The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

On Saturday, at seven in the morning, Citizen Blaise, wearing a black bicorne, scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and yellow top-boots, knocked at the studio door with the handle of his riding-crop. Citizen Widow Gamelin was there, engaged in respectable conversation with Citizen Brotteaux, while Évariste stood before a small scrap of mirror, tying his high white cravat.

“A pleasant journey, Monsieur Blaise!” said the Citizen. “But since you are going to paint landscapes, do take Monsieur Brotteaux with you; he is a painter.”

“Well then,” said Jean Blaise, “Citizen Brotteaux, come with us.”

Once assured that he would not be intruding, Brotteaux, who was sociable by nature and fond of amusement, accepted.

Citizen Élodie had climbed the four flights to embrace Citizen Widow Gamelin, whom she called her dear mother. She was dressed entirely in white and smelled of lavender.

An old travelling coach drawn by two horses, its hood lowered, was waiting in the square. Rose Thévenin sat at the back with Julienne Hasard. Élodie made the actress take the right-hand place, seated herself on the left, and put the slender Julienne between them. Brotteaux took his seat facing Citizen Thévenin; Philippe Dubois faced Citizen Hasard; Évariste faced Élodie. As for Philippe Desmahis, he displayed his athletic torso on the box, to the coachman’s left, astonishing the man with an account of a certain country in America where the trees bore saveloys and cervelat sausages.

Citizen Blaise, an excellent horseman, travelled on horseback and rode ahead to escape the dust of the coach.

As the wheels flew over the paving-stones of the suburb, the travellers forgot their cares; and at the sight of fields, trees, and sky, their thoughts grew cheerful and gentle. Élodie dreamed that she had been born to raise chickens beside Évariste, a justice of the peace in some village by a river and near a wood. The roadside elms streamed past them. At the entrance to the villages, mastiffs rushed slantwise at the carriage and barked at the horses’ legs, while some large spaniel lying across the road rose reluctantly; hens fluttered apart and, in their efforts to escape, ran across the road; geese moved slowly away in a close-packed flock. Grubby children watched the equipage pass. The morning was hot and the sky clear. The cracked earth awaited rain. They alighted near Villejuif. As they passed through the town, Desmahis entered a fruiterer’s shop to buy cherries with which he meant to refresh the women. The shopkeeper was pretty: Desmahis did not reappear. Philippe Dubois called him by the nickname his friends commonly gave him:

“Ho, Barbaroux!… Barbaroux!”

At that detested name, the passers-by pricked up their ears, and faces appeared at every window. When they saw a handsome young man emerge from the fruiterer’s, his jacket open, his frill floating over an athletic chest, a basket of cherries on his shoulders and his coat hanging from the end of a stick, they took him for the outlawed Girondin. Some sans-culottes seized him roughly and, despite his indignant protests, would have carried him before the municipal authorities had not old Brotteaux, Gamelin, and the three young women sworn that the citizen’s name was Philippe Desmahis, that he was a copperplate engraver and a good Jacobin. Even then the suspect had to produce his certificate of civic loyalty, which by the rarest chance he had about him, for he was extremely careless in such matters. At that price he escaped from the hands of the patriotic villagers with no worse injury than the loss of one lace cuff, which had been torn away; but that was a trifling loss. He even received the apologies of the National Guardsmen who had gripped him most tightly and who now spoke of carrying him in triumph to the town hall.

Once free, and surrounded by Citizens Élodie, Rose, and Julienne, Desmahis cast a bitter smile at Philippe Dubois, whom he disliked and suspected of treachery; and, towering a full head above him, said:

“Dubois, if you call me Barbaroux again, I shall call you Brissot. He is a short, thickset, ridiculous fellow, with greasy hair, oily skin, and clammy hands. No one will doubt that you are the infamous Brissot, the enemy of the people; and the republicans, seized with horror and disgust at the sight of you, will hang you from the next lamp-post… Do you understand?”

Citizen Blaise, who had just been watering his horse, declared that he had settled the affair, although it was plain to everyone that it had been settled without him.

