Vendome. Noon was striking everywhere in the sunshine.
Issued forth from behind its curtain of mist, luxurious
Paris, awake and on its feet, was commencing its whirling
day. The shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix shone
brightly. The mansions of the square seemed to
be ranging themselves haughtily for the receptions
of the afternoon; and, right at the end of the Rue
Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries,
beneath a fine burst of winter sunshine, raised shivering
statues, pink with cold, amid the stripped trees.
A LUNCHEON IN THE PLACE VENDOME
There were scarcely more than a score of persons that
morning in the Nabob’s dining-room, a dining-room
in carved oak, supplied the previous evening as it
were by some great upholsterer, who at the same stroke
had furnished these suites of four drawing-rooms of
which you caught sight through an open doorway, the
hangings on the ceiling, the objects of art, the chandeliers,
even the very plate on the sideboards and the servants
who were in attendance. It was obviously the kind
of interior improvised the moment he was out of the
railway-train by a gigantic parvenu in haste
to enjoy. Although around the table there was
no trace of any feminine presence, no bright frock
to enliven it, its aspect was yet not monotonous,
thanks to the dissimilarity, the oddness of the guests,
people belonging to every section of society, specimens
of humanity detached from all races, in France, in
Europe, in the entire globe, from the top to the bottom
of the social ladder. To begin with, the master
of the house—a kind of giant, tanned, burned
by the sun, saffron-coloured, with head in his shoulders.
His nose, which was short and lost in the puffiness
of his face, his woolly hair massed like a cap of
astrakhan above a low and obstinate forehead, and his
bristly eyebrows with eyes like those of an ambushed
chapard gave him the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuck,
of some frontier savage living by war and rapine.
Fortunately the lower part of the face, the fleshy
and strong lip which was lightened now and then by
a smile adorable in its kindness, quite redeemed,
by an expression like that of a St.
Vincent de Paul,
this fierce ugliness, this physiognomy so original
that it was no longer vulgar. An inferior extraction,
however, betrayed itself yet again by the voice, the
voice of a Rhone waterman, raucous and thick, in which
the southern accent became rather uncouth than hard,
and by two broad and short hands, hairy at the back,
square and nailless fingers which, laid on the whiteness
of the table-cloth, spoke of their past with an embarrassing
eloquence. Opposite him, on the other side of
the table at which he was one of the habitual guests,
was seated the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon
presenting no resemblance to the painted spectre of
whom we had a glimpse in the last chapter. He
was now a haughty man of no particular age, fine majestic
nose, a lordly bearing, displaying a large shirt-front
of immaculate linen crackling beneath the continual
effort of the chest to throw itself forward, and bulging
itself out each time with a noise like that made by
a white turkey when it struts in anger, or by a peacock
when he spreads his tail. His name of Monpavon
suited him well.
