This conversation took place at the breakfast-table, for Jacques had called on the following morning as soon as his four pages were finished to ask for the classic egg and cutlet, a thing he had never done before. This curious haste proved to me how interested he was in the success of his manœuvre in diplomatic gallantry. I had not received him very cordially.
“Tricks like that are not very attractive,” I said to him; “you force me to accept an invitation to dinner which is odious to me, on purpose to meet you there, and then you do not turn up.”
“But you must admit that it was very jolly!” he replied in such a gay tone that I had not the heart to be angry any more. After he had very minutely questioned me as to the diverse attitudes of different persons, concluding with the ridiculous warning of Senneterre the Jealous, he said seriously—
“You noticed nothing in particular then, even you who know how to see? Yes, you painters do not understand, but you know how to see. Nothing in the intercourse of Machault and Queen Anne, for instance?”
“Stop,” I replied; “certainly when he warned me that Senneterre had met you, Machault gave me a singular look. Why do you ask me that? Is he paying court to her too?”
“I think, if she has already risked a false step, it is with Machault.”
“With Machault?” I cried. “With Machault, the drunken colossus, the gladiator in black, the fencing machine, while she herself is such a fine woman, though a little too angular for my taste, and so aristocratic? It is not possible. The other day, too, you told me that you thought she was true to her husband.”
“Ah, my dear fellow!” he said with a nod, “you do not know that when one wishes to find out of whom an ideal woman, a siren, a madonna, an angel, is the mistress, one must first think of the most vulgar person of her own circle. There has been a good deal of gossip about her, I know, and she knows that I know. I have not concealed the fact from her. Consequently, the presence of Machault last evening was designed to produce upon me exactly the same effect which I produced upon her by my absence. I took the initiative, and I was right. Besides,” he added with almost hateful acrimony in his voice, “one of two things, either she has already had lovers and she is a jade. In that case I should be the greatest of fools if I did not have her in my turn. Or else she has not had lovers and is a coquette who will not make me go the same way as the others.”
“If you are not wasting your time,” I replied to him, “I shall be very surprised. I studied her yesterday, and as you admit the eagle eyes of our profession, let me tell you that I have diagnosed in her the signs of the most complete absence of temperament, which are a little throat, small hips, skin without down, thin lips, the lower one receding a little, hard and lean nostrils, and metallic voice. I would wager that she has no palate, and that she does not know what she eats or drinks. She is a creature all intellect without a shadow of sensuality.”
“But these cold women have just as many intrigues as the others!” he interrupted. “You do not know that class then? They give themselves, not to surrender themselves, but to take others. When it is necessary for them to grip a lover tightly, a lover they need, they do so with their person the more easily since the pleasure of it is a matter of indifference to them. They know that possession detaches some men and attaches others. It is simply a question of persuading them that one is of the kind who become attached in this way, when one is not. Then, too, there are cold women who are hunters, and then! Sometimes I place Madam de Bonnivet in the first group, sometimes in the second. I do not pretend to solve the riddle of this sphinx. But failing the answer to the riddle of this sphinx, I will have the sphinx in person, or my name is not Jacques Molan. Then, as you have helped me and are just, you shall have a reward. You will no longer reproach me with that dinner in the Rue des Écuries d’Artois. You shall be paid for your unpleasant task. What time is it? Half-past one. Prepare to see in ten minutes Mademoiselle Camille Favier herself enter with her respectable mother to arrange about the portrait. Is not that good of me? But I have been better still, and I have not told her where you dined yesterday.”