Cousin Betty Part 68

"I have three."

"Diamonds?"

"I am selling them."

"A green monkey?"

"No. A picture by Raphael."

"What maggot is that in your brain?"

"Josepha makes me sick with her pictures," said Carabine. "I want some better than hers."

Du Tillet came with the Brazilian, the hero of the feast; the Duc d'Herouville followed with Josepha. The singer wore a plain velvet gown, but she had on a necklace worth a hundred and twenty thousand francs, pearls hardly distinguishable from her skin like white camellia petals.

She had stuck one scarlet camellia in her black hair--a patch--the effect was dazzling, and she had amused herself by putting eleven rows of pearls on each arm. As she shook hands with Jenny Cadine, the actress said, "Lend me your mittens!"

Josepha unclasped them one by one and handed them to her friend on a plate.

"There's style!" said Carabine. "Quite the d.u.c.h.ess! You have robbed the ocean to dress the nymph, Monsieur le Duc," she added turning to the little Duc d'Herouville.

The actress took two of the bracelets; she clasped the other twenty on the singer's beautiful arms, which she kissed.

Lousteau, the literary cadger, la Palferine and Malaga, Ma.s.sol, Vauvinet, and Theodore Gaillard, a proprietor of one of the most important political newspapers, completed the party. The Duc d'Herouville, polite to everybody, as a fine gentleman knows how to be, greeted the Comte de la Palferine with the particular nod which, while it does not imply either esteem or intimacy, conveys to all the world, "We are of the same race, the same blood--equals!"--And this greeting, the s.h.i.+bboleth of the aristocracy, was invented to be the despair of the upper citizen cla.s.s.

Carabine placed Combabus on her left, and the Duc d'Herouville on her right. Cydalise was next to the Brazilian, and beyond her was Bixiou.

Malaga sat by the Duke.

Oysters appeared at seven o'clock; at eight they were drinking iced punch. Every one is familiar with the bill of fare of such a banquet. By nine o'clock they were talking as people talk after forty-two bottles of various wines, drunk by fourteen persons. Dessert was on the table, the odious dessert of the month of April. Of all the party, the only one affected by the heady atmosphere was Cydalise, who was humming a tune.

None of the party, with the exception of the poor country girl, had lost their reason; the drinkers and the women were the experienced _elite_ of the society that sups. Their wits were bright, their eyes glistened, but with no loss of intelligence, though the talk drifted into satire, anecdote, and gossip. Conversation, hitherto confined to the inevitable circle of racing, horses, hammerings on the Bourse, the different occupations of the _lions_ themselves, and the scandals of the town, showed a tendency to break up into intimate _tete-a-tete_, the dialogues of two hearts.

And at this stage, at a signal from Carabine to Leon de Lora, Bixiou, la Palferine, and du Tillet, love came under discussion.

"A doctor in good society never talks of medicine, true n.o.bles never speak of their ancestors, men of genius do not discuss their works,"

said Josepha; "why should we talk business? If I got the opera put off in order to dine here, it was a.s.suredly not to work.--So let us change the subject, dear children."

"But we are speaking of real love, my beauty," said Malaga, "of the love that makes a man fling all to the dogs--father, mother, wife, children--and retire to Clichy."

"Talk away, then, 'don't know yer,'" said the singer.

The slang words, borrowed from the Street Arab, and spoken by these women, may be a poem on their lips, helped by the expression of the eyes and face.

"What, do not I love you, Josepha?" said the Duke in a low voice.

"You, perhaps, may love me truly," said she in his ear, and she smiled.

"But I do not love you in the way they describe, with such love as makes the world dark in the absence of the man beloved. You are delightful to me, useful--but not indispensable; and if you were to throw me over to-morrow, I could have three dukes for one."

"Is true love to be found in Paris?" asked Leon de Lora. "Men have not even time to make a fortune; how can they give themselves over to true love, which swamps a man as water melts sugar? A man must be enormously rich to indulge in it, for love annihilates him--for instance, like our Brazilian friend over there. As I said long ago, 'Extremes defeat--themselves.' A true lover is like an eunuch; women have ceased to exist for him. He is mystical; he is like the true Christian, an anchorite of the desert!--See our n.o.ble Brazilian."

Every one at table looked at Henri Montes de Montejanos, who was shy at finding every eye centred on him.