They climbed back into the coach. On the road, Desmahis informed the coachman that several inhabitants of the Moon had once fallen upon the plain of Longjumeau; in shape and colour they resembled frogs, though they were very much taller. Philippe Dubois and Gamelin talked about their art. Dubois, a pupil of Regnault’s, had been to Rome. He had seen Raphael’s tapestries, which he ranked above every other masterpiece. He admired Correggio’s colouring, Annibale Carracci’s invention, and Domenichino’s draughtsmanship, but in point of style found nothing comparable to the paintings of Pompeo Batoni. In Rome he had frequented Monsieur Ménageot and Madame Lebrun, both of whom had declared against the Revolution; for that reason he said nothing of them. But he praised Angelica Kauffmann, whose taste was pure and who understood the antique.

Gamelin deplored the swift and profound decline that had followed the belated flowering of French painting, which dated only from Le Sueur, Claude, and Poussin and had coincided with the decay of the Italian and Flemish schools. He attributed its causes to public morals and to the Academy, which reflected them. But the Academy had now happily been abolished, and under the influence of the new principles David and his school were creating an art worthy of a free people. Among the younger painters, Gamelin, without jealousy, placed Hennequin and Topino-Lebrun foremost. Philippe Dubois preferred his master Regnault to David and rested the hopes of painting upon the young Gérard.

Élodie complimented Citizen Thévenin on her red velvet toque and white gown. The actress in turn praised the dresses of both her companions and told them how they might improve them still further: in her opinion, by removing some of the ornament.

“One can never dress too simply,” she said. “We learn that in the theatre, where a costume must reveal every attitude. That is its beauty; it needs no other.”

“You are quite right, my beauty,” Élodie replied. “But nothing in dress is so expensive as simplicity. It is not always from bad taste that we add frills and furbelows; sometimes it is for economy.”

They discussed with interest the autumn fashions: plain gowns and short waists.

“So many women make themselves ugly by following fashion!” said Thévenin. “One ought to dress according to one’s figure.”

“Nothing is beautiful but cloth wound about the body and draped,” said Gamelin. “Everything cut and sewn is hideous.”

These reflections, better suited to a book by Winckelmann than to the lips of a man addressing Parisian women, were dismissed with the contempt of indifference.

“For the winter,” said Élodie, “they are making Lapland-style quilted coats in Florence silk and Sicilienne, and Zulima riding-coats with rounded waists, fastening over a Turkish waistcoat.”

“They are mere covers for poverty,” said Thévenin. “They are sold ready-made. I have a little dressmaker who works like an angel and is not expensive. I shall send her to you, my dear.”

And the words flew, light and swift, spreading and lifting the delicate fabrics: striped Florence silk, plain pekin, Sicilienne, gauze, nankeen.

And old Brotteaux, listening to them, reflected with melancholy delight upon those veils of a single season cast over charming forms, which endure but a few years and are eternally renewed like the flowers of the fields. His eyes, wandering from the three young women to the cornflowers and poppies in the furrows, grew moist with smiling tears.

They reached Orangis at about nine and stopped at the Bell Inn, where the Poitrines provided lodging for man and horse. Citizen Blaise, who had refreshed his appearance, offered his hand to the women. After ordering dinner for noon, they set off on foot across the fields towards the meeting of the Orge and the Yvette, preceded by their paint-boxes, portfolios, easels, and parasols, which were carried by a village lad. These were delightful regions, commanding a view over the green plain of Longjumeau, bordered by the Seine and the woods of Sainte-Geneviève.

Jean Blaise, who led the artistic company, exchanged facetious remarks with the former financier, in which Verboquet the Generous, Catherine Cuissot the pedlar, the Chaudron sisters, the sorcerer Galichet, and the more recent figures of Cadet-Rousselle and Madame Angot appeared without order or measure.

