"At last, ladies!" said Barousse, addressing Mme. Mauperin; "allow me to introduce my young friend, M. Lemeunier. He knows the collection thoroughly, and if you want a guide he will take you to the best things. I must ask to be excused, as I want to go and push something in No. 3 room."
M. Lemeunier took Mme. Mauperin and her daughter round the room, stopping at the canvases signed by the most celebrated names. He merely explained the subjects of the pictures, and did not talk art. Renée was grateful to him for this from the bottom of her heart, without knowing why. When they had seen everything, Mme. Mauperin thanked M. Lemeunier, and they bowed and parted company.
Renée wanted to see one of the side-rooms. The first thing she caught sight of on entering was M. Barousse's back, the back of an amateur in the very height of the excitement of the sale. He was seated on the nearest chair to the auctioneer, next to a picture-dealing woman wearing a cap. He was nudging her, knocking her knee, whispering eagerly his bid, which he imagined he was concealing from the auctioneer and his clerk, from the expert, and from all the room.
"There, come, you have seen enough," said Mme. Mauperin, after a short time. "It's your sister's 'At Home' day, and it is not too late. We have not been once this year to it, and she will be delighted to see us."
Renée's sister, Mme. Mauperin's elder daughter, Mme. Davarande, was the type par excellence of a society woman. Society filled her whole life and her brain. As a child she had dreamed of it; from the time she had been confirmed she had longed for it. She had married very young, and had accepted the first "good-looking and suitable" man who had been introduced to her, without any hesitation or trouble and entirely of her own accord. It was not M. Davarande, but a position she had married. Marriage for her meant a carriage and servants in livery, diamonds, invitations, acquaintances, drives in the Bois. She had all that, did very well without children, loved dress, and was happy. To go to three balls in an evening, to leave forty cards before dinner, to run about from one reception to another, and to have her own "At Home" day—she could not conceive of any happiness beyond this. Devoting herself entirely to society, Mme. Davarande borrowed everything from it herself, its ideas, its opinions, its way of giving charity, its stock phrases in affairs of the heart, and its sentiments. She had the same opinions as the women whose hair was dressed by the famous coiffeur, Laure. She thought exactly what it was correct to think, just as she wore exactly what it was correct to wear. Everything, from her very gestures to the furniture in her drawing-room, from the game she played to the alms she gave away, from the newspaper she read to the dish she ordered from her cook, aimed at being in good style—good style being her law and her religion. She followed the fashion of the moment in everything and everywhere, even to the theatre of the Bouffes Parisiens. She had, when driving in the Bois, been told the names of certain women of doubtful reputation, and could point them out to her friends, and that made an effect. She spelt her name with a small "d," an apostrophe, and a capital A, and this converted it into d'Avarande. Mme. Davarande was pious. It seemed to her that God was chic. It would have seemed almost as improper to her to have no parish as to have no gloves. She had adopted one of those churches where grand marriages are celebrated, where people with great names are to be met, where the chairs have armorial bearings, where the beadle glitters with gold lace, where the incense is perfumed with patchouli, and where the porch after high mass on Sundays resembles the corridor of the Opera House when a great artiste has been singing.
She went to hear all the preachers that people were supposed to hear. She confessed her sins, not in the confessional, but in a community. The name and the individuality of the priest played an important part so far as she was concerned in the sacraments of the Church: she would not have felt that she was really married if any one but the Abbé Blampoix had officiated at her wedding, and she would not have considered a baptism valid if a ten-pound note had not been sent to the curé inside the traditional box of sugar-plums. This woman, whose mind was always fixed on worldly things, even when at church and during the benediction, was naturally, thoroughly, and absolutely virtuous, but her virtue was not the result of any effort, merit, or even consciousness. In the midst of this whirlwind, this artificial air and warm atmosphere, exposed to all the opportunities and temptations of society life, she had neither the heart which a woman must have who is given to dreaming nor enough intelligence to be bored by such an existence. She had neither the curiosity nor the inclination which might have led her astray. Hers was one of those happy, narrow-minded dispositions which have not enough in them to go wrong. She had that unassailable virtue, common to many Parisian women who are not even touched by the temptations which pass over them: she was virtuous just in the same way as marble is cold. Physically, even, as it happens sometimes with lymphatic and delicate natures, the effect of society life on her had been to free her from all other desires by using up her strength, her nervous activity, and the movement of the little blood she had in her body, in the rushing about on visits and shopping, the effort of making herself agreeable, the fatigue of evening parties, resulting in utter weariness at night, and enervation the next day.
There are society women in Paris who, by the amount of vitality and vigour they expend, and by the intense application of their energy and grace, remind one of circus-riders and tight-rope dancers, whose temperament suffers from the fatigue of their exercises.
Mme. Mauperin and her daughter met Mme. Davarande in her dining-room, accompanying a smooth-faced gentleman with blue spectacles to the door. She was extremely amiable to him, and when she had seen him out she returned to her mother and sister.
"Excuse my leaving you," she said, as she kissed them, "but it was M. Lordonnot, the architect of the Sacred Heart Convent. I cultivate him for the sake of my collections. Thanks to him I had forty-eight pounds you know last time. That's very good: Mme. de Berthival has never reached thirty-two pounds. I'm so glad to see you; it's very nice of you to have come. We'll go into the other room—there's no one here to-day. Mme. de Thésigny, Mme. de Champromard, and Mme. de Saint-Sauveur, and then two young men, young de Lorsac—you know him I think, mamma, and his friend de Maisoncelles? Wait a minute," she said to Renée, patting her hair down a little, "your hair looks like a little dog's," and then advancing and opening the drawing-room door, she announced her mother and sister.