And suddenly there was something like an intense and exquisite stateliness of intimacy: a huge bedroom, all gold, with the dim gold of tenderly faded golden tissues. On the walls were gold-coloured tapestries: Venus rising from the gilt foam of a golden ocean, Venus and Mars, Venus and Cupid, Venus and Adonis. The pale-pink nudity of these mythological beings stood forth very faintly against the sheer gold of sky and atmosphere, in golden woodlands, amid golden flowers, with golden cupids and swans and doves and wild boars; golden peacocks drank from golden fountains; water and clouds were of elemental gold; and all this had tenderly faded into a languorous sunset of expiring radiance. The state bed was gold, under a canopy of gold brocade, on which the armorial bearings of the family were embroidered in heavy relief; the bedspread was gold; but all this gold was lifeless, had lapsed into the melancholy of all but grey lustre: it was effaced, erased, obliterated, as though the dusty ages had cast a shadow over it, had woven a web across it.
“How beautiful!” said Cornélie.
“Our famous bridal chamber,” said the prince, laughing. “It was a strange idea of those old people, to spend the first night in such a peculiar apartment. When they married, in our family, they slept here on the bridal night. It was a sort of superstition. The young wife remained faithful only provided it was here that she spent the first night with her husband. Poor Urania! We did not sleep here, signora mia, among all these indecent goddesses of love. We no longer respect the family tradition. Urania is therefore doomed by fate to be unfaithful to me. Unless I take that doom on my own shoulders....”
“I suppose the fidelity of the husbands is not mentioned in this family tradition?”
“No, we attached very little importance to that ... nor do we nowadays....”
“It’s glorious,” Cornélie repeated, locking around her. “Duco will think it perfectly glorious. Oh, prince, I never saw such a room! Look at Venus over there, with the wounded Adonis, his head in her lap, the nymphs lamenting! It is a fairy-tale.”
“There’s too much gold for my taste.”
“It may have been so before, too much gold....”
“Masses of gold denoted wealth and abundant love. The wealth is gone....”
“But the gold is softened now, so beautifully toned down....”