“An amazing thing, isn’t it?” he said to me. “It is stunning, eh?”
“Yes, it isn’t bad!”
“Not bad! Not bad! … Why that is a masterpiece, an astounding masterpiece! What I especially like is the second act. There is a situation for you, not that … a tense situation! Why it is high comedy, you know! And the gowns! And that Judic, ah! that Judic! …”
He struck his thigh and clicked his tongue:
“It got me all excited, my dear! It’s astonishing!”
We thus discussed the merits of the various acts, scenes and actors.
When we were parting:
“Tell me,” I asked him, “do you happen to know a certain Juliette Roux?”
“Wait now! Oh, perfectly well! A little brunette, very ‘chic’? No, I got mixed up. Wait now! Juliette Roux! Don’t know her.”
An hour later I was seated at a table with a glass of soda water in front of me, in the café de la Paix where, after the theatre, used to assemble the most beautiful representatives of the fashionable world. A great many women came in and out, insolent, loudmouthed, their faces covered with fresh layers of rice powder, their lips newly painted with rouge! At the adjoining table a little blonde lady, already aged but very animated, was speaking in a nasal voice; a brunette, farther away, was simpering with a turkey’s ludicrous majesty, and with the same hand which had raked manure on the farm she held a fan, while her escort, leaning against his chair, his hat pushed back, his legs spread apart, was obdurately sucking his cane’s head.
An uncontrollable feeling of disgust rose within me; I was ashamed of being here, and I compared the ridiculous and noisy manners of these women with the reserved deportment of the gentle Juliette at Lirat’s studio. These raucous and piercing voices rendered even more suave the freshness of her voice, the voice which I still heard saying to me: “Delighted, Monsieur! But I know you well.” I arose.
“What a scoundrel this Lirat is, all the same,” I exclaimed while getting into bed, furious at the fact that he had so treated a young woman whom I had met neither on the street, at the Bois, in the restaurant, at the theatre, nor at the night cabaret.
IV
“Madame Juliette Roux, if you please?”
“Will Monsieur please come in?” the maid asked.
Without demanding my name or waiting for my answer, she made me cross a small, dark antechamber, and led me into a room where at first I could only distinguish a lamp covered by a large lampshade, which burned low in a corner. The maid raised the flame of the lamp and carried out an otter skin cape which had been thrown on the sofa.
“I will go tell madame,” she said.
And she disappeared, leaving me alone in the room.
So I was at her house! For eight days the thought of this visit had tortured me. I had no special business, I simply wanted to see Juliette; some kind of keen curiosity, which I did not stop to analyze, drew me to her. Several times I had gone to the Rue Saint Petersbourg with the firm intention of calling on her, but at the last moment my nerve failed me, and I left without mustering sufficient courage to cross her threshold. And now I was the most embarrassed being in the world, and I regretted my foolish step, for obviously it was a foolish step. How would she receive me? What should I say? What caused me the greatest uneasiness was that after I had made a thorough search in my brain I found not a single phrase, not a single word with which to begin our conversation when Juliette entered. What if words should fail me and I should be left standing here with gaping mouth! How ridiculous that would be!
I examined the room into which Juliette was presently to come. It was a dressing room which also served as a parlor. It made a rather unfavorable impression on me. The toilet table, ostentatiously displayed with its two wash basins of cracked, pink cut glass, shocked me. The walls and ceiling, hung with loud red satin, the furniture, bordered with elaborate plush hangings, the knickknacks, costly and ugly, placed here and there on the furniture, the queer tables serving no apparent purpose, consols weighed down with heavy ornaments—all this bespoke a vulgar taste. I noticed in the center of the mantelpiece, between two massive vases of onyx, a terra cotta statuette of Cupid, smiling with a sort of grimace and offering a flower held at the tips of his outspread fingers. Every detail revealed, on the one hand, a love of expensive and unrefined luxury, and on the other a regrettable predilection for romance and puerile affection. It was at once distressing and sentimental. Nevertheless, and that was a relief to me, I saw here no evidence of that incongruity, that transitory air, that severity of aspect so characteristic of ladies’ boarding houses, those apartments where one is made aware of a haggard existence, where by the number of knickknacks one can count the number of
