The Nabob, Volume 2 | Page 7

I spoke to you. A deep, sure affection
which I was foolish enough to throw away, like the wasteful idiot I am.
I always used to invoke her memory in moments of perplexity, when
there was some question to be decided or some sacrifice to be made. I

would say to myself: 'What will she think about it?' as we pause in our
work to think of some great man, of one of our masters. You must fill
that place for me. Will you?"
Paul did not answer. He was looking at Aline's portrait. It was she, it
was she to the life, her regular profile, her kindly, laughing mouth, and
the long curl caressing the slender neck. Ah! all the Ducs de Mora on
earth might come now. Felicia no longer existed for him.
Poor Felicia, a creature endowed with superior powers, was much like
those sorceresses who weave and ravel the destinies of others without
the power to accomplish anything for their own happiness.
"Will you give me this sketch?" he said almost inaudibly, in a voice
that trembled with emotion.
"Very gladly; she is pretty, isn't she? Ah! if you should happen to meet
her, love her, marry her. She is worth more than all the rest. But, failing
her, failing her--"
And the beautiful tamed sphinx looked up at him with her great tearful,
laughing eyes, whose enigma was no longer insoluble.

XIV.
THE EXHIBITION.
"Superb!"
"A tremendous success. Barye never did anything as fine."
"And the bust of the Nabob! What a marvellous likeness! I tell you,
Constance Crenmitz is happy. See her trotting about."
"What! is that La Crenmitz, that little old woman in a fur cape? I
supposed she was dead twenty years ago."

Oh! no; on the contrary, she is very much alive. Enchanted, rejuvenated
by the triumph of her goddaughter, who is decidedly the success of the
Exhibition, she glides through the crowd of artists and people of
fashion grouped around the two points where Felicia's contributions are
exhibited like two huge masses of black backs, variegated costumes,
jostling and squeezing in their struggles to look. Constance, usually so
retiring, makes her way into the front row, listens to the discussions,
catches on the wing snatches of sentences, technical phrases which she
remembers, nods her head approvingly, smiles, shrugs her shoulders
when she hears any slighting remark, longing to crush the first person
who should fail to admire.
Whether it be the excellent Crenmitz or another, you always see, at the
opening of the Salon, that shadow prowling furtively about where
people are conversing, with ears on the alert and an anxious expression;
sometimes it is an old father who thanks you with a glance for a kindly
word said in passing, or assumes a despairing expression at the epigram
which you hurl at a work of art and which strikes a heart behind you. A
face not to be omitted surely, if ever some painter in love with things
modern should conceive the idea of reproducing on canvas that
perfectly typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of the Salon
in that vast hothouse of statuary, with the yellow gravelled paths and
the great glass ceiling, beneath which, half-way from the floor, the
galleries of the first tier stand forth, lined with heads bending over to
look, and with extemporized waving draperies.
In a light that seems slightly cold and pale as it falls on the green
decorations of the walls, where the rays become rarefied, one would
say, in order to afford the spectators an opportunity for concentration
and accuracy of vision, the crowd moves slowly back and forth, pauses,
scatters over the benches, divided into groups, and yet mingling castes
more thoroughly than any other gathering, just as the fickle and
changing weather, at that time of year, brings together all sorts of
costumes, so that the black lace and superb train of the great lady who
has come to observe the effect of her own portrait rub against the
Siberian furs of the actress who has just returned from Russia and
proposes that everybody shall know it.

Here there are no boxes, no reserved seats, and that is what gives such
abiding interest and charm to this first view in broad daylight. The real
society women can pass judgment at close quarters on the painted
beauties that excite so much applause by artificial light; the tiny hat,
latest shape, of the Marquise de Bois-l'Héry and her like brushes
against the more than modest costume of some artist's wife or daughter,
while the model who has posed for that lovely Andromeda near the
entrance struts triumphantly by, dressed in a too short skirt, in wretched
clothes tossed upon her beauty with the utmost lack of taste. They
scrutinize one another,