The calèche turned down the avenue de la Reine-Hortense and stopped at the end of the rue Monceau, a few steps from the boulevard Malesherbes, before a large mansion with a courtyard in front and a park to the rear. Two gates encrusted with gilt ornaments opened onto the courtyard, each gate flanked by a pair of lamps in the shape of urns similarly bristling with gold appurtenances and equipped with large gaslights. Between the two gates the concierge occupied an elegant gatehouse vaguely reminiscent of a small Greek temple.

Just as the carriage was about to enter the court, Maxime jumped nimbly to the ground.

Renée, grabbing hold of his hand, said, “You know, we sit down to dinner at seven-thirty. You have more than an hour to dress. Don’t keep us waiting.”

With a smile she added, “The Mareuils will be there. . . . Your father wants you to pay particular attention to Louise.”

Maxime shrugged. “That’s some job,” he mumbled grumpily. “I want to get married, but courting her is just too silly. . . . It would be awfully nice of you, Renée, if you saved me from Louise tonight.”

He put on a funny face, borrowing his expression and accent from the actor Lassouche,⁸ as he did when he was about to come out with one of his customary pleasantries: “Will you, step-mama dear?”

Renée shook hands with him as with a friend. Quickly, in a mocking tone, she tried a nervous sally: “You know, if I hadn’t married your father, I think you might make love to me.”

The young man must have found this idea quite funny, because he was still laughing as he rounded the corner of the boulevard Malesherbes.

The calèche entered the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps of the mansion.

The wide, low steps were sheltered by a huge glass canopy, which was edged with a lambrequin trimmed with gold fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose above a servants’ hall, whose small, square windows of frosted glass could be seen almost level with the ground. At the top of the stairs the entrance to the vestibule was set forward and flanked by thin columns recessed into the wall, forming a protruding portion of the façade that had a round bay window on each floor and stretched all the way up to the roof, where it ended in a delta. On either side of this projection each floor had five windows, regularly spaced along the façade and set in simple stone frames. The mansard roof was cut square, with large sections almost vertical.

The façade on the park side was quite a bit more sumptuous. A royal staircase led up to a narrow terrace dominating the entire length of the ground floor. The banister of this terrace, in the style of the gates of the Parc Monceau, was even more gold-encrusted than the canopy and lamps on the courtyard side. Behind it stood the hôtel, with a pavilion at each corner, consisting of a sort of tower half set into the body of the structure, which created space for round rooms inside. In the middle, another turret set still more deeply into the structure made a slight bulge. The windows, high and thin for the pavilions, more widely spaced and almost square on the flat parts of the façade, featured stone balustrades on the ground floor and gilded wrought-iron railings on the upper floors. It was a parade of wealth, a profusion, an embarrassment of riches. The mansion disappeared beneath its sculptures. Around the windows and along the ledges ran coils of branches and flowers. There were balconies that resembled planters held aloft by huge naked women, their hips twisted and nipples thrust forward. Attached to the walls here and there were fantastic escutcheons, grapes, roses, efflorescences in stone and marble of every imaginable variety. The higher the eye looked, the more the mansion bristled with flowers. Circling the roof was a balustrade on which were set at intervals urns ablaze with sprays of gems. And there, amid the oeils-de-boeuf of the mansards, which looked out on an incredible tangle of fruit and foliage, lay the culminating elements of this astonishing décor, the pediments of the pavilions, in the center of which stood additional huge female nudes—naked women playing with apples or striking poses in thickets of bulrushes. The roof, laden with these ornaments and capped by additional fretwork in lead, along with two lightning rods and four enormous, symmetrical chimneys sculpted like everything else, seemed to mark the climax of this display of architectural fireworks.

On the right stood a vast conservatory, attached to the side of the mansion and communicating with the ground floor by way of a glass door in one of the salons. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low fence hidden behind a hedge, was rather steeply sloped. Too small for the house, so narrow that a lawn and a few clumps of trees sufficed to fill it, it was simply a mound, a pedestal of greenery, on which the mansion stood proudly ensconced and decked out for a ball. Seen from the park, looming above its neat lawn and the polished leaves of its gleaming shrubbery, that huge edifice, still brand-new and quite pale, had the wan face and rich, idiotic self-importance of a par-venue, with its heavy slate chapeau, its gilt railings, and its façade dripping with sculptures. It was a scale model of the new Louvre,⁹ one of the most characteristic examples of the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed. On summer nights, when the sun’s slanting rays lit up the gold of the railings against the white façade, people strolling in the park stopped to stare at the red silk curtains hanging in the first-floor windows. Through windows so large and so clear that they seemed to have been placed there, like the windows of a great modern department store, to display the sumptuous interior to the outside world, these petit-bourgeois families caught glimpses of the furniture, of the fabrics, and of the dazzlingly rich ceilings, the sight of which riveted them to the spot with admiration and envy.

Just now, however, darkness was gathering under the trees, and the façade lay sleeping. In the courtyard, a footman had respectfully helped Renée down from the carriage. On the right were the stables, with walls of striped red brick and broad doors of brown oak that opened onto a large area lit by skylights. On the left, as if to balance the composition, a very ornate niche was embedded in the wall of the house next door, in which a stream of water flowed perpetually from a shell that two Cupids held in outstretched arms. The young woman stood for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, lightly tapping at her skirt, which refused to hang properly. The courtyard, into which the clatter of horses and carriage had erupted only a moment earlier, now sank back into solitude, its aristocratic silence broken only by the eternal refrain of running water. In all the dark mass of the mansion, whose chandeliers would soon be lit for the first great banquet of the fall season, only the lower windows were ablaze, coloring the neat, regular checkerboard of small paving stones with the intense glow of a roaring conflagration.

As Renée pushed open the door of the vestibule, she found herself face-to-face with her husband’s manservant on his way to the servants’ hall with a silver kettle. The man was magnificent, all dressed in black, tall, solid, with the white face and neatly trimmed side-whiskers of an English diplomat and the grave, dignified air of a judge.

The young woman detained him with a question. “Baptiste, has Monsieur returned?”

“Yes, Madame, he is dressing,” the servant replied, with a nod worthy of a prince saluting a crowd.

Renée climbed the stairs slowly, pulling off her gloves as she went.

The vestibule was most luxurious. On entering it, one experienced a slight feeling of suffocation. The thick carpets covering the floor and staircase and the broad expanses of red velvet that hid the walls and doors made the air heavy with the silence, the stale fragrance, of a chapel. Draperies hung down from above, and the very high ceiling was adorned with ornamental rosettes on a latticework of gilt molding. The staircase had a double balustrade of white marble equipped with a red velvet handrail, and it opened out into two gently curving branches, between which stood the door of the drawing room. An immense mirror covered the entire wall of the first landing. Below, at the foot of each branch of the staircase, standing on marble pedestals, two women of gilt bronze, naked to the waist, held up two large lamps with five burners each, whose intense light was softened by globes of frosted glass. On either side, rows of lovely majolica pots were filled with rare plants.