# The Eyes of Innocence/IV

IV
AN EVENING AT MME. DE LA VAUDRAYE'S
It would be wearisome to describe the long series of moves and machinations, the whole comedy of affectation and pretended solicitude which Mme. de la Vaudraye employed to induce Gilberte to come and see her. One day, at last, Gilberte promised, on the understanding that there would be no one there but the regular visitors to the house.
And, in the evening, Adèle, carrying a lantern and muttering between her teeth, accompanied her through the deserted streets.
It was a very modest house that was occupied by her who remained the first lady of Domfront despite her shattered fortunes. No show, no comfort, hardly room for the ​mother and son; but there was a salon, a sumptuous salon, a salon, to which everything had been sacrificed, a salon that enabled Mme. de la Vaudraye to declare, with pride:
"I have a salon."
And the townspeople nodded their heads in chorus:
"Mme. de la Vaudraye has a salon."
In so saying, they had in mind not only the costly furniture heaped up in that one room, but also the shining lights of the town who adorned it with their presence. You were really nobody at Domfront if you did not form part of the salon of Mme. de la Vaudraye.
In its essence and as Gilberte saw it, the salon consisted of an old-oak chest and an Empire sideboard, of the Bottentuit and Charmeron couples and their five young ladies, of M. and Mme. Lartiste and their son, of Mlle. du Bocage, of M. Beaufrelant, M. Hourteulx and Messrs. Simare, father ​and son, of a Louis XV clock, of a lacquered glass-case, and of a set of chairs and armchairs upholstered in crimson silk.
A great silence, composed of eager curiosity, admiration and envy, greeted Gilberte's entrance. The hostess at once made the introductions, or rather chiselled them out in elaborate phrases. Gilberte bowed.
"And my son? Where is my dear Guillaume?"
He was extracted from a small side-room.
"Dear Mme. Armand, here is my Guillaume, who is so anxious to make your acquaintance."
Guillaume de la Vaudraye was not at all bad-looking, with a very good figure; but he had a sullen expression and his manners seemed constrained. He gave a bow and vanished.
There was an attempt at general conversation, which fell very flat. People exchanged distressful looks and dared not raise their voices. Gilberte did not utter a word.
​Then, to break the ice, a rush was made for the principal person present, the last resource of drawing-rooms. He always lords it in the place of honour, displaying the expansive smile of his large yellow teeth. He looks like a squatting Hindu idol; he is well-groomed, shiny and pretentious. He is the centre of social life, the ever-ready rescuer, the life and soul of the company, the master of ceremonies, the master of the revels, the vanisher of intolerable silence. And none can contest his supremacy, for he alone is capable of making so much noise without becoming exhausted and of making more noise by himself than all the rest put together. The specimen in Mme. de la Vaudraye's drawing-room was signed, "Pleyel."
It was as though the parts had been allotted beforehand. Two groups were formed: the audience and the performers. Gilberte found herself seated between Mme. Charmeron, who was famed for her persistent dumbness and distinction, and M. Simare ​junior, the best-dressed and most dissipated young man in the town. He went twice a year to Paris and was looked upon as a master of wit and satire. As a matter of fact, he started chaffing at once:
"Ah, the overture of The Bronze Horse by a Demoiselle Charmeron and a Demoiselle Bottentuit! That's the invariable first piece here. Ten years ago, it seems, it was played by Mme. Bottentuit and her sister, Mme. Charmeron; to-day, their heiresses are following in their footsteps. Observe how beautifully the two young ladies hold themselves. Their ambition is to realize the back view of a pair of sticks. They practise it for four hours every morning. ..."
When the last chords had been banged out, he continued:
"Now, the little Charmeron girl will move off on the right, taking her stool with her, and the little Bottentuit girl will slide to the middle of the key-board. From the performer that she was she will become the ​accompanist of papa. There, what did I tell you? It's all settled beforehand! Look out! Maître Bottentuit, the attorney, the drawing-room howler, is going off, going off, I say. ... I defy you to make out a word he sings. ... People have been trying for ten years; and no one has ever succeeded. ... Excuse me ... got to stop ... can't hear myself talk ... the wretch is bawling too loud. ..."