"He has been feeding there for an hour without discovering, any more than an ox at pasture, that he is sitting next to--I will not say, in such company, the loveliest--but the freshest woman in all Paris."

"Everything is fresh here, even the fish; it is what the house is famous for," said Carabine.

Baron Montes looked good-naturedly at the painter, and said:

"Very good! I drink to your very good health," and bowing to Leon de Lora, he lifted his gla.s.s of port wine and drank it with much dignity.

"Are you then truly in love?" asked Malaga of her neighbor, thus interpreting his toast.

The Brazilian refilled his gla.s.s, bowed to Carabine, and drank again.

"To the lady's health then!" said the courtesan, in such a droll tone that Lora, du Tillet, and Bixiou burst out laughing.

The Brazilian sat like a bronze statue. This impa.s.sibility provoked Carabine. She knew perfectly well that Montes was devoted to Madame Marneffe, but she had not expected this dogged fidelity, this obstinate silence of conviction.

A woman is as often gauged by the att.i.tude of her lover as a man is judged from the tone of his mistress. The Baron was proud of his attachment to Valerie, and of hers to him; his smile had, to these experienced connoisseurs, a touch of irony; he was really grand to look upon; wine had not flushed him; and his eyes, with their peculiar l.u.s.tre as of tarnished gold, kept the secrets of his soul. Even Carabine said to herself:

"What a woman she must be! How she has sealed up that heart!"

"He is a rock!" said Bixiou in an undertone, imagining that the whole thing was a practical joke, and never suspecting the importance to Carabine of reducing this fortress.

While this conversation, apparently so frivolous, was going on at Carabine's right, the discussion of love was continued on her left between the Duc d'Herouville, Lousteau, Josepha, Jenny Cadine, and Ma.s.sol. They were wondering whether such rare phenomena were the result of pa.s.sion, obstinacy, or affection. Josepha, bored to death by it all, tried to change the subject.

"You are talking of what you know nothing about. Is there a man among you who ever loved a woman--a woman beneath him--enough to squander his fortune and his children's, to sacrifice his future and blight his past, to risk going to the hulks for robbing the Government, to kill an uncle and a brother, to let his eye be so effectually blinded that he did not even perceive that it was done to hinder his seeing the abyss into which, as a crowning jest, he was being driven? Du Tillet has a cash-box under his left breast; Leon de Lora has his wit; Bixiou would laugh at himself for a fool if he loved any one but himself; Ma.s.sol has a minister's portfolio in the place of a heart; Lousteau can have nothing but viscera, since he could endure to be thrown over by Madame de Baudraye; Monsieur le Duc is too rich to prove his love by his ruin; Vauvinet is not in it--I do not regard a bill-broker as one of the human race; and you have never loved, nor I, nor Jenny Cadine, nor Malaga. For my part, I never but once even saw the phenomenon I have described. It was," and she turned to Jenny Cadine, "that poor Baron Hulot, whom I am going to advertise for like a lost dog, for I want to find him."

"Oh, ho!" said Carabine to herself, and looking keenly at Josepha, "then Madame Nourrisson has two pictures by Raphael, since Josepha is playing my hand!"

"Poor fellow," said Vauvinet, "he was a great man! Magnificent! And what a figure, what a style, the air of Francis I.! What a volcano! and how full of ingenious ways of getting money! He must be looking for it now, wherever he is, and I make no doubt he extracts it even from the walls built of bones that you may see in the suburbs of Paris near the city gates--"

"And all that," said Bixiou, "for that little Madame Marneffe! There is a precious hussy for you!"

"She is just going to marry my friend Crevel," said du Tillet.

"And she is madly in love with my friend Steinbock," Leon de Lora put in.

These three phrases were like so many pistol-shots fired point-blank at Montes. He turned white, and the shock was so painful that he rose with difficulty.

"You are a set of blackguards!" cried he. "You have no right to speak the name of an honest woman in the same breath with those fallen creatures--above all, not to make it a mark for your slander!"

He was interrupted by unanimous bravos and applause. Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Vauvinet, du Tillet, and Ma.s.sol set the example, and there was a chorus.

"Hurrah for the Emperor!" said Bixiou.

"Crown him! crown him!" cried Vauvinet.

"Three groans for such a good dog! Hurrah for Brazil!" cried Lousteau.

"So, my copper-colored Baron, it is our Valerie that you love; and you are not disgusted?" said Leon de Lora.