“You’re spying on me!” Renée said angrily.

But Mme Sidonie replied with splendid disdain: “As if I’d bother with your filth!”

Then, hiking up her magician’s robes, she withdrew with a majestic glare: “It’s not my fault, darling, if you’ve had some mishaps. . . . But understand that I hold no grudge. And that you would have found a second mother in me and may find one still. I’ll be happy to see you at my place whenever it suits you.”

Renée wasn’t listening. She walked into the large drawing room and made her way through a very complex figure of the cotillion without so much as noticing the surprise occasioned by her fur cloak. In the middle of the room, groups of ladies and gentlemen were milling around and waving streamers, and M. de Saffré’s high-pitched voice was saying, “Let’s go, ladies, it’s time for the ‘Mexican War.’ The ladies must pretend to be cactus plants by sitting on the floor and spreading their skirts out around them. . . . Now, the gentlemen will dance around the cacti. . . . Then, when I clap my hands, each gentleman must waltz with his cactus.”

He clapped his hands. The brass rang out, and couples once again waltzed around the salon. The figure was not much of a success. Two of the ladies remained sitting on the carpet, tangled up in their petticoats. Mme Daste said that what amused her in the “Mexican War” was making a “cheese” out of her dress as the girls used to do at boarding school.

When Renée reached the vestibule, she found Louise and her father with Saccard and Maxime. Baron Gouraud had left. Mme Sidonie was on her way out with Mignon and Charrier, and M. Hupel de la Noue escorted Mme Michelin, while her husband followed at a discreet distance. The prefect had spent most of the evening courting the pretty brunette. He had just persuaded her to spend a month of the summer season in the capital of his district, “where there are some truly unusual ancient artifacts to be seen.”

Louise, who was surreptitiously nibbling on the nougat she had hidden in her pocket, succumbed to a fit of coughing just as she was about to leave.

“Button up tight,” her father said.

And Maxime hastened to tighten the string on the hood of her evening wrap. She lifted her chin and allowed herself to be swaddled. But when Mme Saccard appeared, M. de Mareuil returned to say his good-byes. Everyone stood chatting for a while. To explain her pallor and shivering, she said that she had felt cold and had gone upstairs to fetch the fur now draped over her shoulders. Meanwhile, she was waiting for an opportunity to whisper something to Louise, who was staring at her with curious tranquillity. Since the men were still shaking hands, Renée leaned over to her and whispered: “You won’t marry him, will you? It’s out of the question. You know full well—”

But the child interrupted, rising up on her toes to whisper in Renée’s ear. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take him away. . . . It won’t matter, since we’ll be going off to Italy.”

And she smiled the inscrutable smile of a wicked sphinx. All Renée could do was stammer. Understanding eluded her; she thought the hunchback was making a joke at her expense. Then, after the Mareuils had left, having repeated “Until Sunday!” several times before doing so, she looked with terrified eyes first at her husband, then at Maxime, and seeing them there, looking cool and smug, she hid her face in her hands and fled, taking refuge at the far end of the conservatory.

The paths were deserted. The great masses of foliage slept, while two budding water lilies slowly unfolded on the stagnant surface of the pool. Renée felt like crying, but the humid heat and strong odor that she knew so well took her by the throat and strangled her despair. She looked at her feet on the edge of the pool, on the patch of yellow sand where she had laid out the bearskin the previous winter. And when she looked up, she could still see a figure of the cotillion unfolding in the distance through the double doors, which had been left open.

There was a deafening noise, a chaotic free-for-all in which all she could make out at first were flying skirts and black legs stamping and whirling. M. de Saffré’s voice cried out: “Change your ladies! Change your ladies!” And couples passed by in a cloud of fine yellow dust. Each gentleman danced three or four turns of the waltz and then flung his lady into the arms of his neighbor, who did the same. Baroness von Meinhold, wearing her Emerald costume, passed from the hands of the comte de Chibray to those of Mr. Simpson. He caught her 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.