Dunoisse read in that Book with raptures and exultations, and fierce delight and passionate triumph. He was to read it with agonies and humiliations and galling, unspeakable shame. He was to shed secret scalding tears over the cruel pages. He was to laugh over them with the laughter that is born of despair. But the sweetness of honey came before the tang of gall, the pleasure before the torment. So it was and will be while the world goes spinning round.
Women like Henriette give out fascination as radium dispenses its invisible energies. Every tone of their voices is a call, every glance an appeal or an invitation, every rustle of their garments, every heave of their bosoms, constitutes an appeal to the senses and a stimulant to the passions of men.
She was half-a-dozen women in one; you were master of a whole harem of beauties possessing her; a jewel cut in innumerable facets lay in your hand. She could be fierce and tender, pathetic and cynical, gay and sorrowful, delicate and robust, in the space of half-an-hour. Cigarettes calmed her nerves; moonlight, music, tiny glasses of Benedictine, and minute pills of Turkish opium. Chloral and morphia had not at that date been discovered, else what a votary of the tabloid would have been found in Henriette.
She adored sweets, Chinese bezique and good cookery. Green oysters, bouillabaisse, poulet sauté Marengo, and peaches in Kirsch, were among her passions. But she was a pious Catholic, and observed with scrupulous rigor the fasts and feasts of the Church.
She had campaigned with the 999th in Algeria, wore a dagger sometimes in her girdle; carried a tiny ivory-and-silver mounted pistol—fellow to one de Moulny kept locked up—and was expert in its use, as in the handling of the fencing-foil and the womanlier weapon, the needle. What webs of cunning embroidery grew under those little fingers! She wrought at these, sometimes for days together. Then she would pine for exercise and the open air: ride furiously in the Bois, with her plumed hat cocked à la mousquetaire, and her silver-gray veil and smoke-colored habit streaming; use the jeweled whip until her horse lathered, drive home the little silver-gilt spur of the dainty polished boot until his flank was specked with blood. Or she would shoot pigeons at Tivoli, handling her gun with ease, and vying with crack masculine sportsmen in her skilled capacity for slaughter. Or she would be driven in her barouche or landau, lying back among her silken cushions, as though too indolent to lift an eyelash, languid and voluptuous as any odalisque. Returning from these excursions, she would lie upon the sofa, silent, pale and mysterious, her vinaigrette at her nostrils, a silken handkerchief bound about her brows. For a crown of diamonds she could not, would not go to theater, or ball, or supper that night! She was fit to die—wanted nothing but to be left in solitude.... But she never failed to go; and towards the end of some gay, boisterous midnight banquet she would move with that long, gliding, supple step of hers into the middle of the room, and dance you the cachucha, with coffee-spoons for castanets, if nobody could produce these.
Who could resist her then? With the proud little head swaying on the rounded throat, and the long eyes darting fiery glances as the lithe body swung, and whirled, and the white arms beckoned and waved. With the silken swish of skirts calling attention to the lovely supple curve that went from hip to knee, and from the swelling calf to the delicate rounded ankle, and bidding you note and worship the elastic arch of the Andalusian instep, under which water could run and never wet the sole....
Nor was she less bewitching, be sure, at those other moments when Dunoisse would be alone with her; when, snatching her Spanish guitar from clumsier hands, she would warble the naughtiest ballads of the cafés chantant, reproducing the cynical improprieties of Fanny Hervieu or Georgette Bis-Bis, with inimitable chic and go. Or she would sing a Spanish love-song, vibrating with Southern passion; or sigh forth some Irish ballad, breathing of the green isle whence Norah Murphy sailed, to conquer with her beauty a guerrilla chief of Spain, and bear him Henriette, and die of sorrow; bequeathing her daughter a passionate, emotional nature and an hereditary religion, and the memory of some kisses and cradle-songs.
The simile of the changeful fay in the rainbow was never inappropriate to her. What a charming mingling of inconsistencies, what a creature of contradictions was she.... When her Brazilian cockatoo “Coco,” a magnificent bird, emerald-green as the Prince-Pretender’s dress-waistcoat, with a crest of sulphur-yellow and a beak as crimson as the Colonel’s own, was murdered by the Convent tom-cat, how tragic was her grief! Coco was interred in the Convent gardens, beautiful still in those days, though filched from even then for the builders’ diabolical uses. And the glove-box that served Henriette’s slaughtered darling as a coffin had been won at a pigeon-shooting match at Tivoli....
Those decapitated birds, fluttering on the smooth green turf in their death-struggles, had not drawn from the beautiful eyes a single tear. But Coco, who had been taught to shriek “Vive l’Empereur!” when he wanted fruit or bonbons, with loyalty quite as genuine as M. de Persigny’s—Coco was quite a different affair....
Mistigris must pay the death-penalty—upon that point Coco’s bereaved mistress was inexorable. The Augustinian Sisters pleaded for their darling; Madame de Roux would not budge. When she spoke of an appeal to the authorities—never reluctant at any time to impose penalties upon the Church—the Sisters caved in. At any rate, they ultimately produced a tail.... And whether the caudal appendage had really belonged to Mistigris, or had been filched from an old cat-skin belonging to the portress, touched up with red ink at the end where it had been attached to the original wearer, to impart a delusive air of freshness, was never absolutely known. When a cat strangely resembling Mistigris, but called by another name, attracted the attention of Coco’s bereaved mistress a few weeks later, the retort was unanswerable: