The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [65]
Instead of the sweet smile awaiting Maurice, which was supposed to greet him from afar the moment he appeared, Geneviève had promised herself to show him only a frosty politeness—a weak rampart she busily erected to stem the torrent that threatened to swamp her heart. She had retired to her room on the first floor and intended to come down to the ground floor only when called.
Alas! Geneviève got it wrong, too.
Only Dixmer got it right. He was watching out for Maurice through a wire fence and smiling with a smirk of irony. Meanwhile, citizen Morand was phlegmatically applying black dye to little tails that were to be stuck on white catskins to turn them into ermine.
Maurice pushed open the little alley door and entered the garden the old familiar way. The doorbell rang the way it used to do to indicate that it was Maurice who had opened the door.
Geneviève, who was standing by her closed window, gave a start. She dropped the curtain she had parted.
The first thing Maurice felt on returning to his host’s was therefore disappointment; not only was Geneviève not waiting for him at her ground-floor window, but even when he entered the small salon where he had taken his leave of her she wasn’t there, and he was forced to have himself announced as though these three weeks of absence had turned him into a stranger.
His heart sank.
It was Dixmer Maurice saw first, Dixmer who ran up bleating for joy and gave Maurice a hug. Only then did Geneviève come down. She had whipped her cheeks with her mother-of-pearl spatula to bring the blood back, but by the time she’d descended the twenty steps, the artificially induced red had disappeared as the blood rushed back to her heart.
Maurice saw Geneviève appear in the doorway; with a smile on his face, he went toward her to kiss her hand. It was only then that he registered how much she had changed. On her side, she remarked with fright how thin Maurice had become, and the alarmingly feverish light in his eyes.
“So you are here, monsieur?” she said to him in a voice whose emotion she could not control. She’d promised to toss him an indifferent, “Hello, citizen Maurice. Why have you made yourself so scarce?” The variant still sounded frosty to Maurice, and yet, what a difference between the two!
Dixmer cut short the mutual prolonged examinations and recriminations. He saw to it that dinner was served, for it was close to two o’clock. Passing into the dining room, Maurice saw that his place had been set. Citizen Morand then arrived, dressed in the same brown outfit and the same jacket and still wearing his green glasses, his long limp strands of black hair, and his white ruffle. Maurice felt something like affection for the whole getup now—close up, it was infinitely less threatening than at a distance.
Indeed, what was the likelihood that Geneviève loved this little chemist? You’d have to be head over heels in love, and therefore completely mad, to dream up such poppycock. Besides, this was not the moment to be jealous. Maurice was carrying Geneviève’s letter in the pocket of his jacket and his heart was beating beneath it, pounding fit to rupture with sheer joy.
Geneviève had regained her composure. Women are built in such a peculiar way as to be almost always able to wipe out all traces of the past and all threats of the future in favor of the present. Finding herself feeling happy, Geneviève regained her self-control, which meant she returned to being calm and collected, though affectionate—another nuance that Maurice wasn’t quite strong enough to understand. Lorin would have found the explanation in Parny, the poet, or Bertin or Gentil-Bernard.
The conversation turned to the Goddess of Reason. The fall of the Girondins and the new cult of worship that caused the inheritance of the heavens to pass into female hands were the two main events of the day. Dixmer claimed he wouldn’t have