And she told her friends, crowded in the box, leaning over her and looking at the pretty, plump bosom of this little, well-made brunette, how Vaudrey was to dine at her house on the very evening when he fell from power.
"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy advised me, one day,—she has passed through that in her time: one should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry! Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!—One invites the Secretary of the President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes. It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's titles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"
She laughed heartily and loud, and Madame Marsy, who was half dethroned, fanned herself nervously in her box, or levelled her glass at some one in the audience, affecting a little disdainful manner toward her fair neighbor. A friendship turned to acid.
Vaudrey, looking fatigued and abstracted, sat in his stall during the entr'acte. He looked unconsciously about the theatre and still felt surprised at not receiving salutations and bows, as formerly. He felt that he was becoming a waif. Bah! he consoled himself with the thought that the human race is thus constructed: everything is in success, he gets most who offers most. Why then trouble about it?
His eyes followed the movement of his glass and one after another he saw Madame Marsy, Jouvenet, Madame Gerson, so many living and exceedingly taunting recollections, when suddenly Sulpice trembled, shaken by a keener and almost angry feeling as his glance was directed to a box against the dark-red of which two faces were boldly outlined: those of Rosas and Marianne.
He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.
There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic, gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored and the sight of whom still tore his heart. Pale and dressed in a white gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable attitude, with her fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders—those shoulders that he still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.
That livid beauty, strangely adorable, with her hair and ears dazzling with jewels, stood clearly out against the background of the box in which, like an enormous Cyclopean eye, appeared the round, ground glass let into the door, forming a nimbus of light around Marianne's brow. Paler than her, with a sickly but smiling countenance, Rosas showed his bloodless, pale, Spanish face beside that of Marianne, as tragic looking as a portrait by Coello. His tired-looking, pensive, thin face was resting on his hand, which through the opera-glass looked a transparent hand of wax, on which an enormous emerald ring flashed under the gaslight. Monsieur de Rosas did not move.
She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth close to the Castilian's ear, standing out against his reddish beard as if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up José's sad eyes. As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red line of the velvet border. And with his greedy glance he continued to trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed, all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.
This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted, and branded with its true name, folly, he felt as if a yawning chasm had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted, yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!