Then, he turned round to the Bohemian:
“Look here, Hussonnet; sacrifice yourself!”
“Oh! yes, my boy! That would be a very obliging act!”
Hussonnet set off, without even requiring to have an appeal made to him.
In what way could they repay him for his kindness? Frederick did not bestow a thought on it. He was even beginning to rejoice at finding himself alone with her, when a waiter entered.
“Madame, somebody is asking for you!”
“What! again?”
“However, I must see who it is,” said Rosanette.
He was thirsting for her; he wanted her. This disappearance seemed to him an act of prevarication, almost a piece of rudeness. What, then, did she mean? Was it not enough to have insulted Madame Arnoux? So much for the latter, all the same! Now he hated all women; and he felt the tears choking him, for his love had been misunderstood and his desire eluded.
The Maréchale returned, and presented Cisy to him.
“I have invited Monsieur. I have done right, have I not?”
“How is that! Oh! certainly.”
Frederick, with the smile of a criminal about to be executed, beckoned to the gentleman to take a seat.
The Maréchale began to run her eye through the bill of fare, stopping at every fantastic name.
“Suppose we eat a turban of rabbits à la Richeliéu and a pudding à la d’Orléans?”12
“Oh! not Orléans, pray!” exclaimed Cisy, who was a Legitimist, and thought of making a pun.
“Would you prefer a turbot à la Chambord?” she next asked.
Frederick was disgusted with this display of politeness.
The Maréchale made up her mind to order a simple fillet of beef cut up into steaks, some crayfishes, truffles, a pineapple salad, and vanilla ices.
“We’ll see what next. Go on for the present! Ah! I was forgetting! Bring me a sausage!—not with garlic!”
And she called the waiter “young man,” struck her glass with her knife, and flung up the crumbs of her bread to the ceiling. She wished to drink some Burgundy immediately.
“It is not taken in the beginning,” said Frederick.
This was sometimes done, according to the Vicomte.
“Oh! no. Never!”
“Yes, indeed; I assure you!”
“Ha! you see!”
The look with which she accompanied these words meant: “This is a rich man—pay attention to what he says!”
Meantime, the door was opening every moment; the waiters kept shouting; and on an infernal piano in the adjoining room someone was strumming a waltz. Then the races led to a discussion about horsemanship and the two rival systems. Cisy was upholding Baucher and Frederick the Comte d’Aure when Rosanette shrugged her shoulders:
“Enough—my God!—he is a better judge of these things than you are—come now!”
She kept nibbling at a pomegranate, with her elbow resting on the table. The wax-candles of the candelabrum in front of her were flickering in the wind. This white light penetrated her skin with mother-of-pearl tones, gave a pink hue to her lids, and made her eyeballs glitter. The red colour of the fruit blended with the purple of her lips; her thin nostrils heaved; and there was about her entire person an air of insolence, intoxication, and recklessness that exasperated Frederick, and yet filled his heart with wild desires.
Then, she asked, in a calm voice, who owned that big landau with chestnut-coloured livery.
Cisy replied that it was “the Comtesse Dambreuse.”
“They’re very rich—aren’t they?”
“Oh! very rich! although Madame Dambreuse, who was merely a Mademoiselle Boutron and the daughter of a prefect, had a very modest fortune.”
Her husband, on the other hand, must have inherited several estates—Cisy enumerated them: as he visited the Dambreuses, he knew their family history.
Frederick, in order to make himself disagreeable to the other, took a pleasure in contradicting him. He maintained that Madame Dambreuse’s maiden name was De Boutron, which proved that she was of a noble family.
“No matter! I’d like to have her equipage!” said the Maréchale, throwing herself back on the armchair.
And the sleeve of her dress, slipping up a little, showed on her left wrist a bracelet adorned with three opals.
Frederick noticed it.
“Look here! why—”
All three looked into one another’s faces, and reddened.
The door was cautiously half-opened; the brim of a hat could be seen, and then Hussonnet’s profile exhibited itself.
“Pray excuse me if I disturb the lovers!”
But he stopped, astonished at seeing Cisy, and that Cisy had taken his own seat.
Another cover was brought; and, as he was very hungry, he snatched up at random from what remained of the dinner some meat which was in a dish, fruit out of a basket, and drank with one hand while he helped himself with the other, all the time telling them the result of his mission. The two bow-wows had been taken home. Nothing fresh at the house. He had found the cook in the company of a soldier—a fictitious story which he had especially invented for the sake of effect.
The Maréchale took down her cloak from the window-screw. Frederick made a rush towards the bell, calling out to the waiter, who was some distance away:
“A carriage!”
“I have one of my own,” said the Vicomte.
“But, Monsieur!”
“Nevertheless, Monsieur!”
And they stared into each other’s eyes, both pale and their hands trembling.
At last, the Maréchale took Cisy’s arm, and pointing towards the Bohemian seated at the table:
“Pray mind him! He’s choking himself. I wouldn’t care to let his devotion to my pugs be the cause of his death.”
The door closed behind him.
“Well?” said Hussonnet.
“Well, what?”
“I thought—”
“What did you think?”
“Were you not—?”
He completed the sentence with a gesture.
“Oh! no—never in all my life!”
Hussonnet did not press the matter further.
He had an object in inviting himself to dinner. His journal—which was no longer called L’Art, but Le Flambart,13 with this epigraph, “Gunners, to your cannons!”—not being at all in a flourishing condition, he had a mind to change it into a weekly review, conducted by himself, without any assistance from Deslauriers. He again referred to the old project and explained his latest plan.
Frederick, probably not understanding what he was talking about, replied with some vague