Évariste, seized by a sudden love of nature, felt his eyes swell with tears at the sight of reapers binding sheaves; dreams of harmony and love filled his heart. Desmahis blew the light seeds of dandelions into the women’s hair. All three possessed a townswoman’s fondness for bouquets, and in the meadows they gathered great mullein, whose flowers cluster in spikes about the stalk; bellflowers, with their pale lilac bells hanging in tiers; the slender sprays of fragrant vervain; dwarf elder, mint, weld, yarrow—all the wild flora of departing summer. And because Jean-Jacques had made botany fashionable among the daughters of the towns, all three knew the flowers’ names and loves. As the delicate corollas, languishing from drought, shed their petals in Élodie’s arms and fell in a shower at her feet, the Citizen sighed:

“The flowers are fading already!”

They all set to work and endeavoured to express nature as they saw it; but each saw it in the manner of some master. In very little time Philippe Dubois had dashed off, in the style of Hubert Robert, an abandoned farm, felled trees, and a dried-up torrent. Évariste Gamelin discovered the landscapes of Poussin on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmahis, seated before a dovecote, worked in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux, who prided himself on imitating the Flemings, carefully drew a cow. Élodie sketched a thatched cottage, while her friend Julienne, the daughter of a colour merchant, prepared her palette. Children pressed close against her and watched her paint. She moved them out of her light, calling them gnats and giving them sugar sweets. Whenever Citizen Thévenin found pretty ones, she washed their faces, kissed them, and put flowers in their hair. She caressed them with a melancholy tenderness because she had never known the joy of motherhood, and also to enhance her own beauty with the expression of tender feeling and to practise her art of pose and grouping.

She alone neither drew nor painted. She occupied herself in learning a part, and still more in pleasing. Her script in her hand, she passed from one to another, a light and charming creature. “No complexion, no features, no figure, no voice,” the women said of her; yet she filled the air with movement, colour, and harmony. Faded, pretty, weary, indefatigable, she was the delight of the excursion. Uneven in temper and yet always gay, sensitive, irritable, yet accommodating and easy, sharp-tongued in the politest tones, vain, modest, sincere, false, delightful—if Rose Thévenin failed to prosper, if she did not become a goddess, it was because the times were evil and Paris no longer possessed incense or altars for the Graces. Citizen Élodie, who grimaced whenever she spoke of Rose and called her her “stepmother,” could never see her without yielding to so many charms.

They were rehearsing The Visitandines at the Feydeau, and Rose congratulated herself on having a part full of naturalness. Naturalness was what she sought, pursued, and found.

“Then we are not to see Pamela?” asked the handsome Desmahis.

The Théâtre de la Nation had been closed, and its actors sent to the Madelonnettes and Sainte-Pélagie.

“Is this liberty?” cried Thévenin, raising her beautiful, indignant eyes to heaven.

“The actors of the Théâtre de la Nation,” said Gamelin, “are aristocrats, and Citizen François’s play is calculated to make people regret the privileges of the nobility.”

“Gentlemen,” said Thévenin, “can you listen only to those who flatter you?…”

Towards noon, everyone having grown very hungry, the little company returned to the inn.

Walking beside Élodie, Évariste smilingly recalled their first encounters:

“Two fledglings had fallen from the roof where they nested onto the ledge of your window. You fed them from your own lips; one survived and flew away. The other died in the nest of cotton wool you had made for it. ‘That was the one I loved best,’ you said. That day, Élodie, you wore a red ribbon in your hair.”

Philippe Dubois and Brotteaux, a little way behind the others, talked of Rome, where they had both been: Brotteaux in ’72, Dubois during the Academy’s last days. Old Brotteaux still remembered Princess Mondragone, to whom he would gladly have made his sighs understood, had it not been for Count Altieri, who never left her side any more than her shadow did. Philippe Dubois did not neglect to mention that he had been invited to dine with Cardinal de Bernis and that the Cardinal was the most obliging host in the world.

“I knew him,” said Brotteaux, “and I may say without boasting that for a time I was among his closest intimates: he liked to frequent the rabble. He was an amiable man, and although he made a profession of retailing fables, there was more sound philosophy in his little finger than in the heads of all your Jacobins, who mean to virtuefy and godify us. Indeed, I prefer our simple god-eaters, who know neither what they say nor what they do, to those rabid daubers of laws, who labour to guillotine us into virtue and wisdom and make us worship the Supreme Being, who made them in his own image. In former days I had Mass said in the chapel of Les Ilettes by a poor devil of a priest who, after drinking, would say: ‘Let us not speak ill of sinners: we live by them, unworthy priests that we are!’ You must agree, sir, that this gobbler of prayers had sound maxims of government. We ought to return to that, and govern men as they are, not as we would have them be.”

