In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and said, “But you’re going to Lily.... Ma will hate that.”
“I know she will.... She’s always been afraid of Lily. She needn’t worry though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can ever happen to me again.”
It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of Ellen’s destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played for she never knew, of course, that if chance had not thrown her glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been blinded.
So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right. Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them.
37
THE world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois. Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and unmorality.
The house stood in the Rue Raynouard a short distance from the place where it rushes down a slope to join a half dozen other streets in a whirlpool known as the Place Passy surrounded by magasins, cafés, and tobacconists’ shops. It was, in all truth, an eighteenth century house, built in the beginning as a château in the open country on the outskirts of Paris between the city and the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Here in the open fields the Marquise de Sevillac, an ugly, clever and eccentric woman, held a court of her own, a court indeed which in some respects outshone the splendor of Versailles. In her house were to be found the poets, the wits and the philosophers of the day. She corresponded with Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists came frequently to work in the rooms which overlooked the little park and the sheep pastures beyond. Indeed the Sage of Ferney on his triumphant return to Paris had planned a visit to the Marquise and was only prevented by the fatal illness which overtook so swiftly his skinny old body.
The Marquise had been the last of her family. There is a Marquis de Sevillac living to-day but the title is Bonapartist and has nothing to do with the ancient splendor of the true family. As an old woman, the Marquise clung to her house even with the approach of the revolution. During that cataclysm, which she faced in a bold and cynical fashion, she was allowed to survive because the people remembered her as the friend of the radicals and the philosophers who plagued their stupid King. She allied herself with the Girondists and took Madame Roland perilously to her bosom, and when the débâcle came at length her bony old body would have been dragged off to the guillotine along with the others save that she was so old and that Danton and Terezia Tallien intervened. So she died at last in her bed and the château became the property of the Directory.
Since her death it has known many occupants. For a time it served as a museum; it housed the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who gave his name to a street nearby; it passed through a period of neglect and emptiness and at last fell into the possession of a wealthy manufacturer of soap and chocolate. It was during his day and the day of his son that the château came to be pressed upon by other houses and by apartments in the florid German style, until there was left at length only the house itself and the little park designed by Le Nôtre which still remained the largest private garden in all the city of Paris.
The house turns to the world a deceptive face, for on the side facing the Rue Raynouard it is but one story high with a commonplace door and a single row of shuttered windows. It is this side which in the days of the Marquise faced the stables and dovecote; so the house now turns its back upon the world and preserves for its friends the glory of its three story façade of Caen stone. The façade, broken by rows of tall windows, looks upon a high terrace lined with crumbling urns carved in the classic Greek manner and a garden with a reticulation of paths laid out by Le Nôtre to center upon the pastry-cake pavilion erected to the God of Love. Inside the high wall which shuts out the noise and dust of the Rue de Passy there are great plane trees with trunks mottled like the backs of salamanders, and laburnums that cluster close about the Temple of Eros.