Never had the Countess seemed to me more majestic than in those saffron silks, her décolletage edged with lace à la Marie Antoinette, her curly, reddish hair caught back over her magisterial brow, and her curved patrician nose sheltering that ever-glittering smile, just as the arch of a bridge shelters the flow and shimmer of a stream. Erect as a throne and with her long tortoiseshell lorgnette held to her small, dull blue eyes, she stood first before the Graphophone and then before the Microphone, listening as if to some superior melody as Jacinto, with pained politeness, gave a garbled explanation of their workings. And each wheel, each spring elicited from her cries of wonder and finely turned compliments, as, with a mixture of shrewdness and candour, she attributed all these scientific inventions to Jacinto himself. The mysterious implements crowding his ebony desk were for her like a stirring rite of initiation. A paginating machine! A sticker-on of stamps! The metals grew warm beneath the gentle caress of her dry fingers. And she begged Jacinto for the addresses of the manufacturers so that she herself could purchase these adorably useful items! For thus equipped, one’s life would be so much easier! But it was, of course, necessary to have Jacinto’s taste and talent in order to choose and to ‘create’! Nor did she offer the honey of flattery only to Jacinto (who received it with resignation). Caressing the Telegraph machine with the handle of her lorgnette, she praised Danjon’s eloquence. As we stood by the Phonograph, she even managed to flatter me (whose name she did not even know) by saying how sweet it was to be able to record and collect the voices of one’s friends – a plump and luscious compliment which I sucked on as if it were a piece of celestial candy. Like a good farmer’s wife, she threw grain to all the hungry chickens, maternally feeding other people’s vanity as she went. Eager for more candy, I followed the whispering saffron train of her dress. She paused next to the Adding Machine, and Jacinto patiently provided her with an erudite description of its uses. She again ran her fingers over the holes concealing the black numbers, and with the same rapturous smile, murmured: ‘It really is quite remarkable, this electric printing press of yours!’

Jacinto spluttered:

‘But it’s a …’

Still smiling, Madame de Trèves had, however, already moved on. She had failed to understand the function of each of my Prince’s machines! She had not listened to a single one of his explanations! In that room filled with sumptuous machinery, her sole concern had been to exercise, with profit and perfection, the Art of Pleasing Others. Everything about her was sublimely false. I confessed my astonishment to Danjon.

The eloquent academician rolled his eyes:

‘Oh, she has such taste, such intelligence, such allure! Besides, one dines so well at her house! What coffee! She is, dear sir, a truly superior woman!’

I sidled away into the Library. At the entrance to that temple of erudition, a few gentlemen stood talking next to the shelf housing the Fathers of the Church. I stopped to greet the editor of Le Boulevard and the feminist psychologist, author of The Triple Heart, whom I had met the day before over lunch at No. 202. The latter greeted me paternally and, as if he urgently required my presence there, greedily clasped my large, coarse, country paw in his illustrious, glitteringly beringed hand. Everyone there, in fact, was celebrating his novel, The Cuirass, which had been launched that week to little yelps of pleasure and an excited rustle and flurry of skirts. An overcoat, with a vast head of hair – which resembled a wig coiffed à la Van Dyck – was standing on tiptoe and proclaiming that the scalpel of experimental psychology had never before penetrated so deeply into that ancient thing, the human soul! And everyone agreed and pressed closer to the psychologist and addressed him as ‘Maître’. Even I, never having so much as glimpsed the book’s yellow cover, but finding myself the object of those imploring eyes, hungry for more honey, murmured sibilantly:

‘Yes, absolutely delicious!’

And the psychologist, face aglow, lips moist, neck pinched by a high collar around which coiled an 1830s-style cravat, modestly confessed that he had dissected the souls who appeared in The Cuirass with ‘some care’, basing himself on documentary evidence, on scraps of still-warm, still-bleeding life. And it was then that Marizac, the Duke de Marizac, his hands in his pockets, remarked, with a smile sharper than the glint on the blade of a cut-throat razor:

‘And yet, my friend, in this carefully researched book there is one mistake, a very strange, very curious mistake.’

The psychologist threw back his head and squeaked:

‘A mistake?’

Yes, a mistake. And a most unexpected one in a man of the Maître’s great experience. The mistake consisted in attributing to The Cuirass’s splendid heroine – a Duchess with exquisite taste – a black satin corset! This black satin corset made its appearance in an otherwise fine and passionately perceptive passage in which she was getting undressed in Ruy D’Alize’s bedroom. And Marizac, still with his hands in his pocket, but looking serious now, appealed to the other gentlemen. Was it likely that an aesthetic, Pre-Raphaelite woman like the Duchess, who bought her clothes from such intellectual couturiers as Doucet and Paquin, would wear a black satin corset?

The psychologist was struck dumb, caught out, wounded! Marizac was the supreme authority on the underwear of duchesses, and he knew that when spending the afternoon in a young man’s bedroom, a duchess would – for purely idealistic reasons and in keeping with the dictates of her yearning soul – always wear a white corset and a white petticoat. The editor of Le Boulevard then weighed in pitilessly, declaring confidently that only an uneducated grocer’s wife would ever think that the combination of plump flesh and black satin could possibly be attractive. And in order that they would not think me inexperienced in such expensive, ducal adulteries, I smoothed my hair and said:

‘Black, of course, would only be suitable if the woman happened to be in deep mourning!’

The poor author of The Cuirass accepted defeat.