“I was informed of it. You even went into the studio.”
“And I saw the famous group—my group.”
“Well?”
“It is very fine. The hound runs as though he were mad. The fox scampers away admirably. Only I did not quite understand. You had told me that it was our own story, yours and mine.”
“Ah, there! Try. It is an apologue that I read in—You do not read Rabelais, M. le Duc?”
“My faith, no. He is too coarse.”
“Ah, well, his works were the text-book of my first reading lessons. Very badly brought up, you know. Oh, exceedingly badly. My apologue, then, is taken from Rabelais. Here it is: Bacchus created a wonderful fox, impossible to capture. Vulcan, on the other hand, gave a dog of his own creation the power to catch every animal that he should pursue. ‘Now,’ as my author has it, ‘it happened that the two met.’ You see what a wild and interminable chase. It seems to me, my dear duke, that destiny has in the same way brought us together, endowed with conflicting attributes; you who have received from the gods the gift of reaching all hearts, I whose heart will never be made prisoner.”
She spoke these words, looking him full in the face, almost laughing, but sheathed and erect in the white tunic which seemed to defend her person against the liberties of his thought. He, the conqueror, the irresistible, had never before met one of this audacious and headstrong breed. He brought to bear upon her, therefore, all the magnetic currents of his seductiveness, while around them the rising murmur of the fete, the soft laughter, the rustle of satins and the rattling of pearls formed the accompaniment to this duet of mundane passion and juvenile irony. He resumed after a minute’s pause:
“But how did the gods escape from that awkward situation?”
“By turning the two runners into stone.”