An exotic, penetrating odor made Lubimoff wince. He knew that perfume. And there was a look of severity in his eyes as he glanced sharply at the Duchess.
"Sit down," she said. "They are going to serve us."
As the Prince looked about, without seeing any sort of a chair, Alicia set him an example, dropping on a heap of cushions. Michael sat down in the same fashion, beside a tiny mother of pearl table no bigger than a tabouret. On it a lamp with a dark shade let fall a circle of soft light. Inwardly the Prince began to feel a boiling of suppressed anger as he thought of his evening wasted.
"You must have eaten this way often," she continued, "you have traveled more than I. The style of decoration must be familiar to you."
Yes; he knew the style, the original and authentic style, and for that very reason he did not care to see it again in imitation. Besides obliging him to eat on the floor, there in a house on the Avenue de Bois.... What an affectation!
But in a short time his opinion began to change. A poseur she undoubtedly was, but affectation had already become a more or less natural trait in her, a sort of second nature. He guessed that even in its slightest details none of this had been prepared especially for him. Alicia lived and ate there when she was alone just as she was doing then. She was prey to a desire to be different from other people even when no one was noticing her.
The servant in charge of the meal was a copper-colored man with a long down-curling mustache. He was dressed in a black tuxedo, with a white cloth wrapped around his legs like a skirt. He had long hair, done up on his head like a woman's and held in place by a tortoiseshell comb. The Asiatic was placing the huge trays containing the food on the floor: Some of the dishes were of ancient hammered silver, others of many colored lacquer, or of semi-transparent materials made in imitation of emerald, topaz, and red sealing wax.
For Michael the meal looked like something a great chef might have prepared if he had suddenly gone mad and made up the dishes in the midst of his ravings. There was not a single item that suggested the harmonious course of an ordinary dinner. The palate acted on the imagination, awakening memories of distant travels, visions of far off lands. Exotic preserves alternated with hot dishes. Pastry flavored with penetrating perfumes was served along with sharp, biting, or intensely bitter sauces.
Alicia, half reclining on the cushions, looking at the dishes without appetite, extended her hand carelessly toward the most unusual delicacies, and those with the most pungent and racy savors. Clearly the perversion of her palate was profound. She herself saw to it that Michael's glass was always filled. It was a drink of her own invention, having a champagne base. It burned and rasped his mouth, paralyzing all other sensation with its stinging coolness. It penetrated his nostrils with a lingering scent of the rarest flowers and of Asiatic spices.
Speaking of the dead Princess, Alicia came to mention her own mother. They were now on terms of open hostility. Her eyes began to gleam with defiance as she was reminded of Doña Mercedes, confined in the Champs-Élysée residence with her court of clericals, and showing herself in public only for the organizing of pious works. She was trying to starve her only daughter to death!... And as Michael smiled at this explosion of anger, she explained her grievances.