THE EMPEROR AND THE OLD GENERAL OGLING RENÉE AT THE BALL AT THE TUILERIES.
They were in the middle of the room, when Renée felt their glances fall upon her. The general gazed at her with a look of surprise, while the Emperor, half raising his eyelids, let a sensual gleam shoot from his grey, hesitating, bleared eyes. Renée, losing countenance, lowered her head, bowed, and saw nothing more but the pattern of the carpet. Still, she watched their shadows, and she understood that they were pausing for a few seconds before her. And she fancied that she heard the Emperor, that licentious dreamer, murmur, as he gazed at her, immersed in her muslin skirt striped with velvet:
"Look there, general, a flower to be culled, a mysterious pink, variegated white and black."
And the general answered in a more brutal voice:
"That pink would look awfully well in our button-holes, sire."
Renée raised her head. The apparition had disappeared, the crowd was thronging round about the doorway. After that evening she often returned to the Tuileries, she even had the honour of being complimented by his majesty aloud, and of becoming a little bit his friend; but she always remembered the sovereign's slow, heavy walk along the centre of the reception-room between the two rows of shoulders; and whenever she experienced any new joy amid her husband's growing prosperity, she again saw the Emperor overtopping the bowing bosoms, coming towards her, and comparing her to a pink which the general advised him to place in his button-hole. For her this was the high note of her life.
[CHAPTER IV.]
The well-defined, galling desire which had risen to Renée's heart amid the troublous perfumes of the conservatory, while Maxime and Louise laughed on a couch of the little buttercup room, seemed to die away like a nightmare of which naught remains save a slight shudder. The young woman had retained the bitterness of the Tanghinia on her lips all night; and it had seemed to her, on feeling the burning of the cursed leaf, that a mouth of flame was pressing itself to hers, blowing her a devouring love. Then this mouth escaped her, and her dream was immersed in vast waves of shade which rolled around her.
In the morning she slept a little, and when she awoke she thought she was ill. She had the curtains drawn, spoke to her doctor of nausea and headache, and for a couple of days actually refused to go out. And as she pretended that she was being besieged, she forbade her door. Maxime came and knocked at it fruitlessly. He did not sleep in the house, as he preferred to be able to dispose freely of his rooms; indeed, he led the most nomadic life in the world, lodging in his father's new houses, selecting whatever floor suited him, and moving every month, often out of sheer caprice, and at times to make room for serious tenants. He dried the walls in the company of some mistress. Accustomed to his stepmother's whims, he feigned great compassion for her, and went upstairs four times a-day to inquire after her, with a most distressed look, though, in point of fact, he merely wished to tease her. On the third day he found her in the little drawing-room, rosy and smiling, and with a calm and rested look.