, which have passed over her head without leaving a
wrinkle, trace their passage all at once brutally in indelible marks.
People no longer say, on seeing her, "How beautiful she is!" but "How
beautiful she must have been!" And this cruel way of speaking in the
past, of throwing back to a distant period that which was but yesterday
a visible fact, marks a beginning of old age and of retirement, a change
of all her triumphs into memories. Was it the disappointment of
seeing the doctor's wife arrive, instead of Mme. Jansoulet, or did the
discredit which the Duke de Mora's death had thrown on the fashionable
physician fall on her who bore his name? There was a little of each
of these reasons, and perhaps of another, in the cool greeting of the
baroness. A slight greeting on the ends of her lips, some hurried words,
and she returned to the noble battalion nibbling vigorously away. The
room had become animated under the effects of wine. People no longer
whispered; they talked. The lamps brought in added a new brilliance to
the gathering, but announced that it was near its close; some indeed,
not interested in the great event, having already taken their leave. And
still the Jansoulets did not come.

All at once a heavy, hurried step. The Nabob appeared, alone, buttoned
up in his black coat, correctly dressed, but with his face upset, his
eyes haggard, still trembling from the terrible scene which he had left.

She would not come.

In the morning he had told the maids to dress madame for three o'clock,
as he did each time he took out the Levantine with him, when it was
necessary to move this indolent person, who, not being able to accept
even any responsibility whatever, left others to think, decide, act for
her, going willingly where she was desired to go, once she was
started. And it was on this amiability that he counted to take her to
Hemerlingue's. But when, after _dejeuner_, Jansoulet dressed, superb,
perspiring with the effort to put on gloves, asked if madame would soon
be ready, he was told that she was not going out. The matter was grave,
so grave, that putting on one side all the intermediaries of valets and
maids, which they made use of in their conjugal dialogues, he ran up the
stairs four steps at once like a gust of wind, and entered the draperied
rooms of the Levantine.

She was still in bed, dressed in that great open tunic of silk of
two colours, which the Moors call a _djebba_, and in a little cap
embroid