Opposite the armchair, however, in which the count’s mother had died—a square armchair of formal design and inhospitable padding, which stood by the hearthside—the Countess Sabine was seated in a deep and cozy lounge, the red silk upholsteries of which were soft as eider down. It was the only piece of modern furniture there, a fanciful item introduced amid the prevailing severity and clashing with it.
“So we shall have the shah of Persia,” the young woman was saying.
They were talking of the crowned heads who were coming to Paris for the exhibition. Several ladies had formed a circle round the hearth, and Mme du Joncquoy, whose brother, a diplomat, had just fulfilled a mission in the East, was giving some details about the court of Nazr-ed-Din.
“Are you out of sorts, my dear?” asked Mme Chantereau, the wife of an ironmaster, seeing the countess shivering slightly and growing pale as she did so.
“Oh no, not at all,” replied the latter, smiling. “I felt a little cold. This drawing room takes so long to warm.”
And with that she raised her melancholy eyes and scanned the walls from floor to ceiling. Her daughter Estelle, a slight, insignificant-looking girl of sixteen, the thankless period of life, quitted the large footstool on which she was sitting and silently came and propped up one of the logs which had rolled from its place. But Mme de Chezelles, a convent friend of Sabine’s and her junior by five years, exclaimed:
“Dear me, I would gladly be possessed of a drawing room such as yours! At any rate, you are able to receive visitors. They only build boxes nowadays. Oh, if I were in your place!”
She ran giddily on and with lively gestures explained how she would alter the hangings, the seats—everything, in fact. Then she would give balls to which all Paris should run. Behind her seat her husband, a magistrate, stood listening with serious air. It was rumored that she deceived him quite openly, but people pardoned her offense and received her just the same, because, they said, “she’s not answerable for her actions.”
“Oh that Leonide!” the Countess Sabine contented herself by murmuring, smiling her faint smile the while.
With a languid movement she eked out the thought that was in her. After having lived there seventeen years she certainly would not alter her drawing room now. It would henceforth remain just such as her mother-in-law had wished to preserve it during her lifetime. Then returning to the subject of conversation: