"'I have a much prettier one underneath,'" quietly added Monsieur de Saffré. "It's old, my dear fellow, very old."
Monsieur Hupel de la Noue looked at him in consternation. The remark was old, and he had meant to sift his commentary on the naivete of this cry from the heart!
"Old, as old as the world," repeated the secretary. "Madame d'Espanet has said it twice already at the Tuileries."
This was the last blow. After that the prefect no longer cared a fig for the minister or the whole drawing-room. He was proceeding towards the platform when the piano began a prelude, in a saddened tone, with trembling notes which seemed to weep; then the complaint expanded, dragged on at length, and the curtains parted. Monsieur Hupel de la Noue, who had already half disappeared, returned into the drawing-room on hearing the slight grating of the rings. He was pale, exasperated; he made a violent effort to restrain himself from apostrophizing the ladies. What! they had taken up their positions unassisted! It must be that little d'Espanet who had fomented a plot to hasten the change of costume and dispense with him. That wasn't it, that was worth nothing at all!
He returned, mumbling indistinct words. He looked on to the platform, shrugging his shoulders, and murmuring:
"The nymph Echo is too near the edge—And that leg of handsome Narcissus, nothing noble in its attitude, nothing noble at all."
Mignon and Charrier, who had approached him to hear "the explanation," ventured to ask "what the young man and the young woman were doing there, lying on the ground." But he did not answer, he refused to explain any more of his poem; and as the contractors insisted:
"Why," he said, "it no longer concerns me, since the ladies set themselves in position without me!"
The piano softly sobbed. On the platform a clearing, on which the electric ray set a stretch of sunlight, revealed a vista of leaves. It was an ideal glade with blue trees, and large red and yellow flowers which rose as high as the oaks. Venus and Plutus stood on a grassy mound side by side, and surrounded by nymphs who had hastened from the neighbouring thickets to serve as their escort. There were the daughters of the trees, the daughters of the springs, the daughters of the heights, all the laughing naked divinities of the forest. And the god and the goddess triumphed, and punished the apathy of the proud young fellow who had scorned them, while the group of nymphs looked inquisitively and with religious fright at the vengeance of Olympus displayed in the foreground. The drama was there being unravelled. Handsome Narcissus, lying on the margin of a brook which came down from the back of the stage, was looking at himself in the clear mirror; and exactitude had been carried to the point of placing a strip of looking-glass, at the bottom of the brook. But he was no longer the free young fellow, the forest wanderer; death surprised him amid his delighted admiration of his own figure, death enervated him, and Venus with her outstretched finger, like a fairy in a transformation scene, consigned him to his deadly fate. He was becoming a flower. His limbs became verdant and longer, in his tight-fitting costume of green satin; the flexible stalk, figured by his slightly bent legs, sank into the ground to take root there, while his bust, decked with broad lappets of white satin, expanded into a marvellous corolla. Maxime's fair hair completed the illusion, and set, with its long curls, yellow pistils amid the whiteness of the petals. And the large, nascent flower, still human, inclined its head towards the spring, with its eyes bedimmed, and smiling with voluptuous ecstasy, as if handsome Narcissus had at length satisfied in death the passion which he had felt for himself. A few paces off the nymph Echo was dying also, dying of unquenched desires; she found herself gradually caught in the rigidity of the soil, she felt her burning limbs congeal and harden. She was not a vulgar rock, soiled by moss, but white marble, by her shoulders and arms, by her long snowy robe from which the girdle of foliage and the blue drapery had glided. Sunk down amid the satin of her skirt, which formed large plaits, similar to a block of Paros, she threw herself back, with nought alive, in her statue-like congealed body, save her woman's eyes, eyes which glistened as they remained fixed on the flower of the waters, languidly leaning above the mirror of the spring. And it already seemed as if all the love sounds of the forest, the prolonged noises of the thickets, the mysterious quivers of the leaves, the deep sighs of the old oaks, came and beat upon the marble flesh of the nymph Echo, whose heart, still bleeding amid the block, resounded protractedly, repeating afar the slightest complaints of the Earth and of the Air.
"Oh! how they have muffled up poor Maxime!" murmured Louise. "And Madame Saccard, you would say a dead woman!"