rden. When the first
guests arrived and were welcomed at the door by the count and the
countess they were positively dazzled. One had only to recall to mind
the drawing room of the past, through which flitted the icy, ghostly
presence of the Countess Muffat, that antique room full of an atmosphere
of religious austerity with its massive First Empire mahogany furniture,
its yellow velvet hangings, its moldy ceiling through which the damp had
soaked. Now from the very threshold of the entrance hall mosaics set off
with gold were glittering under the lights of lofty candelabras,
while the marble staircase unfurled, as it were, a delicately chiseled
balustrade. Then, too, the drawing room looked splendid; it was hung
with Genoa velvet, and a huge decorative design by Boucher covered the
ceiling, a design for which the architect had paid a hundred thousand
francs at the sale of the Chateau de Dampierre. The lusters and the
crystal ornaments lit up a luxurious display of mirrors and precious
furniture. It seemed as though Sabine's long chair, that solitary red
silk chair, whose soft contours were so marked in the old days, had
grown and spread till it filled the whole great house with voluptuous
idleness and a sense of tense enjoyment not less fierce and hot than a
fire which has been long in burning up.

People were already dancing. The band, which had been located in the
garden, in front of one of the open windows, was playing a waltz,
the supple rhythm of which came softly into the house through the
intervening night air. And the garden seemed to spread away and away,
bathed in transparent shadow and lit by Venetian lamps, while in a
purple tent pitched on the edge of a lawn a table for refreshments
had been established. The waltz, which was none other than the quaint,
vulgar one in the Blonde Venus, with its laughing, blackguard lilt,
penetrated the old hotel with sonorous waves of sound and sent a
feverish thrill along its walls. It was as though some fleshly wind
had come up out of the common street and were sweeping the relics of a
vanished epoch out of the proud old dwelling, bearing away the Muffats'
past, the age of honor and religious faith which had long slumbered
beneath the lofty ceilings.

Meanwhile near the hearth, in their accustomed places, the old friends
of the count's mother were taking refuge. They felt out of their
element--they were dazzled and they formed a little group amid the
slowly invading mob.