“Was not that Mme. de Manerville with whom you were talking, dear?”
Félix had not yet got clear of the thorny ground, through which his wife’s neat little attack marched him, when the carriage stopped at their door. It was the first stratagem prompted by love. Marie was delighted to have thus got the better of a man whom till then she had considered so superior. She tasted for the first time the joy of victory at a critical moment.
V
Florine
In a passage between the Rue Basse-du-Rempart and the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, Raoul had one or two bare, cold rooms on the third floor of a thin, ugly house. This was his abode for the general public, for literary novices, creditors, intruders, and the whole race of bores who were not allowed to cross the threshold of private life. His real home, which was the stage of his wider life and public appearances, he made with Florine, a second-rate actress who, ten years before, had been raised to the rank of a great dramatic artist by the combined efforts of Nathan’s friends, the newspaper critics, and a few literary men.
For ten years Raoul had been so closely attached to this woman, that he spent half his life in her house, taking his meals there whenever he had no engagements outside nor friends to entertain. Florine, to a finished depravity, added a very pretty wit, which constant intercourse with artists and daily practice had developed and sharpened. Wit is generally supposed to be a rare quality among actors. It seems an easy inference that those who spend their lives in bringing the outside to perfection should have little left with which to furnish the interior. But anyone who considers the small number of actors and actresses in a century, compared with the quantity of dramatic authors and attractive women produced by the same population, will see reason to dispute this notion. It rests, in fact, on the common assumption that personal feeling must disappear in the imitative expression of passion, whereas the real fact is that intelligence, memory, and imagination are the only powers employed in such imitation. Great artists are those who, according to Napoleon’s definition, can intercept at will the communication established by nature between sensation and thought. Molière and Talma loved more passionately in their old age than is usual with ordinary mortals.
Florine’s position forced her to listen to the talk of alert and calculating journalists and to the prophecies of garrulous literary men, while keeping an eye on certain politicians who used her house as a means of profiting by the sallies of her guests. The mixture of angel and demon which she embodied made her a fitting hostess for these profligates, who reveled in her impudence and found unfailing amusement in the perversity of her mind and heart.
Her house, enriched with offerings from admirers, displayed in its exaggerated magnificence an entire regardlessness of cost. Women of this type set a purely arbitrary value on their possessions; in a fit of temper they will smash a fan or a scent-bottle worthy of a queen, and they will be inconsolable if anything happens to a ten-franc basin which their lapdogs drink out of. The dining-room, crowded with rare and costly gifts, may serve as a specimen of the regal and insolent profusion of the establishment.
The whole room, including the ceiling, was covered with carved oak, left unstained, and set off with lines of dull gold. In the panels, encircled by groups of children playing with chimaeras, were placed the lights, which illuminated here a rough sketch by Decamps; there a plaster angel holding a basin of holy water, a present from Antonin Moine; further on a dainty picture of Eugène Devéria; the sombre figure of some Spanish alchemist by Louis Boulanger; an autograph letter from Lord Byron to Caroline in an ebony frame, carved by Elschoet, with a letter of Napoleon to Josephine to match it. The things were arranged without any view to symmetry, and yet with a sort of unstudied art; the whole effect took one, as it were, by storm. There was a union of carelessness and desire to please, such as can only be found in the homes of artists. The exquisitely-carved mantelpiece was bare except for a whimsical Florentine statue in ivory, attributed to Michelangelo, representing a Pan discovering a woman disguised as a young herd, the original of which is at the Treasury in Vienna. On either side of this hung an iron candelabrum, the work of some Renaissance chisel. A Boule timepiece on a tortoiseshell bracket, lacquered with copper arabesques, glittered in the middle of a panel between two statuettes, survivals from some ruined abbey. In the corners of the room on pedestals stood gorgeously resplendent lamps—the fee paid by some maker to Florine for trumpeting his wares among her friends, who were assured that Japanese pots, with rich fittings, made the only possible stand for lamps. On a marvelous whatnot lay a display of silver, well-earned trophy of a combat in which some English lord had been forced to acknowledge the superiority of the French nation. Next came porcelain reliefs. The whole room displayed the charming profusion of an artist whose furniture represents his capital.
The bedroom, in violet, was a young ballet-girl’s dream: velvet curtains, lined with silk, were draped over inner folds of tulle; the ceiling was in white cashmere relieved with violet silk; at the foot of the bed lay an
