‘Chéri!’ said Solange, turning pale.

  ‘You are my accomplice now,’ said Grandsailles gently. ‘You are going to obey and carry out the laws of my perversion to the last detail,’ he went on, both gentle and tyrannical.

  Solange gave a little affirmative and unhappy nod.

  ‘The beginning will be a small matter for you,’ concluded the Count, having again become wholly gentle.

  Solange gave another little affirmative and painful nod, trying to smile at him sweetly. Grandsailles was for a long time silent in order thoroughly to cement by this silence the seeming compliance which he had drawn forth by Solange’s second assent.

  ‘But what? What must I do?’

  Grandsailles had calmly written down the address of his house in the Bois de Boulogne on one of the pages of his date-book, which he tore out and passed to Solange with a sure hand. It was now Solange’s slender gloved hand that trembled as it took this piece of paper, as if shaken by a fine and continual, almost electric nervousness. Grandsailles then gave his directions in short and steel-edged sentences, illustrating these by drawings which he pencilled on the tablecloth, going into details as to their execution, rectifying… before Solange’s gaze. Her cheeks had become red-hot coals, while she felt her lips and her forehead turn to ice.

  ‘There,’ said the Count, ‘this is the entrance gate to the little chestnut grove. It will be open. There you must get out. Cars can’t go in. The house is at the end of the path. You will ring. The door will be open, but you won’t see anyone, and no one will be there to show you the way. You will go up to the second floor. The first door to your left in the corridor – that is your boudoir. It will be lighted. There you will get undressed.’

  ‘Altogether?’ asked Solange.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Count. ‘You will come into my bedroom and lie down on the bed.’

  ‘How will I know where your room is?’ Solange asked again.

  ‘It connects with your boudoir, through the only door besides the one from the hall,’ Grandsailles answered, caressing with his pencil the pale floor-plan of this boudoir which he had just drawn. ‘I shall be in my room waiting for you,’ Grandsailles continued, speaking more rapidly. ‘When you open the door to my room everything will automatically become dark. You will remain motionless on my bed, in the dark, about fifteen minutes. When the clock strikes two you will leave again. During all this time nothing must happen between us – neither a touch nor a word. And afterwards we must never consider that we have the right to make the slightest allusion to this episode.’

  ‘How am I going to reach the bed in the dark?’ Solange asked, in a childish and worried voice, as if frightened at the possibility of making a mistake.

  Grandsailles then severely repressed a smile that might have risked weakening the ascendant and triumphal march of his tyranny, and answered her as dryly as he could, ‘I have foreseen that. My bed will be immediately behind the door. You will only have to take one step forward to reach it. There will be a very feeble night-lamp placed at the other end of your boudoir, whose light will enable you to find your way back when you leave.’

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ Solange sighed…. ‘And when is all this going to happen?’

  ‘Tonight,’ said Grandsailles.

  ‘At what time am I to come?’ asked Solange, getting up and pulling back her glove to uncover a strip of her wrist for Grandsailles to kiss.

  ‘Come at half-past one.’ Then the Count, as if unable to resist a last whim, held her back by the hand for a moment and added, ‘It would give me pleasure to know I could look forward to your coming to the rendezvous wearing the same furs that you have on now.’

  Behind the great rain-streaked window the Count of Grandsailles watched Solange disappear, with the help of her chauffeur, in the depths of her Rolls-Royce. Then he pulled a slender, dry cigar from his pocket, vigorously bit off the end and spat it out with the same plebeian heedlessness as a peasant of the plain of Creux de Libreux might have done; out of a velvet case he took his diamond-studded obsidian cigar-holder on which were chiselled three hawk’s claws with gold talons, put his cigar in it and had the waiter give him a light.

  Sitting back in her car, Solange slowly relived the killing emotion of her laconic rendezvous with Grandsailles. ‘At least,’ she said to herself, ‘he now thinks only of me; he spoke neither of the war nor of his ball….’

