Towards nine o'clock, M. Kahn and M. Béjuin arrived together. They were the first of the band to put in an appearance, but were soon followed by Madame Correur. Clorinde was found in her bedroom, stretched upon a couch there. She complained of one of those extraordinary and unheard-of troubles which suddenly came upon her every now and then. She must have swallowed a fly, she said, while drinking, for she could feel it flying about inside her stomach. Draped in her long black velvet robe, her shoulders supported by three pillows, she none the less looked superbly beautiful with her pale face and bare arms, recalling indeed one of those reclining, dreaming figures, which sculptors portray on monuments. At her feet was Luigi Pozzo, gently twanging the strings of a guitar. He had deserted painting for music.
'Sit down, won't you?' she said to the others. 'Please excuse me. A wretched little insect has got inside me somehow.'
Pozzo went on twanging his guitar, and singing in a low voice, with an ecstatic expression on his face, as if lost in a reverie. Madame Correur wheeled a chair up to Clorinde's side, and M. Kahn and M. Béjuin, after a little searching, also succeeded in finding seats. It was not an easy matter to do so, for the five or six chairs were hidden beneath a litter of dresses and petticoats, so that when Colonel Jobelin and his son Auguste arrived five minutes later, they had to remain standing.
'Little one,' said Clorinde to Auguste, whom she still treated quite familiarly in spite of his seventeen years, 'go and bring two chairs out of my dressing-room.'
These were cane-seated chairs, with all the varnish worn away by the damp linen which was constantly hung over their backs. The bedroom was lighted by a single lamp with a shade of pink paper. There was another in the dressing-room and a third in the boudoir, which, seen through the doorways, seemed to be full of dusky shadow, as though merely illuminated by a night-light. The bedroom itself, with hangings of a tender mauve that had now turned to a pale grey, was full of a floating haze, in which one could scarcely distinguish the rents in the coverings of the easy-chairs, the dust-marks on the furniture and the big ink-stain in the middle of the carpet where some inkstand had fallen with such force that even the wainscotting was splashed. The bed-curtains had been drawn, probably in order to conceal the untidiness of the bed. And amidst this hazy gloom, there rose a powerful scent as though all the bottles and flasks in the dressing-room had remained uncorked. Clorinde obstinately refused to have any of the windows open, even in warm weather.
'What a nice scent you've got here,' said Madame Correur, complimentarily.
'Oh, it's I who smell so nice,' the young woman naïvely replied.
Then she began to talk of the essences which she obtained direct from the perfumer to the Sultanas, and even held her arm under Madame Correur's nose. Her black velvet blouse had got a little disarranged, and her feet, in their little red slippers, showed below it. Pozzo, languid and intoxicated by the strong perfumes which she exhaled, was tapping his instrument gently with his thumb.
However, after a few minutes, the conversation turned of necessity on Rougon, as was invariably the case every Thursday and Sunday. The band seemed to come together for the sole purpose of discussing this one everlasting subject. Its members felt an ever-growing rancour against the great man, a craving to relieve themselves by ceaseless recrimination. Clorinde no longer had any trouble to set them going. They always arrived with a fresh burden of grievances, ever discontented and jealous, actually embittered by what Rougon had done for them, and burning with a violent fever of ingratitude.
'Have you seen the fat man to-day?' the colonel asked.