"She is covered with rice powder," said Madame Michelin.
Other scarcely complimentary remarks circulated. This third tableau did not meet with the same unqualified success as the two others. And yet it was this tragical ending which made Monsieur Hupel de la Noue enthusiastic about his own talent. He admired himself in it, as his Narcissus did in his strip of looking-glass. He had set a number of poetical and philosophical allusions in it. When the curtains had closed again for the last time, and the spectators had applauded like people of good breeding, he experienced mental regret at having given way to anger and not having explained the last page of his poem. He then wished to give the people around him the key to the charming, grand, or simply suggestive things which handsome Narcissus and the nymph Echo represented, and he even tried to say what Venus and Plutus were doing in the depths of the clearing; but the gentlemen and ladies, whose clear practical minds had understood the grotto of flesh and the grotto of gold, had no inclination to descend into the prefect's mythological complications. Only Mignon and Charrier, who absolutely wished to inform themselves, were good-natured enough to question him. He took possession of them, and kept them during nearly two hours, standing in the embrasure of a window, relating to them the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid.
The minister now withdrew. He apologised for not being able to wait for the beautiful Madame Saccard to compliment her on the perfect gracefulness of the nymph Echo. He had just been three or four times round the drawing-room on the arm of his brother, giving a few shakes of the hand and bowing to the ladies. He had never before compromised himself so much for Saccard. He left him radiant, when, on the threshold, he said to him in a loud voice:
"I shall expect you to-morrow morning. Come and breakfast with me."
The ball was about to begin. The servants had ranged the ladies' arm-chairs along the walls. The large drawing-room now displayed from the little yellow room to the platform, its bare carpet the large purple flowers of which opened under the dripping light which fell from the crystal of the chandeliers. The heat was increasing; the reflection of the red hangings brightened the gilding of the furniture and the ceiling. To open the ball one waited until the ladies, the nymph Echo, Venus, Plutus, and the others, had changed their costumes.
Madame d'Espanet and Madame Haffner appeared the first. They had reassumed their costumes of the second tableau; the first as gold, the other as silver. They were surrounded and congratulated; and they recounted their emotions.
"As for me I nearly burst out," said the marchioness, "when I saw Monsieur Toutin-Laroche's big nose looking at me in the distance!"
"I think that I have a stiff neck," languidly remarked the fair-haired Suzanne. "No, really, if it had lasted a minute longer I should have replaced my head in a natural position, my neck hurt me so much."
From the embrasure into which Monsieur Hupel de la Noue had pushed Mignon and Charrier, he cast nervous glances at the group formed around the two young women; he was afraid that people were poking fun at him. The other nymphs arrived one after the other; they had all resumed their costumes as precious stones; the Countess Vanska, as coral, met with prodigious success when one was able to closely examine the ingenious details of her dress. Then Maxime entered, correct in his dress coat and with a smiling air; and a flow of women enveloped him, he was placed in the centre of the circle, he was joked about his part as a flower, and his passion for looking-glasses. Without any embarrassment, as if delighted with his part, he continued smiling, answered the jokes, confessed that he adored himself, and that he was sufficiently cured of women to prefer himself to them. People laughed the louder at this, the group grew larger, and took possession of the whole centre of the drawing-room, while the young man, drowned amid this people of shoulders, this medley of bright costumes, retained his perfume of monstrous love, his vicious fair flower's gentleness.
When Renée, however, at last came down, there was semi-silence. She had attired herself in a new costume of such original grace and such audacity that the gentlemen and the ladies, although accustomed to the young woman's eccentricities, at first gave a movement of surprise. She was dressed as an Otaheitian. This costume, it appears, is most primitive: as she wore it, it comprised soft tinted tights which rose from her feet to her bosom, leaving her shoulders and arms bare; and over these tights a simple muslin blouse, short and trimmed with two flounces so as to slightly hide the hips. In her hair a wreath of wild flowers; and gold rings round her ankles and her wrists. Nothing more. She was naked. The tights had the suppleness of flesh under the paleness of the blouse; the pure line of her nudity could be detected from her knees to her arm-pits, vaguely bedimmed by the flounces, but reappearing at the slightest movement, and becoming more distinct between the threads of the lace. She was an adorable savage, a barbarous, voluptuous girl scarcely hidden by a white vapour, a patch of sea fog, amid which her whole body could be divined.