Free French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) by Unknown

off nothing but the blood of souls. He likes to pink his champagne with it, and you can’t find liquor like that anymore among the cabaret
cocottes
!’
    ‘Indeed,’ she went on with irony, ‘so he supped at the Benedictine Convent, with the ladies…’
    ‘Of Perpetual Adoration, yes, Madame! For once he has inspired adoration, the old devil, it does tend to last forever.’
    ‘For a Catholic I find you full of profanity,’ she said slowly, but a little nettled, ‘and I beg you to spare me the details of your dissolutesuppers, if this is what you intend to impart to me by harping on so about Don Juan.’
    ‘I’m not inventing anything, Madame! The harlots at that particular supper, if harlots they were, are nothing to do with me… unfortunately…’
    ‘That’s enough, Monsieur!’
    ‘Allow me my modesty. They were…’
    ‘The
mille è tre
?…’ * she broke in, curious now, altering her manner, almost friendly again.
    ‘O! Not all of them, Madame… Only a dozen. It’s quite enough, really, a respectable number…’
    ‘And not quite respectable, either,’ she put in.
    ‘Besides, you know as well as I do that you can’t fit many people into the boudoir of the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. It has seen great exploits, to be sure, but it
is
a very small boudoir…’
    ‘What?’ she exclaimed, sounding shocked. ‘They had supper in the boudoir?…’
    ‘Yes, Madame, in the boudoir. And why not? People have supper on the battlefield. They wanted to give a sumptuous supper to Don Juan, and where better to honour him than in the very theatre of his triumphs, the place where memories bloom in lieu of orange trees. It was a charming idea, both tender and melancholic. This was not the
victims’ ball
; * it was the
victims’ supper
.’
    ‘And Don Juan?’ she said, much as Orgon, in the play, says ‘And Tartuffe?’ *
    ‘Don Juan took it all in good heart, and ate an excellent supper,
    …He, alone, in front of the women!
    in the person of someone of your acquaintance… none other than the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès.’ *
    ‘
Him!
It’s true, he
is
Don Juan,’ she said.
    And though she was too old for such daydreams—a pious bigot in beak and claw—she dreamed nevertheless of the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector—of the ancient and eternal race of Juan, to whom God did not give the world, but allowed the devil to do so instead.
II
    W HAT I just recounted to the old Marquise Guy de Ruy was nothing less than the truth. Barely three days earlier, a dozen ladies, hailing from the irreproachably virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain * (let them rest easy, I shall not name names!), all twelve of whom, according to the dowagers of gossip,
had been honoured
(to use the piquant old expression) by the Comte Ravila de Ravilès, took it into their heads to hold a supper for him—
at which he was to be the only male present
—to celebrate… what? They didn’t say. Giving such a supper was an audacious enterprise; but women, cowardly when alone, become daring in numbers. Probably not one of them would have dared to invite the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector to a supper
en tête à tête
; but together, and using each other as moral support, they gladly formed a Mesmer chain, * bound by magnetic force to the compelling, to the dangerous, Ravila de Ravilès…
    ‘What a name!’
    ‘And a most fitting one, Madame…’
    The Comte de Ravila de Ravilès, who incidentally had always obeyed the directive suggested by his imperious name, was indeed the incarnation in one man of every seducer ever evoked in history or in novels. Even the Marquise Guy de Ruy—who was an old malcontent, with cold, sharp blue eyes, if less cold than her heart, and less sharp than her wit—conceded that in an age when matters concerning women became daily less relevant, then if there
did
exist anyone who resembled Don Juan, it had to be him! Unfortunately, he was the Don of the fifth act. The witty Prince de Ligne * never fully