'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried to revive; we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to end everything with a laugh en gouailleur, yet with tears in our eyes. We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that, ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'
'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as the boom of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep waves of sound.
It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to be called in the Valois Amyôt arrière-grand-souper, and was now called 'dinner,' awaited them.
There were some twenty-five guests then staying there; she did not approve of immense house parties, and she restricted her house list to the very choicest of her favourites and associates; she always asked double the number of men to that of women, but she was proportionately careful that the latter should be those whom men most liked and admired; she was wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her sex. Her vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no rivals.
As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated in the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large square cases of white porcelain; the white columns were garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without; at either end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and water-lilies; through the columns the whole enchanting view of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-risen moon.
'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented her upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse question; nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with any incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it; but the marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after dinner.
She smiled.