‘Look, Comte, over there ... I swear it is our old friend, the ghost of the fashion of 1640!’
‘It is, it is, it’s the black shadow of the white Ariane! The crotesque and importunate gallant!’ They made a dash for Monsieur Troqueville, who was trying hard to look unconscious, and leaping round him beset him with a volley of somewhat questionable jests. All eyes were turned on him, eyebrows were raised, questioning glances were exchanged. Madame Troqueville sat quite motionless, gazing in front of her, determined not to hear what they were saying. She would not be forced to see things too closely.
When they had finished with Monsieur Troqueville, they bowed to the Présidente, studiously avoiding the rest of the company in their salutation, and, according to their picture of themselves, minced or swaggered out of the room. Jacques followed them.
This interlude had shaken Madeleine out of her vastly agreeable dreams. The muguets had made her feel unfinished and angular, and they had not even asked her to dance. Then, their treatment of her father had been a sharp reminder that after all she was by birth nothing but a contemptible bourgeoise. But as the evening’s gaiety gradually readjusted itself, so did her picture of herself, and by the time of the final Branle, she was once more drunk with vanity and hope.
The Troguins sent them back in their own coach, and the drive through the fantastic Paris of the night accentuated Madeleine’s sense of being in a dream. There passed them from time to time troops of tipsy gallants, their faces distorted by the flickering lights of torches, and here and there the lanternes vives of the pastry-cooks—brilliantly-lighted lanterns round whose sides, painted in gay colours, danced a string of grimacing beasts, geese, and apes, and hares and elephants—showed bright and strange against the darkness.
Then the words:—
La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies! echoed melancholy in the distance. It was the cry of the Oublieux, the sellers of wafers and the nightingales of seventeenth century Paris, for they never began to cry their wares before dusk.
La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!
Oublie, oublier! The second time that evening there came into Madeleine’s head a play on words.