THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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but she continued smiling, comically, like a schoolboy delighted with a rather broad joke.
The ball began. The stage of the tableaux-vivants had been utilized to accommodate a small band, in which brass predominated; and the clear notes of the horns and cornets rang out in the ideal forest with the blue trees. First came a quadrille: “Ah, il a des bottes, il a des bottes, Bastien!” which was at that time sending the ballrooms into raptures. The ladies danced. Polkas, waltzes, mazurkas alternated with the quadrilles. The swinging couples passed and repassed, filling the long gallery, bounding beneath the lash of the brass, swaying to the lullaby of the violins. The fancy dresses, this flow of women of every country and of every period, rocked to and fro in a swarming medley of bright materials. After mingling and carrying off the colours in cadenced confusion, the rhythm, at certain strokes of the bow, abruptly brought back the same pink satin tunic, the same blue velvet bodice, side by side with the same black coat. Then another stroke of the bows, a blast of the cornets pushed the couples on, made them travel in files around the drawingroom with the swinging motion of a rowing-boat drifting under the impulse of the wind, which has snapped her painter. And so on, endlessly, for hours. Sometimes, between two dances, a lady went up to a window, suffocating, to inhale a little of the icy air; a couple rested on a sofa in the small buttercup drawingroom or went into the conservatory, strolling slowly round the pathways. Skirts, their edges alone visible, wore languid smiles under the arbours of creepers, in the depths of the tepid shadow, where the forte notes of the cornets penetrated during the quadrilles of “Ohé les p’tits agneaux!” and “J’ai un fled qui r’mue!”
When the servants opened the door of the dining-room, transformed into a refreshment buffet, with sideboards against the walls and a long table in the middle, laden with cold things, there was a push and a crush. A fine tall man, who had bashfully kept his hat in his hand, was so violently flattened against the wall that the wretched hat burst with a pitiful moan. This made the others laugh. They rushed at the pastry and the truffled game, brutally digging their elbows into one another’s sides. It was a sack, hands met in the middle of dishes, and the lackeys did not know to whom to attend of this band of well-bred men, whose outstretched arms expressed the one fear of arriving too late and finding the dishes empty. An old gentleman grew angry because there was no claret, and champagne, he maintained, kept him awake.
“Gently, messieurs, gently,” said Baptiste, in his serious voice. “There will be enough for every one.”
But nobody listened. The dining-room was full, and anxious dress-coats stood on tiptoe at the door. Before the sideboards stood groups, eating quickly, crowding together. Many swallowed their food without drinking, not having been able to lay their hands on a glass. Others, on the contrary, drank and sought fruitlessly for a morsel of bread.
“Listen,” said M. Hupel de la Noue, whom the Mignon and Charrier couple, sick of mythology, had dragged to the supper-room, “we shan’t get a thing if we don’t club together…. It’s much worse at the Tuileries, and I’ve gained experience there…. You look after the wine, I’ll see to the solids.”
The préfet had his eye on a leg of mutton. He stretched out his arm at the right moment through a break in the shoulders, and quietly carried it off, after stuffing his pockets with rolls. The contractors returned on their side, Mignon with one bottle, Charrier with two bottles of champagne; but they had only been able to find two glasses; they said that didn’t matter, they would drink out of the same. And the party supped off the corner of a flower-stand, at the end of the room. They did not even take off their gloves, but put the slices already cut from the leg of mutton between their bread, and kept the bottles under their arms. And standing up, they talked with their mouths full, stretching out their chins beyond their waistcoats so as to let the gravy fall on the carpet.
Charrier, having finished his wine before his bread, asked a servant to get him a glass of champagne.
“You will have to wait, monsieur!” angrily replied the scared domestic, losing his head, forgetting that he was not in the kitchen. “They have drunk up three hundred bottles already.”
Meantime the notes of the band could be heard swelling with sudden gusts. They were dancing the Kisses Polka, famous at public balls, the rhythm of which each dancer had to mark by saluting his partner. Mme. d’Espanet appeared at the door of the dining-room, flushed, her hair a little disarranged, trailing her long silver dress with a charming air of lassitude. Hardly any one moved aside, she was obliged to push with her elbows to effect a passage. Then she came straight up to M. Hupel de la Noue, who had finished, and who was wiping his mouth with his handkerchief.
“It would be so good of you, monsieur,” she said with a bewitching smile, “if you would find me a chair. I have been all round the table in vain….”
The prefet had a grudge against the marquise, but his gallantry gave him no alternative: he bustled about, found the chair, installed Mme. d’Espanet, and stayed behind her to wait on her. She would only take a few prawns, with a little butter, and half a glass of champagne. She ate daintily amid the gluttony of the men. The table and the chairs were reserved exclusively for the ladies. But an exception was always made in favour of the Baron Gouraud. There he was, comfortably seated in front of a piece of game-pie of which his jaws were slowly munching the crust. The marquise re-subjugated the préfet by telling him that she would never forget her artistic emotions in Les Amours du Beau Narcisse et de la Nymphe Écho. She even explained to him why they had not waited for him, in a way that completely consoled him: the ladies, on learning that the minister was there, thought it would not be very proper to prolong the entr’acte. She ended by begging him to go and look for Mme. Haffner, who was dancing with Mr. Simpson, a brute of a man, she said, whom she disliked. And when Suzanne had come, she no longer had an eye for M. Hupel de la Noue.
Saccard, followed by MM. Toutin-Laroche, de Mareuil, Haffner, had taken possession of a sideboard. As there was no room at the table, and M. de Saffré passed with Madame Michelin on his arm, he stopped them and insisted that the pretty brunette should join his party. She nibbled at some pastry, smiling, raising her bright eyes to the five men who surrounded her. They leant over her, touched her alme’s veils embroidered with threads of gold, drove her up against the sideboard against which she ended by leaning, taking cakes from every hand, very gently and very caressing, with the amorous docility of a slave amid her masters. M. Michelin, all alone at the other end of the room, was finishing up a pot of pâté de foie gras which he had succeeded in capturing.
Meantime Mme. Sidonie, who had been prowling about ever since the first strokes of the bow had opened the ball, entered the dining-room and beckoned to Saccard with a glance.
“She is not dancing,” she said, in a low voice. “She seems restless. I believe she is meditating something desperate…. But I have not yet been able to discover the spark…. I must have something to eat and return to the watch.”
And standing up, like a man, she ate a wing of a chicken which she got M. Michelin, who had finished his pâté, to give her. She poured herself out a large champagne-glass full of malaga, and then, after wiping her lips with her fingers, she returned to the drawingroom. The train of her sorceress’s dress seemed already to have gathered up all the dust of the carpets.
The ball grew languid, the band was showing signs of fatigue, when a murmur circulated: “The cotillon! the cotillon!” putting fresh life into the dancers and the brass. Couples came from all the shrubberies in the hothouse; the large drawingroom filled up as for the first quadrille; and there was a discussion among the awakened crowd. It was the last flicker of the ball. The men who were not dancing watched with limp goodnature from the depths of the window-recesses the talkative group swelling in the middle of the room; while the supper-eaters in the next room stretched out their necks to see, without relinquishing their food.
“M. de Mussy says he won’t,” said a lady. “He swears he never leads the cotillon now…. Come, just once more, Monsieur de Mussy, only this little once. Do, to oblige us.”
But the young attaché remained stiff and serious in his stick-up collar. It was really impossible, he had taken a vow. Disappointment followed. Maxime refused also, saying that he could not possibly, that he was worn out. M.