However, the door had opened, and Mathilde came in, followed by Jory.  She was richly attired in a tunic of nasturtium-hued velvet and a skirt of straw-coloured satin, with diamonds in her ears and a large bouquet of roses on her bosom.  What astonished Claude the most was that he did not recognise her, for she had become plump, round, and fair skinned, instead of thin and sunburnt as he had known her.  Her disturbing ugliness had departed in a swelling of the face; her mouth, once noted for its black voids, now displayed teeth which looked over-white whenever she condescended to smile, with a disdainful curling of the upper lip.  You could guess that she had become immoderately respectable; her five and forty summers gave her weight beside her husband, who was younger than herself and seemed to be her nephew.  The only thing of yore that clung to her was a violent perfume; she drenched herself with the strongest essences, as if she had been anxious to wash from her skin the smell of all the aromatic simples with which she had been impregnated by her herbalist business; however, the sharpness of rhubarb, the bitterness of elder-seed, and the warmth of peppermint clung to her; and as soon as she crossed the drawing-room, it was filled with an undefinable smell like that of a chemist’s shop, relieved by an acute odour of musk.

Henriette, who had risen, made her sit down beside Christine, saying: 

‘You know each other, don’t you?  You have already met here.’

Mathilde gave but a cold glance at the modest attire of that woman who had lived for a long time with a man, so it was said, before being married to him.  She herself was exceedingly rigid respecting such matters since the tolerance prevailing in literary and artistic circles had admitted her to a few drawing-rooms.  Henriette hated her, however, and after the customary exchange of courtesies, not to be dispensed with, resumed her conversation with Christine.

Jory had shaken hands with Claude and Sandoz, and, standing near them, in front of the fireplace, he apologised for an article slashing the novelist’s new book which had appeared that very morning in his review.

’As you know very well, my dear fellow, one is never the master in one’s own house.  I ought to see to everything, but I have so little time!  I hadn’t even read that article, I relied on what had been told me about it.  So you will understand how enraged I was when I read it this afternoon.  I am dreadfully grieved, dreadfully grieved—­’

‘Oh, let it be!  It’s the natural order of things,’ replied Sandoz, quietly.  ’Now that my enemies are beginning to praise me, it’s only proper that my friends should attack me.’

The door again opened, and Gagniere glided in softly, like a will-o’-the-wisp.  He had come straight from Melun, and was quite alone, for he never showed his wife to anybody.  When he thus came to dinner he brought the country dust with him on his boots, and carried it back with him the same night on taking the last train.  On the other hand, he did not alter; or, rather, age seemed to rejuvenate him; his complexion became fairer as he grew old.