“You are nice—give me a kiss!”
She caught hold of his two ears, and pressed her lips against his forehead.
At that moment the dancing stopped; and in the conductor’s place appeared a handsome young man, rather fat, with a waxen complexion. He had long black hair, which he wore in the same fashion as Christ, and a blue velvet waistcoat embroidered with large gold palm-branches. He looked as proud as a peacock, and as stupid as a turkey-cock; and, having bowed to the audience, he began a ditty. A villager was supposed to be giving an account of his journey to the capital. The singer used the dialect of Lower Normandy, and played the part of a drunken man. The refrain—
“Ah! I laughed at you there, I laughed at you there,
In that rascally city of Paris!”4
was greeted with enthusiastic stampings of feet. Delmas, “a vocalist who sang with expression,” was too shrewd to let the excitement of his listeners cool. A guitar was quickly handed to him and he moaned forth a ballad entitled “The Albanian Girl’s Brother.”
The words recalled to Frederick those which had been sung by the man in rags between the paddle-boxes of the steamboat. His eyes involuntarily attached themselves to the hem of the dress spread out before him.
After each couplet there was a long pause, and the blowing of the wind through the trees resembled the sound of the waves.
Mademoiselle Vatnaz blushed the moment she saw Dussardier. She soon rose, and stretching out her hand towards him:
“You do not remember me, Monsieur Auguste?”
“How do you know her?” asked Frederick.
“We have been in the same house,” he replied.
Cisy pulled him by the sleeve; they went out; and, scarcely had they disappeared, when Madame Vatnaz began to pronounce a eulogy on his character. She even went so far as to add that he possessed “the genius of the heart.”
Then they chatted about Delmas, admitting that as a mimic he might be a success on the stage; and a discussion followed in which Shakespeare, the Censorship, Style, the People, the receipts of the Porte Saint-Martin, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Dumersan were all mixed up together.
Arnoux had known many celebrated actresses; the young men bent forward their heads to hear what he had to say about these ladies. But his words were drowned in the noise of the music; and, as soon as the quadrille or the polka was over, they all squatted round the tables, called the waiter, and laughed. Bottles of beer and of effervescent lemonade went off with detonations amid the foliage; women clucked like hens; now and then, two gentlemen tried to fight; and a thief was arrested. The dancers, in the rush of a gallop, encroached on the walks. Panting, with flushed, smiling faces, they filed off in a whirlwind which lifted up the gowns with the coattails. The trombones brayed more loudly; the rhythmic movement became more rapid. Behind the medieval cloister could be heard crackling sounds; squibs went off; artificial suns began turning round; the gleam of the Bengal fires, like emeralds in colour, lighted up for the space of a minute the entire garden; and, with the last rocket, a great sigh escaped from the assembled throng.
It slowly died away. A cloud of gunpowder floated into the air. Frederick and Deslauriers were walking step by step through the midst of the crowd, when they happened to see something that made them suddenly stop: Martinon was in the act of paying some money at the place where umbrellas were left; and he was accompanying a woman of fifty, plain-looking, magnificently dressed, and of problematic social rank.
“That sly dog,” said Deslauriers, “is not so simple as we imagine. But where in the world is Cisy?”
Dussardier pointed out to them the smoking-divan, where they perceived the knightly youth, with a bowl of punch before him, and a pink hat by his side, to keep him company. Hussonnet, who had been away for the past few minutes, reappeared at the same moment.
A young girl was leaning on his arm, and addressing him in a loud voice as “My little cat.”
“Oh! no!” said he to her—“not in public! Call me rather ‘Vicomte.’ That gives you a cavalier style—Louis XIII and dainty boots—the sort of thing I like! Yes, my good friends, one of the old regime!—nice, isn’t she?”—and he chucked her by the chin—“Salute these gentlemen! they are all the sons of peers of France. I keep company with them in order that they may get an appointment for me as an ambassador.”
“How insane you are!” sighed Mademoiselle Vatnaz. She asked Dussardier to see her as far as her own door.
Arnoux watched them going off; then, turning towards Frederick:
“Did you like the Vatnaz? At any rate, you’re not quite frank about these affairs. I believe you keep your amours hidden.”
Frederick, turning pale, swore that he kept nothing hidden.
“Can it be possible you don’t know what it is to have a mistress?” said Arnoux.
Frederick felt a longing to mention a woman’s name at random. But the story might be repeated to her. So he replied that as a matter of fact he had no mistress.
The picture-dealer reproached him for this.
“This evening you had a good opportunity! Why didn’t you do like the others, each of whom went off with a woman?”
“Well, and what about yourself?” said Frederick, provoked by his persistency.
“Oh! myself—that’s quite a different matter, my lad! I go home to my own one!”
Then he called a cab, and disappeared.
The two friends walked towards their own destination. An east wind was blowing. They did not exchange a word. Deslauriers was regretting that he had not succeeded in making a shine before a certain newspaper-manager, and Frederick was lost once more in his melancholy broodings. At length, breaking silence, he said that this public-house ball appeared to him a stupid affair.
“Whose fault is it? If you had not left us, to join that
