And yet that terrible woman was capable of rehumanizing herself. Her neighbor at the dinner had just told her that he had admired her little daughter at the Parc Monceau. She had instantly broken her indignant silence. This obscure bookkeeper had aroused her pure and grateful liking, which she might have been incapable of feeling for a prince, and now they were chatting away like old friends.
Madame Fremer presided over the conversations with a visible satisfaction brought on by her sense of the lofty mission she was performing. Accustomed to introducing great writers to duchesses, she viewed herself as a sort of omnipotent foreign minister, who displays a sovereign spirit even in ceremonial etiquette.
In the same way, a spectator at the theater, while digesting his dinner, judges, and therefore looks down at, the performers, the audience, the author, the rules of dramatic art, and genius.
The conversation, incidentally, was taking a rather harmonious course. The dinner had reached the point at which the men touch the knees of the women or question them about their literary preferences according to their temperament and education, according, above all, to the individual lady.
For an instant a snag seemed unavoidable. When, with the imprudence of youth, Honoré’s handsome neighbor attempted to insinuate that Heredia’s oeuvre might contain more substance than was generally claimed, the diners, whose habits of thinking were upset, grew surly.
But since Madame Fremer promptly exclaimed, “On the contrary, those things are nothing but admirable cameos, gorgeous enamels, flawless goldsmithery,” vivacity and contentment returned to all faces.
A discussion about anarchists was more serious. But Madame Fremer, as if resigned and bowing to a fateful law of nature, slowly said: “What good does it all do? There will always be rich people and poor people.” And, struck by this truth and delivered from their scruples, all these people, of whom the poorest had a private annual income of at least a hundred thousand francs, drained their final flutes of champagne with hearty cheerfulness.
After Dinner
Honoré, sensing that the melange of wines was making his head spin, left without saying goodbye, picked up his coat downstairs, and walked along the Champs-Élysées. He was extremely joyful. The barriers of impossibility, which close off the field of reality to our dreams and desires, were shattered, and his thoughts drifted exuberantly through the unattainable, fired by their own movement.
He was drawn by the mysterious avenues that stretch between all human beings and at the ends of which an unsuspected sun of delight or desolation goes down every evening. He instantly and irresistibly liked each person he thought about, and one by one he entered the streets where he might hope to encounter them, and had his expectations come true, he would have gone up to the unknown or indifferent person without fear and with a delicious thrill.
With the collapse of a stage set that had stood too nearby, life spread out far away in all the magic of its novelty and mystery, across friendly, beckoning landscapes. And the regret that this was the mirage or reality of only a single evening filled him with despair; he would never again do anything but dine and drink so well in order to see such beautiful things.
He suffered only for being unable to immediately reach all the sites that were scattered here and there in the infinity of the faraway perspective. Then he was struck by the noise of his slightly threatening and exaggerated voice, which for the last quarter hour had kept repeating: “Life is sad, it’s idiotic” (that last word was underlined by a sharp gesture of his right arm, and he noticed the brusque movement of his cane).
He mournfully told himself that those mechanically spoken words were a rather banal translation of similar visions, which, he thought, might not perhaps be expressed.
“Alas! It’s probably only the intensity of my pleasure or regret that’s increased a hundredfold, but the intellectual content has remained as is. My happiness is skittish, personal, untranslatable for others, and if I were writing at this moment, my style would have the same qualities, the same defects, alas, and the same mediocrity as always.” However, the physical well-being he felt kept him from pursuing those thoughts and immediately granted him the supreme consolation: oblivion.
He had reached the boulevards. People were passing to and fro, and he offered them his friendship, certain of their reciprocity.
He felt like their glorious center of attention; he opened his overcoat to show them the so very becoming whiteness of his shirt and the dark-red carnation in his buttonhole.
That was how he offered himself to the admiration of the passersby, to the affection he so voluptuously shared with them.
The end