La Thévenin had drawn nearer to old Brotteaux. She knew that this man had once lived in magnificent style, and in her imagination the brilliance of that memory adorned the former financier’s present poverty, which she judged less humiliating because it was universal and caused by the ruin of the nation. Curiously, and not without respect, she contemplated in him the remains of one of those generous Croesuses whom the actresses of the generation before hers recalled with sighs. Besides, she liked the manners of this old fellow in his plum-coloured frock coat, so threadbare and so clean.

“Monsieur Brotteaux,” she said, “everyone knows that once, in a beautiful park on nights ablaze with lights, you would steal into groves of myrtle with actresses and dancers, while flutes and violins sounded in the distance… Alas! Your goddesses of the Opéra and the Comédie-Française were more beautiful, were they not, than poor little actresses of the National Theatre like us?”

“Do not believe it, mademoiselle,” Brotteaux replied, “and be assured that if a woman like you had appeared in those days, she would have walked alone through that park, sovereign and unrivalled, had she so much as wished it—the park of which you are pleased to form so flattering a picture…”

The Hôtel de la Cloche was rustic. A branch of holly hung over the carriage gateway, which opened into a perpetually damp yard where hens pecked for food. At the rear stood the house, comprising a ground floor and one upper storey, beneath a steep roof of mossy tiles; its walls disappeared under old rosebushes laden with bloom. To the right, the tips of spindle-trained fruit trees rose above the low garden wall. To the left were the stable, with a rack outside, and a timber-framed barn. A ladder leaned against the wall. On that side also, beneath a shed cluttered with farm implements and tree stumps, a white cock, perched atop an old cabriolet, kept watch over his hens. The yard was closed at that end by cattle sheds, before which a heap of manure rose like a glorious mound. At that hour a girl broader than she was tall, with straw-coloured hair, was turning it with a fork. The liquid manure filling her clogs washed her bare feet, whose heels, yellow as saffron, could be seen rising at intervals. Her tucked-up skirt exposed the grime upon her enormous, stunted calves. While Philippe Desmahis watched her, surprised and amused by the strange caprice of nature that had constructed this girl in breadth, the innkeeper called out:

“Hey, La Tronche! Go and fetch some water!”

She turned and displayed a scarlet face and a broad mouth lacking one front tooth. It had taken a bull’s horn to chip that formidable set of teeth. With her fork over her shoulder, she laughed. Her arms, bared by rolled-up sleeves and thick as thighs, gleamed in the sun.

The table had been laid in the downstairs room, where the chickens were finishing their roasting beneath the hood of the fireplace, which was hung with old guns. More than twenty feet long, the whitewashed room was lit only through the greenish panes of the door and by a single window framed in roses, beside which the grandmother turned her spinning wheel. She wore a lace cap and lappet dating from the Regency. The knotted fingers of her earth-stained hands held the distaff. Flies settled along the rims of her eyelids, and she did not brush them away. In her mother’s arms she had watched Louis XIV pass by in his coach.

It was sixty years since she had made the journey to Paris. In a faint, singsong voice she told the three young women standing before her that she had seen the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, and the Samaritaine; and that, as she crossed the Pont-Royal, a boat carrying apples to the Mail market had broken open, the apples had floated away with the current, and the whole river had been crimsoned by them.

She had been told of the changes lately brought about in the kingdom, and above all of the quarrel between priests who took the oath and those who refused it. She knew also that there had been wars, famines, and signs in the heavens. She did not believe that the king was dead. He had been made to escape through an underground passage, she said, and a common man had been delivered to the executioner in his stead.

At the grandmother’s feet, in his Moses basket, Jeannot, the youngest of the Poitrine children, was cutting his teeth. La Thévenin lifted the wicker cradle and smiled at the child, who gave a feeble moan, exhausted by fever and convulsions. He must indeed have been very ill, for they had summoned the physician, