Part 30

Then, while Delestang gazed admiringly at the prospect, the Minister of State cast furtive glances into the little drawing-room through the open window. The Emperor was bending forward, and was speaking with his lips close to the young woman's face, while she threw herself back with tightly strained breast as though to escape him. Nothing could be seen of his Majesty from outside save an indistinct profile, the tip of an ear, a long red nose, and a heavy mouth half-buried beneath a quivering moustache. His cheek and eyes were glowing, whilst Clorinde, who looked irritatingly fascinating, gently swayed her head like a coy young shepherdess.

In spite of all the unpleasantness at the council, Rougon returned to Paris with Delestang and Clorinde. On the journey home the young woman appeared anxious to make her peace with him. She no longer manifested that nervous restlessness which in the morning had impelled her to choose disagreeable subjects of conversation, but even occasionally looked at Rougon with an air of smiling compassion. When the landau, passing through the Bois de Boulogne, now steeped in sunshine, rolled gently alongside the lakes, she murmured with a sigh of enjoyment: 'What a lovely day it is!' Then, after a moment's reverie, she said to her husband: 'Tell me, is your sister, Madame de Combelot, still in love with the Emperor?'

'Henriette is mad!' replied Delestang, shrugging his shoulders.

But Rougon intervened: 'Yes, indeed, she's still in love,' said he: 'people assert that she actually threw herself at his Majesty's feet one day. He raised her and advised her to be patient.'

'Ah, yes, indeed,' cried Clorinde gaily, '_She'll_ have a long time to wait!'

XII

DEFECTION

Clorinde was now revelling in a florescence of fantasy and power. In character she was still the big eccentric girl who had scoured Paris on a livery-stable hack in search of a husband; but the big girl had developed into a woman, who calmly performed the most extraordinary actions, having at length realised her long-cherished dream of becoming a power. Her everlasting prowlings in out-of-the-way neighbourhoods, her correspondence which inundated the four corners of France and Italy with letters, her continued contact with politicians, into whose intimacy she managed to insinuate herself, and all her erratic schemings, full of gaps and illogical as they were, had ended in the acquirement of real and indisputable influence. She still indulged in strange eccentricities, and propounded wild schemes and extravagant hopes, even when she was talking seriously. And when she went out, she still took her tattered portfolio with her, carrying it in her arms like a baby, and with such an air of earnestness that people in the streets smiled as she passed them in her dirty, draggling skirts. However, she was consulted now, and even feared. No one could have exactly told the origin of her power, which seemed to come from numerous distant and invisible sources, now difficult to trace. Folks knew nothing but a few scraps of gossip, anecdotes that were whispered from ear to ear. There was something to mystify one in the young woman's strangely compound character, in which wild imagination was linked to common sense which commanded attention and obedience, while apart from all mental attributes there was her magnificent person, in which, perhaps, lay the true secret of her power. It mattered little, however, upon what foundations Clorinde's throne was reared. It was sufficient that she did reign, though it were in a whimsical, erratic fashion, and that people bowed down before her.

This was a real period of power for the young woman. In her dressing-room, amidst a litter of dirty basins, she contrived to centralise the policy of all the courts of Europe. She received information, even detailed reports, in which the slightest pulsations of governmental life were carefully noted, before the embassies did, and without anyone knowing whence her news was derived. As a natural consequence she was surrounded by a court of bankers, and diplomatists, and friends, who came to her in the hope of obtaining information. The bankers showed her particular attention. She had enabled one of them to gain a hundred million francs in a single haul by merely telling him of an approaching change of ministry in a neighbouring state. Truth to tell, however, she disdained to employ her knowledge for purposes of gain, and she readily told all that she knew--the gossip of diplomatists, and the talk of the different capitals--for the mere pleasure of hearing herself speak, and of showing that she had her eyes upon Turin, Vienna, Madrid, and London, as well as on Berlin and St. Petersburg. She could supply endless information concerning the health of the different sovereigns, their amours and habits, the politicians of the various states, and all the scandals of even the smallest German duchies. She judged statesmen in a single phrase; jumped from north to south without the slightest transition; spoke as carelessly of the different countries of Europe as if they had been her own, as if, indeed, the whole wide world, with its cities and nations, had formed part of a box of playthings, whose little cardboard houses and wooden men she could set up, and move about as she pleased. And, when at last her tongue ceased wagging, and she was tired of chattering, she would snap her fingers, as though to say that this was quite as much as all these things were worth.

