When the ministers went back inside, Clorinde was just standing up and saying — though they could not know in response to what remark of the Emperor’s:
‘Ah, Your Majesty can’t count on it, I’m as stubborn as a mule.’
In spite of their disagreement, Rougon returned to Paris with Delestang and Clorinde. The latter seemed anxious to make her peace with him. There was no trace now of the nervous tension that had prompted their earlier, unpleasant exchanges. She even shot him a sympathetic glance from time to time. When they were in the Bois and the landau, bathed in sunlight, was going round the lake, she lay back and, with a sigh of satisfaction, murmured:
‘Oh, what a lovely day it is today!’
Then, after appearing to daydream for a moment, she asked her husband:
‘Tell me, your sister, Madame de Combelot — is she still in love with the Emperor?’
‘Henriette is crazy,’ was all Delestang said, with a shrug.
Rougon was more forthcoming.
‘Yes, she still is,’ he said. ‘I was told that the other evening she grovelled at his feet… He helped her up and said she should be patient…’
‘Then let her be patient!’ cried Clorinde excitedly. ‘She must wait her turn.’
Chapter 12
Clorinde was now growing both odder and more assertive. She was still at bottom the tall, eccentric young woman who had once hired a horse to ride around Paris in search of a husband, but she had now grown into a real woman, large of bust, wide of hip, calmly pulling off the most unusual feats and enjoying the realization of her long-cherished dream of becoming very powerful. Those endless errands to out-of-the-way parts of the city, that flood of correspondence with people in every corner of France and Italy, that continuous rubbing of shoulders with political figures with whom she had become close, all these different activities, apparently haphazard and lacking any consistent aim, had at last secured for her a position of real influence. When she spoke seriously with people, she still alluded to the most outrageous things, madcap schemes, extravagant hopes; she still carried around with her the enormous satchel, bursting at the seams and tied with string, carrying it under her arm like a doll, and with such conviction that people would smile when they saw her pass by in her muddy petticoats. Yet her advice was sought after, and she was even feared. Nobody could have said exactly what her power was based on; it had distant, multiple origins, many of which no longer existed and would have been hard now to trace. Nothing was known beyond odd anecdotes and gossip exchanged in whispers. But the essence of this strange personality — with her eccentricity but her sound common sense which men listened to and acted upon, and her superb body in which perhaps lay the sole secret of her influence — remained a mystery. In any case, the background of Clorinde’s success mattered little. It was enough to know that, however fantastic a monarch she was, she reigned supreme. She was truly revered.
She seemed to control everything. In her house — to be precise, in her dressing room, with its grubby basins — she centralized the political life of all the courts of Europe. She had news and detailed reports — how, nobody knew — before the ambassadors did, and she was aware of the slightest changes in the heartbeat of governments. She thus kept her own court, consisting of bankers, diplomats, and close friends, who came to her house in the hope of getting something out of her. The bankers were especially assiduous. Out of the blue, she had enabled one of them to make about a hundred million francs, simply by alerting him to an impending change of government in a neighbouring country. She held petty politics in disdain. She blurted out everything she knew, diplomatic gossip and the tittle-tattle of foreign capitals, for the sheer pleasure of talking and showing that she kept her eyes simultaneously on Turin, Vienna, Madrid, London, even Berlin and Saint Petersburg; there was a never-ending flow of information on the health of kings, their love affairs, their habits, the political personalities of every country, even the scandals of the smallest German duchy. She would sum up statesmen in a single phrase, flitting from north to south without rhyme or reason, stirring up kingdoms on a whim, treating every one of them as her own, as if she kept the whole world, its cities and peoples, in a little toybox, setting up the pasteboard houses and little wooden men as her mood took her. And when she fell silent, from sheer fatigue, she would make a favourite gesture: put thumb and middle finger together and snap them, as if to say that none of it was worth a fig.
Amid her multifarious activities, what at the moment interested her passionately was a matter of the utmost gravity of which she was at pains to say nothing at all, though she could not quite deny herself the luxury of an occasional hint. She wanted Venice. When she spoke of the great Italian minister, she said ‘Cavour’* in a most familiar way. She would add: ‘He was against it, but I insisted. He understood.’ Morning and afternoon, she was likely to be closeted with Count Rusconi at the Italian legation. Indeed, the ‘cause’ was now going very well. Her mind at rest, throwing back her goddess-like head and speaking like a sleepwalker, she let slip a few incoherent phrases, faint indications that there had been a secret meeting between the Emperor and a foreign statesman, that there was some scheme for a treaty of alliance of which the terms were still under discussion, and that there would be a war in the spring. There were other days when she was in a foul mood, kicking chairs and table legs in her bedroom, tipping over basins or breaking them. She behaved then like a queen who had been let down by her idiot ministers and saw her kingdom going from bad to worse. On days like this she would raise her bare arm in a tragic gesture and, shaking her fist towards the south-east, in the direction of Italy, would repeat: ‘Oh, if only I was there, they would never behave so stupidly.’