  At exactly half-past one Solange de Cléda passed through the wrought-iron gate that formed the limit of the little chestnut grove, and when she was halfway up the path she saw the entrance door open. Someone must have been on the lookout for her so that she would not have to wait in the rain. She would not for anything in the world have had the rain cease. This persistence of grey, sombre weather enveloped everything that she had lived through with the Count of Grandsailles for the last three days in a kind of unreality and timelessness. Going up the stairs she felt her heart in her throat. She said to herself, ‘I would rather die than falter!’ But her feet seemed to have wings. She opened the first door to the left with a firm turn of the wrist, swung it into the boudoir and closed it again without a sound. She immediately felt dazzled and surrounded by a white, milky light, blended with an intense and intoxicating fragrance. The four walls of the boudoir were entirely lined with tube-roses. This decoration, improvised that very morning, was the work of the famous florist-decorator Grimiert, the master of ceremonies of the official festivals of the season of ‘la Ville de Paris’. The flowers were held up by a harmonious trellis of diagonally crossed white and green cords that spanned the walls and that were barely visible among the leaves; but at each intersection was fastened a little knot of gold cord, which gave to the whole a sunlike glitter. On the floor the tiling was covered with a carpet of dark, thick moss, giving to the whole the illusion of a uniform surface of velvet. The dressing-table was in turn entirely abloom with tube-roses and exactly in the centre lay a glittering jewel representing a small split pomegranate in gold and rubies, scrupulously executed after the description in ‘Le Rêve de Polyphile’. This jewel was accompanied by a little pearl-bordered plaque on which was written, likewise in pearls, the one word, ‘Merci’.

  Solange, who had taken only a moment to undress, opened the door to the Count’s room and everything was plunged in complete darkness; she took one step forward, and immediately her leg struck the bed; lightly, with an almost immaterial suppleness, she slipped on to the smooth, taut sheets and lay motionless, trying to moderate her breathing that seemed to rend her sides. She held herself with her face lifted toward the ceiling and her arms crossed on her chest, struggling to calm the tumult of all her senses, stubbornly imposing upon herself the fixed idea of thinking about the hour of her own death; it was thus that she was able to push back, step by step, the pleasure that she felt so close to the threshold of her immobility.

  Outside could be heard the incessant scratchings of branches rubbing against one another beneath the Wagnerian sighs of the wind, the exasperation of leafy branches heavily soaked with rain striking systematically against the drawn shades of the window with the lapping sound of wet cloth…. When the clock struck two, Solange got up, light as a feather, but she restrained her impetus at once, leaning her knee against the edge of the bed for a few seconds before shutting the door again behind her, and lighting the flower-lined boudoir again in all its whiteness. As soon as she had put on her furs she took the gold pomegranate and the little plaque and slipped them into her muff, and presently, as though she had been whisked through space in a single breath by fairies, she found herself once more in her bedroom on Rue de Babylone, weeping in her bed.

  As soon as Solange had left, the Count of Grandsailles turned on the light in his room. The sheets of his bed, imperceptibly mussed, barely kept the imprint of Solange’s body, and her irremediable absence suddenly assailed him, haunting him and plunging his desire into a deep distress, in the heart of which the most contradictory feelings began to batter one another in a cruel struggle. First of all his bourgeois prejudices, startled into wakefulness, severely condemned Solange for having obeyed him so readily, and immediately the prod of his contempt painfully pricked through the still intact membrane of his esteem for the woman, who had needed so little urging to appear naked in his presence. But the pain was tinged with remorse over the hastiness of his, perhaps unfair, judgment and was instantly followed by a kind of infinite tenderness that found release in tears. For even in the total darkness he had felt Solange’s nakedness like that of a martyrized, humiliated victim!…

  But this feeling of compassion, in spite of its intensity, did not last long either, for now all the chaotic and ambivalent uneasiness of his thoughts was giving way to a single emotion, more and more clear, debasing, tyrannical and unendurable – that of jealousy. Yes, he was vexed at feeling himself, for the first time since he had known Solange, dying of jealousy! And the mere unfounded supposition that she might have belonged to another as easily as to him kindled all his blood. For that matter, this eventuality now appeared to him as an accomplished and inevitable fact. He instantly imagined Solange after their ‘spell’ scene falling compliantly into the arms of the Viscount of Angerville, and this fleeting vision brought such a pang to his heart that he was obliged to raise his hand to it. ‘I’m becoming maudlin, like a two-year-old,’ said Grandsailles to himself ruefully, pressing the flesh on his chest with his contracted fingers. ‘In fact this all goes together, with the recurrence of my complex of impotence.’

