All these poor devils, all these poor wretches, male and female, forgetting their own social irregularities, showed a strangely implacable severity toward persons whom it was allowable to suspect, not even of stains or blemishes, but simply of some formal lack of respect for society laws,—the only ones that ought to be obeyed.
Living, in a certain sense, outside of their social ideal, thrown back, so to speak, to the margin of that existence whose disgraced correctness and regularity they honored as a religion, they undoubtedly hoped to get into it again by driving out others.
The comicality of this was really intense and savory.
They divided the universe into two great parts: on the one side, that which is regular; on the other, that which is not; here the people that one may receive; there the people that one may not receive.
And these two great parts soon became pieces, and the pieces became thin slices, the subdivision going on ad infinitum.
There were those in whose houses one may dine, and also those to whose houses one may go only for the evening. Those in whose houses one may not dine, but to which one may go for the evening. Those whom one may receive at his table, and those to whom one may accord only admission to his salon,—and even then only under certain circumstances, clearly defined.
There were also those in whose houses one may not dine and whom one should not receive at one's house, and those whom one may receive at one's house and in whose houses one may not dine; those whom one may receive at breakfast, and never at dinner; and those in whose country houses one may dine, but never in their Paris residences, etc.
The whole being supported with demonstrative and peremptory examples, well-known names being cited by way of illustration.
"Shades," said the Viscount Lahyrais, sportsman, clubman, gambler, and trickster.
"The whole thing lies there. It is by the strict observance of shades that a man is really in society, or is not."
I believe that I never heard such dreary things. As I listened to them, I really felt a pity for these unfortunates.
Charrigaud neither ate or drank, and said nothing.
Although he was scarcely in the conversation, he nevertheless felt its enormous and forbidding stupidity like a weight upon his skull.
Impatient, feverish, very pale, he watched the service, tried to catch favorable or ironical impressions of the faces of his guests, and mechanically, with movements more and more accelerated, and in spite of the warnings of his wife, rolled big pellets of bread-crumb between his fingers.
When a question was put to him, he answered in a bewildered, distracted, far-away voice:
"Certainly ... certainly ... certainly."
Opposite him, very stiff in her green gown, upon which spangles of green steel glittered with a phosphorescent brilliancy, and wearing an aigrette of red feathers in her hair, Mme. Charrigaud bent to right and to left, and smiled, without ever a word,—a smile so eternally motionless that it seemed painted on her lips.
"What a goose!" said Charrigaud to himself; "what a stupid and ridiculous woman!
And what a carnival costume!
To-morrow, because of her, we shall be the laughing-stock of Parisian society."
And on her side Mme. Charrigaud, beneath the fixity of her smile, was thinking:
"What an idiot this Victor is!
And what a bad appearance he makes!
To-morrow we shall catch it on account of his pellets."
The topic of correctness in society being exhausted, there followed an embarrassing lull in the conversation, which Kimberly broke by telling of his last trip to London.
"Yes," said he, "I spent in London an intoxicating week; and, ladies, I witnessed a unique thing. I attended a ritual dinner which the great poet, John-Giotto Farfadetti, gave to some friends to celebrate his betrothal to the wife of his dear Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton."
"How exquisite that must have been!" minced the Countess Fergus.
"You cannot imagine," answered Kimberly, whose look and gestures, and even the orchid that adorned the button-hole of his coat, expressed the most ardent ecstasy.
And he continued:
"Fancy, my dear friends, in a large hall, whose blue walls, though scarcely blue, are decorated with white peacocks and gold peacocks,—fancy a table of jade, inconceivably and delightfully oval. On the table some cups, in which mauve and yellow bonbons harmonized, and in the centre a basin of pink crystal, filled with kanaka preserves ... and nothing more. Draped in long white robes, we slowly passed in turn before the table, and we took, upon the points of our golden knives, a little of these mysterious preserves, which then we carried to our lips ... and nothing more."
"Oh! I find that moving," sighed the countess, "so moving!"
"You cannot imagine. But the most moving thing—a thing that really transformed this emotion into a painful laceration of our souls—was when Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton sang the poem of the betrothal of his wife and his friend.
I know nothing more tragically, more superhumanly beautiful."
"Oh! I beg of you," implored the Countess Fergus, "repeat this prodigious poem for our benefit, Kimberly."
"The poem, alas! I cannot. I can give you only its essence."
"That's it, that's it!
The essence." In spite of his morals, in which they cut no figure, Kimberly filled women with mad enthusiasm, for his specialty was subtle stories of transgression and of extraordinary sensations. Suddenly a thrill ran round the table, and the flowers themselves, and the jewels on their beds of flesh, and the glasses on the table-cloth, took attitudes in harmony with the state of souls. Charrigaud felt his reason departing. He thought that he had suddenly fallen into a mad-house. Yet, by force of will, he was still able to smile, and say: "Why, certainly ... certainly."
The butlers finished passing something that resembled a ham, from which, in a flood of yellow cream, cherries poured like red larv?.
As for the Countess Fergus, half swooning, she had already started for extra-terrestrial regions.
Kimberly began:
"Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton and his friend, John-Giotto Farfadetti, were finishing their daily tasks in the studio which they occupied in common.
One was the great painter, the other the great poet; the former short and stout, the latter tall and thin; both alike clad in drugget robes, their heads alike adorned with Florentine BONNETS, both alike neurasthenics, for they had, in different bodies, like souls and lily-twin spirits.
John-Giotto Farfadetti sang in his verses the marvelous symbols that his friend, Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton, painted on his canvases, so that the glory of the poet was inseparable from that of the painter, and that their works and their immortal geniuses had come to be confounded in one and the same adoration."
Kimberly stopped for a moment. The silence was religious. Something sacred hovered over the table.
He continued:
"The day was nearing its end.
A very soft twilight was enveloping the studio in a pallor of fluid and lunar shade.
Scarcely could one still distinguish on the mauve walls the long, supple, waving, golden alg? that seemed to move in obedience to the vibration of some deep and magic water.
John-Giotto Farfadetti closed the sort of antiphonary on the vellum of which, with a Persian reed, he wrote, or rather engraved, his eternal poems; Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton turned his lyre-shaped easel against a piece of drapery, placed his heart-shaped palette upon a fragile piece of furniture, and the two, facing one another, stretched themselves, with august poses of fatigue, upon a triple row of cushions, of the color of sea-weed."
"Hum!" said Mme. Tiercelet, with a slightly warning cough.