Clorinde’s involvement in affairs of state did not prevent her from immersing herself in all kinds of other activities, in which in the end she seemed to get lost. She would often be found sitting up in bed, the contents of her huge satchel tipped out on the counterpane, up to her elbows in papers, beside herself, weeping with frustration, losing her way altogether in the mass of loose sheets, or trying to find a file and finally discovering it behind a piece of furniture, under an old pair of boots, mixed up with dirty clothes. Whenever she set forth to wind up one piece of business, she would start two or three others en route. Her activities became increasingly complicated, she lived in a permanent state of excitement, in a whirlwind of ideas and activity, in a world of endless, unfathomable intrigue. In the evening, after a day spent traipsing about Paris, she got back home with her legs aching from having climbed so many stairs, bringing with her in her skirts the strange smells of the places she had visited; but nobody could have guessed half the dealings she had been engaged in all over the city. If anyone asked her, she just laughed. She herself did not always remember.
It was at this time that she took it into her head to rent a private room in one of the main boulevard restaurants. She said her house in the Rue du Colisée was too out of the way, she needed a pied-à-terre that was central; and so she turned this private room into her office. For two months she received people there, served by waiters who acted as ushers, announcing the most eminent people. High officials, ambassadors, ministers, all called to see her at the restaurant. Quite unconcerned, she sat them down on a divan whose springs had been broken by the previous season’s carnival couples, while she sat in state at the table, from which the white cloth was never removed, and which was covered with breadcrumbs and papers. There was one occasion when she suddenly felt unwell and simply climbed up to the attics to lie down in the room of the waiter who was looking after her, a tall, dark fellow she allowed to kiss her. She stayed there, refusing to go home until nearly midnight.
In spite of everything, Delestang was happy. He seemed not to notice his wife’s eccentricities. He was now completely under her thumb; she made whatever use of him she wanted, without his daring to utter a word of protest. His temperament predisposed him to this subservience. He enjoyed his life too muc
h to attempt rebellion. Whenever she chose to put up with him for the night, he would be the one, in the morning, who waited on her when she got up, searching for the odd lost boot under the chairs or rummaging in the wardrobe for a slip without a hole in it. He was content to be able to retain in public his pose as the smiling, superior male. Indeed, he used to speak of his wife with such serenity and with such loving concern that he was almost respected for it.
When she had thus become all-powerful, Clorinde had the idea of bringing her mother back from Turin, saying she now wanted the Countess to spend six months of every year with her. There was now an explosion of daughterly love. She turned one floor of the house upside down in order to install the old lady as close to her own apartment as possible. She even had a communicating door put in, so she could go straight from her dressing room to her mother’s bedroom. Especially when Rougon was there, she flaunted her affection for the Countess with the most extravagant show of Italian endearments. However could she have resigned herself so long to living apart from her mother, she who had never been without her for a single hour before she was married? She accused herself of hard-heartedness. But it had not been her fault, she had been forced to accept the advice of others, who had argued that the separation was necessary, though she had never understood why. Rougon reacted phlegmatically to this revolt. He no longer lectured her. He had given up trying to make her one of Paris’s great ladies. There had been a time when he would have spent hours with her, when his blood smouldered with the fever of inactivity, and his body was alive with the desires of a wrestler at rest. Today, in the midst of battle, he hardly gave a thought to such things. What little sensuality he had was absorbed by his fourteen hours of work each day. However, he still treated her affectionately, but with a hint of his disdain for all women; he still came to see her from time to time, his eyes seeming to glow with a renewal of his old, frustrated passion. She remained his great weakness, the only woman who troubled him.
Ever since Rougon had been living at the Ministry, where his friends complained that they could no longer see him in private, Clorinde had conceived the idea of receiving them at her house. Gradually the custom became established, and, to make the point that her ‘at homes’ were replacing those at the Rue Marbeuf, she fixed them, like his, on Thursdays and Sundays. The only difference was that at the Rue du Colisée they stayed until one in the morning. She received her guests in her boudoir. Delestang still kept the big drawing room locked, for fear of grease-spots. As the boudoir was very small, she used to leave her bedroom and dressing room open, so that more often than not they all crowded into her bedroom, and sat in the midst of piles of clothes.
On Thursdays and Sundays, Clorinde’s great concern was to get back in time to dine early and do the honours at her soirée. In spite of her best efforts to remember, on two occasions she forgot completely about her guests, and was surprised when she found them all round her bed when she arrived home just after midnight. One Thursday, towards the end of May, most exceptionally, she came back shortly before five. She had gone out on foot and been caught in a shower while crossing the Place de la Concorde and had not been able to bring herself to fork out the three francs for a cab up the Champs-Élysées. Soaked to the skin, she went straight to her dressing room, where her maid Antonia, her lips all smeared from a slice of bread and jam she had just eaten, undressed her, splitting her sides at the way water was streaming from her skirts on to the parquet.
‘There’s a gentleman here,’ Antonia said at last, when she had squatted on the floor and pulled off Clorinde’s boots. ‘He’s been waiting at least an hour.’
Clorinde asked what the man looked like. Antonia, still on the floor, her hair tousled, her dress dirty, her white teeth gleaming in her swarthy face, said he was a stout gentleman, and very grim-looking.