For the time being, amidst her many tangled schemes, there was one very serious matter which excited her warmest enthusiasm, and on which she tried her best to keep silent, though, occasionally, she could not deny herself the pleasure of alluding to it. She wanted Venice. Whenever she spoke of the great Italian minister, she referred to him familiarly as 'Cavour.' 'Cavour,' said she, 'did not want it, but I want it, and he has understood.' Morning and night she shut herself up at the embassy with Chevalier Rusconi. And tranquilly lounging, throwing back her narrow, but goddess-like brow, as if in a sort of somnambulism, she would utter scraps of disconnected sentences, shreds of revelations; a hint of a secret interview between the Emperor and some foreign statesman; a projected treaty of alliance, some clauses of which were still under discussion; a war which would take place in the coming spring. On other days she became excited and angry, kicked the chairs about her room and knocked the basins over at the risk of breaking them. On these occasions she looked like some angry queen who has been betrayed by imbecile ministers, and sees her kingdom going from bad to worse; and, with a tragic air, she would stretch her bare majestic arm in the direction of Italy and clench her fist, exclaiming: 'Ah! if I were over yonder there would be none of this folly!'

However, the worries of high politics did not prevent Clorinde from engaging in all sorts of other businesses, in which she seemed to get quite lost. She was often to be found sitting on her bed with the contents of her large portfolio spread over the counterpane, while she plunged her arms into the papers, distracted and crying with irritation. She would be unable to find anything amidst such a chaos of documents; or else, after long hunting for some lost batch of papers, she would at length discover it behind some piece of furniture or amongst her old boots or dirty linen. When she went out to conclude any particular piece of business, she generally contrived to involve herself in two or three fresh affairs on her way. She was for ever rushing about to all sorts of places, lived in a perfect whirl of ideas, a state of perpetual excitement; while beneath her lay the mazy depths of mysterious, unfathomable intrigues. When she came home again in the evening, after a day's scouring of Paris, tired out by climbing so many flights of stairs, and carrying in the folds of her skirts an odour of all the strange haunts which she had visited, no one would have guessed one half of the errands that she had been engaged upon. And if anyone happened to question her, she only laughed; she herself did not always remember what she had been doing.

It was about this time that she had the extraordinary whim of engaging a private room at one of the great restaurants on the boulevard. The house in the Rue du Colisée was so far away from everything, she said; she wanted a place in some central position; so she turned the private room at the restaurant into an office. For two months she received there all who wanted to see her, simply attended by the waiters, who had to usher in persons of the highest position. Great functionaries, ambassadors, and ministers presented themselves at the restaurant. Clorinde, entirely at her ease there, made them sit down on the couch, damaged by the supper parties of the Carnival, while she herself remained in front of the table, the cloth of which was always laid, strewn with bread-crumbs and littered with papers. She camped there like a general officer. One day, however, when she did not feel very well, she calmly went upstairs to the top of the house and lay down on the bed of the _maître d'hôtel_ who usually waited upon her, and she could not be induced to go home till it was nearly midnight.

