French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) by Unknown

been so lively only a moment before. It was that moment, familiar at any dinner-party, when the fatigue which comes with the emotion of theevening just passed begins to show, in the chignons coming slightly loose, in the burning cheeks, flushed or grown paler, in the wearied looks from dark-rimmed eyes, and even in the thousand flaring and guttering lights in the candelabra, which are like bouquets of flame whose stalks are sculpted in bronze and gold.
    The conversation, which had been carried on in a general and lively fashion, a game of shuttlecock in which everyone had batted back and forth, had become fragmented, and nothing distinct could now be heard above the harmonious hubbub made by all these voices, with their aristocratic accents, warbling together like the dawn chorus at the edge of a wood… when one of these voices—a clarion voice—imperious and almost impertinent, just as the voice of a duchess should be—made itself heard above the others, and addressed the following words to the Comte de Ravila, which must have been the logical conclusion to a quiet conversation she had been having with him, and which none of the other chattering ladies had heard:
    ‘Since you are reputed to be the Don Juan of our time, you ought to tell us the story of your greatest conquest, the one that most flattered your pride as a lover of women, and which you consider, in the light of this present moment, to be the crowning love of your life…’
    This challenge, as much as the voice that delivered it, cut through all the other conversations, and a sudden silence fell.
    The voice belonged to the Duchesse de ***—I shall leave her disguised behind the asterisks; but some of you may recognize her, when I say that she has the palest of pale hair and complexions, and the blackest eyes beneath her golden brows, in all of the Faubourg Saint Germain.—She was seated, like one of the just at the right hand of God, directly to the right of the Comte de Ravila, god of this feast, who had left off using his enemies as a footstool; slim and ethereal as an arabesque, she was fairylike in her green velvet dress with its silvery reflections, whose long train wound around her chair, not unlike the serpent’s tail that prolonged the charming posterior of Melusina the sea-nymph. *
    ‘Now there’s an idea!’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, eager in her role as hostess to second the motion the Duchesse had put forward. ‘Yes, the love you place above all the others, whether inspired, or felt—the one, were it possible, you should most like to live through again.’
    ‘Oh! I should like to live through them all again!’ answered Ravila with the unflagging appetite of a Roman emperor, or other replete monsters of the type. And he raised his champagne glass, which was not the crude and pagan cup they have replaced it with, but the tall, thin vessel used by our ancestors, known as the
flûte
, perhaps because of the heavenly melodies it pours into our hearts!—Then, looking round the table, he embraced with his eyes every woman in that magnetic chain. ‘And yet,’ he went on, setting down his glass before him with a melancholy astonishing for a Nebuchadnezzar like him, who had not yet eaten grass except in the tarragon salads of the Café Anglais * —‘and yet it is true, there is
one
feeling one has experienced in all one’s life, which shines more strongly in the memory than others, as life advances, and for which one would give up the rest!’
    ‘The diamond in the set,’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, dreamily, possibly contemplating the facets of her own.
    ‘… And as legend has it in my country’, chimed in the Princesse Jable… ‘which lies at the foot of the Ural Mountains, there is the famous and fabulous diamond that starts off pink, and then turns black, while remaining a diamond, and still more brilliant black than pink…’ She said that with all the strange charm that she has, this Bohemian! For she is a true