At seven o’clock they attacked the oysters. At eight o’clock, between two courses, they sipped iced punch. Everyone knows the menu of these parties.
At nine o’clock they were chattering away as people chatter after drinking forty-two bottles of different wines, shared between fourteen people. The dessert, the horrible dessert of the month of April,* had been served. The heady atmosphere had affected only the Norman girl, who was humming a Christmas carol.
With the exception of that poor girl, no one had lost the use of his reason; the drinkers, men and women, were the élite of Paris diners-out. Wits were sparkling merrily, eyes, though gleaming, were still full of intelligence, but tongues turned to satire, anecdote, and indiscreet gossip.
The conversation up till then had kept to the vicious circle of racing and horses, of Stock Exchange operations, of the comparative merits of social celebrities and of well-known scandalous stories. But it was threatening to become intimate and to break up into heart-to-heart talks between couples.
It was at this moment that, at winks from Carabine to Léon de Lora, Bixiou, La Palférine, and du Tillet, they began to talk of love.
‘Well-bred doctors never talk of medicine, real nobles never talk of their ancestors, men of talent never talk about their works,’ said Josépha. ‘Why should we talk about our profession? I had the Opera performance cancelled so that I could come here and it certainly wasn’t so that I should work. So let’s not put on an act, my dear friends.’
‘They’re talking about real love, my dear,’ said Malaga, ‘of the kind of love that engulfs a man completely, that makes him drag down his father and mother, sell his wife and children, and end up in Clichy.’*
‘Talk away then,’ replied the singer. ‘Not known here.’
Not known here! When this phrase, taken over from street urchins’ slang into the vocabulary of courtesans, is reinforced by the expression in the eyes and on the faces of these women, it is, on their lips, a whole poem.
‘So I don’t love you, Josépha?’ said the Duke in a low voice.
‘You may love me truly,’ the singer whispered to the Duke with a smile. ‘But I don’t love you with the kind of love they’re talking about, with the love which makes the universe all dark without the man one loves. I think you’re very nice and I find you useful, but you’re not indispensable to me. And if you were to desert me tomorrow, I’d have three dukes for one.’
‘Does love exist in Paris?’ said Léon de Lora. ‘No one here has the time to earn a decent living, so how can one devote oneself to true love that takes possession of a man as water does sugar? You have to be enormously rich to love, for love annihilates a man, rather as it has done to our Brazilian friend here. As I said a long time ago, extremes coincide! A true lover is like a eunuch, for women no longer exist on earth for him. He is a mystery; he is like the true Christian in his solitary retreat. Just look at our fine Brazilian!’
The whole table stared at Henri Montès de Montéjanos, who was embarrassed at finding himself the cynosure of all eyes.
‘He’s been feeding there for the last hour, as unaware as an ox that he’s sitting beside the … I won’t say, in this company, the loveliest, but the freshest young woman in Paris.’
‘Everything’s fresh here, even the fish. That’s what this place is famous for,’ said Carabine.
Baron Montès de Montéjanos looked affably at the landscape artist and said:
‘Very good. I drink to your health.’
Then he nodded to Léon de Lora, put his glassful of port to his lips, and drank deeply.
‘So you’re in love,’ Carabine said to her neighbour, interpreting the toast in this way.
The Brazilian Baron had his glass filled up again, bowed to Carabine, and repeated the toast.
‘To Madame’s health,’ replied the courtesan in such an amusing tone that the painter, du Tillet, and Bixiou burst out laughing.
The Brazilian remained as unmoved as a bronze statue. His composure irritated Carabine. She knew perfectly well that Montes was in love with Madame Marneffe, but had not expected the absolute trust, the obstinate silence of a man with no doubts at all.
A woman is judged as often by her lover’s demeanour as a lover is judged by his mistress’s bearing.
Proud of loving Valérie and of being loved by her, there was a tinge of irony in the smile the Baron bestowed on these experienced connoisseurs, and, moreover, he was magnificent to look upon. Wine had not altered his colour, and his eyes, shining with the brilliance peculiar to burnished gold, did not reveal the secrets of his heart.
So Carabine said to herself: ‘What a woman! How she has sealed up that heart of yours!’
‘He’s a rock,’ said Bixiou under his breath; he thought it was only a bit of fooling and did not suspect the importance Carabine attached to the demolition of this fortress.
While, on Carabine’s right, this apparently frivolous conversation was taking place, on her left the discussion about love was being continued between the Duc d’Hérouville, Lousteau, Josépha, Jenny Cadine, and Massol.
They had reached the stage of considering whether such rare phenomena were the product of infatuation, obstinacy, or true love.
Josépha, thoroughly bored by these theories, wanted to change the subject.
‘You’re talking of something you know absolutely nothing about. Is there any one of you who has loved a woman enough—and a woman quite unworthy of him—to squander all his fortune, and his children’s too, to compromise his future, to tarnish his past, to run the risk of the galleys by robbing the State, to kill an uncle and a brother, to let his eyes be so completely blindfolded that he didn’t realize it was being done so as to prevent him from seeing the abyss into which he was thrust as a final jest? Du Tillet has a cash-box under his left breast; Léon de Lora has his wit there; Bixiou would laugh at himself if he loved anyone but himself; Massol has a minister’s portfolio instead of a heart; Lousteau has only an internal organ there, for he let Madame de la Baudraye* leave him; Monsieur le Duc is too rich to be able to prove his love by ruining himself; Vauvinet doesn’t count, for I exclude the discounter of the human race. So you’ve never been in love, nor have I, nor Jenny, nor Carabine. For my own part, I’ve only once seen the phenomenon I’ve just described. It was our poor Baron Hulot,’ she said, turning to Jenny Cadine. ‘I’m going to advertise for him like a lost dog, for I want to find him.’
