The Kill - Emile Zola [144]
Meanwhile, Mme Sidonie, who had been roaming among the dancers since the first strokes of the violinists’ bows, had entered the dining room and was beckoning to Saccard with her eyes.
“She’s not dancing,” she whispered to him. “She seems anxious. I think she may try something rash. . . . But I haven’t been able to find out who the lucky fellow is yet. . . . I’m going to have something to eat and then go back to nosing about.”
She ate standing up, like a man, devouring a chicken wing that she got M. Michelin to serve her after he finished his pâté. She poured some Malaga into a large champagne glass. Then, after wiping her lips with her fingertips, she returned to the drawing room. The train of her magician’s robe already seemed to have picked up all the dust from the carpets.
The ball was languishing and the orchestra showing signs of flagging when a murmur raced through the room: “The cotillion, the cotillion!” This revived the dancers and the brass. Couples emerged from behind the shrubbery in the conservatory. The large drawing room filled up, as it had before the first quadrille, and as the crowd revived, so did the conversation. It was the ball’s final flicker. The men who weren’t dancing stared indulgently from the embrasures at the chatty group growing steadily in size in the middle of the room, while those still eating in the dining room craned their necks to see without putting down their bread.
“M. de Mussy won’t do it,” said one of the ladies. “He swears he’s done with conducting. . . . Please, M. de Mussy, just one more time. Do it for us, won’t you?”
But the young embassy attaché stood stiff-necked in his high starched collar turned town at the corners. It was really quite impossible; he had given his word. Disappointment greeted this refusal. Maxime also refused, saying that he was all worn out and couldn’t do it. M. Hupel de la Noue didn’t dare volunteer; poetry was as low as he would go. When one of the ladies mentioned Mr. Simpson, the others told her to hold her tongue. Mr. Simpson was the oddest cotillion leader one could imagine. Fantastic and nasty ideas were his specialty. In one drawing room where the guests had been incautious enough to choose him, he had forced the ladies to jump over chairs, and one of his favorite maneuvers was to make everybody get down on all fours and crawl around the room.
“Has M. de Saffré left?” asked a childlike voice.
He was just leaving, in fact he was saying good-bye to beautiful Mme Saccard, with whom he was on the best of terms now that she wanted nothing more to do with him. An amiable skeptic, Saffré admired unpredictability in others. The guests brought him back from the vestibule in triumph. He resisted and, smiling, said that he was a serious man and that they were putting him in an awkward position. But then, with so many white hands reaching out to him, he gave in and said, “Go now, take your places. . . . But I’m warning you, I’m from the old school. I haven’t two cents’ worth of imagination.”
The couples, using all the chairs they could find, arrayed themselves around the drawing room. Some of the young men even went to the conservatory in search of metal garden chairs. It was a monster cotillion. M. de Saffré, who wore the rapt expression of an officiating priest, chose as his partner Countess Wanska, whose Coral costume fascinated him. When everybody was in place, he stared for quite some time at the circle of skirts, each flanked by a dark frock coat. Then he signaled the orchestra, and the brass rang out. Heads leaned forward along the smiling ribbon of faces.
Renée had refused to take part in the cotillion. She had seemed giddy from the moment the ball began, dancing hardly at all, mingling with various groups, and unable to remain in one place. Her friends found her mood odd. Earlier in the evening she had mentioned the possibility of going up in a balloon with a celebrated aeronaut who was the talk of Paris. When the cotillion began, she was irritated that she could no longer move freely about the room and stationed