As if they wished to show even more markedly the distance that separated them from the profane, matrons and maids and gentlemen of all ages treated each other with such domesticity, with such familiarity, that they seemed to be the closest relations, the most intimate and inseparable friends. The women particularly tutoied each other; many men and women called each other by name. French diminutives and English endearments were to be heard and strange nicknames. One greeted Fanchette, another excused the absence of Bob, one gave news of Dorine, another asked after Gladys or spoke of Bibi's illness. In that society it seemed as if no one any longer had a surname or title; all seemed brothers, cousins, husbands, lovers of one race and caste, of a single country and house. Whatever did the wretched, profane intruders know about those names, endearments, and nicknames, whoever they were, wherever they came from, whatever they did; if Bibi were a man or woman, or if Gladys were young or old? However could the profane intruders understand those conversations in French, English, or German, conversations which seemed to be carried on in a special and incomprehensible, aristocratic jargon, full of sub-understandings, references to people unknown to them, allusions to events they knew nothing of; however could they understand that chaff full of completely conventional wit, whose formula escaped them? What could they see in the malicious smiles, in the little sceptical bursts of laughter? What could they grasp of the subdued, half-uttered phrases said with a sneer—a regular cryptic language, let us say? How could they imagine from a word thrown into the ear an assignment, a refusal, a consent, a warning, a malignity, a trouble, a scandal especially; words underlined by a fleeting but expressive glance, by a rapid but suggestive squeeze of the hand? Ought not the profane intruders to be astonished, stupefied, almost oppressed by all this, while the curious, alluring spectacle was augmenting their wonderment and secret pain?
A curious, most curious, yet alluring spectacle! Not one of the ladies of the "Palace" or of the initiated resembled each other; not one was dressed alike; there was not one whose jewels resembled another's; not one whose beauty was equal to another's; not one whose ugliness was similar to another's ugliness. All were truly Olympian, by an almost mysterious sign that made them seem of one race and caste, of but one country and family. But beyond this indefinite sign, each preserved a personal character in face, dress, features, and gestures. And all these women seemed to be detached from a background even more phantasmagorial, of exquisite French women, who caused the flowing lines of their Parisian dresses to undulate gently from their hips, amidst light lace and soft silk, purposely brought from the great ateliers of the Rue de la Paix for balls at the "Palace"—le Palace, ma chère, vous pensez—detached from a background of Austrian ladies, with rich and graceful dresses, certainly beautiful, but rather more pleasing than beautiful; separated by a background of Egyptians, Greeks, Roumanians, Argentines, Spaniards, who owed it to their immense fortunes, their natural, humble sweetness of temperament, that they were enabled to be introduced and placed in the Olympus of the "Palace"; detached from a background of Italian women, majestic and grave, or pretty and witty—each figure, amidst those more prominent and those more in the shade, with her own character and own life forming a curious, singular, and alluring spectacle. The profane intruders, with dazzled eyes and bewildered glance, went from one to another of these feminine figures and now and then, tired of wondering, they lowered their glance, a little pale, before a world of such varied appearances, multiform and dissimilar, a world from which every moment they felt themselves separated for ever: they raised their eyes, ever less anxiously, ever more fatigued, for some new, wondrous apparition.
At last, amidst the murmurs of the whole crowd, appeared, late as usual, the famous Miss Miriam Jenkyns, a divine girl—ah, elle est vraiment divine, ma chère—with whom already ten to thirty celebrated personages were in love, and numerous unknown personages. Amongst the illustrious were an hereditary prince of a powerful empire, an Indian Maharajah, a grandee of Spain, a celebrated scientist, a renowned painter and father of sons; but Miss Jenkyns loved none of them, and instead, contented herself with her unrestrained desire of conquest, being now a Europeanised American girl, full of the deepest scepticism. Nevertheless, as she came from Pontresina she appeared one of the last, desired and invoked especially by those who had never seen her. She appeared in a wilful simplicity, dressed in a tunic of white wool, like the "Primavera" of Sandro Botticelli, adorned with a branch of flowers which crossed the skirt right to its hem, with hair knotted a little loosely as in the picture of the great Tuscan, and covered with loose flowers, with a white tulle shawl, like a cloud, on her shoulders and arms. Her natural beauty had been recomposed and transformed by her according to the purest pre-Raphaelite type, and it was very difficult to discover the subtle and minute art of the recomposition and transformation. There was another great murmuring, one of the last, when the Princess of Leiningen entered, an Armenian who, in the strangest circumstances, had married a German mediatised prince, a military prince, whose appearances were rare. Not very tall of stature, in fact rather small, but moulded to perfection, with little hands and feet, the Princess of Leiningen comprised within herself the poetic legends of Armenian beauty. Beneath a mass of black, shining hair, her forehead was white and short, her two immense black eyes were shining like jewels; she had a pure, oval face, very white, on which the long eyelashes cast a slight shadow, touched up by the inevitable but pretty maquillage of Eastern women, with rather a crimson rouge on the cheeks and the lobes of the ears, a slightly violet shade beneath the eyes, some black, the better to arch the subtle eyebrows, and a little of the rather crimson rouge on the lips. She was dressed completely in black, and since she was so white she seemed to rise from a background of shadow; an immense hat of black tulle strangely framed her white face and splendid eyes. She always wore an immense hat, black or white, even with her décolleté dresses, and she never danced. She crossed the room with her light little feet, shod in white satin, without looking at anyone—a dream creature, unreal as one of Edgar Allan Poe's characters, unreal as a vision in an hallucination. She remained at the back of the salon silent beneath the shadow of her black hat and black dress, completely white with her unreal countenance.
