"Shall you go home?" inquired the Countess of Bertin, with whose habits she was familiar.
"No, I am going to the club."
"Then, shall we set you down there in passing?"
"Thank you, that will be very convenient."
"And when shall you invite us to breakfast with the Duchess?"
"Name your day."
This painter in ordinary to the fair Parisians, whom his admirers christened "a Watteau realist" and his detractors a "photographer of gowns and mantles," often received at breakfast or at dinner the beautiful persons whose feature he had reproduced, as well as the celebrated and the well known, who found very amusing these little entertainments in a bachelor's establishment.
"The day after to-morrow, then. Will the day after to-morrow suit you, my dear Duchess?" asked Madame de Guilleroy.
"Yes, indeed; you are charming! Monsieur Bertin never thinks of me when he has his little parties. It is quite evident that I am no longer young."
The Countess, accustomed to consider the artist's home almost the same as her own, replied:
"Only we four, the four of the landau--the Duchess, Annette, you and I, eh, great artist?"
"Only ourselves," said he, alighting from the carriage, "and I will have prepared for you some crabs _a l'alsacienne_."
"Oh, you will awaken a desire for luxury in the little one!"
He bowed to them, standing beside the carriage door, then entered quickly the vestibule of the main entrance to the club, threw his topcoat and cane to a group of footmen, who had risen like soldiers at the passing of an officer; mounted the broad stairway, meeting another brigade of servants in knee-breeches, pushed open a door, feeling himself suddenly as alert as a young man, as he heard at the end of the corridor a continuous clash of foils, the sound of stamping feet, and loud exclamations: _"Touche!" "A moi." "Passe!" "J'en ai!" "Touche!" "A vous!"_
In the fencing-hall the swordsmen, dressed in gray linen, with leather vests, their trousers tight around the ankles, a sort of apron falling over the front of the body, one arm in the air, with the hand thrown backward, and in the other hand, enormous in a large fencing-glove, the thin, flexible foil, extended and recovered with the agile swiftness of mechanical jumping-jacks.
Others rested and chatted, still out of breath, red and perspiring, with handkerchief in hand to wipe off faces and necks; others, seated on a square divan that ran along the four sides of the hall, watched the fencing--Liverdy against Landa, and the master of the club, Taillade, against the tall Rocdiane.
Bertin, smiling, quite at home, shook hands with several men.
"I choose you!" cried the Baron de Baverie.
"I am with you, my dear fellow," said Bertin, passing into the dressing-room to prepare himself.
He had not felt so agile and vigorous for a long time, and, guessing that he should fence well that day, he hurried as impatiently as a schoolboy ready for play. As soon as he stood before his adversary he attacked him with great ardor, and in ten minutes he had touched him eleven times and had so fatigued him that the Baron cried for quarter.
Then he fenced with Punisimont, and with his colleague, Amaury Maldant.
The cold douche that followed, freezing his palpitating flesh, reminded him of the baths of his twentieth year, when he used to plunge head first into the Seine from the bridges in the suburbs, in order to amaze the bourgeois passers-by.
"Shall you dine here?" inquired Maldant.
"Yes."
"We have a table with Liverdy, Rocdiane, and Landa; make haste; it is a quarter past seven."
The dining-room was full, and there was a continuous hum of men's voices.
There were all the nocturnal vagabonds of Paris, idlers and workers, all those who from seven o'clock in the evening know not what to do and dine at the club, ready to catch at anything or anybody that chance may offer to amuse them.
When the five friends were seated the banker Liverdy, a vigorous and hearty man of forty, said to Bertin:
"You were in fine form this evening."
"Yes, I could have done surprising things to-day," Bertin replied.
The others smiled, and the landscape painter, Amaury Maldant, a thin little bald-headed man with a gray beard, said, with a sly expression:
"I, too, always feel the rising of the sap in April; it makes me bring forth a few leaves--half a dozen at most--then it runs into sentiment; there never is any fruit."
The Marquis de Rocdiane and the Comte Landa sympathized with him. Both were older than he, though even a keen eye could not guess their age; clubmen, horsemen, swordsmen, whose incessant exercise had given them bodies of steel, they boasted of being younger in every way than the enervated good-for-nothings of the new generation.
Rocdiane, of good family, with the entree to all salons, though suspected of financial intrigues of many kinds (which, according to Bertin, was not surprising, since he had lived so much in the gaming-houses), married, but separated from his wife, who paid him an annuity, a director of Belgian and Portuguese banks, carried boldly upon his energetic, Don Quixote-like face the somewhat tarnished honor of a gentleman, which was occasionally brightened by the blood from a thrust in a duel.
The Comte de Landa, a good-natured colossus, proud of his figure and his shoulders, although married and the father of two children, found it difficult to dine at home three times a week; he remained at the club on the other days, with his friends, after the session in the fencing-hall.
"The club is a family," he said, "the family of those who as yet have none, of those who never will have one, and of those who are bored by their own."
The conversation branched off on the subject of women, glided from anecdotes to reminiscences, from reminiscences to boasts, and then to indiscreet confidences.
The Marquis de Rocdiane allowed the names of his inamoratas to be guessed by unmistakable hints--society women whose names he did not utter, so that their identity might be the better surmised. The banker Liverdy indicated his flames by their first names. He would say: "I was at that time the best of friends with the wife of a diplomat. Now, one evening when I was leaving her, I said to her, 'My little Marguerite'"--then he checked himself, amid the smiles of his fellows, adding "Ha! I let something slip. One should form a habit of calling all women Sophie."
Olivier Bertin, very reserved, was accustomed to declare, when questioned:
"For my part, I content myself with my models."
They pretended to believe him, and Landa, who was frankly a libertine, grew quite excited at the idea of all the pretty creatures that walked the streets and all the young persons who posed undraped before the painter at ten francs an hour.
As the bottle became empty, all these gray-beards, as the younger members of the club called them, acquired red faces, and their kindling ardor awakened new desires.
Rocdiane, after the coffee, became still more indiscreet, and forgot the society women to celebrate the charms of simple cocottes.
"Paris!" said he, a glass of kummel in his hand, "The only city where a man never grows old, the only one where, at fifty, if he is sound and well preserved, he will always find a young girl, as pretty as an angel, to love him."
Landa, finding again his Rocdiane after the liqueurs, applauded him enthusiastically, and mentioned the young girls who still adored him every day.
But Liverdy, more skeptical, and pretending to know exactly what women were worth, murmured: "Yes, they tell you that they adore you!"
"They prove it to me, my dear fellow," exclaimed Landa.
"Such proofs don't count."
"They suffice me!"
"But, _sacrebleu!_ they do mean it," cried Rocdiane. "Do you believe that a pretty little creature of twenty, who has been going the rounds in Paris for five or six years already, where all our moustaches have taught her kisses and spoiled her taste for them, still knows how to distinguish a man of thirty from a man of sixty? Pshaw! what nonsense!
She has seen and known too many of them. Now, I'll wager that, down in the bottom of her heart, she actually prefers an old banker to a young stripling. Does she know or reflect upon that? Have men any age here?