The Kill - Emile Zola [137]
The curtains opened; the piano played louder. The scene was dazzling. The electric light revealed a stage ablaze in splendor, which the audience at first took to be a brazier filled with gold bars and precious gems that seemed to melt into one another. Another grotto loomed before them, but this time not the cool lair in which Venus lived on sands strewn with pearls and lapped by the ebbing tide. This second grotto was supposed to be located at the center of the earth, in a fiery region of the underworld, a fissure of Hades, a crevice in a mine of molten metal inhabited by Plutus. The silk that stood for rock revealed broad seams of metal, great flows that were like the veins of the primeval world, bearing incalculable riches and the eternal essence of earth. In M. Hupel de la Noue’s boldly anachronistic vision, the ground was covered with an avalanche of twenty-franc coins, rivers and heaps and swelling mounds of gold louis. Atop this pile of gold sat Mme de Guende as Plutus—a female Plutus, a Plutus who showed her bosom through the strands of a gown woven of every metal imaginable. Arrayed around this god, either standing erect or slightly reclining, clustered together or set apart, were the fantastic effusions of a grotto into which the caliphs of A Thousand and One Nights had poured their treasure: Mme Haffner as Gold, wearing a gown as stiff and resplendent as a bishop’s robes; Mme d’Espanet as Silver, shimmering like a moonbeam; Mme de Lauwerens, all fiery blue, as Sapphire, with little Mme Daste at her side, a smiling Turquoise with a tender bluish tinge. Away from the center of the stage were Emerald, Mme von Meinhold, and Topaz, Mme Teissière, while downstage Countess Wanska lent her somber passion to Coral even as she lay with upraised arms weighed down by red pendants like some monstrous but fascinating polyp exhibiting a woman’s flesh in the gap between nacreous pink shells. Each of the ladies wore necklaces, bracelets, and complete sets of jewelry made of the precious stone her character represented. The novel ornaments worn by Mme d’Espanet and Mme Haffner attracted a great deal of comment, being composed solely of small gold and silver coins fresh from the mint. The foreground drama remained the same: the nymph Echo tempting handsome Narcissus, who again indicated his refusal with a wave. The delighted eyes of the spectators slowly adjusted to this dazzling glimpse of the earth’s blazing entrails, this heap of gold upon which the wealth of a certain society lay sprawled.
This second tableau proved even more successful than the first. The idea seemed particularly ingenious. The boldness of the twenty-franc coins, the dumping of the contents of a modern safe into a corner of Greek mythology, enchanted the imaginations of the ladies and financiers in attendance. “So much gold!” people exclaimed. “So much money!” There were smiles all around, and thrills of satisfaction, as each of the ladies and each of the gentlemen privately dreamt of having all that loot to himself or herself in an underground vault somewhere.
“England has paid its debt, those are your billions,” Louise maliciously whispered in Mme Sidonie’s ear.
Mme Michelin, her lips parted in an expression of rapturous desire, pushed aside her dancer’s veil and with gleaming eyes gazed fondly on the gold, while the group of serious men went into transports. A beaming M. Toutin-Laroche whispered a few words in the ear of the baron, on whose face yellow spots had begun to appear. Meanwhile, Mignon and Charrier, less discreet, expressed themselves in a direct and simple manner: “Good God! There’s enough there to demolish Paris and build it all up again.”
This remark struck Saccard as profound, and he began to think that Mignon and Charrier were thumbing their noses at society when they pretended to be imbeciles. When the curtains had closed, and the piano ended the triumphal march with a great clatter of notes heaped one upon