Free Pleasure by Gabriele D'Annunzio Page B

others followed.
    â€”Let’s go, said Elena.
    It seemed to Andrea that she was leaning on him with some abandon. Was it not an illusion brought about by his desire? Perhaps. He tended toward doubt; but, with every moment that passed, he felt a sweet spell conquer him ever more deeply; and with every moment he grew more anxious to penetrate the woman’s soul.
    â€”Cousin, over here, said Donna Francesca, assigning him his place.
    At the oval table he was seated between the Baron of Isola and the Duchess of Scerni with Cavalier Sakumi facing him. The latter was seated between the Baroness of Isola and Don Filippo del Monte. The marquis and marchioness were at each head. Porcelain, silver, crystal, and flowers glittered on the table.
    Very few women could compete with the Marchioness of Ateleta in the art of giving dinner parties. She put more care into preparing a table than into her clothing. The exquisiteness of her taste was apparent in every object; and she was, truly, the arbiter of convivial elegance. Her fantasy and refined taste could be seen reflected in all the dinner tables of Roman nobility. She had, that winter, introduced the fashion of chains of flowers suspended from one side of the table to another, threaded through the great candelabra; and also the fashion of the slender vase of Murano glass, pale and shifting like an opal, containing one single orchid, placed between the various glasses in front of each diner.
    â€”Diabolical flower, said Donna Elena Muti, taking the glass vase and observing from close up the bloodred and deformed orchid.
    Her voice was so rich in tonalities that even the most vulgar words and the most common phrases appeared to take on, uttered by her mouth, an occult meaning, a mysterious accent and a new grace. In the same manner, King Midas turned everything he touched to gold.
    â€”A symbolic flower, in your hand, Andrea murmured, gazing at the lady, who in that pose was wondrous to behold.
    She was wearing a fabric of an exceedingly pale sky blue scattered with silver dots that sparkled beneath antique white Burano lace, an indefinable white, tending slightly toward fawn, but so slightly that it could barely be perceived. The flower, almost unnatural, as if made by some evil spell, waved about on its stalk, protruding from the fragile tube that its creator had surely forged with one breath into a liquid jewel.
    â€”But I prefer roses, Elena said, replacing the orchid with a gesture of revulsion that contrasted with her previous act of curiosity.
    Then she threw herself into the general conversation. Donna Francesca was talking about the latest reception given at the Austrian Embassy.
    â€”Did you see Madame de Cahen? Elena asked her. —She wore a dress of yellow
tulle
scattered with innumerable hummingbirds with ruby eyes. A magnificent dancing birdcage. And Lady Ouless, did you see her? She had on a dress of white tarlatan fabric, with seaweed strewn all over it and I don’t know how many goldfish, and over the seaweed and the goldfish there was another layer of sea-green tarlatan. Did you not see her? She was the most impressive beautiful aquarium . . .
    And she laughed after making these little cutting remarks, a cordial laugh that lent a tremor to the underside of her chin and her nostrils.
    In the presence of this incomprehensible volubility, Andrea was still perplexed. Those frivolous or cutting comments issued forth from the same lips that had just then, uttering a simple phrase, agitated him to the very depths of his soul; they came from the same mouth that just then had seemed to him like the mouth of Leonardo’s
Medusa,
a human flower with a soul made divine by the flame of passion and the anguish of death. What, therefore, was the true essence of that creature? Did she have any perception or consciousness of her constant metamorphosis or was she impenetrable even to herself, remaining on the outside of her own mystique? How much, in