After Maître Bottentuit, Mlle. du Bocage—a little old maid whose mouth opened so wide that you could have dived down her throat—struck up the duet in Mireille, supported by M. Lartiste the elder, an old man, with a clean-shaven face, whose mouth, on the contrary, remained hermetically closed, with the results that both parts of the duet—not only the cooing roulades of the woman, but also the frenzied appeals of the man, his prayers, his promises, his metamorphoses into a bird and a butterfly—seemed to issue from the yawning throat of Mireille, that ​gulf where you saw a host of little pieces of mechanism madly at work. The loving couple had a great success.
"M. le Hourteulx next," said young Simare. "Our millionaire is going to sing for you, madame, for, you know, he has been smitten with a passion since he saw you in church; a passion shared, of course, by his enemy Beaufrelant, for the two men always form the same wishes, so as to have the pleasure of thwarting each other. It's a long-standing hatred: le Hourteulx was married once; and it seems that Beaufrelant ..."
Simare bent over towards Gilberte and whispered a few words in her ear.
Young Lartiste, who owed his fame as a great actor to his name and to his name alone, was reserved for the end.
"No one recites like young Lartiste," people said at Domfront.
And, from the first words that he spoke, everybody watched Gilberte, to enjoy her amazement. Unfortunately, Simare was ​continuing his more or less decorous reflexions; and Gilberte, although not always catching his exact meaning, felt so uncomfortable that she did not listen to young Lartiste at all and forgot to applaud at the striking passages, an omission that was put down to her bad taste.
"Mme. de la Vaudraye is furious," said Simare. "Her son's gone. And I expect she jolly well lectured him about making himself agreeable to you. By Jove, when you're a mother, you have to think of your son's future. But Guillaume making himself agreeable is a sight that was never yet seen! Besides, he looks down upon us too much to remain in the drawing-room. Just fancy, a writer like him! ... Oh, I say, madame, look at the eyes Beaufrelant's making at you! Beaufrelant is the Don Juan of Domfront. No one can resist him. They even say ... but I don't know if I ought. ... Pooh, you have a fan ... if you want to blush."
​And he again leant over towards Gilberte.
She rose from her seat at the first words. Mme. de la Vaudraye came running up to her:
"I am sure that that scapegrace of a Simare is saying all sorts of things that he shouldn't."
She drew her aside:
"Be careful with him, my child," she said. "I can see through his designs: he is trying to compromise you. He is head over ears in debt and hunting for a fortune. ... But haven't you seen Guillaume? Wait for me here, I'll bring him to you."
Simare came up to Gilberte:
"I must apologize to you, madame; I shocked you just now."
"No, no," stammered Gilberte, driven to her wits' end by this persistency, "only I thought I ought not to ..."
He interrupted her:
"It was I who ought not. I couldn't help it: I was talking, talking a little at random, ​lest I should say what I have no right to say, what lies deep down within myself, one of those involuntary sentiments. ..."
"I am so sorry, Mme. Armand," cried the hostess, returning. "My son was a little tired and has gone up to his room."
The musical and literary evening was over. But the resources of the la Vaudraye salon did not end there. Its frequenters prided themselves on knowing how to talk. And the conversation went by rule, of course, as everything went by rule in this society which, by the almost daily repetition of the same acts, had established habits as strong as immutable laws.
The licensed talkers were M. Beaufrelant, who, they said, cultivated the flowers of rhetoric with the same zeal and the same success as the flowers of the soil; Mme. de la Vaudraye, who specialized in literary discussions; M. Lartiste, who, as a printer, was naturally marked out for the loftiest philosophical speculations; M. Simare the elder, ​a remarkable spinner of anecdotes; and, lastly, M. Charmeron and his sister-in-law, Mme. Bottentuit, who found, in their morbid need for contradicting and disputing with each other, an inexhaustible source of opinions, witticisms and banter. Outside these privileged and, so to speak, official protagonists, it was very seldom that any one ventured to open his mouth.
