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By Root 1240 0

as best he could by one shoulder, while the fingers of his gloves slipped beneath her bodice. A flushed Countess Wanska, her coral pendants jangling, leapt in a single bound from the chest of M. de Saffré to that of the duc de Rozan, whom she wrapped herself around and forced to pirouette for five measures so that she might attach herself next to the hip of Mr. Simpson, who had just hurled the Emerald at the cotillion’s leader. And Mme Teissière, Mme Daste, and Mme de Lauwerens, gleaming like great living jewels with the pale yellow of Topaz, the soft blue of Turquoise, and the fiery blue of Sapphire, briefly let themselves go and arched their backs under the outstretched wrists of their waltzing partners, then started up anew, moving backward or forward into yet another embrace, and in this fashion sampled one after another the arms of every man in the room. Meanwhile, Mme d’Espanet, standing in front of the orchestra, managed to grab Mme Haffner as she passed and waltzed off with her, unwilling to let her go. Gold and Silver danced together, like lovers.

Renée now understood this whirl of skirts, this stamping of feet. Situated as she was below the level of the dance floor, she saw the frenzy of legs, the chaos of patent-leather boots and white ankles. At times it seemed as though a gust of wind might carry off the women’s gowns. The bare shoulders, arms, and heads that flew past, that whirled by only to be caught, flung off, and caught again at the far end of the gallery where the orchestra played ever more furiously and the red hangings seemed to droop as the ball succumbed to its final fever, struck her as a tumultuous reflection of her own life, with its moments of nakedness and surrender. And she experienced such pain at the thought that Maxime, in order to take the hunchback in his arms, had cast her aside into the very spot where they had loved each other, that she dreamed of plucking a branch of the tanghin that grazed her cheek and chewing it down to the heartwood. But she was a coward, so she stood in front of the shrub shivering under the fur, which she pulled over her arms and clutched tightly in a gesture of terrified shame.

7

Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings that bring the low clouds and gloomy dampness of winter back to Paris, Aristide Saccard stepped down from his carriage on the place du Châteaud’Eau and with four other gentlemen entered the gaping hole opened up by demolitions making way for the future boulevard du Prince-Eugène. The men were from the investigative commission that the jury on indemnities sent out to construction sites to estimate the value of certain properties, whose owners had not been able to reach agreement with the city.

Saccard was going for a repeat of the stroke of fortune he had pulled off on the rue de la Pépinière. In order to expunge his wife’s name from the record entirely, his first move had been to arrange a mock sale of the land and the music hall. Larsonneau transferred the entire property to a fictitious creditor. The deed bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This amount was so exorbitant that when the expropriation agent, acting on behalf of the imaginary creditor, asked for an indemnity equal to the selling price, the city hall commission refused to award more than two million five hundred thousand francs despite the surreptitious efforts of M. Michelin and the pleas of M. Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud. Saccard had expected this setback. He rejected the offer and allowed the case to go to the jury, of which he happened to be a member, along with M. de Mareuil— a lucky break that he had no doubt had a hand in arranging. That was how he came to be conducting an inquiry into his own property along with four of his colleagues.

M. de Mareuil was at his side. Of the three other members of the committee, one was a doctor, who smoked a cigar and paid absolutely no attention to the rubble he was walking on, and two were businessmen, one of whom, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly been a knife sharpener who