  Filled with such thoughts, he made his way to the other end of his antechamber, and in the semi-darkness he poured a spoonful of his green potion into the glass and lifted it to his lips; immediately he spat out the liquid, retching with disgust and coughing violently. He had half-swallowed a spoonful of his bitter potion. He then lit the light. Was it possible that the canoness could have made a mistake? She had indeed, for the blue-enamelled flask was on the left in the place that should have been occupied by the red-enamelled flask: and the glasses were likewise turned around. This interchange of objects also struck him as a bad omen, and he rang furiously for the canoness.

  He did not have to explain why he had sent for her. The glass on the floor and the Count’s mouth, twisted with disgust, sufficed. For a long time the canoness gazed alternately at the two flasks, the flagrant proof of her mistake. In her consternation she could do nothing but shake her head in sign of contrition. Finally the wrinkles in her brow smoothed, for she had just snatched the cause of her distraction from the depth of her memory. She remembered now, and she was telling the truth: the last time she had prepared the Count’s two potions had been the very afternoon when she had learned that war had been declared…. Such a thing had had to happen to give the Count of Grandsailles cause to complain about the order in which his familiar objects were kept.

  ‘Well, my good canoness,’ sighed Grandsailles, ‘this war seems to me to be beginning with a very bitter taste!’

  The canoness had already started toward the Count’s door, and she had only to pass her gnarled hand once across the sheets to smooth them before opening the bed, then she went through the flower-decked boudoir without wishing to look and making a face as though she could not stand the smell of tube-roses.

  ‘Confound Grandsailles,’ she muttered, reverting to her fixed idea, ‘it’s not with flowers that one gets children!’

  The Count of Grandsailles, though he was preparing to go out, was beside himself, and he paced his apartment aimlessly, unable to banish from his mind the Viscount of Angerville’s elegant face with that vague, indeterminate moustache that could just as easily have been borrowed from the nonchalantly sporting face of a contemporary lord at the court of Saint James as from the discreetly malicious face of a councillor of the period of Richelieu. Presently d’Angerville’s distant and outrageously gallant smile began to assume the hateful expression of perfidy. D’Angerville was his rival and, giving free rein to his imagination, Grandsailles treated himself to the sybaritic torture of supposing himself married to Solange, while d’Angerville continued to be her lover! It was as though the lions of love had been let loose in Grandsailles’ brain, and the canoness who was watching him out of the corner of her eye, while she straightened the closets in the hall – she could hear those lions roar in his silence – was terrified to see the Count stop his pacing back and forth and go and fetch his revolver out of the drawer of his desk. This he habitually did each time he left for England, and he was in fact going to London the following day. Nevertheless this anticipated precaution, at this hour, meant that Grandsailles no longer intended to come back to sleep tonight. Moreover she did not like the obsessive way in which he so calmly slipped the weapon into his pocket.

  ‘This nightmarish rendezvous was all I needed!’ Grandsailles said aloud to himself as he got into his coat, alluding to the engagement in Scotland which he had accepted that same day, yielding to an inflamed and urgent appeal from Lady Chidester-Ames. This was a thing which, if possible, further added to the confusion of his feelings. It is true that he hoped for no reconciliation from this trip. Nevertheless the fact of going back once more to his recent, most adored mistress immediately after his first ‘night of love’ with Solange, which he would have liked to surround with silence and mystery for several days, added to his growing anxiety a fresh wrong on his part, a kind of disloyalty toward Solange, as though he were already deceiving her.

