第18章

"For a fortnight I seemed to take no heed of my neighbor.Towards the end of May,one lovely evening,we happened both to be out on opposite sides of the paling,both walking slowly.Having reached the end,we could not help exchanging a few civil words;she found me in such deep dejection,lost in such painful meditations,that she spoke to me of hopefulness,in brief sentences that sounded like the songs with which nurses lull their babies.I then leaped the fence,and found myself for the second time at her side.The Countess led me into the house,wishing to subdue my sadness.So at last I had penetrated the sanctuary where everything was in harmony with the woman I have tried to describe to you.

"Exquisite simplicity reigned there.The interior of the little house was just such a dainty box as the art of the eighteenth century devised for the pretty profligacy of a fine gentleman.The dining-room,on the ground floor,was painted in fresco,with garlands of flowers,admirably and marvelously executed.The staircase was charmingly decorated in monochrome.The little drawing-room,opposite the dining-room,was very much faded;but the Countess had hung it with panels of tapestry of fanciful designs,taken off old screens.Abath-room came next.Upstairs there was but one bedroom,with a dressing-room,and a library which she used as her workroom.The kitchen was beneath in the basement on which the house was raised,for there was a flight of several steps outside.The balustrade of a balcony in garlands a la Pompadour concealed the roof;only the lead cornices were visible.In this retreat one was a hundred leagues from Paris.

"But for the bitter smile which occasionally played on the beautiful red lips of this pale woman,it would have been possible to believe that this violet buried in her thicket of flowers was happy.In a few days we had reached a certain degree of intimacy,the result of our close neighborhood and of the Countess'conviction that I was indifferent to women.A look would have spoilt all,and I never allowed a thought of her to be seen in my eyes.Honorine chose to regard me as an old friend.Her manner to me was the outcome of a kind of pity.Her looks,her voice,her words,all showed that she was a hundred miles away from the coquettish airs which the strictest virtue might have allowed under such circumstances.She soon gave me the right to go into the pretty workshop where she made her flowers,a retreat full of books and curiosities,as smart as a boudoir where elegance emphasized the vulgarity of the tools of her trade.The Countess had in the course of time poetized,as I may say,a thing which is at the antipodes to poetry--a manufacture.

"Perhaps of all the work a woman can do,the making of artificial flowers is that of which the details allow her to display most grace.

For coloring prints she must sit bent over a table and devote herself,with some attention,to this half painting.Embroidering tapestry,as diligently as a woman must who is to earn her living by it,entails consumption or curvature of the spine.Engraving music is one of the most laborious,by the care,the minute exactitude,and the intelligence it demands.Sewing and white embroidery do not earn thirty sous a day.But the making of flowers and light articles of wear necessitates a variety of movements,gestures,ideas even,which do not take a pretty woman out of her sphere;she is still herself;she may chat,laugh,sing,or think.

"There was certainly a feeling for art in the way in which the Countess arranged on a long deal table the myriad-colored petals which were used in composing the flowers she was to produce.The saucers of color were of white china,and always clean,arranged in such order that the eye could at once see the required shade in the scale of tints.Thus the aristocratic artist saved time.A pretty little cabinet with a hundred tiny drawers,of ebony inlaid with ivory,contained the little steel moulds in which she shaped the leaves and some forms of petals.A fine Japanese bowl held the paste,which was never allowed to turn sour,and it had a fitted cover with a hinge so easy that she could lift it with a finger-tip.The wire,of iron and brass,lurked in a little drawer of the table before her.

"Under her eyes,in a Venetian glass,shaped like a flower-cup on its stem,was the living model she strove to imitate.She had a passion for achievement;she attempted the most difficult things,close racemes,the tiniest corollas,heaths,nectaries of the most variegated hues.Her hands,as swift as her thoughts,went from the table to the flower she was making,as those of an accomplished pianist fly over the keys.Her fingers seemed to be fairies,to use Perrault's expression,so infinite were the different actions of twisting,fitting,and pressure needed for the work,all hidden under grace of movement,while she adapted each motion to the result with the lucidity of instinct.

"I could not tire of admiring her as she shaped a flower from the materials sorted before her,padding the wire stem and adjusting the leaves.She displayed the genius of a painter in her bold attempts;she copied faded flowers and yellowing leaves;she struggled even with wildflowers,the most artless of all,and the most elaborate in their simplicity.