At this last strange appearance the profane felt their impressions to be founded and they settled themselves into two different parties. The one, proud and impertinent, like Frau Mentzel, openly hated the surroundings they had wished to penetrate and began to vent their anger and their humiliation, finding all the matrons and maids of the "Palace," who were unaware of their existence, ugly, awkward, indecent, shameless, venting their anger on their husbands and followers who, poor people, through cowardice agreed, though they were frightened at heart lest these vituperations should be heard, as they looked around them carefully in fear of a scandal. The other party, true snobs, blind and deaf adorers of that surrounding, venerated it even more deeply, felt themselves even more humiliated, and oppressed, bewailing even more their own anonymity, nullity, and lack of existence. They felt they deserved to be anonymous there and non-existing for ever: they understood that they had no right, that they never would have any right to belong to that superior, unarrivable, sublime humanity that lived at the "Palace"!
The which superior, unreachable, sublime humanity, while it aroused such vain disdain, such empty proposals of revenge, such sterile lamentation among the wretched profane, was troubling itself with nothing else at that lively and intense hour of the ball but with that deep and supreme feminine interest—to see, observe, study, value, and put a figure on the jewels of the other women in the ballroom. To note, analyse, and value these jewels and compare them with their own; at times to smile in triumph, or enviously, or really bitterly, according as their own jewels succeeded in being superior, equal, inferior, or very inferior to the others. Their eyes seemed not to rest on the pearl necklaces, on the rivières of diamonds, the diadems of pearls and diamonds, the emerald solitaires, and the ruby sprays. Their glance was fleeting, their lips offered other words, but the women did nothing but mentally make rapid calculations, after which they smiled carelessly, or suddenly sighed, or were unexpectedly disturbed. For on that summer night in the high mountains, in a landscape of the purest beauty, amid proud peaks so close to the stars, amid eternal glaciers that told an austere and terrible tale, in that room there were collected, in the shape of jewels, the fortune perhaps of a populace. At the splendour of thousands and thousands of gems, at the scintillations of those thousands of precious stones, in the presence of all that bewildering brilliance, women's beauty, girls' grace, and richness of apparel were concentrated into a furnace of light, lost their value, and were completely eclipsed. Each woman's hair, neck, bosom, and arms were so thickly crowded with pearls and diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, while the jewels of some were few, but enormous, that nothing took the eye or mind, at once astonishing and frightening, but that mad, frenzied luxury up there in the high mountains, in the still summer night, not far from the whiteness of the peaks profiled against the sky. But suddenly even that madness and frenzy seemed conquered, and in spite of the studied reserve of all those women, and in spite of the studied indifference of the men, a word passed from group to group, from room to room, murmured a hundred times, softly or loudly:
"The tiara! The tiara!"
Mrs. Annie Clarke appeared in the hall, coming from her apartments, although her daughter had been dancing for an hour, having for her partner in the cotillon Don Vittorio Lante della Scala. Being lazy, Annie Clarke always arrived late, or perhaps she did so purposely. That evening she was wearing a rather dark dress of purple velvet, trimmed with quite simple lace; from neck and bosom descended a rivière of diamonds, which were very large at the neck, and afterwards became less large, in long streams of small, shining diamonds, like streams of running water, falling to the waist, whence neck, bosom, and corsage assumed a luminous, strange appearance. But what was astounding in Annie Clarke that evening, what had never been seen before, was her diamond tiara. It was not a single diadem of large diamonds, but three diadems, one above the other, in flowers, and leaves, and Arabic work and points. It was a veritable little tower of diamonds, perched on a suitable coiffure. It was a tiara that bizarrely resembled those of the High Priests of Buddha in Indian temples, a tiara that strangely resembled the jewelled triple crown of the Pope of the whole Catholic world. It was the tiara of all the great American ladies, the famous tiara of the house of Clarke, like a lighthouse or like the torch which Bartholdi's "Liberty" holds aloft over the port of Brooklyn, to show navigators the entrance to New York. As Annie Clarke crossed the length of the hall quietly and indifferently to pay her respects to Her Serene Highness, the Grand Duchess of Salm-Salm, this Clarke tiara, beacon and torch of America, eclipsed, annulled, destroyed—a unique, inimitable jewel—all the other jewels of the women who were gathered there. After a great silence of wonderment amongst the throng, of groups near and far, after a silence of stupor, spite, annoyance, envy, anger, and sadness; after some instants of these atrocious, seething sentiments of every kind, a chattering began and spread everywhere about the tiara and against it, about Mabel's marriage and against it.
"Puis-je me congratuler pour les fiançailles de votre chère fille?" the Grand Duchess politely asked Annie Clarke.
As she bowed, the tiara threw a stream of light around. Beneath her tiara Annie Clarke smiled, bowed, and expressed her thanks.