The Kill - Emile Zola [21]
Meanwhile the guests had stopped eating. A hot wind seemed to have grazed the table, clouding the glasses, leaving the bread in crumbs, darkening the skins of the fruits on their plates, and disrupting the pleasing symmetry of the settings. The flowers spilling out of the great cornucopias of chased silver wilted. And for a moment, the guests, staring vacantly at what was left of dessert, forgot themselves and remained seated, lacking the heart to get up. Leaning on one elbow, they sat with the blank faces and vague lassitude of fashionable people whose drunkenness takes a measured and respectable form, who get sloshed one sip at a time. The laughs had subsided, and talk had become rare. Having drunk and eaten a good deal, the group of bemedaled gentlemen seemed graver than ever. In the heavy air of the dining room, the ladies felt their foreheads and the backs of their necks grow moist. Waiting to move into the drawing room, they seemed serious and a little pale, as though they felt a bit faint. Mme d’Espanet had turned quite pink, while Mme Haffner’s shoulders had taken on a waxy white sheen. Meanwhile, M. Hupel de la Noue examined the handle of a knife; M. Toutin-Laroche continued to spit fragmentary comments at M. Haffner, who received them with much nodding of his head; M. de Mareuil stared dreamily at M. Michelin, who returned the look with an arch smile. As for the delectable Mme Michelin, she had long since stopped talking. Looking quite flushed, she had allowed one of her hands to dangle beneath the tablecloth, where M. de Saffré was no doubt holding it in his as he leaned awkwardly against the table’s edge, his eyebrows knit with the grimace of a man solving a problem in algebra. Mme Sidonie had also made a conquest. Mignon and Charrier, both leaning on their elbows and facing her, seemed delighted to share her confidences. She confessed that she adored dairy products and was afraid of ghosts. And Aristide Saccard himself, eyes half-closed, reveled in the smug satisfaction of a host confident of having properly lubricated his guests and gave no thought to leaving the table. With a respectfully affectionate eye he contemplated Baron Gouraud, who was ponderously digesting his dinner while his right hand lay splayed across the white tablecloth— the hand of a sensual old man, small, thick-fingered, discolored by purple blotches, and covered with red hair.
Renée mechanically finished off the few drops of Tokay that remained in the bottom of her glass. Her face tingled. The short, pale hairs on her forehead and the back of her neck stood out in unruly display as if moistened by a humid breeze. Her lips and nose were pinched by nervous tension, and her face was as expressionless as that of a child who has drunk undiluted wine. If her mind had been filled with nice bourgeois thoughts while staring into the shadows of the Parc Monceau, those thoughts were now drowned out by the excitement induced by the food, wine, and light and the stimuli of unsettling surroundings rife with warm exhalations and raucous laughter. She was no longer exchanging quiet smiles with her sister Christine and Aunt Elisabeth—both modest, self-effacing women not much given to talk. With