“And until then when shall I see you?”
he asked.
“To-morrow evening at the Corbelles’.
Come over here Thursday, at three o’clock, if
you are free; and I believe that we are to dine together
with the Duchess on Friday.”
“Yes, exactly.”
He arose.
“Good-by!”
“Good-by, my friend.”
He remained standing, unable to decide to go, for
he had said almost nothing of all that he had come
to say, and his mind was still full of unsaid things,
his heart still swelled with vague desires which he
could not express.
“Good-bye!” he repeated, taking her hands.
“Good-by, my friend!”
“I love you!”
She gave him one of those smiles with which a woman
shows a man, in a single instant, all that she has
given him.
With a throbbing heart he repeated for the third time,
“Good-by!” and departed.
A DOUBLE JEALOUSY
One would have said that all the carriages in Paris
were making a pilgrimage to the Palais de l’Industrie
that day. As early as nine o’clock in the
morning they began to drive, by way of all streets,
avenues, and bridges, toward that hall of the fine
arts where all artistic Paris invites all fashionable
Paris to be present at the pretended varnishing of
three thousand four hundred pictures.
A long procession of visitors pressed through the
doors, and, disdaining the exhibition of sculpture,
hastened upstairs to the picture gallery. Even
while mounting the steps they raised their eyes to
the canvases displayed on the walls of the staircase,
where they hang the special category of decorative
painters who have sent canvases of unusual proportions
or works that the committee dare not refuse.
In the square salon a great crowd surged and rustled.
The artists, who were in evidence until evening, were
easily recognized by their activity, the sonorousness
of their voices, and the authority of their gestures.
They drew their friends by the sleeve toward the pictures,
which they pointed out with exclamations and mimicry
of a connoisseur’s energy. All types of
artists were to be seen—tall men with long
hair, wearing hats of mouse-gray or black and of indescribable
shapes, large and round like roofs, with their turned-down
brims shadowing the wearer’s whole chest.
Others were short, active, slight or stocky, wearing
foulard cravats and round jackets, or the sack-like
garment of the singular costume peculiar to this class
of painters.
There was the clan of the fashionables, of the curious,
and of artists of the boulevard; the clan of Academicians,
correct, and decorated with red rosettes, enormous
or microscopic, according to individual conception
of elegance and good form; the clan of bourgeois painters,
assisted by the family surrounding the father like
a triumphal chorus.
On the four great walls the canvases admitted to the
honor of the square salon dazzled one at the very
entrance by their brilliant tones, glittering frames,
the crudity of new color, vivified by fresh varnish,
blinding under the pitiless light poured from above.
