A hothouse of this kind in this thicket! I should have been less astonished to find a love-philter in a monastery!
In the days of my late lamented aunt, the lion-room was reserved for guests. It had—it still has—three windows, with deep recesses as deep as alcoves. One of them looks out in the direction of the conservatory and has a balcony attached; the second opens on the park; I saw the paddock from it and further away the pond, and between the two that summerhouse which once was Briareus. The third window faces the eastern wing; from there I saw the window of my old room—shut—and the whole façade of the château blocking the view on the left.
I felt as if I were in an hotel. Nothing there recalled anything to me. A Jouy wall-paper stained with damp from the wall and hanging loose in one corner, covered the walls with a host of red lions each with a cannon ball fixed under its paw. The bed curtains and window curtains showed, in distortion, the same subject. Two pictures balanced one another: The Education of Achilles and The Rape of Deianeira, in which the damp spotted the faces of the four subjects with red and dappled the cruppers of the Centaurs, Chiron and Nessus; there was also rather a fine Norman clock which looked like a coffin set on end, the emblem and at the same time the measures of Time—and the whole furnishing of the room was commonplace and out-of-date.
I splashed my face with cold water and put on clean linen with pleasure. Barbe brought me, without knocking at the door, a plate of coarse broth, and made no reply to my condolences on her inflamed cheek; then she waddled out of the room like a gigantic sylph.
There was no one in the drawing-room—unless shades are people. O little black velvet armchair with your two yellow tassels, hideous piece of squat puffiness, so well termed a crapaud, could I behold you again as of yore without imagining seated on your toad-like form the shade of my anecdotal aunt? And you, my mother’s chair—an austerer one, and one I cannot jest about—will she not always be in my memory leaning over your back as long as you shall be an armchair, if indeed you ever really were one?
Not a detail was altered. From the unspeakable white paper on the walls down which hung garlands of flowers trussed like sausages, to the hangings of sulphur-colored damask draping their fringed basques in a row, the work of the former owner—a contemporary of the crinoline—had admirably stood the effect of time. A swollen stuffing puffed out the sofas single and double, and nothing had succeeded in deflating the inflamed chairs or the blistered settees.
From the wainscot smiled down on one all my dead and gone ancestors: my great-great-grandfathers in chalk, my grandfathers in miniatures, my father a schoolboy in daguerrotype; and on the mantelpiece (duly petticoated with puffed-out fringed flounces) a few photographs were sticking to the mirror. A large-sized group claimed my attention. I took it up to look at it more carefully. It represented my uncle surrounded by five gentlemen and a big St. Bernard dog. The group had been taken at Fonval; the wall of the château made the background, and a rose-laurel in a tub figured in the picture. An amateur’s work and unsigned. Lerne beamed with kindness and mental energy, resembling, in a word, the savant I had expected to find. Of the five men, three were known to me, the Germans; I had never seen the two others.
Then suddenly the door opened without my having the time to replace the photograph. Lerne was ushering in a young woman.
“My nephew, Nicolas Vermont—Mademoiselle Emma Bourdichet.”