She was enduring, while in this carriage, one of those tempests of passion which she had to pass through several times in the day, and especially at night, for she had not slept two hours out of the twenty-four during the past three weeks. It was as though a tide of bitterness were rising within her, and the whirling of her thoughts became so rapid that all idea of ambient things was blotted out from her consciousness; and she did not emerge from her dream until some inevitable detail compelled her to action, such as Alfred's hand shaking her arm as the brougham stopped, and his voice saying to her: "We have arrived." The stupor of an awakening from sleep showed in her eyes, and she recognised the Malhoures' gate.
The house stood at the back of a courtyard and was one of those old mansions such as are still found in that part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with views behind over vast stretches of garden, while in front there is the narrow, populous, noisy street. The house was let in floors, and the Malhoures occupied the second. The lofty windows were gleaming, and the shadows of the various couples were thrown in black, moving silhouettes upon the luminous glass. Old Malhoure, as he was familiarly called, was a professor in the École Polytechnique, a member of the Institute, and tolerably rich by inheritance from his father, the celebrated inventor. He had three marriageable daughters, and received every Wednesday. Twice a year he gave a fancy dress dance. On these evenings a general clearance was made. All the rooms, even the savant's study, were in requisition for the entertainment, and although they were large and lofty apartments, they scarcely sufficed for the number of the guests.
People used to visit the Malhoures a great deal. Their house was in the first place a centre of reunion for the great professor's former pupils who were separated by their modes of life; intrigue also went on behind the doors with important personages of the Academy of Sciences; finally people were amused by the youthfulness of the three young ladies and the good nature of their father, whose appearance—a legendary one in the École—was in itself an element of mirth. He was huge and short, with eyes hidden behind blue spectacles, a beard collar of greenish-white, clothes of extraordinary cut, and a continual nodding of the head. Though he presented this figure, it was pretended that the old man had once been a lady's man, a gay dog, as the students used to say facetiously to one another. At twenty-two, he had discovered a theorem, which bore his name, and since then he had multiplied treatises after treatises. When, wearied by fourteen hours of work, he went out in the evening, he used to follow the young workwomen in the Quartier de l'Observatoire, where he then lived. He used to heap up engaging offers to entice them, but he was so ugly—so ugly—that they laughed impudently in his face. The savant used to look round him to make sure he was not heard, and then murmur as a supreme argument:
"I am Malhoure, the inventor of the theorem!"
After his marriage he had grown somewhat religious, but he had remained very cheerful, especially when he had discovered some particularly elegant formula during the day. Such was doubtless the case that evening, for he was standing on the threshold receiving the guests with his most cordial smile, although he did not recognise one person out of ten; he had no memory for faces. By his side, and grumbling, was his intimate friend, Professor Moreau, a calculator long and lean, and as great a pessimist as Malhoure was an optimist. Just as Madame Chazel reached the landing, and while she was leaving her furs in the care of the servant, the two professors were speaking of a lady who had just passed, wearing a dress as outrageously low as she herself was faded, and old Malhoure was saying to his friend:
"Well, geometry does not grow old. The square of the hypotenuse is always young."
"For my own part," replied Moreau, "I can see whether a woman is hump-backed or blind of an eye, whether she walks straight or is lame. But what difference there is between ugliness and beauty I have never been able to conceive."
The piano was playing a quadrille, the din of the dance filled the rooms, and Malhoure clasped both of Chazel's hands, taking him for some one else, and calling him "My dear, my very dear Arthur." Helen was looking, with strange feeling of envy, at the professors, whose conversation she had just overheard. They at least would never know that continuous, settled torture which brings with it incapacity for a thought foreign to itself, for study, for reading, for conversation!
But she was already in the hands of Madame Malhoure and her three daughters, all four being equally unreasonable, and having no object save that of amusing themselves. The mother was dressed as Catherine de Médicis, and the three daughters as a gipsy, a milk-woman, and a Cauchois peasant. Their costumes savoured of work done at home, and fashioned with chance materials after the engravings of the illustrated papers, and the same held good of the toilets worn by these ladies' friends. The men, on their side, seemed uncomfortable in their black coats; several looked like people who had to get up early in the morning, and were computing that every call from the piano robbed them of a little of their sleep.
The talk that was flying about in the warm atmosphere was astonishing by contrast. Fragments of frivolous phrases alternated with thoughtful conversation.