Delestang, in spite of everything, was a happy man. He appeared to be quite ignorant of his wife's eccentricities. She was now completely master of him, and treated him as she liked, while he never made the least complaint. His natural temperament predisposed him to this kind of servitude. He found far too much happiness in the secret surrender of his authority to attempt any revolt. In the privacy of their domestic life, it was he who rendered Clorinde all kinds of little services. He hunted about for her lost boots, or went through all the linen in the wardrobe to find a chemise that was not in holes. He was quite satisfied with preserving a serene appearance of superiority when he was at other people's houses. The unruffled air of loving protection with which he then spoke of his wife almost won him public respect.

Clorinde, having now become all-powerful at home, had decided to bring her mother back from Turin. She intended, she said, that Countess Balbi should henceforth spend six months of each year with her. She seemed to be suddenly overwhelmed by an outburst of filial affection. She threw a whole floor of the house into confusion so as so instal the old lady as near as possible to her own apartments. She even provided a door of communication between her dressing-room and her mother's bedchamber. In Rougon's presence especially she made an excessive parade of her affection, indulging in the most exaggerated Italian expressions of endearment. How had she ever been able, she wondered, to resign herself to such a long separation from her mother, she who, before her marriage, had never left her for an hour? She accused herself of want of heart. But it was not her fault, she protested; she had been forced to yield to other people's advice, to give way before pretended necessities, in which even now she could see no force. Rougon remained quite unmoved by this rebellion. He had altogether ceased to lecture her, and no longer attempted to make her one of the most distinguished women in Paris. In former times she had filled up a gap in his life, but now that he was in the forefront of the battle with fourteen hours' work to get through every day, he gave little thought to love and passion. Nevertheless, he continued to treat her with an air of affection, mingled with that kind of contempt which he usually manifested for women. He came to see her from time to time, and then his eyes would occasionally gleam as in the days of old. She was still his one weakness; the one woman who perturbed him.

Since Rougon had gone to live at the official residence of the Minister of the Interior where his friends complained that they could no longer see him in intimate fashion, Clorinde had thought of receiving the band at her own house, and it had gradually become a custom for the others to go there. To mark more plainly the fact that these receptions took the place of those in the Rue Marbeuf, she fixed the same evenings as Rougon had chosen, namely Sundays and Thursdays. There was this difference, however, that in the Rue du Colisée the guests remained till one o'clock in the morning. Clorinde received them in her boudoir, as Delestang still kept the keys of the big drawing-room for fear of it being damaged by grease-spots. And as the boudoir was a very small apartment, Clorinde left the doors of her dressing-room and bedroom open; so that, very frequently, the friends were to be found crowding together in the sleeping-chamber amid a litter of feminine finery.

On Thursdays and Sundays, Clorinde usually made a point of hastening home early so as to get through her dinner in time to receive her guests. But, in spite of all her efforts to remember these evening receptions, she twice forgot all about them, and was taken quite aback on finding a crowd of people in her bedroom when she returned home after midnight. One Thursday, towards the end of May, she got home at the unusually early hour of five. She had been out on foot and had preferred to walk all the way from the Place de la Concorde in a heavy fall of rain rather than pay thirty sous for a cab. She was quite soaked when she reached the house, and she went straight to her dressing-room where her maid, Antonia, whose mouth was smeared with jam, undressed her, laughing merrily the while at the stream of water which poured from her mistress's clothes on to the floor.

'There is a gentleman come to see you,' said the servant, presently, as she sat down on the floor to take off Clorinde's boots. 'He has been waiting for an hour.'

Clorinde asked her what he was like. The maid, with her greasy dress and unkempt hair, and her white teeth gleaming in her dusky face, remained sitting on the floor. The gentleman, she said, was fat and pale, and stern-looking.

'Oh, it must be Monsieur de Reuthlinguer the banker,' cried Clorinde. 'I remember now, he was to come at four o'clock. Well, let him wait. You have the bath ready for me, haven't you?'

Then she quietly got into the bath which was concealed behind a curtain in a corner of the room, and while in it, she read the letters which had arrived during her absence. Half an hour went by when Antonia, after leaving the room for a few minutes, came back again and said to her mistress: 'The gentleman saw you come in and would very much like to speak to you, madame.'

