“Stop,” she said; “should the painter be so amorous of his model?” She laughed her wicked laugh. Then suddenly she turned her head and said to her husband: “Pierre, you don’t take enough exercise, you are getting fat. It makes you look ten years older than you really are. You should take Senneterre as your example.” This evening the “beater” was polished and fastened together like an old piece of furniture, so that this praise of his apparent youth was fearful irony. “Come,” she concluded, “don’t get angry, but have some raisins, they are exquisite.”
“What an amiable child!” I said to myself as she offered us the box of fruit in a peevish way. “What time is she put to bed?” Her character, which had no inner truth, was ceaselessly dominated by a double need in which two moral miseries were manifest: the unhealthy appetite for producing an effect developed in her by the abuse of worldly success, the even more unhealthy appetite for emotion at all costs, the result of secret licentiousness, which had made her blasé, and her lack of heart. Have I mentioned that she was a mother, and that she did not love her child, who had been at a boarding school for years? She could not dispense with astonishment, and she had that strange taste for fear, that singular pleasure of provoking man’s anger, that joy of feeling that she was threatened with brutality which is the great sign of woman in her natural state. Except on serious occasions the most childish things were good enough to procure for her these two emotions: such as dazzling a poor devil of a painter by ways so contrary to her social pretensions, and lighting in her husband’s eyes, without any cause, the light of anger which I had just seen there.
Senneterre and Bonnivet began to laugh a similar laugh to that of Tournade and Figon in little Favier’s dressing-room. The comparison struck me at once, as it has done under different conditions when I have skirted “High Society.” The actress and the woman of the world had exactly the same bad tone. Only the bad tone of the delicate Burne-Jones girl betrayed a depth of passionate soul, and an extraordinary facility for allurement, while in the case of Madam de Bonnivet it was the intolerable and fantastic caprice of the spoilt child; but it was very fine, for no shade of feeling escaped her, not even the antipathy of an unimportant person like myself, nor the ill-humour of her husband disguised by his laughter.
“My dear Senneterre,” Bonnivet had simply said, “we are done with. But an old husband and an old friend are umbrellas upon which much rain has fallen!”
There was in these few words a strange mixture of irony with regard to the two artists, new-comers into their circle, to whom the young woman was talking, and a deep irritation which no doubt procured for her the little tremor of fear she loved to feel. She gave her husband, whom she had so saucily braved, a coquettish glance almost tender, while the glance she gave me was indignant, and rather exciting than provoking. I had irritated her curiosity by being refractory to her seductiveness. Then, changing her conversation, and almost her accent, with a prodigious suddenness, she asked me in the most simple way possible a question about the school of painting to which I belonged. It was a starting point for her to talk of my art, without much knowledge, but strange to say with as much intelligence and good sense as before she had displayed lack of it in her jeering chaff. She talked of the danger to us artists in going much into society, and she spoke according to my idea, with a perfectly accurate view of the failings of vanity and charlatanism which the society of the idle induces. It was as if another person had replaced the original woman. They resembled one another in one point. It was the production of an effect upon a new-comer. Only this time she had divined the precise words it was necessary to use. Cold-blooded coquettes have these intuitions which take the place of knowledge concerning their adorers. I was already too much on my guard to be the dupe of this manœuvre and not to discern its artifice. But still, how could I help admiring her versatility?
“Is not my little Bonnivet clever?” Jacques Molan said after we had taken our departure; “she understands everything before it is said. But why did she not invite you to supper? For she is interested in you. You could see that by Senneterre’s ill-humour. He hardly returned your greeting.” The game he did not bring was not to his liking, nor was the man who brought it. “Yes,” he went on in the tones of a man playing a very careful game and watching every detail of his opponent’s play, “why did she not invite you to supper?”
“Why should she invite me?” I asked.
“Obviously to make you talk about Camille and myself,” he said.
“After my eulogy of little Favier,” I replied, “she had very little to ask me. It did not please her. That is an excellent sign for you, and a sufficient reason for not wishing to hear it again.”
“Possibly,” he said. “But what do you think of the husband?”