Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/128

112 Dufour, his coat off, his waistcoat and shirt unbuttoned, his head rolled weakly back upon the gilded wood-scroll of his Louis Ouinze chair: his face flushed and swollen, strangely broadened, coarsened and undone, with sick, loose expressions rolling over it as shallow water rolls above a stone; he had in his hands an old lute, a studio property, from which he had been picking poor detached, discordant notes.

There were other men, with wild arrested merriment in their faces, the merriment of licence. Mixed among them, tangling like the serpents and reptiles in an allegorical picture, were women of whom the drapery or the bareness seemed indifferently lewd.

One had fainted with a glass at her lips, and the splash of spilled liquor was on her neck and dripping from her chin. No one heeded her.

Another had dashed her head upon the table, her hands were clutched in her hair, shaking with a palsy of terror; and from her arose the sobs which were no more than the dull moaning of a beast in labour.

One other, in a dress all Paris would have recognised as being the orange ballet-muslins in which Dufour had painted his celebrated "Coquelicot," was lying with long white arms spread on the back of a chair; above her low black satin bodice the waves of her dead-white breast were heaving convulsively; her red hair blazed from under the live fantastic orange-poppy horns that spread out from her head; her clever, common little face was twitching to recover a vinous courage, the black eyes were blinking, the crooked lines of her mouth more fascinating than any fancied bow-curve were moving in irresponsible striving to open on one side, as they had a habit of doing, and let out some daring phrase.

All that they saw, these miserable revellers, was the white