What could I say? This was the way in which a mere reporter on the
Boulevard found himself installed at a five-o'clock tea-table in the salon
of a château, where surely no newspaper man had ever before set foot and
was presented as a young poet and novelist of the future to the old
Marquise de Proby, whose guest the master was. This amiable white-haired
dowager questioned me upon my alleged work and I replied equivocally, with
blushes, which the good lady must have attributed to bashful timidity.
Then, as though some evil genius had conspired to multiply the witnesses
of my bad conduct, the two young women whom I had seen going out, returned
in the midst of my unlooked-for visit. Ah, my interview with this student
of femininity upon the Age for Love was about to have a living commentary!
How it would illumine his words to hear him conversing with these new
arrivals! One was a young girl of possibly twenty--a Russian if I rightly
understood the name. She was rather tall, with a long face lighted up by
two very gentle black eyes, singular in their fire and intensity. She bore
a striking resemblance to the portrait attributed to Froncia in the Salon
Carré of the Louvre which goes by the name of the "Man in Black," because
the color of his clothes and his mantle. About her mouth and nostrils was
that same subdued nervousness, that same restrained feverishness which
gives to the portrait its striking qualities. I had not been there a
quarter of an hour before I had guessed from the way she watched and
listened to Fauchery what a passionate interest the old master inspired in
her. When he spoke she paid rapt attention. When she spoke to him, I felt
her voice shiver, if I may use the word, and he, he glorious writer,
surfeited with triumphs, exhausted by his labors, seemed, as soon as he
felt the radiance of her glance of ingenuous idolatry, to recover that
vivacity, that elasticity of impression, which is the sovereign grace of
youthful lovers.