We reached Madam de Bonnivet’s house, and found a long string of carriages already in the street. I was to find a great difference between the almost familiar reception of the other evening and my reception now. It seemed as if Jacques had in those few minutes tried to give a complete representation of the different phases of character of this human lighthouse. While we ascended the carved wooden staircase, with its wealth of pictures, busts, tapestry, and ancient stuffs, he whispered to me this last expression, which had nothing cunning nor dandified about it, but was simply the childish vanity of the middle-class gentleman engaged in a love affair—
“You must admit that my friend is not badly housed?”
I am quite sure that at that moment the carpets upon which his pumps rested warmed a secret place in his heart. I am certain that the lustre on that staircase illuminated the darkest depths of his snobbish conceit. I am sure that a conqueror’s pride swelled his chest as he said to himself in these luxurious surroundings: “I am her lover.” He had become during the last few weeks too transparent for this shade of his sensibility to escape me. Each of his words was like the striking of a clock, the works of which are in a glass case. When the sound strikes the ear one can see the little cogwheels bite the large ones and the complicated mechanism at work.
The hall doors had opened, and Jacques and myself were at once separated. The spectacle, which this room, vaulted like a chapel and unknown to me, and the two drawing-rooms opening from it presented, awakened the painter in me, the man used to vibrating by a look. In a corner of the hall a little platform had been erected, which was empty just then. There were perhaps fifty women sitting with a like number of men, all in evening dress, and the women’s jewels sparkled in their blonde or dark hair and on their naked shoulders. The entire range of colours was displayed in these various toilettes, which were heightened by their contrast with the black coats and the details which had on my first visit to this house so displeased me, the too composite character of the decorations, blended and harmonized as they were in this light with the aid of the moving crowd. Fans were waving, eyes shining, faces were animated by questions and answers, and Queen Anne, towards whom I went to pay my respects, really had in her white evening dress the majestic air of a princess worshipped by her courtiers.
As I approached her, I thought of the mortal peril she had been in the other week. There seemed to me no more trace of it in her pale azure eyes than there was of jealousy upon Bonnivet’s beaming face. For the first, and, without doubt, the last time in my life, I was supplied with positive information about a fashionable intrigue. Usually one does not know the history of these fine gentlemen and beautiful ladies except from a vague “they say.” A woman is suspected of having so and so for a lover, and a man is suspected of having so and so as his mistress. This suspicion, which to people of their class is equivalent to certainty, is not reduced to exactness. The street and number of the house where they meet is not known. It is not known under what circumstances they start for the rendezvous. A door remains open to doubt, and if not open it is ajar.
As I bowed to Madam de Bonnivet and received her greeting in the form of an amiable commonplace, I could see this haughty head on the pillow in the chamber of adultery, and the terror of her disturbed features when the continuous ringing of the bell and the repeated knocking at the door had warned her of her danger. The contrast was so sharp that for the first time I understood the unhealthy attraction which this to some extent double existence exercises over certain imaginations, and why women or men who have tasted these sensations no longer find any relish in others. Such profound and perilous deception procures something like an evil intoxication, the pleasure of a really superior and almost demoniac hypocrisy, to the man or woman who lie in that fashion. To this kind of infernal falsehood belonged the phrase which Madam de Bonnivet used to close our rapid and uninteresting conversation.
“There is some one who would not forgive me for detaining you any longer,” she said, and the point of her fan indicated a direction which my glance followed. I saw Camille Favier, whom at that moment Jacques was approaching. “Go and speak to her,” she continued, “and tell your friend Molan that I have a little commission for him while I think of it.”
I was prepared, on arriving that evening, to encounter much coolness in this woman, who was depraved by coldness a coquette through egoism, and curious even as regards vice through idleness. I had not even thought the audacity of such a phrase addressed by her to me who knew everything possible. In spite of my firm intention not to allow my impressions to appear, she read my astonishment in my face. Her half-closed eyes darted at me the most incisive look which has ever fathomed the soul of a man to its depths. Without doubt, regarding her liaison with Molan, she thought I had only one of those hypotheses, which I was unable to verify, one of those hypotheses which grow around those so-called mysteries, Parisian love affairs, and that I could not very well conceal my deductions. The acuteness of her eyes became dulled into indulgent irony, and I left her to obey the order she had given me, but in part only. She had obviously calculated, with her habit of relying upon the evil sentiments of her intimates, that I should be only too happy to convey her message to Jacques in Camille’s presence, to make their quarrel all the worse and put my friend in a somewhat false position. She was to find out that a good fellow of a painter did not lend himself to this pleasantry. I approached the two lovers as if the beautiful enemy of the pretty actress had not entrusted me with any commission. They were only exchanging, according to agreement, the most indispensable polite phrases in a loud voice—
“Have you come to this corner of Bohemia, then?” Molan said, my presence restoring his natural assurance to him; “it is quite natural that you should.”
“Do not boast,” I replied in a tone of banter with a foundation of truth to it similar to the one he affected. “It is a long time since you passed as a man of the world.”