Suddenly quitting, almost pushing aside, the guest to whom he was speaking in a low voice and promising endless favors, he flew to meet a stately lady with crimson cheeks and authoritative manner: “Ah, Madame la Maréchale,” and placing in his own the august arm encased in a twenty-button glove, he led his noble guest through the rooms between a double row of obsequious black coats to the concert room, where Mme. Roumestan presided, assisted by her sister.
As he passed through the rooms on his return he scattered kind words and hand-shakes right and left. “Count on me! It’s a settled thing!”—or else he threw rapidly his “How are you, friend?”—or again, in order to warm up the reception and put a sympathetic current flowing through all this solemn society crowd, he would present people to each other, throwing them without warning into each other’s arms: “What! you do not know each other? The Prince of Anhalt!—M. Bos, Senator!” and never noticed that the two men, their names hardly uttered, after a hasty duck of the head and a “Sir”—“Sir,” merely waited till he was gone to turn their backs on each other with a ferocious look.
Like the greater number of political antagonists, our good Numa had relaxed and let himself out when he had won the fight and come to power. Without ceasing to belong to the party of moral order, this Vendean from the South had lost his fine ardor for the Cause, permitted his grand hopes to slumber, and began to find that things were not so bad after all. Why should these savage hatreds exist between nice people? He yearned for peace and a general indulgence. He counted on music to operate a fusion among the parties, his little fortnightly concerts becoming a neutral ground for artistic and sociable enjoyment, where the most bitterly hostile people might meet each other and learn to esteem one another in a spot apart from the passions and torments of politics.
That was why there was such a queer mixture in the invitations; thence also the embarrassment and lack of ease among the guests; therefore also colloquies in low tones suddenly interrupted and that curious going and coming of black coats, the assumed interest seen in looks raised to the ceiling, examining the gilded fluting of the panels, the decorations of the time of the Directory, half Louis XVI, half Empire, with bronze heads on the upright lines of the marble chimneypieces. People were hot and at the same time cold, as if, one might believe, the terrible frost outside, changed by the thick walls and the wadding of the hangings, had been converted into moral cold. From time to time the rushing about of De Lappara and De Rochemaure to find seats for the ladies broke in upon the monotonous strolling about of bored men, or else a stir was made by the sensational entrance of the beautiful Mme. Hubler, her hair dressed with feathers, her profile dry like that of an indestructible doll, with a smile like a stamped coin drawn up to her very eyebrows—a wax doll in a hair-dresser’s window. But the cold soon returned again.
“It is the very devil to thaw out these rooms of the Public Instruction. I am sure the ghost of Frayssinous walks here at night.”
This remark in a loud tone was made by one of a group of young musicians gathered obsequiously round Cadaillac, the manager of the opera, who was sitting philosophically on a velvet couch with his back against the statue of Molière. Very fat, half deaf, with a bristling white moustache, his face puffy and impenetrable, it was hard to find in him the natty and politic young impresario under whose care the “Nabob” had given his entertainments; his eyes alone told of the Parisian joker, his ferocious science of life, his spirit, hard as a blackthorn with an iron ferule, toughened in the fire of the footlights. But full and sated and content with his place and fearful of losing it at the end of his contract, he sheathed his claws and talked little and especially little here; his only criticism on this official and social comedy being a laugh as silent and inscrutable as that of Leather-Stocking.
“Boissaric, my good fellow,” he asked in a low voice of an ambitious young Toulousian who had just had a ballet accepted at the opera after only ten years of waiting—a thing nobody could believe—“you who know everything, tell me who that solemn-looking man with a big moustache is who talks familiarly to every one and walks behind his nose with as thoughtful an air as if he were going to the funeral of that feature: he must belong to the shop, for he talked theatre to me as one having authority.”
“I don’t think he is an actor, master, I think he is a diplomat. I just heard him say to the Belgian Minister that he had been his colleague a long time.”
“You are mistaken, Boissaric. He must be a foreign general; only a moment ago I heard him perorating in a crowd of big epaulettes and he was saying: ‘Unless one has commanded a large body of men—’”
“Strange!”