‘Ah yes! It’s Monsieur de Reuthlinguer, the banker!’ cried Clorinde. ‘That’s right, he was supposed to come at four. Well, he’ll have to wait… Get me a bath ready, will you?’
And she stretched out in her bath, behind the curtain at the end of the dressing room. There, she proceeded to read the afternoon mail. After fully half an hour, Antonia, who had gone out a few minutes earlier, came back and whispered:
‘The gentleman saw Madame come back. He would very much like to talk to her.’
‘Of course, I was forgetting the Baron!’ cried Clorinde, standing up in the bath. ‘Dress me, quick!’
But this evening she was extremely particular about her toilet. There were times when her indifference about her appearance turned into sudden worship of her body. Then she would become obsessed with every detail. She would stand naked before her mirror, having her limbs rubbed with unguents and pomades and aromatic oils of which she alone had the secret. They had been bought for her in Constantinople from the Sultan’s harem perfumery, she said, by an Italian diplomat who was a friend of hers. While Antonia rubbed her, she stood as still as a statue. The oils were supposed to make her skin soft and white, and as ageless as marble. One oil especially, the drops of which she would count out on to a flannel, had the miraculous property of removing immediately the slightest wrinkle. Then came a painstaking examination of hands and feet. She could have spent a whole day in self-worship.
Nevertheless, after three-quarters of an hour, when at last she had had a slip and a petticoat put over her head by Antonia, she suddenly remembered again.
‘The Baron! Oh, too bad, just tell him to come in here! After all, he knows what a woman looks like.’
The Baron de Reuthlinguer had been waiting patiently in Clorinde’s boudoir for two hours now, hands clasped on his knees. Pale, cold-blooded, austere in his habits, this banker, who was one of the richest men in Europe, had thus been made to cool his heels in Clorinde’s anteroom for some time now, as often as two or three times a week. He even enticed her to his own house, with its prudish atmosphere and icy correctness, where her flamboyant manner caused consternation among the valets.
‘Hello, Baron!’ cried Clorinde, ‘I’m having my hair done, don’t look!’
She was still only half dressed, her slip slithering off her shoulders. The Baron’s bloodless lips curved into an indulgent smile. He stood in front of her, his eyes cold and limpid, and bent forward with a bow of the utmost courtesy.
‘You’ve come to hear the news, haven’t you? Well, I’ve got something.’
Getting to her feet, she sent Antonia out, leaving the comb in her hair. No doubt she was still afraid of being overheard, for she put one hand on the banker’s shoulder, then stretched up and whispered something in his ear. As he listened, his eyes were fixed on her bosom; but he appeared to have seen nothing, for he simply gave a quick nod.
‘There!’ she said, out loud. ‘Now you can get going.’
He grabbed her arm and drew her to him, to ask for details. He would hardly have treated one of his clerks with greater familiarity. When he left, he invited her to dinner the following day; his wife, he said, missed seeing her. She went all the way to the front door with him. Then, suddenly, she blushed deeply and folded her arms over her bosom.
‘Just look at me, coming all this way with you like this!’ she cried.
She now told Antonia to get a move on. The girl was far too slow! Clorinde hardly gave her time to do her hair up. She said she hated dawdling over her toilet like this. Despite the season, she insisted on putting on a long black velvet gown, a kind of loose tunic drawn in at the waist by a red silk cord. Twice already a maid had come up to tell Madame that dinner was served. Then, as she went through her bedroom, she came upon three gentlemen, whose presence nobody had noticed. It was the three political refugees — Messieurs Brambilla, Staderino, and Viscardi. But she did not seem at all surprised to find them there.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ she asked.
‘Yes, we have,’ they replied, looking at her very seriously.
In fact they had arrived before the banker. And, as befitted mysterious characters made silent and t
aciturn by political misfortune, they had not made the slightest sound. They were now seated side by side on the same settee, chewing at dead cigars, all three leaning back in identical postures. However, now that Clorinde had come, they stood up, and there was a rapid, murmured exchange in Italian. She seemed to be giving them instructions. One of them wrote something in a notebook, while the other two, seeming excited by what Clorinde had said, stifled faint little cries with their gloved hands. Then all three left together, in single file, their faces expressionless.
This particular Thursday, in the evening, there was to be a meeting of ministers to discuss an important matter, a dispute over a question of viability. When he left after dinner, Delestang had promised Clorinde he would bring Rougon home with him. She pouted, as if to say she was not keen on the idea. It had not yet come to a rupture, but she had become increasingly cool towards Rougon.
At about nine o’clock, Monsieur Kahn and Monsieur Béjuin were the first to arrive, and were followed, soon after, by Madame Correur. They found Clorinde stretched out on a chaise longue in her bedroom, complaining of one of the very strange attacks she sometimes had. This time she was sure she had swallowed a fly while drinking. She could feel it flitting around in the pit of her stomach. With her loose black velvet tunic draped over her, and raised on three pillows, she was quite regal in her loveliness, her face very pale, her arms bare, like one of those prone figures that lie dreaming at the foot of monuments. At her feet, Luigi Pozzo was softly plucking the strings of a guitar; he had abandoned painting for music.