In the soft gloom of the July evening Armenonville glittered and twinkled among the trees, and flung handfuls of shivered light on the wind-ruffled waters of the little lake. As they approached, they had a glimpse of tables brilliant with spotless napery and sheen of crystal and silver, and of heavy-headed roses leaning from tall and slender vases. Solicitous waiters, grotesquely swaddled in their aprons, were turning every wine-glass to a ruby or a topaz with the liquid light of Bourgogne or Champagne. Electric lights glowed pink in roses of crinkled silk. The Pavilion was a veritable fairy palace, as unstable, to all appearance, and as gossamer-light as the fabric of a dream swung miraculously within a luminous haze.
The table reserved for them was in an elbow of the piazza and so, a little apart from the others; and the maître d'hôtel led them toward it with an air which was hardly less impressive than a fanfare. It was his business to remember the faces of young foreigners who thundered up at midday in twenty-horse-power Panhards expressly to command a table, and incidentally to tip him a louis. Moreover, there was Radwalader—Radwalader, who knew by his first name every maître d'hôtel from Lavenue's to the Rat Mort, and from Marguery's to the Pavillon Bleu, called Frédéric himself "mon vieux," and sent messages to the chef at Voisin's or the Café Riche, informing him for whom the order was to be prepared.
Among the things which Andrew had unconsciously assimilated from Radwalader, was something very nearly equalling the latter's instinct for ordering a dinner. It was that, even more than the louis or the Panhard, which inspired respect in the supercilious mind of the maître d'hôtel. So they had caviar, sharpening the twang of their halves of lemon with a dash of tabasco; and langouste à l'Américaine, with a hint of tarragon in the mayonnaise; venison, with a confection of ginger, marmalade, and currant jelly, which not every one gets, even for the asking, at the Pavilion d'Armenonville; a salad of split Malaga grapes and hearts of lettuce; and a Camembert cheese, taken at the flood—the which, in Camembert, is of as good omen as that in the affairs of men.
Around them the brilliantly-illuminated tables were filled with diners. The true Parisian monde, long since departed for Aix or Hombourg, had given place to the annual influx of foreigners and the lighter spirits of the half-world, men and women both. Here were minds which skidded from subject to subject with the eccentricity of water-spiders on a roadside pool. The latest comedies, the latest fashions, the latest scandals—they came and went, verbal drops sliding over the acute edge of conversation, each touched with prismatic hues of humour, irony, or cynicism. The hum of chat was a patchwork of English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Italian. Europe was talking—talking the gossip of the day—pouring it like liquid silver into the moulds of many languages, wherefrom it took the oddest forms of epigram.
Here and there, members of the American Colony were entertaining friends from the States, arrived that afternoon from Calais, Cherbourg, or Le Hâvre, with the odour of bilge-water yet in their nostrils, and the terra, misnamed firma, rocking unpleasantly under their senses. At an adjoining table, a huge American collegian, labouring heavily against the head-wind of many cocktails, addressed his waiter:
"Ziss my las' night 'n Paruss, gassun. Jer know w'a' I've done t' Paruss? Ziss w'a' I've done t' Paruss."
He made the gesture of one wringing a half of lemon, and casting it contemptuously aside, and looked up, proudly, for approval. Later he would be tenderly removed—"a river ark on the ocean brine."
But these—the transient Americans—were the least significant factors in the scene. They had come to prey, and would go away to scoff. They were a grade above the herded tourists to whose understanding the Colonne Vendôme is an edifice closed for fear of suicides; but among them were women who would write books on Paris, upon the strength of three months' residence and six letters of introduction, and men whose diligence in exhuming the most sordid evidences of metropolitan degradation would enable them to speak, thenceforward, with authority upon French depravity—the Hams, Tartuffes, and Parkhursts of their hour. Paris finds time to smile at many such. Over and around them flowed the smooth current of Parisian savoir vivre which they could not hope to understand, still less to emulate.
"I feel," said Andrew slowly, "as if I had lived here all my life. Do you remember telling me, that day at Auteuil, that things one ordinarily disregards in America are part of one's education in Paris? I've learned the truth of that. I don't think I should be apt to mistake cerise for red, as things are now."
"Did you ever think of the irony of these toilettes de demi-mondaine?" asked Radwalader, looking from one to another of the superb gowns at the neighbouring tables. "You know, they're society's fashions of the day after to-morrow. I wonder what our dear lady of the Parc Monceau, or Mayfair, or Fifth Avenue, or Back Bay, or Nob Hill, would say if she knew the source of that trick of sleeve, or that contrast of entre-deux, which she fondly imagines was born in the mind of a Doucet for her and her alone. It came into being, my dear Vane, in a stuffy, overfurnished little apartment in one of the suburbs, as a patron of questionable merit by a charming creature with more ideas than reputation, and was first worn at the little Mathurins—or here—by Ninon Gyrianne: at a theatre where my lady would not be seen, by a woman whom she would not receive! Or, if not that, La Girofla stood sponsor for it at Deauville or Monte Carlo, and was duly complimented in the potins of Gil Blas. Quelle farce, mon Dieu!"