THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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green satin; the flexible stalk, formed by his legs slightly bent, was on the point of sinking into the ground and taking root, while his body, adorned with broad lappets of white satin, blossomed into a wondrous corolla. Maxime’s fair hair completed the illusion, and with its long curls set yellow pistils amid the whiteness of the petals. And the great nascent flower, still human, inclined its head towards the spring, its eyes moistened, its countenance smiling with voluptuous ecstasy, as though the beauteous Narcissus had at last in death satisfied the passion with which he had inspired himself. A few paces off the nymph Echo was dying also, dying of unquenched desire; she found herself little by little caught in the hardness of the ground, she felt her burning limbs freezing and hardening. She was no vulgar moss-stained rock, but one of white marble, through her arms and shoulders, through her long snow-white robe, from which the girdle of leaves and the blue drapery had glided down. Sinking amid the satin of her skirt, which was creased in large folds, like a block of Parian marble, she threw herself back, retaining nothing of life, in her cold sculptured body, save her woman’s eyes, eyes that gleamed, fixed on the flower of the waters, reclining languidly above the mirror of the spring. And it already seemed as if all the love-sounds of the forest, the long-drawn voices of the thickets, the mystic shivers of the leaves, the deep sighs of the tall oaks, came and beat upon the marble flesh of the Nymph Echo, whose heart, still bleeding within the block, resounded evermore, repeating afar the slightest complaints of Earth or Air.
“Oh, how they have rigged out that poor Maxime!” murmured Louise. “And Madame Saccard, she looks like a corpse.”
“She is covered with rice-powder,” said Madame Michelin.
Other remarks flitted about of a hardly complimentary nature. This third tableau had not the unqualified success of the two others. And yet it was this tragic ending that filled M. Hupel de la Noue with enthusiasm for his own talent. He admired himself in it as did his Narcissus in his strip of looking-glass. He had put into it a crowd of poetical and philosophical allusions. When the curtains were closed for the last time, and the spectators had applauded in a well-bred way, he felt a mortal regret at having yielded to anger and not explained the last page of his poem. Then he essayed to give to the people about him the key to the charming, grandiose, or simply naughty ideas represented by the beauteous Narcissus and the Nymph Echo, and he even tried to say what Venus and Plutus were doing at the bottom of the glade; but these ladies and gentlemen, whose clear, practical minds had understood the grotto of flesh and the grotto of gold, did not care to go into the préfet’s mythological complications. Only the Mignon and Charrier couple, who had made up their minds to know, had the goodnature to question him. He took possession of them, and kept them standing for nearly two hours in a window-recess while he related to them Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
Meantime the minister departed. He apologized for not being able to stay and compliment the beautiful Madame Saccard on the perfect grace of her Nymph Echo. He had gone three or four times round the drawingroom on his brother’s arm, shaking hands with people, bowing to the ladies. Never had he compromised himself so much for Saccard. He left him radiant when, on the threshold, he said to him in a loud voice:
“I shall expect you tomorrow morning. Come to breakfast.”
The ball was about to begin. The servants had ranged the ladies’ chairs along the walls. The large drawingroom now displayed, from the small yellow drawingroom to the stage, its bare carpet, whose big purple flowers opened out under the dripping light that fell from the crystal of the chandeliers. The heat increased, the reflection of the red hangings burnished the gilt of the furniture and the ceiling. To open the ball they were waiting for the ladies, the Nymph Echo, Venus, Plutus and the rest, to change their costumes.
Madame d’Espanet and Madame Haffner were the first to appear. They had resumed the dresses they wore in the second tableau; one was Gold, the other Silver. They were surrounded, congratulated; and they related their emotions.
“As for me, I almost exploded with laughter,” said the marquise, “when I saw M. Toutin-Laroche’s big nose looking at me from the distance!”
“I believe I’ve got a crick in my neck,” drawled the fair-haired Suzanne. “No, on my word, if it had lasted a minute longer, I would have put my head back into a natural position, it pose without consulting me!”
From the recess into which he had driven the Mignon and Charrier couple, M. Hupel de la Noue cast restless glances at the group formed around the two ladies; he feared he was being ridiculed. The other nymphs arrived one after the other; all had resumed their costumes as precious stones; the Comtesse Vanska, as Coral, achieved a stupendous success when the ingenious details of her dress were closely examined. Then Maxime entered, faultless in dress-clothes, with a smiling air; and a flow of women enveloped him, he was placed in the centre of the circle, he was joked about his floral character, about his passion for mirrors; while he, unembarrassed, as though delighted with his part, continued to smile, joked back, confessed that he adored himself, and that he was sufficiently cured of women to prefer himself to them. The laughter grew louder, the group grew larger, took up the whole of the middle of the drawingroom, while the young man, lost in this mob of shoulders, in this medley of dazzling costumes, retained his fragrance of depraved love, the gentleness of a pale, vicious flower.
But when Renée at length came down, there was a semi-silence. She had put on a new costume of such original grace and so audacious that the ladies and the men, however accustomed to her eccentricities, gave a sudden movement of surprise. She was dressed as an Otaheitan belle. This dress, it would seem, is by way of being very primitive: a pair of soft tinted tights, that reached from her feet to her breasts, leaving her arms and shoulders bare, and over these tights a simple muslin blouse, short, and trimmed with two flounces so as to hide the hips a little. A wreath of wild flowers in her hair; gold bangles on her wrists and ankles. And nothing more. She was naked. The tights had the suppleness of flesh under the muslin blouse; the pure naked outline was visible, vaguely bedimmed by the flounces from the armpits to the knees, but at the slightest movement reappearing and accentuating itself between the meshes of the lace. She was an adorable savage, a barbarous and voluptuous wanton, barely hidden beneath a white haze, a blurr of sea-fog, beneath which her whole body could be divined.
Renée, with rosy cheeks, came briskly forward. Céleste had managed to split the first pair of tights; fortunately Renée, foreseeing this eventuality, had taken her precautions. The torn tights had delayed her. She seemed to care little for her triumph. Her hands burned, her eyes glittered with fever. She smiled, however, answered briefly the men who stopped her, who complimented her on the chasteness of her attitudes in the tableaux-vivants. She left in her wake a trail of dress-coats astounded and charmed at the transparency of her muslin blouse. When she had reached the group of women surrounding Maxime, she occasioned short cries of admiration, and the marquise began to eye her from head to foot, amorously murmuring:
“She is deliciously made.”
Madame Michelin, whose alme dress became hideously ponderous beside this simple veil, pursed her lips, while Madame Sidonie, shrivelled up in her black sorceress’s dress, whispered in her ear:
“It’s the height of indecency: don’t you think so, you beautiful thing?”
“Well!” said the pretty brunette at last, “how angry M. Michelin would be if I undressed myself like that.”
“And quite right too,” concluded the business woman.
The band of serious men was not of this opinion. They indulged in ecstasies at a distance. M. Michelin, whom his wife had so inappropriately quoted, went into transports, in order to please M. Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud, whom the sight of Renée enraptured. Saccard was greatly complimented on the perfection of his wife’s figure. He bowed, he professed to be very much overcome. The evening was an auspicious one for him, and but for a preoccupation that flitted through his eyes at moments when he threw a rapid glance towards his sister, he would have appeared perfectly happy.
“I say, she never showed us so much as that before,” said Louise, jestingly, in Maxime’s ear, glancing towards Renée.
She corrected herself, and added, with a mystifying smile:
“At