The daughter of the Countess Barineff had noticed among the spectators a stout man, perhaps sixty years old, whom she had often seen at the Meyrins', and who now kept his eyes fixed on her, while his attitude, his smile, and his muttered asides, indicated strange emotion as well as inexpressible vanity. By reason of his clean-shaven face, his pale complexion, the way in which he held his hat, resting it on his left hip and rounding his arm, his right hand thrust into the depths of his double-breasted and carefully buttoned coat, in the style of the portraits of the first Napoleon, he was unmistakably an actor.
It was none other than the old Dumesnil, one of the most faithful interpreters of stock rôles at the Odéon, a very good sort of fellow at bottom, but rather ludicrous from his habit of always fancying himself on the stage, the buskins on his legs, the toga hanging from his shoulders. Lise had given him an affectionate smile.
In less than half an hour all was over, and the bride and bridegroom, having shaken hands with the witnesses of the marriage, got into their carriage and were driven to their apartments in the Rue d'Assas, while Dumesnil, who had looked after them with tearful eyes, walked away muttering a verse which his memory of classical rôles supplied him with, or which was an indifferent impromptu for the occasion:
"A tout ce qui séduit, préférant le bonheur,
Elle a quitté pour lui palais, gloire et splendeur."
The following day the ex-Princess Olsdorf began a calm, prosaic, middle-class life. She wished to think she was quite ready to accept it, without revolt or regrets. She told herself that Paul, in compensating her for all she had abandoned, would make her forget it. She refused to think of the past, longing only to become a mother for the third time, to satisfy the heart-hunger that the absence of her children had roused in her.
That nothing might recall the past to her, and perhaps also because her pride made her dread their ironical smiles, she discharged her former servants, being satisfied for the time, until she could organize her household, with a cook and a lady's-maid, engaged in haste and almost without inquiry.
The first evening of her new life, tired out by the events of the day, and waiting for Paul, who was putting things straight in his studio, Lise sunk into a chair, and, in spite of herself, her mind turned to the past, now left so far behind.
In her waking dream she smiled sadly on Alexander and Tekla; she saw again the château of Pampeln and its shady park, her companions in the chase, urged on by the horns of the huntsmen, her drosky drawn at lightning speed by its three horses flecked with foam; and, standing at the door of the banqueting hall, with its elaborate wood carvings, she saw the butler, clothed in strictly correct black, appearing to announce in his sonorous voice, "Madame la Princess is served," when, suddenly startled from her thoughts by the entrance of her maid, she came back to the reality indeed as the girl said:
"Madame, the soup is on the table."
With a slight involuntary shiver, the ex-Princess Olsdorf could not, however, help smiling; and as her husband appeared at this moment, she rose quickly and hurried toward him, saying in an almost passionate voice, a sort of echo of the feelings called to aid in completely burying the past: