The enormous grand piano occupied one entire end of the drawing-room, the ladies being seated in front of it on rows of chairs, like at the theatre; and two dense masses of black coats filled up the doorways leading to the dining-room and the parlour. The chandelier and the candelabra, and the six lamps standing on side-tables, lit up with a blinding light the white and gold room in which the red silk of the furniture and of the hangings showed up vividly. It was very warm, the fans produced a breeze at regular intervals, impregnated with the penetrating odours of bodices and bare shoulders.
Just at that moment, Madame Duveyrier was taking her seat at the piano. With a gesture, Madame Josserand smilingly begged she would not disturb herself; and she left her daughters in the midst of the men, as she accepted a chair for herself between Valérie and Madame Juzeur. Monsieur Josserand had made for the parlour, where the landlord, Monsieur Vabre, was dozing at his usual place, in the corner of a sofa. There were also Campardon, Théophile and Auguste Vabre, Doctor Juillerat and the Abbé Mauduit, forming a group; whilst Trublot and Octave, who had rejoined each other, had flown from the music to the end of the dining-room. Near them, and behind the stream of black coats, Duveyrier, thin and tall of stature, was looking fixedly at his wife seated at the piano waiting for silence. In the button-hole of his coat he wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in a neat little rosette.
“Hush! hush! silence!” murmured some friendly voices.
Then, Clotilde Duveyrier commenced one of Chopin’s most difficult serenades. Tall and handsome, with magnificent red hair, she had a long face, as pale and cold as snow; and, in her grey eyes, music alone kindled a flame, an exaggerated passion on which she existed without any other desire either of the flesh or the spirit. Duveyrier continued watching her; then, after the first bars, a nervous exasperation contracted his lips, he drew aside and kept himself at the farthest end of the dining-room. On his clean-shaven face, with its pointed chin and eyes all askew, large red blotches indicated a bad blood, quite a pollution festering just beneath the skin.
Trublot, who was examining him, quietly observed:
“He does not like music.”
“Nor I either,” replied Octave.
“Oh! the unpleasantness is not the same for you. A man, my dear fellow, who was always lucky. Not a whit more intelligent than another, but who was helped along by every one. Belonging to an old middle-class family, the father an ex-presiding judge, called to the bar the moment he had completed his studies, then appointed, deputy judge at Reims, from whence he was removed to Paris and made judge of the Court of First Instance, decorated, and now a counsellor before he is forty-five years of age. It’s stiff, isn’t it? But he does not like music, that piano has been the bane of his life. One cannot have everything.”
Meanwhile, Clotilde was knocking off the difficult passages with extraordinary composure. She handled her piano like a circus-rider her horse. Octave’s attention was solely occupied with the furious working of her hands.
“Just look at her fingers,” said he, “it is astonishing! A quarter of an hour of that must hurt her immensely.”