The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 55
THE drawing-room of the house in the Rue Raynouard was a long, high-ceilinged room with tall windows opening upon a terrace and a sloping lawn which ran down to the high wall that shut out the dust and the noise of the Rue de Passy. It was curiously like the muffled, shuttered drawing-room in the old house in Cypress Hill, not because the furnishings were the same; they were not. From Shane's Castle Lily brought only two things . . . the glowing Venice and the portrait of her father. Mr. Turner's flamboyant painting hung above the black marble mantelpiece in the Rue Raynouard. The portrait of John Shane hung against the satinwood paneling opposite the row of tall windows . . . The similarity was not an easy thing to define, for its roots lay in nothing more tangible than the bond between old Julia Shane and her daughter Lily, in a subtle sense of values which the one had passed on to the other.
The cold, impersonal hand of a decorator had nothing to do with either room. There was no striving toward a museum accuracy of period. The effect was much warmer, much more personal than that. The distinction was achieved by the collection, bit by bit, of beautiful things each chosen for some quality which warmed the heart of the purchaser . . . carpets, bits of crystal and carved jade on ebony stands, books, cushions, chairs, pictures, sconces, candelabra, brocades and old Italian damasks, footstools, and mirrors which coldly reflected the warm bodies of beautiful women. Even in a city where taste and beauty were the rule, the drawing-room in the Rue Raynouard was a marvel of these qualities. It was more beautiful than the rooms of Madame Gigon's respectable friends; for these women were French bourgeoises and neither wealth nor decorators could endow them with a quality that descends from Heaven only upon the few and the blessed. These women admired Madame Shane's drawing room and envied it . . . all of them, Madame de Cyon, the Comptesse de Turba, Madame Marchand, the mysterious old Madame Blaise, who people said had been a famous beauty in her youth; Geneviève Malbour, who wrote novels as dowdy as herself and struck the literary note; even the rich Duchesse de Gand, who frequented the royalist soirées and the parties given by the chic Jews, and only came occasionally to Madame Gigon to placate her husband whose title was created by the first Napoleon. They attempted to imitate the seductive, quiet beauty of Numero Dix but they failed somehow, perhaps because they could not resist introducing a pillow of just the wrong, violent shade or a pair of rubber plants, or some monstrous piece of furniture from the period of the Second Empire.
"This American" had outdone them, quite without striving or effort. Indeed if the success of Lily's drawing-room had depended upon either of these things it would have remained forever as ugly as on the day she moved into it, to succeed a chocolate manufacturer whose growing prosperity led him to a small palace in the new German style on the Avenue de Jena. She was incapable of effort. If she had been poor, if she had been forced to work, she would have become sloven; even her beauty would have deteriorated and grown sloppy through neglect. It was money which stood between her and these disasters . . . money which permitted her to enter a shop and say, "I will have this and this and this for my drawing-room," money which permitted her to enter any salon of the Rue de la Paix and say, "I will have this gown, or this one, or this," money which permitted her to go to the hairdresser, Augustine, and say, "I will have my hair waved and my complexion treated." And having been born with taste, she made no errors.
Although the friends of Madame Gigon spoke of her as "the American," it is seldom that they thought of her as a foreigner. Only her indolence and her extravagance could have betrayed to a stranger the fact that she was not a true Frenchwoman. In the seven years that followed the death of her mother, Lily abandoned forever all thought of returning to America. She spoke French to perfection, indolently and gracefully, with a fine smooth accent. Her son, for all his American parentage and British schooling, was French; or at least, not American. He had a taste for music, for pictures, even for poetry.
"Fancy that," she remarked to Ellen. "Fancy that, and think what his father has become."
