She refused all invitations, and declined almost all visits. She had come there only to see her friend, the Queen of Natalia. Paris, which loves anything new, talked a great deal about her; and its street crowds, which admires what is beautiful, began to gather before the doors at the hours when her black horses, driven Russian fashion, came fretting and flashing like meteors over the asphalte.
'Why did you bring your horses for so short a time?' said Madame Kaulnitz to her. 'You could, of course, have had any of ours.'
'I always like to have some of my horses with me,' she answered. 'I would have brought them all, only it would have looked so ostentatious; you know they are my children.'
'I do not see why you should not have other children,' said Madame Kaulnitz. 'It is quite inhuman that you will not marry.'
'I have never said that I will not. But I do not think it likely.'
Two days after her arrival, as she was driving down the Avenue de l'Impératrice, she saw Sabran on foot. She was driving slowly. She would have stopped her carriage if he had paused in his walk; but he did not, he only bowed low and passed on. It was almost rude, after the hospitality of Hohenszalras, but the rudeness pleased her. It spoke both of pride and of sensitiveness. It seemed scarcely natural, after their long hours of intercourse, that they should pass each other thus as strangers; yet it seemed impossible they should any more be friends. She did not ask herself why it seemed so, but she felt it rather by instinct than by reasoning.
She was annoyed to feel that the sight of him had caused a momentary emotion in her of mingled trouble and pleasure.
No one mentioned his name to her, and she asked no one concerning him. She spent almost all her time with the Queen of Natalia, and there were other eminent foreign personages in Paris at that period whose amiabilities she could not altogether reject, and she had only allowed herself fifteen days as the length of her sojourn, as Madame Ottilie was alone amidst the snow-covered mountains of the Tauern.
On the fifth day after her meeting with Sabran he sent another card of his to the hotel, and sent with it an immense basket of gilded osier filled with white lilac. She remembered having once said to him at Hohenszalras that lilac was her flower of preference. Her rooms were crowded with bouquets, sent her by all sorts of great people, and made of all kinds of rare blossoms, but the white lilac, coming in the January snows, touched her more than all those. She knew that his poverty was no fiction; and that great clusters of white lilac in midwinter in Paris meant much money.
She wrote a line or two in German, which thanked him for his recollection of her taste, and sent it to the Chamber. She did not know where he lived.