'Oh, dear, I'd forgotten all about him!' cried Clorinde. 'Come and dress me, quickly.'

However, the young woman showed much capriciousness over her toilette that evening. In spite of the neglect with which she usually treated her person, she was occasionally seized with a sudden idolatry for it. At these times she would indulge in the most elaborate toilette; even having her limbs rubbed with ointments and balms and aromatic oils, of a nature known only to herself, which had been bought at Constantinople, so she said, from the perfumer to the Seraglio, by an Italian diplomatist, a friend of hers. While Antonia was rubbing her, she threw herself into statuesque attitudes. This anointing made her skin white and soft, and beautiful as marble. One of the oils, of which she herself carefully counted the drops as she let them fall on to a small piece of flannel, had the miraculous quality of at once effacing every wrinkle. And when this business was over, she would commence a minute examination of her hands and feet. She could have spent a whole day in adoring herself.

At the end of three quarters of an hour, however, when Antonia had slipped some wraps over her, she suddenly seemed to recollect her visitor. 'Oh, dear, the Baron!' she cried. 'Well, never mind, show him in here!'

M. de Reuthlinguer had been patiently sitting in Clorinde's boudoir, with his hands clasped over his knees for more than two hours. He was a pale frigid man of austere morals, the possessor of one of the largest fortunes in Europe, and for some time past he had been in the habit of thus dancing attendance upon Clorinde twice or thrice a week. He even invited her to his own house, that abode of rigid decorum and glacial strictness, where the young woman's startling eccentricities quite shocked the footmen.

'Good day, baron!' Clorinde exclaimed as he came in. 'I'm having my hair dressed, so don't look.'

An indulgent smile played round the baron's pale lips. After bowing with the most respectful courtesy, he remained standing quite close to her, without a quiver of his eyelids.

'You've come for news, haven't you?' she asked. 'Well, I've just heard something.'

Then she got up and dismissed Antonia, who went away leaving the comb stuck in her mistress's hair. Clorinde was doubtless afraid of being overheard, for laying her hand on the banker's shoulder and, standing on tip-toe, she whispered something in his ear. As he listened to her, he nodded his head briskly.

'There!' concluded the young woman, raising her voice. 'You can go now.'

But the banker took hold of her bare arm and brought her back towards him to ask for certain explanations. He could not have been more at his ease if he had been talking to one of his clerks, instead of to this beautiful woman in deshabille. When he left her, he invited her to dine at his house on the following day. His wife was very anxious to see her again, he said. She accompanied him to the door, but all at once crossed her arms over her bosom and turned very red as she exclaimed: 'Good gracious! I was actually about to go out with you like this!'

She now began to scold Antonia for being so slow. She would never get finished! she cried; and then she scarcely gave the girl time to dress her hair, saying that she hated being so long over her toilette. In spite of the time of the year, she insisted upon wearing a long robe of black velvet, a sort of loose blouse, drawn in at the waist with a red silk girdle. Twice already, a servant had come to tell her that dinner was served. However, as she passed through her bedroom, she found three gentlemen there, of whose presence no one had had the slightest idea. They were the three political refugees, Signori Brambilla, Staderino, and Viscardi. Clorinde, however, showed no surprise at meeting them.

'Have you been waiting for me long?' she asked.

'Yes, yes,' they replied, gently nodding their heads.

They had arrived before the banker, but had remained extremely quiet, for political misfortunes had made them taciturn and reflective. They were seated side by side on the same couch, all three lolling in much the same position, with big extinguished cigars between their lips. But they now rose and clustered round Clorinde, and a rapid muttering in Italian ensued. The young woman seemed to be giving them instructions. One of the refugees took notes in cipher in a pocket-book, while the others, appearing much excited by what they heard, stifled slight cries with their gloved hands. Then they all three went off in single file, with quite impenetrable faces.