And she held up a newspaper photograph of the Governor . . . now the Senator . . . clipped from one of the American newspapers which Ellen brought to Numero Dix. It portrayed him in the act of addressing the Benevolent Order of Camels in Detroit. The pose was in itself flamboyant. Everything about him flowed. His loose black cravat flowed in the breeze. His hair, worn rather long, waved behind him. His alpaca suit ballooned about his heavy figure. His stomach rested upon a flag-draped railing, and his face wore a smile that was old and familiar, the smile of one who patronized his audience. In the background there was a vague suggestion of a square, solid figure in a richly flowered costume, wearing a pince nez and a cloud of flowing veils . . . obviously the figure of the Senatoress.
Though Lily sometimes mocked the Governor, she never mentioned him as the source of Jean's restless vitality and intelligence. But it did not matter, since no one in her world and, least of all Ellen, was interested in the Governor or eager to defend him.
The women who came to her drawing-room were, first of all, "Madame Gigon's friends." Toward Lily, for all her good-nature and her submission to their world, their attitude was never more than that of acquaintances. She saw them many times a month but there remained always an insurmountable barrier. It existed perhaps because she was too indolent to make those overtures necessary to friendship, perhaps because deep down in the heart of their bourgeois respectability they detected in the American traces of the wanton. They came to the "salons" of Madame Gigon and Lily went in turn to theirs. But she never entertained in the evening save at small dinners of four and six, and she never went to balls. Her hunger for gaiety she satisfied in the midst of crowds, at the Opera, in the music halls, at the races. And always she was accompanied by Jean or Ellen or Madame Gigon so that no one was able to say that she was indiscreet. If she went out frequently with the Baron, he was after all the cousin and protector of the old woman who accompanied them. If the Baron came frequently to her house it was to see Madame Gigon who was flattered by his attentions and his gifts of money.
Yet it could not be said that she was more friendly with men than with women. The men admired her. Indeed men from the world of fashion, from the world of the Duchesse de Guermantes' soirées, sometimes mingled with the dowdy Bonapartists of Madame Gigon's salon, brought there by friends who moved in the circle closest to "the American." They were pleasantly received and sent on their way, having accomplished nothing. If they became a trifle ardent she called Madame Gigon or the Baron to her side and the incident ended without difficulty. The visits came to nothing, for Lily appeared to have no ambitions. She was bafflingly content. She might have had great success in a score of ways, for her flamboyant beauty was a sort rarely seen among French women and it attracted notice wherever she appeared. But she had no ambi tions; she was both wealthy and content. People remarked her at the Opera but it was seldom that any one was able to identify her, for none knew her. Her circle was small, dowdy and infinitely respectable. She lived quietly with old Madame Gigon, now almost blind, and a charming son. It seemed that she was even content to forego a second marriage. And among those who admired her, because she was so good-natured and lovely to look upon, was the wife of the Baron, a pretty blond woman, rich and stupid, the daughter of a manufacturer from Lyons.
Madame Gigon adored her in two quite distinct fashions. The first because Lily was pleasant, kindly and generous. The second adoration, less commendable perhaps but none the less thorough, was the adoration of a woman pinched all her life by poverty for a fellow creature who secured her declining years with every possible luxury. Madame Gigon could not possibly forget that it was Lily who had set her up in a situation worthy of a woman whose father had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little. The widow of the curator of the Cluny Museum had grown very small and dry. Her face resembled a withered pomegranate both in texture and color. Her dog Fifi had long since been laid to rest in the dog's cemetery on a little island in the Seine where Madame Shane had kindly raised a tombstone with Fifi in marble sitting on a bronze cushion, "tout à fait comme dans la vie." Fifi had not one successor but two, both provided by Madame Shane to console "her poor old Louise." One was a black and tan, for all the world like the departed Fifi, and bore the name of Criquette. The other, a perky black Scotty brought back from England as a surprise, bore the name of Michou. They slept in Madame Gigon's room over-looking the garden and had their own corner in the Louis Seize dining room, where they ate when the rest of the household sat down at an enormous table lighted by tall candles. Like Fifi they had gone the way of gateaux and were stout and short of breath.