Cydalise, Montès, and Madame Nourrisson got into a cab which was waiting at Carabine’s door. Madame Nourrisson quietly directed the driver to a house in the same block as the Italian Opera. They could have got there quite quickly, for it is only seven to eight minutes’ drive from the Rue Saint-Georges, but Madame Nourrisson told him to go by the Rue Lepelletier and to drive very slowly so that they could examine the waiting carriages.
‘Brazilian,’ said Ma Nourrisson, ‘look out for your angel’s carriage and servants.’
The Baron pointed out Valérie’s carriage as the cab drove past it.
‘She told her servants to come at ten o’clock and she took a cab to the house where she is with Count Steinbock. She had dinner there and in half an hour she’ll arrive at the Opera. It’s well worked out. That explains how she’s been able to pull the wool over your eyes for so long,’ said Madame Nourrisson.
The Brazilian made no answer. Transformed into a tiger, he had recovered the imperturbable composure that had been so greatly admired at the dinner-party. In short, he was as calm as a bankrupt the day after his petition has been filed.
At the door of the fateful house, a two-horse hackney carriage was waiting, one of those called General company from the name of the firm that runs them.
‘Stay in your cab,’ Madame Nourrisson said to Montes. ‘You can’t go in there as if it were a public bar. Someone will come and fetch you.’
Madame Marneffe’s and Wenceslas’s paradise was not the least like Crevel’s little house, which he had sold to Comte Maxime de Trailles, for it seemed to him it was no longer required.
This paradise, a paradise used by many people, consisted of a fourth-floor room opening on to the staircase in a house in the same block as the Italian Opera.
On each floor of the house, on each landing, there was a room formerly intended to serve as a kitchen for each flat.
But as the house had become a sort of inn whose rooms were let out for clandestine love-affairs at exorbitant prices, the real Madame Nourrisson, a second-hand clothes dealer in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Marc, had made a sound judgement of the enormous value of these kitchens and had converted each one into a sort of dining-room.
Each of these rooms had thick party-walls on both sides, looked out on to the street, and was completely cut off by very thick folding doors providing a secure lock on the landing side. Tenants could therefore discuss important secrets at dinner without risk of being overheard. For greater security, the windows were provided with Venetian blinds outside and shutters inside.
Because of their special feature these rooms cost three hundred francs a month.
This house, replete with its paradises and its mysteries, was let for twenty-four thousand francs a year to Madame Nourrisson I, who made a profit of twenty thousand a year, taking one year with another, after paying her agent Madame Nourrisson II, for she did not manage the property herself.
The paradise let to Count Steinbock had been hung with chintz. The coldness and hardness of the cheap red-polished tiles could no longer be felt underfoot because of a soft carpet. The furniture consisted of two pretty chairs and a bed in an alcove; just then it was half hidden by a table, on which there were the remains of an elegant dinner, and where two long-necked bottles and an empty champagne bottle in its ice-bucket marked out the fields of Bacchus tilled by Venus.
Sent no doubt by Valerie, there was a comfortable upholstered armchair beside a low fireside chair and a pretty rosewood chest of drawers with its mirror nicely framed in the Pompadour style. A lamp hanging from the ceiling shed a half-light, augmented by the candles standing on the table and on the mantelpiece.
This sketch will give an idea, urbi et orbi,* of the sordid dimensions of a clandestine love-affair in the Paris of 1840. How far removed, alas, from adulterous love as symbolized by Vulcan’s nets* three thousand years ago.
As Cydalise and the Baron were going upstairs, Valérie, standing in front of the fireplace where a large faggot was blazing, was having her stays laced up by Wenceslas. This is the moment when a woman who is neither too fat nor too thin, like the slender, elegant Valérie, appears divinely beautiful. The pink-tinted, dewy, flesh invites a glance from the sleepiest eyes. The lines of the body, so thinly veiled at such a time, are so clearly defined by the striking folds of the petticoat and the material of the stays that a woman is then irresistible, like everything we are obliged to leave. Her happy, smiling face in the mirror, her foot tapping impatiently, her hand busy repairing the disorder of her curls and her badly rearranged hair, her eyes overflowing with gratitude, then the glow of contentment which, like a sunset, lights up the smallest details of her face, everything makes that moment a mine of memories. Indeed, anyone who casts a backward glance at his youthful errors will recall some of these delightful details and will perhaps understand, without excusing them, the follies of the Hulots and the Crevels.
Women know their power at such a moment so well that they always gather then what can be called the aftermath of the encounter.