He, too, began to experiment with refinements of the toilet. He used scent, and tended his moustache and his brown hair. It seemed to him, as to all young lovers, that life had begun for him on the day when he first met his mistress, and that all his past existence counted for nothing.
IX
Cora loved him, too, but the heart had little to do with the sort of love she felt.
A mulatto of Bourbon, she had been brought up in the sensual idleness and luxury of wealthy creoles, but had been kept at arm’s length by white women with pitiless contempt, repulsed everywhere as a coloured woman. The same racial prejudice had pursued her to St Louis; although she was the wife of one of the leading farmers of revenue on the river, she was left alone, an outcast.
In Paris she had had numbers of exquisites to love her; her ample means had enabled her to make a presentable appearance in France, to taste vice according to the most elegant standards of propriety.
At present she was tired of delicate gloved hands, the sickly affectations of dandies, and their romantic languid airs. She had chosen Jean because he was big and strong. In her way she loved this splendid, wild growing plant. She loved his rough, simple manners; she found attraction even in the coarse texture of his soldier’s shirt.
Cora’s dwelling was an immense brick building, with the somewhat Egyptian aspect common to the old parts of St Louis, and white like an Arab caravanserai. Below, there were great courts, whither came camels and Moors of the desert to crouch upon the sand, and where swarmed a grotesque, motley crowd of cattle, dogs, ostriches, and black slaves.
Up above there were endless verandahs, supported by massive, square columns, like the terraces of Babylon.
The apartments were reached by means of outside staircases of white stone, monumental of aspect. All this was dilapidated and dreary, like everything else at St Louis, that town which has already lived its life, that moribund colony of bygone days.