Just then Nanine appeared, to tell us that supper was served.
When we entered the dining-room, Marguerite was leaning against the
wall, and Gaston, holding her hands, was speaking to her in a low voice.
"You are mad," replied Marguerite. "You know quite well that I don't
want you. It is no good at the end of two years to make love to a woman
like me. With us, it is at once, or never. Come, gentlemen, supper!"
And, slipping away from Gaston, Marguerite made him sit on her right at
table, me on her left, then called to Nanine: "Before you sit down, tell them in the kitchen not to open to anybody if
there is a ring."
This order was given at one o'clock in the morning.
We laughed, drank, and ate freely at this supper. In a short while mirth
had reached its last limit, and the words that seem funny to a certain
class of people, words that degrade the mouth that utters them, were
heard from time to time, amidst the applause of Nanine, of Prudence, and
of Marguerite. Gaston was thoroughly amused; he was a very good sort of
fellow, but somewhat spoiled by the habits of his youth. For a moment
I tried to forget myself, to force my heart and my thoughts to become
indifferent to the sight before me, and to take my share of that gaiety
which seemed like one of the courses of the meal. But little by little
I withdrew from the noise; my glass remained full, and I felt almost
sad as I saw this beautiful creature of twenty drinking, talking like a
porter, and laughing the more loudly the more scandalous was the joke.
Nevertheless, this hilarity, this way of talking and drinking, which
seemed to me in the others the mere results of bad company or of bad
habits, seemed in Marguerite a necessity of forgetting, a fever, a
nervous irritability. At every glass of champagne her cheeks would flush
with a feverish colour, and a cough, hardly perceptible at the beginning
of supper, became at last so violent that she was obliged to lean her
head on the back of her chair and hold her chest in her hands every time
that she coughed. I suffered at the thought of the injury to so frail a
constitution which must come from daily excesses like this. At length,
something which I had feared and foreseen happened. Toward the end of
supper Marguerite was seized by a more violent fit of coughing than any
she had had while I was there. It seemed as if her chest were being torn
in two. The poor girl turned crimson, closed her eyes under the pain,
and put her napkin to her lips. It was stained with a drop of blood. She
rose and ran into her dressing-room.