That Thursday evening it had been arranged that several of the ministers should confer together on a very important financial matter. When Delestang went off after dinner, he told Clorinde that he would bring Rougon back with him, at which his wife made a little grimace which seemed to imply that she was not very anxious to see her whilom master. There was as yet no positive break in their friendship, but the young woman showed an increasing coldness towards Rougon.

Towards nine o'clock, M. Kahn and M. Béjuin arrived together. They were the first of the band to put in an appearance, but were soon followed by Madame Correur. Clorinde was found in her bedroom, stretched upon a couch there. She complained of one of those extraordinary and unheard-of troubles which suddenly came upon her every now and then. She must have swallowed a fly, she said, while drinking, for she could feel it flying about inside her stomach. Draped in her long black velvet robe, her shoulders supported by three pillows, she none the less looked superbly beautiful with her pale face and bare arms, recalling indeed one of those reclining, dreaming figures, which sculptors portray on monuments. At her feet was Luigi Pozzo, gently twanging the strings of a guitar. He had deserted painting for music.

'Sit down, won't you?' she said to the others. 'Please excuse me. A wretched little insect has got inside me somehow.'

Pozzo went on twanging his guitar, and singing in a low voice, with an ecstatic expression on his face, as if lost in a reverie. Madame Correur wheeled a chair up to Clorinde's side, and M. Kahn and M. Béjuin, after a little searching, also succeeded in finding seats. It was not an easy matter to do so, for the five or six chairs were hidden beneath a litter of dresses and petticoats, so that when Colonel Jobelin and his son Auguste arrived five minutes later, they had to remain standing.

'Little one,' said Clorinde to Auguste, whom she still treated quite familiarly in spite of his seventeen years, 'go and bring two chairs out of my dressing-room.'

These were cane-seated chairs, with all the varnish worn away by the damp linen which was constantly hung over their backs. The bedroom was lighted by a single lamp with a shade of pink paper. There was another in the dressing-room and a third in the boudoir, which, seen through the doorways, seemed to be full of dusky shadow, as though merely illuminated by a night-light. The bedroom itself, with hangings of a tender mauve that had now turned to a pale grey, was full of a floating haze, in which one could scarcely distinguish the rents in the coverings of the easy-chairs, the dust-marks on the furniture and the big ink-stain in the middle of the carpet where some inkstand had fallen with such force that even the wainscotting was splashed. The bed-curtains had been drawn, probably in order to conceal the untidiness of the bed. And amidst this hazy gloom, there rose a powerful scent as though all the bottles and flasks in the dressing-room had remained uncorked. Clorinde obstinately refused to have any of the windows open, even in warm weather.

'What a nice scent you've got here,' said Madame Correur, complimentarily.

'Oh, it's I who smell so nice,' the young woman naïvely replied.

Then she began to talk of the essences which she obtained direct from the perfumer to the Sultanas, and even held her arm under Madame Correur's nose. Her black velvet blouse had got a little disarranged, and her feet, in their little red slippers, showed below it. Pozzo, languid and intoxicated by the strong perfumes which she exhaled, was tapping his instrument gently with his thumb.

However, after a few minutes, the conversation turned of necessity on Rougon, as was invariably the case every Thursday and Sunday. The band seemed to come together for the sole purpose of discussing this one everlasting subject. Its members felt an ever-growing rancour against the great man, a craving to relieve themselves by ceaseless recrimination. Clorinde no longer had any trouble to set them going. They always arrived with a fresh burden of grievances, ever discontented and jealous, actually embittered by what Rougon had done for them, and burning with a violent fever of ingratitude.

'Have you seen the fat man to-day?' the colonel asked.

Rougon was no longer 'the great man.'

'No,' said Clorinde; 'but we may see him here this evening. My husband persists in bringing him to see me.'

'I was in a café this afternoon, where they were criticising him very severely,' the colonel continued, after a pause. 'They say that his position is very shaky, and that he won't last another two months.'