CHAPTER XXXVIII.
When Nadine Napraxine came into her boudoir on New Year’s day, she smiled a little to see it blocked with flowers. She had always discountenanced any other gifts than flowers. Whoever had presumed to offer her anything else would have run the risk of having his name struck off her list of acquaintances.
‘All those gros cadeaux are so vulgar,’ she was wont to say. ‘A branch of lilac—a tea-rose—nothing else. No; you must not send the lilac in a cloisonné Limoges vase, or the roses in a repoussé silver bowl; I should send you your vase or your bowl back to you; you have no kind of right to suppose that I want vases or bowls; but just the branch, just the rose, you may send if you like.’
They trembled, and dared not disobey; the lilacs or the roses came by the scores, with the greatest names of Europe attached to them; and her courtiers managed ingeniously to spend many thousands of francs by means of the rarest of the orchids, fulfilling her commands in the letter, though breaking them in the spirit.
She smiled now as she came into her favourite room this morning, when fog and frost together reigned without. All the orchid world was there to welcome her, brilliant and ethereal as the hues of sunrise.
‘They love to be extravagant,’ she thought, with a little contempt. ‘If one limit them to flowers they manage to spend as much as if they bought jewels. It is very vulgar, all that sort of thing. If I cared for any one of them, I think I should like him to bring me a little bunch of corn-cockles—just by way of change.’
She glanced here and there at a name, but, for the most part, did not even trouble herself to look who was the sender of this or of that.
‘C’est toute la bande!’ she murmured, with an impatient amusement, knowing that every man in Paris, with rank sufficient to be able to dare to do so, had sent his floral tribute there.
She rang for her favourite servant Paul; when he appeared she said to him, ‘Take all those cards off those baskets and bouquets; they look as if they were ticketed for a horticultural show.’ So Paul, obedient, swept away the visiting cards with his swift and silent touch, and the senders of them were not even honoured by her caring to know their names; their gifts were all blended in one mass of blossom as indifferent to her as themselves.