Dunoisse gave the promise with obvious reluctance. Then they talked about the music energetically. But presently, when the great gilded chandelier soared up into the artificial firmament of the domed ceiling, and the stage-lights were lowered, and the flats parted—revealing the Tomb of Ninus, by the pale mysterious rays of the calcium moon—a cheek that was warm and satiny, and glowing as a nectarine plucked from a south wall in the ripening heats of July, brushed Dunoisse’s—and his trumpery promise broke its gilded string, and flew away upon the wind of a double sigh.
De Roux looked in to escort his wife home, at the conclusion of the opera. He had been winning at cards,—was smiling and urbane, and Dunoisse, looking at the dyed, red-faced, dissipated, elderly dandy, knew the sickness of loathing. De Roux had shown him civility, courtesy, even friendliness, yet he hated him with zeal and rancor. He watched the Colonel as he wrapped his beautiful wife in her ermine mantle—the same that she had worn, Dunoisse remembered, upon the evening of the bloodshed at the Hotel of Foreign Affairs. And as the almond-nailed, plump fingers of one of the Colonel’s well-kept, ringed hands touched Henriette’s bare shoulder, she winced and shuddered. Her mouth contracted as though to stifle a cry—her long eyes shot a glance at her friend that seemed a mute appeal to be saved from the indignity of that touch.... And so fierce was the jealous impulse urging Dunoisse to dash his clenched fist into the gross, sensual face of her possessor, that he was fain to thrust his tingling right hand deep into his trouser-pocket and clench it there until the glove split.
XXXIX
The Bonaparte, upon a strong hint received from Citizen Lamartine, did not make a protracted stay in Paris. He returned to the savage scenes of his exile, suffering eclipse behind the curtain of fog enveloping the barbarous island of Great Britain, until an early date in June. But previous to departure, he held a reception of his friends and supporters, followed by a supper, to which only intimate acquaintances were invited, at the Hotel du Rhin in the Place Vendôme. For the earlier function Dunoisse received a card.
The first-floor suite of rooms, occupied by the hope of the Imperialist Party, boasted a certain pompous splendor. There were gilded wall-decorations, velvet hangings, ormolu and marble consoles, clocks and mirrors topped with perching eagles, carpets patterned with garlands, masks, fillets and torches, high-backed settees with scrolled ends; chairs of classical simplicity, tripod-pedestals bearing vases, all the worm-eaten and moth-riddled lumber of the defunct Empire, routed out of basements, dragged down from garrets by a time-serving management eager to gratify their princely tenant’s hereditary tastes.
He thought all this rococo pseudo-classicism supremely hideous, for his predilections were for the gaudy, the showy, the voluptuous, and the bizarre, yet he gazed pensively upon these relics of an extinct era. His bedroom had a vast purple four-poster with a canopy like a catafalque, and a dressing-table, white lace over violet silk, suggestive of an altar in mid-Lent, that gave him the horrors. And it was all as expensive as it was ugly, and every hour added to the length of the management’s Python-bill. Fortunate that funds supplied him by an anonymous adherent had plumped the cheeks of his emptying purse, otherwise Paris might have been treated to a spectacle that London had witnessed before then—the pantomimic interlude of the Prince Pretender, who, lacking the needful cash to defray mine host’s charges, had, minus his hatboxes and tin cases and hair-trunks, with grievous lack of ceremony, been hustled to the door....
He received his guests of that evening with a bland, dignified politeness, even a certain grace, despite his awkward build, stunted proportions, and heavy, sleepy air.
Badly dressed, in an egregious chocolate-colored evening coat with gold buttons, trousers of the same color, wide at the hips, and with strips of black silk braiding down the outer seams, he yet wore an air of composed assurance, smiling pleasantly under his heavy brown mustache, moving his tufted chin about in the high stock embraced by the cravat of white satin, adorned with emerald pins, flowing into the bosom of a waistcoat of green plush. Despite the star upon the chocolate-colored coat; and the crimson watered-silk ribbon that supported the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, there was not one of his small band of followers and adherents but looked more fit to play the rôle of Prince than he.
They bore themselves with imperturbable gravity, these needy adventurers, most of them blown by the wind that had seemed to fill the slack sails of their master’s ship of fortune from Albion’s hospitable shores.... They took the stage at this juncture like the characters in a Comedy of Masks.... You had the Pretender, the Confidant, the Councillor, the Panderer, the Doctor, the Valet, and the Bona Roba—the last discreetly kept out of sight. The Bravo was at that time in Africa, to be recalled later on. And they played their several parts, with some stately change of title and trappings on the part of certain of the actors, to the fall of the curtain upon the Last Act.