Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/309

Rh watched the walk of Mademoiselle de la Mole, whom her mother had called to present to several women friends of hers. She exaggerates all the fashions. Her dress almost falls down to her shoulders, she is even paler than before she went away. How nondescript her hair has grown as the result of being blonde! You would say that the light passed through it.

What a haughty way of bowing and of looking at you! What queenly gestures! Mademoiselle de la Mole had just called her brother at the moment when he, was leaving the salon.

The comte de Norbert approached Julien.

"My dear Sorel," he said to him. "Where would you like me to pick you up to-night for Monsieur's ball. He expressly asked me to bring you."

"I know well whom I have to thank for so much kindness," answered Julien bowing to the ground.

His bad temper, being unable to find anything to lay hold of in the polite and almost sympathetic tone in which Norbert had spoken to him, set itself to work on the answer he had made to that courteous invitation. He detected in it a trace of subservience.

When he arrived at the ball in the evening, he was struck with the magnificence of the Hôtel de Retz. The courtyard at the entrance was covered with an immense tent of crimson with golden stars. Nothing could have been more elegant. Beyond the tent, the court had been transformed into a wood of orange trees and of pink laurels in full flower. As they had been careful to bury the vases sufficiently deep, the laurel trees and the orange trees appeared to come straight out of the ground. The road which the carriages traversed was sanded.

All this seemed extraordinary to our provincial. He had never had any idea of such magnificence. In a single instant his thrilled imagination had left his bad temper a thousand leagues behind. In the carriage on their way to the ball Norbert had been happy, while he saw everything in black colours. They had scarcely entered the courtyard before the rôles changed.

Norbert was only struck by a few details which, in the midst of all that magnificence, had not been able to be attended to. He calculated the expense of each item, and Julien remarked