She took pleasure in dressing early, with delicate and subtle taste. Her
dressing-room, an aesthetic fantasy of Vivian Bell, with its coarsely
varnished pottery, its tall copper pitchers, and its faience pavement,
like a chess-board, resembled a fairy’s kitchen. It was rustic and
marvellous, and the Countess Martin could have in it the agreeable
surprise of mistaking herself for a fairy. While her maid was dressing
her hair, she heard Dechartre and Choulette talking under her windows.
She rearranged all the work Pauline had done, and uncovered the line of
her nape, which was fine and pure. She looked at herself in the glass,
and went into the garden.
Dechartre was there, reciting verses of Dante, and looking at Florence:
“At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh...”
Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs
hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of
Misery on his stick.
Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle: “At the hour when our
mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of
thoughts, is almost divine in its visions,...”
She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and dressed
in a straw-colored gown. The faint sunlight of winter enveloped her in
pale gold.
Dechartre greeted her joyfully.
She said:
“You are reciting verses that I do not know. I know only Metastasio. My
teacher liked only Metastasio. What is the hour when the mind has divine
visions?”
“Madame, that hour is the dawn of the day. It may be also the dawn of
faith and of love.”
Choulette doubted that the poet meant dreams of the morning, which leave
at awakening vivid and painful impressions, and which are not altogether
strangers to the flesh. But Dechartre had quoted these verses in the
pleasure of the glorious dawn which he had seen that morning on the
golden hills. He had been, for a long time, troubled about the images
that one sees in sleep, and he believed that these images were not
related to the object that preoccupies one the most, but, on the
contrary, to ideas abandoned during the day.
Therese recalled her morning dream, the hunter lost in the thicket.
“Yes,” said Dechartre, “the things we see at night are unfortunate
remains of what we have neglected the day before. Dreams avenge things
one has disdained. They are reproaches of abandoned friends. Hence their
sadness.”
She was lost in dreams for a moment, then she said:
“That is perhaps true.”
Then, quickly, she asked Choulette if he had finished the portrait
of Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and
Choulette recognized the Virgin in it. He had even composed a quatrain
which he was to write on it in spiral form--a didactic and moral
quatrain. He would cease to write, except in the style of the
commandments of God rendered into French verses. The four lines
expressed simplicity and goodness. He consented to recite them.
Therese rested on the balustrade of the terrace and sought in the
distance, in the depth of the sea of light, the peaks of Vallambrosa,
almost as blue as the sky. Jacques Dechartre looked at her. It seemed
to him that he saw her for the first time, such was the delicacy that he
discovered in her face, which tenderness and intelligence had invested
with thoughtfulness without altering its young, fresh grace. The
daylight which she liked, was indulgent to her. And truly she was
pretty, bathed in that light of Florence, which caresses beautiful forms
and feeds noble thoughts. A fine, pink color rose to her well-rounded
cheeks; her eyes, bluish-gray, laughed; and when she talked, the
brilliancy of her teeth set off her lips of ardent sweetness. His look
embraced her supple bust, her full hips, and the bold attitude of her
waist. She held her parasol with her left hand, the other hand played
with violets. Dechartre had a mania for beautiful hands. Hands presented
to his eyes a physiognomy as striking as the face--a character, a soul.
These hands enchanted him. They were exquisite. He adored their slender
fingers, their pink nails, their palms soft and tender, traversed by
lines as elegant as arabesques, and rising at the base of the fingers
in harmonious mounts. He examined them with charmed attention until she
closed them on the handle of her umbrella. Then, standing behind her, he
looked at her again. Her bust and arms, graceful and pure in line, her
beautiful form, which was like that of a living amphora, pleased him.
“Monsieur Dechartre, that black spot over there is the Boboli Gardens,
is it not? I saw the gardens three years ago. There were not many
flowers in them. Nevertheless, I liked their tall, sombre trees.”
It astonished him that she talked, that she thought. The clear sound of
her voice amazed him, as if he never had heard it.
He replied at random. He was awkward. She feigned not to notice it, but
felt a deep inward joy. His low voice, which was veiled and softened,
seemed to caress her. She said ordinary things:
“That view is beautiful, The weather is fine.”