Gilberte, who was beginning to feel terribly bored, listened without a word, which was taken for a sign of admiring deference. The truth is that this oratorical joust surprised her greatly. All these people, speaking turn and turn about, seemed to be pursuing so many different conversations, each of them thinking only of shining in the department that had devolved upon himself. M. Lartiste, who had talked his best on capital punishment, the subject in which he excelled, was answered by Mme. de la Vaudraye with a vigorous parallel between the respective merits of Victor Hugo and ​Lamartine, which parallel was duly refuted in a lyrical outburst from M. Beaufrelant on the bulbs of the double dahlia.
And the utmost seriousness presided over all this incoherence, each disputant confounding, with deadly earnestness, the interlocutor in whom he saw such another indomitable as himself. And the dumb circle of hearers listened with nods and grunts of approval, as though these strange discussions had excited them to the highest pitch.
"Well ... and you?" said Mme. de la Vaudraye to M. Simare the elder, at the exact moment when the ardour of the tourney seemed about to wane. "Are you not in form to-day?"
M. Simare, the anecdotist, smiled. His strong point lay in saying nothing until he was questioned; and his dry silence, rich in promise, lent enormous value to the one anecdote to which he treated you each evening, after carefully preparing, polishing, repolishing and chipping it like a precious stone. ​Everybody burst out laughing before he even opened his mouth: it was understood from his manner that the story would be a little ... naughty.
He said:
"I do not know if I can speak. There are young ears present."
A movement on the part of the mothers, a glance; and the five young ladies disappeared "without seeming to."
He insisted:
"All the same, I feel bound to warn you that it is a very risqué story. I shall call a spade a spade: local colour demands it."
"Go on, M. Simare!" said somebody. "We are all married people here!"
Gilberte was sitting in the front row of chairs, understanding nothing of the departure of the young girls nor of all this preamable and in absolute ignorance of what was looming ahead.
M. Simare walked up to her, bowed to her ​gallantly, like a bull-fighter dedicating his next feat of prowess to the most prominent person present and sat down four feet in front of her. And he began:
"The setting first, madame. Picture the skirt of a wood: dramatis personæ, Fanchon and her friend Colin, who is whispering sweet nothings in her ear, very much in her ear, and ... but wait! At no great distance, in the middle of the wood, his reverence the rector is strolling, reading his breviary; and his walk takes him in the direction of our young rustics. ... He comes. ... He comes nearer and nearer. ... Do you see the picture, madame?"
"Yes, yes," said Gilberte, earnestly, like a child who is interested in a fairy-tale. "What next?"
"The sun darts his rays through the branches, from the patches of blue sky. ..."
He continued his description at length, talked of the rector and the birds and the flowers and the cool shade of the trees; and, ​strange to say, there was not another word about Fanchon and Colin.
"M. Simare is a little discursive this evening," whispered somebody. "He is not coming to the point as quickly as usual."
In fact, he was veering away from it, with his eyes fixed on Gilberte, who listened eagerly and who repeated, at intervals:
"And then? What next?"
Thereupon, he got more and more entangled in the poetic stroll of the rector, who kept on walking and never seemed to come as far as Fanchon and Colin. And it was Gilberte who, at last, exclaimed:
"But what became of Colin and Fanchon?"
Then the old boy made a decisive gesture:
"I can't, I can't tell you. ... No, I won't tell you. ..."
Everybody rose. Everybody protested.
M. Simare took refuge in laughter:
"Well, no, I won't tell you."
"But why not?"
​"Why not? I don't know! It's her eyes. ... There are words one can't utter when one looks at her, there are things one can't tell."
He was no longer laughing. The others were silent. And he continued:
"Look at her eyes. They gaze at you so softly, so innocently. ... All the time that I was talking my nonsense, I wanted to invent something for her, something about saints and angels and a good little girl who loves her mother and only thinks of pleasing her and is happy from morning till night. ..."