; then, here and there, were planted fanciful escutcheons, clusters of fruit, roses, every flower that it is possible for stone or marble to represent. The higher the eye ascended, the more the building burst into blossom. Around the roof ran a balustrade on which stood, at equal intervals, urns blazing with flames of stone. And there, between the bull’s-eye windows of the attics, which opened on to an incredible confusion of fruit and foliage, mantled the crowning portions of this stupendous scheme of decoration, the pediments of the turrets, amid which reappeared the great naked women, playing with apples, attitudinizing amidst sheaves of rushes. The roof, loaded with these ornaments, and surmounted besides with a cresting of embossed lead, with two lightning conductors, and with four huge symmetrical chimney-stacks, carved like all the rest, seemed the supreme effort of this architectural firework.

      On the right was a vast conservatory, built on to the side of the house, and communicating with the ground-floor through the glass door of a drawingroom. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low railing concealed by a hedge, had a considerable slope. Too small for the house, so narrow that a grassplot and a few clumps of evergreens filled it up entirely, it was there simply as a mound, a green pedestal on which the house stood proudly planted in its gala dress. Seen from the gardens, across the well-trimmed grass and the glistening foliage of the shrubs, this great structure, still new and absolutely pallid, showed the wan face, the purse-proud, foolish importance of a female parvenu, with its heavy headdress of slates, its gilded flounces, and the rustling of its sculptured skirts. It was a reduced copy of the new Louvre, one of the most characteristic specimens of the Napoleon III style, that fecund bastard of every style. On summer evenings, when the rays of the setting sun lit up the gilt of the railings against its white façade, the strollers in the gardens would stop to look at the crimson silk curtains draped behind the ground-floor windows; and, through sheets of plate glass so wide and so clear that they seemed like the window-fronts of a big modern shop, arranged so as to display to the outer world the wealth within, the small middle-class could catch glimpses of the corners of chairs or tables, of portions of hangings, of patches of ceilings of a profuse richness, the sight of which would root them to the spot with envy and admiration, right in the middle of the pathways.

      But at this moment the shades were falling from the trees, and the façade slept. On the other side, in the courtyard, the footman was respectfully assisting Renée to alight. At the further end of a glass covered-way on the right, the stables, banded with red brick, opened wide their doors of polished oak. On the left, as if for a balance, there was built into the wall of the adjacent house a highly-decorated niche, within which a sheet of water flowed unceasingly from a shell which two Cupids held in their outstretched arms. Renée stood for a moment at the foot of the steps, gently tapping her dress, which refused to fall properly. The courtyard, which had just been traversed by the noise of the equipage, resumed its solitude, its high-bred silence, broken by the continuous song of the flowing water. And as yet, in the black mass made by the house where the first of the great autumn dinner-parties was presently to cause light to be set to the chandeliers, the bottom windows alone shed their light, all glowing and casting the bright reflections of a conflagration upon the little pavement of the courtyard, neat and regular as a draught-board.

      Renée pushed open the hall-door, and found herself face to face with her husband’s valet, who was on his way to the basement, carrying a silver kettle. The man looked magnificent, dressed all in black, tall, broad-shouldered, pale-complexioned, with the conventional side-whiskers of an English diplomat, and the solemn and dignified air of a magistrate.

      “Baptiste,” asked Renée, “has monsieur come in?”

      “Yes, madame, he is dressing,” replied the valet, with a bend of the head which a prince bowing to the crowd might have envied.

      Renée slowly climbed the staircase, drawing off her gloves.

      The hall was very luxurious. There was a slight sense of suffocation on entering. The thick carpets that covered the floor and the stairs, the broad red velvet hangings that concealed the walls and the doorways, made the air heavy with silence, with the tepid fragrance of a chapel. Draperies hung high, and the very lofty ceiling was decorated with bosses projecting from a trelliswork of golden ribs. The staircase, whose double balustrade of white marble had a handrail covered with crimson velvet, commenced in two slightly converging flights, between which, at the back, was placed the door of the big drawingroom. On the first landing an immense mirror filled the whole wall. Below, at the foot of the branching staircase, stood, on marble pedestals, two bronze-gilt women, bare to the waist, upholding great lamps set with five burners, whose bright light was softened by ground-glass globes. And on both sides was a row of admirable majolica vases, in which rare plants displayed their growth.

      Renée climbed the staircase, and at each step her image rose in the glass; she wondered, with the feeling of doubt common to the most popular actresses, whether she was really delicious, as people told her.

      Then, when she had reached her rooms, which were on the first floor and overlooked the Parc Monceau, she rang for Céleste, her maid, and had herself dressed for dinner. This took fully an hour and a quarter. When the last pin had been inserted, she opened a window, as the room was very warm, and, leaning her elbows on the sill, sat thinking. Behind her, Céleste moved about discreetly, putting away the things.

      A sea of shadow filled the gardens below. The tall, inky masses of foliage, shaken by sudden gusts of wind, swayed heavily to and fro as with the flux and reflux of the tide, the sound of their dead leaves recalling the lapping of waves on a pebbly beach. Only now and then this ebb and flow of darkness would be pierced by the two yellow eyes of a carriage, appearing and disappearing between the shrubberies, along the

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