  ‘In any case,’ he said to himself in an almost delirious state, turning all his exasperation against a single being, ‘d’Angerville is a man without honour!’

  Tormented by such thoughts the Count of Grandsailles took a taxi to the heights of Montmartre to Florence’s, which was the night club where Solange went almost every night. She was not there. Then he had himself driven to Maxim’s, where he sat down at the table at which the sparkling mind of Béatrice de Brantès held sway. How he detested her this evening – her voice grated on him like a nightingale’s! To make matters worse, they were speaking of Solange, who had not appeared for two days, and of d’Angerville who had just been there a while ago.

  ‘I wanted to see him before leaving for London,’ said the Count eagerly, ‘at what time did he leave here?’

  They consulted the maître d’hotel. D’Angerville had left Maxim’s in a great hurry at precisely half-past two. At this moment Béatrice de Brantès told a lurid anecdote which she ascribed to the Prince of Orminy. The latter in his youth had witnessed the execution of the anarchist Gaillart, which had taken place at dawn as usual…. After it was over, happening to pass the house where his mistress lived, d’Orminy could not contain himself and dashed upstairs and awakened her from her voluptuous morning slumber by the most passionate embraces. He wanted to make the most of his nervous state, of his excitement at seeing a head roll.

  ‘It’s only nature,’ said Saintonges cynically. ‘Men come and go.’

  The Count of Grandsailles spent the remaining hours until sunrise sitting behind the window of an all-night bistro where the truck-drivers from the Halles would drop in for a rest. From this point of vantage the Count could easily observe the two entrance doors to the Viscount of Angerville’s private mansion, and the fact that the latter’s car was parked in front of the door was an almost certain indication of what he imagined. He was watching for Solange to come out…. But as day began to dawn his situation struck him as more and more grotesque. He felt himself devoured by shame and had a homicidal urge to get it over with. He had made up his mind to provoke d’Angerville, and now accused himself bitterly of the sole and single fault of not having married Solange a long time ago. He could have adored her more than any other woman! Now it was too late. At half-past seven, no longer able to wait, the Count crossed the street to d’Angerville’s house and rang the doorbell. The valet who opened the door, having been startled out of bed, seemed frightened by the Count’s tempestuous appearance.

  ‘It’s very serious,’ said Grandsailles, ‘take me to the Viscount’s room!’ But being familiar with the house, he found his own way and broke into the room without waiting to be admitted.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked d’Angerville, shutting the book he was reading and looking for cigarettes on his bedside table.

  ‘You seem to be waiting for me, said Grandsailles, instantly recovering his naturalness. He was unprepared for the possibility of being mistaken in his suspicions and was trying now to gain time. ‘Listen, my dear Dick, I didn’t come here at this hour of the morning just to flatter you, but you’re the only person on whom I can really count.’

  D’Angerville, his long arms stretched on the eiderdown like slim greyhounds exhausted with melancholy, barely listened to him. Grandsailles continued:

  ‘I haven’t time to explain to you now. I’m leaving for London in an hour. I shall very probably be needing you there, and my mind wouldn’t be at rest if I had to leave without your assurance that you will join me if I urgently need you.’

  ‘I suppose it’s about the mining concessions of Libreux,’ said d’Angerville simply. ‘Just send me a cable and I’ll come.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Grandsailles, avariciously withholding all effusion from his voice. ‘At least I won’t have the remorse of having waked you up. You were reading.’

  ‘So I was,’ said d’Angerville, ‘I’m quite concerned about Solange de Cléda’s strange state of nerves. I have never seen anyone passing so suddenly from one emotional state to an opposite one. I had left her late yesterday afternoon. She was eloquent, like a sheaf of fireworks, burning her furs. I had to promise to telephone her at half-past two in the morning to continue our conversation. Well, I had difficulty in hearing her voice at the other end of the wire, and she hung up before I finished talking to her…. It was not sleepiness – she was like someone under a spell!’

  ‘She takes luminal to sleep,’ said Grandsailles, wishing to reduce any mystery to this strictly pharmaceutical explanation. ‘And what were you reading there?’