"Is supper ready?" asked Marguerite. "Yes, madame, in one moment.""Apropos," said Prudence to me, "you have not looked round; come, and I will show you." As you know, the drawing-room was a marvel.
Marguerite went with us for a moment; then she called Gaston and went into the dining-room with him to see if supper was ready.
"Ah," said Prudence, catching sight of a little Saxe figure on a side-table, "I never knew you had this little gentleman.""Which?"
"A little shepherd holding a bird-cage."
"Take it, if you like it."
"I won't deprive you of it."
"I was going to give it to my maid. I think it hideous; but if you like it, take it."Prudence only saw the present, not the way in which it was given.
She put the little figure on one side, and took me into the dressing-room, where she showed me two miniatures hanging side by side, and said:
"That is the Comte de G., who was very much in love with Marguerite; it was he who brought her out. Do you know him?""No. And this one?" I inquired, pointing to the other miniature.
"That is the little Vicomte de L. He was obliged to disappear.""Why?"
"Because he was all but ruined. That's one, if you like, who loved Marguerite.""And she loved him, too, no doubt?"
"She is such a queer girl, one never knows. The night he went away she went to the theatre as usual, and yet she had cried when he said good-bye to her."Just then Nanine appeared, to tell us that supper was served.
When we entered the dining-room, Marguerite was leaning against the wall, and Gaston, holding her hands, was speaking to her in a low voice.
"You are mad," replied Marguerite. "You know quite well that Idon't want you. It is no good at the end of two years to make love to a woman like me. With us, it is at once, or never. Come, gentlemen, supper!"And, slipping away from Gaston, Marguerite made him sit on her right at table, me on her left, then called to Nanine:
"Before you sit down, tell them in the kitchen not to open to anybody if there is a ring."This order was given at one o'clock in the morning.
We laughed, drank, and ate freely at this supper. In a short while mirth had reached its last limit, and the words that seem funny to a certain class of people, words that degrade the mouth that utters them, were heard from time to time, amidst the applause of Nanine, of Prudence, and of Marguerite. Gaston was thoroughly amused; he was a very good sort of fellow, but somewhat spoiled by the habits of his youth. For a moment I tried to forget myself, to force my heart and my thoughts to become indifferent to the sight before me, and to take my share of that gaiety which seemed like one of the courses of the meal. But little by little I withdrew from the noise; my glass remained full, and I felt almost sad as I saw this beautiful creature of twenty drinking, talking like a porter, and laughing the more loudly the more scandalous was the joke.
Nevertheless, this hilarity, this way of talking and drinking, which seemed to me in the others the mere results of bad company or of bad habits, seemed in Marguerite a necessity of forgetting, a fever, a nervous irritability. At every glass of champagne her cheeks would flush with a feverish colour, and a cough, hardly perceptible at the beginning of supper, became at last so violent that she was obliged to lean her head on the back of her chair and hold her chest in her hands every time that she coughed. Isuffered at the thought of the injury to so frail a constitution which must come from daily excesses like this. At length, something which I had feared and foreseen happened. Toward the end of supper Marguerite was seized by a more violent fit of coughing than any she had had while I was there. It seemed as if her chest were being torn in two. The poor girl turned crimson, closed her eyes under the pain, and put her napkin to her lips.
It was stained with a drop of blood. She rose and ran into her dressing-room.
"What is the matter with Marguerite?" asked Gaston.
"She has been laughing too much, and she is spitting blood. Oh, it is nothing; it happens to her every day. She will be back in a minute. Leave her alone. She prefers it."I could not stay still; and, to the consternation of Prudence and Nanine, who called to me to come back, I followed Marguerite."
