“Do come! You get a capital view from this window!”
They all three leaned out, greatly interested. The trees got in their way, and occasionally the torches disappeared under the foliage. They tried to catch a glimpse of the men of their own party below, but a protruding balcony hid the door, and they could only make out Count Muffat, who looked like a dark parcel thrown down on the bench where he sat. He was still burying his face in his handkerchief. A carriage had stopped in front, and yet another woman hurried up, in whom Lucy recognized Maria Blond. She was not alone; a stout man got down after her.
“It’s that thief of a Steiner,” said Caroline. “How is it they haven’t sent him back to Cologne yet? I want to see how he looks when he comes in.”
They turned round, but when after the lapse of ten minutes Maria Blond appeared, she was alone. She had twice mistaken the staircase. And when Lucy, in some astonishment, questioned her:
“What, he?” she said. “My dear, don’t you go fancying that he’ll come upstairs! It’s a great wonder he’s escorted me as far as the door. There are nearly a dozen of them smoking cigars.”
As a matter of fact, all the gentlemen were meeting downstairs. They had come strolling thither in order to have a look at the boulevards, and they hailed one another and commented loudly on that poor girl’s death. Then they began discussing politics and strategy. Bordenave, Daguenet, Labordette, Prullière and others, besides, had swollen the group, and now they were all listening to Fontan, who was explaining his plan for taking Berlin within a week.
Meanwhile Maria Blond was touched as she stood by the bedside and murmured, as the others had done before her:
“Poor pet! The last time I saw her was in the grotto at the Gaîté.”
“Ah, she’s changed; she’s changed!” Rose Mignon repeated with a smile of gloomiest dejection.
Two more women arrived. These were Tatan Nene and Louise Violaine. They had been wandering about the Grand Hotel for twenty minutes past, bandied from waiter to waiter, and had ascended and descended more than thirty flights of stairs amid a perfect stampede of travelers who were hurrying to leave Paris amid the panic caused by the war and the excitement on the boulevards. Accordingly they just dropped down on chairs when they came in, for they were too tired to think about the dead. At that moment a loud noise came from the room next door, where people were pushing trunks about and striking against furniture to an accompaniment of strident, outlandish syllables. It was a young Austrian couple, and Gaga told how during her agony the neighbors had played a game of catch as catch can and how, as only an unused door divided the two rooms, they had heard them laughing and kissing when one or the other was caught.