THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Эмиль Золя

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СКАЧАТЬ of Europe; and the gentlemen ended by uttering such platitudes that the minister himself changed the conversation. He listened to them with his head erect, the corners of his mouth a little raised, which gave to his fat, white, cleanshaven face an expression of dubiousness and smiling disdain.

      Saccard manœuvred so as to find an excuse to change the subject and to make his announcement of the marriage of Maxime and Louise. He assumed an air of great familiarity, and his brother, with mock geniality, was goodnatured enough to help him by pretending great affection for him. He was really the superior of the two, with his steady gaze, his evident contempt for petty rascality, his broad shoulders, which, with a shrug, could have floored all that crew. When at last the marriage came into question, he became charming, he let it be understood that he had his wedding-present ready; he was so good as to talk of Maxime’s being appointed an auditor to the Council of State. He went so far as twice to repeat to his brother, with an air of absolute good-fellowship:

      “Tell your son I will be his witness.”

      M. de Mareuil crimsoned with delight. Saccard was congratulated. M. Toutin-Laroche offered himself as a second witness. Then, suddenly, they began to talk of divorce. A member of the opposition, said M. Haffner, had just had “the lamentable audacity” to defend this social scandal. And every one protested. Their sense of propriety found vent in profound observations. M. Michelin smiled faintly upon the minister, while the Mignon and Charrier couple noted with astonishment that the collar of his dress-coat was worn.

      Meanwhile M. Hupel de la Noue remained ill at ease, leaning against the armchair of the Baron Gouraud, who had contented himself with silently shaking hands with the minister. The poet dared not leave the spot. An indefinable feeling, the dread of appearing ridiculous, the fear of losing the good graces of his chief detained him, despite his furious desire to go and pose the ladies on the stage for the last tableau. He waited for some happy remark to occur to him and restore him to favour. But he could think of nothing. He felt more and more embarrassed when he perceived M. de Saffré; he took his arm, hooked himself on to him as to a live-saving plank. The young man had just arrived, he was a fresh victim.

      “Haven’t you heard what the marquise said?” asked the préfet.

      But he was so perturbed that he no longer knew how to put the story spicily. He floundered.

      “I said to her, ‘You have a charming costume’; and she replied….”

      “‘I have a much prettier one underneath,’“ quietly added M. de Saffré. “It’s old, my dear sir, very old.”

      M. Hupel de la Noue looked at him in consternation. The repartee was an old one, and he was just about still more deeply to penetrate into his commentary on the candour of this cry from the heart!

      “Old,” replied the secretary, “old as the hills: Mme. d’Espanet has already said it twice at the Tuileries.”

      This was the last straw. What did the Préfet care now for the minister, for the whole drawingroom? He turned to go towards the stage, when the piano played a prelude, in a sad tone, with the trembling of notes that weep; then the plaintive strain expanded, dragged on at length, and the curtains parted. M. Hupel de la Noue, who had already half disappeared, returned to the drawingroom when he heard the soft grating of the curtain-rings. He was pale, exasperated; he made a violent effort to keep himself from apostrophizing the ladies. They had posed themselves without him! It must have been that little d’Espanet woman who had egged them on to hasten the changes of dress and dispense with his assistance. It was all wrong, it was worth nothing at all!

      He returned, mumbling inarticulate words. He looked at the stage, shrugging his shoulders, muttering:

      “Echo is too near the edge…. And Narcissus’s leg, it’s not dignified, not dignified in the least ….”

      The Mignon and Charrier couple, who had drawn near in order to hear “the explanation,” ventured to ask him “What the young man and the young girl were doing, lying down on the ground.” But he made no reply, he refused to explain his poem any further; and as the contractors insisted:

      “Why, it no longer concerns me, since those ladies choose to hurt my neck so.”

      The piano sobbed softly. On the stage, a glade, into which the electric ray threw a sheet of sunlight, revealed a vista of foliage. It was an ideal glade, with blue trees, big yellow and red flowers, that rose as high as the oaks. There, on a grassy mound, lay Venus and Plutus, side by side, surrounded by nymphs who had hastened from the neighbouring thickets to serve as their escort. There were daughters of the trees, daughters of the springs, daughters of the mountains, all the laughing, naked divinities of the forest. And the god and goddess triumphed, punished the indifference of the proud one who had scorned them, while the group of nymphs looked on curiously and with pious affright at the vengeance of Olympus in the foreground. There the drama was unfolded. The beauteous Narcissus, lying on the margin of a brook that came down from the back of the stage, was contemplating himself in the limpid mirror; and realism had been carried so far that a strip of real looking-glass had been placed at the bottom of the brook. But he had already ceased to be the free stripling, the forest wanderer. Death surprised him in the midst of his rapt admiration of his own image, Death enervated him, and Venus, with outstretched finger, like a fairy in a transformation-scene, hurled the fatal doom at his head. He was turning into a flower. His limbs became verdant, elongated, in his tight-fitting dress of green satin; the flexible stalk, formed by his legs slightly bent, was on the point of sinking into the ground and taking root, while his body, adorned with broad lappets of white satin, blossomed into a wondrous corolla. Maxime’s fair hair completed the illusion, and with its long curls set yellow pistils amid the whiteness of the petals. And the great nascent flower, still human, inclined its head towards the spring, its eyes moistened, its countenance smiling with voluptuous ecstasy, as though the beauteous Narcissus had at last in death satisfied the passion with which he had inspired himself. A few paces off the nymph Echo was dying also, dying of unquenched desire; she found herself little by little caught in the hardness of the ground, she felt her burning limbs freezing and hardening. She was no vulgar moss-stained rock, but one of white marble, through her arms and shoulders, through her long snow-white robe, from which the girdle of leaves and the blue drapery had glided down. Sinking amid the satin of her skirt, which was creased in large folds, like a block of Parian marble, she threw herself back, retaining nothing of life, in her cold sculptured body, save her woman’s eyes, eyes that gleamed, fixed on the flower of the waters, reclining languidly above the mirror of the spring. And it already seemed as if all the love-sounds of the forest, the long-drawn voices of the thickets, the mystic shivers of the leaves, the deep sighs of the tall oaks, came and beat upon the marble flesh of the Nymph Echo, whose heart, still bleeding within the block, resounded evermore, repeating afar the slightest complaints of Earth or Air.

      “Oh, how they have rigged out that poor Maxime!” murmured Louise. “And Madame Saccard, she looks like a corpse.”

      “She is covered with rice-powder,” said Madame Michelin.

      Other remarks flitted about of a hardly complimentary nature. This third tableau had not the unqualified success of the two others. And yet it was this tragic ending that filled M. Hupel de la Noue with enthusiasm for his own talent. He admired himself in it as did his Narcissus in his strip of looking-glass. He had put into it a crowd of poetical and philosophical allusions. When the curtains were closed for the last time, and the spectators had applauded in a well-bred way, he felt a mortal regret at having yielded to anger and not explained the last page of his poem. Then he essayed to give to the people about him the key to the charming, grandiose, or simply naughty ideas represented by the beauteous Narcissus and the Nymph Echo, and he even tried to say what Venus and Plutus were doing at the bottom of the glade; but these ladies and gentlemen, whose clear, practical minds had understood СКАЧАТЬ