‘Well, well!’ Carabine said to herself with a sideways look at Josépha. ‘So has Madame Nourrisson got two Raphael pictures, since Josépha’s playing my game?’
‘Poor man!’ said Vauvinet. ‘He was a great man, quite splendid. What style! What bearing! He had the appearance of François I!* What a volcano! And what skill, what genius he had in getting hold of money! Wherever he is, he’s looking for it. He must be extracting some from those walls made of bones that you see in the outskirts of Paris, near the gates, where he’s probably hiding.’
‘And all that for little Madame Marneffe,’ said Bixiou. ‘She’s a cunning bitch, if ever there was one.’
‘She’s going to marry my friend Crevel,’ du Tillet added.
‘And she’s crazy about my friend Steinbock,’ said Léon de Lora.
These three remarks were three pistol shots that struck Montès full in the chest.
He turned pale and was in such distress that he found it difficult to get up.
‘You swine!’ he said. ‘You ought not to mention the name of an honest woman in the same breath as the names of all your dissolute creatures, let alone making her a target for your jibes.’
Montès was interrupted by cries of ‘Bravo’ and unanimous applause. Bixiou, Léon de Lora, Vauvinet, du Tillet, and Massol gave the signal; it was a chorus.
‘Long live the Emperor!’ said Bixiou.
‘Let’s crown him!’ cried Vauvinet.
‘A growl for Médor,* hurrah for Brazil!’ shouted Lousteau.
‘Aha, my copper-coloured Baron, so you’re in love with our Valérie,’ said Léon de Lora, ‘and you’re not disgusted with her!’
‘It wasn’t said in parliamentary language, but it was magnificent!’ remarked Massol.
‘But, my dearest client, you were recommended to me. I’m your banker. Your innocence will count against me.’
‘Oh, tell me, you who are a sensible man …’ the Brazilian said, turning to du Tillet.
‘Thanks on behlf of the whole company,’ said Bixiou, bowing.
‘Tell me some positive facts,’ added Montès, paying no attention to Bixiou’s remark.
‘As to that,’ replied du Tillet, ‘I have the honour to tell you that I’m invited to Crevel’s wedding.’
‘Oh, Combabus is going to defend Madame Marneffe,’ said Josépha, solemnly getting up.
She went up to Montès with a tragic air, gave him a friendly little pat on the head, looked at him for a moment with a comic expression of admiration on her face, and shook her head.
‘Hulot is the first example of love at all costs; here’s the second,’ she said. ‘But he shouldn’t count, for he comes from the tropics.’
As Josépha gently tapped the Brazilian’s brow, he fell back into his chair and appealed with a look to du Tillet.
‘If I’m the butt of one of your Parisian jokes,’ he said, ‘if you wanted to wrest my secret from me …’
And he cast a fiery look round the whole table, including all the guests, in a glance blazing with the Brazilian sun.
‘For pity’s sake, tell me so,’ he continued with a pleading and almost childlike look, ‘but don’t slander a woman I love.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Carabine replied in a low voice, ‘but if you were shamefully betrayed, deceived, tricked by Valérie, if I were to give you proofs in an hour’s time at my house, what would you do?’
‘I can’t tell you here in front of all these lagos,’ said the Brazilian Baron.
Carabine understood him to say magots—ugly wretches.
‘Well, say no more,’ she replied, smiling. ‘Don’t make yourself a laughing-stock for the wittiest men in Paris, but come to my place and we’ll have a talk.’
Montès was shattered.
‘Proofs,’ he stammered. ‘Just think …’
‘You’ll have only too many,’ replied Carabine, ‘but since mere suspicion goes to your head so much, I fear for your reason.’
‘What an obstinate fellow he is; he’s worse than the late King of Holland.* Look here, Lousteau, Bixiou, Massol, listen, all of you. Aren’t you all invited to lunch by Madame Marneffe for the day after tomorrow?’ asked Léon de Lora.
‘Ya,’ replied du Tillet. ‘I have the honour to inform you again, Baron, that if by any chance you intend to marry Madame Marneffe, you are thrown out like a parliamentary bill, blackballed by a man called Crevel. My friend, my former colleague, Crevel, has an annual income of eighty thousand livres and you probably haven’t made a show of as much as that, for, if you had, I think you’d have been preferred.’
Montès listened with a half-abstracted, half-smiling expression which seemed terrifying to the whole company.
Just then the head-waiter came in and whispered to Carabine that one of her relatives was in the ante-room and wanted to speak to her. The courtesan got up, left the room, and found Madame Nourrisson veiled in black lace.
‘Well, am I to go to your house, my child? Has he taken the bait?’
‘Yes, mother dear, the pistol is so well loaded that I’m afraid it’ll explode,’ replied Carabine.