The Kill - Emile Zola [139]
“Have you heard the Marquise’s witty repartee?” the prefect asked.
But he was so flustered that he found it impossible to tell the story properly. He floundered. “I said to her, ‘You’re wearing a charming costume,’ and she answered—”
“ ‘I have a much prettier one underneath,’ ” M. de Saffré calmly finished his sentence. “That’s an old one, my dear fellow, very old.”
M. Hupel de la Noue looked at him in consternation. The witticism was an old one, yet he had been on the verge of embellishing yet again his commentary on the simplicity of the marquise’s cry from the heart.
“Old, as old as the hills,” the secretary repeated. “Mme d’Espanet has already used that remark twice at the Tuileries.”
That was the last straw. At that point the prefect ceased to care about the minister and the crowd in the drawing room. He was headed for the platform when the piano launched into the prelude, a series of notes played so tremulously that they seemed almost to weep. Then the plangent melody opened out into a more expansive section, which dragged on for quite some time, and the curtains were drawn aside. M. Hupel de la Noue, who had already half-vanished backstage, returned to the salon when he heard the gentle grating of the curtain rings on their rods. He looked pale and exasperated. By dint of immense effort he overcame a violent urge to berate the ladies. They had placed themselves on stage! It must have been the little Espanet woman who had organized the conspiracy to speed up the costume changes and make do without his advice. It was all wrong! What they had done was no good at all!
He returned to his place, muttering to himself. He looked at the stage, shrugged, and mumbled, “Echo is too close to the edge. . . . And there’s no nobility in Narcissus’ leg, none at all.”
Mignon and Charrier, who had come over to hear his “explanation,” ventured to ask “what the young man and young woman are doing lying on the ground.” But M. Hupel de la Noue did not answer. He refused to explain his poem any further, and when the contractors pressed their question, he said, “Why, I have nothing more to do with it, now that those women have gone and placed themselves without me.”
The piano sobbed softly. Onstage, a clearing, dappled with “sunlight ” from the electric arc, opened onto a horizon of foliage. It was a fanciful clearing, a sort of glade with blue trees and big yellow and red flowers that grew as tall as oaks. There, on a grassy knoll, Venus and Plutus stood side by side, surrounded by nymphs from the nearby woods, who had hastened to them to form an escort. Among them were daughters of the trees, daughters of the springs, daughters of the mountains—all the laughing, naked deities of the forest. And the god and goddess stood in triumph, punishing the indifference of the proud youth who had scorned them, while the group of nymphs gazed with sacred terror upon the vengeance of Olympus unfolding in the foreground. Handsome Narcissus, lying beside a stream that seemed to flow out of the backdrop, stared at his image in that limpid mirror. Verisimilitude had been carried to the point of placing an actual mirror at the bottom of the stream. But this was no longer the free-spirited youth who had roamed the forest. Death had caught him by surprise as he lay in rapt admiration of his own image; it had made him weak, and Venus, with her finger outstretched like a fairy in a transformation scene, was casting her fatal spell. He was changing into a flower. His limbs seemed to turn green and grow longer inside his green satin tights. His supple trunk and slightly curved legs seemed to sink into the ground and take root, while the upper part of his body, festooned with wide strips of white satin, opened out into a marvelous corolla. Maxime’s blond hair completed the illusion, as his long curls could be taken for yellow pistils with white petals all around. And this great