"If I were really capable of loving for five minutes consecutively, I should love you."
And when they were walking in the _Bois de Boulogne_, while the Victoria was waiting near Armenonville, during their afternoon talks when, as he used to say, they were hanging over the abyss until they both grew giddy, and spoke of love madly and ceaselessly--returning to the subject constantly, and impregnating themselves with it--Madame d"Ormonde would occasionally produce one of her favorite theories. Yes, she certainly understood possession of the beloved object, that touch of madness which seizes you from head to foot, which makes your blood hot, and which makes you forget everything else in a man"s embraces, in that supreme pleasure which overwhelms you, and which rivets two beings together for ever, by the heart and by the brain. But only at some unexpected moment, in a strange place, with a touch of something novel about it, which one would remember all one"s life, something amusing and almost maddening, which one had been in search of for a long time, and which imparted a flavor of curry, as it were, into the common-place flavor of immorality.
And Xavier de Fontrailles did all he could to discover such a place, but failed successively in a bachelor"s lodgings with silk tapestry, like a boudoir of the seventeenth century, in a villa hidden like a nest among trees and rose bushes, with a j.a.panese house furnished in an extraordinary fashion and very expensively, with latticed windows from which one could see the sea, in an old melancholy palace, from which one could see the Grand Ca.n.a.l, in rooms, in hotels, in queer quarters, in private rooms, in restaurants, and in small country houses in the recesses of woods.
Madame d"Ormonde went on her way without turning her head, but Xavier, alas! became more and more amorous, as amorous as an overgrown schoolboy who has never hitherto had any conversation with a woman, and who is amorous enough to pick up the flowers that fall from her bodice, and to be lost and unhappy as soon as he does not see her, or hear her soft, cooing voice, and see her smile....
One evening, however, he had gone with her to the fair at Saint Cloud, and went into three shows, deafened by the noise of the organs, the whistling of the machinery of the round-abouts, and the hubbub of the crowd that came and went among the booths that were illuminated by paraffin lamps. As they were pa.s.sing in front of a somnambulist"s van, Monsieur de Fontrailles stopped and said to Madame d"Ormonde:
"Would you like to have our fortune told?"
It was a very fine specimen of its kind, and had, no doubt, been far and wide. Placards and portraits, bordered by advertis.e.m.e.nts, hung above the shaky steps, and the small windows with their closed shutters, were almost hidden by boxes of sweet basil and mignonette, while an old, bald parrot, with her feathers all ruffled, was asleep just outside.
The fortune teller was sitting on a chair, quietly knitting a stocking, and on their approach she got up, went up to Madame d"Ormonde and said in an unctuous voice:
"I reveal the present, the past and the future, and even the name of the future husband or wife, and of deceased relations, as well as my client"s present and future circ.u.mstances. I have performed before crowned heads. The Emperor of Brazil came to me, with the ill.u.s.trious poet, Victor Hugo.... My charge is five francs for telling your fortune from the cards or by your hand, and twenty francs for the whole lot....
Would you like the lot, Madame?"
Madame d"Ormonde gave vent to a burst of sonorous laughter, like a street girl, who is amusing herself, but they went in and Monsieur de Fontrailles opened the gla.s.s door which was covered by a heavy red curtain. When they got in, the young woman uttered an exclamation of surprise. The interior of the van was full of roses, arranged in the most charming manner as if for a lovers" meeting. On a table covered with a damask cloth, and which was surrounded by piles of cushions, a supper was waiting for chance comers, and at the other end, concealed by heavy hangings, one could see a large, wide bed, one of those beds which give rise to sinister suggestions!
Xavier had shut the door again, and Madame d"Ormonde looked at him in a strange manner, with rather flushed cheeks, palpitating nostrils, and a look in her eyes, such as he had never seen in them before, and in a very low voice, while his heart beat violently, and he whispered into her ear:
"Well, does the decoration please you this time?"
She replied by holding up her lips to him, and then filled two gla.s.ses with extra dry champagne, which was as pale as the skin of a fair woman, and said almost as if she had already been rather drunk:
"I am decidedly worth a big stake!"
It was in this fashion that Madame d"Ormonde, for the first and last time, deceived her husband; and it was at the fair at Saint Cloud, in a somnambulist"s van.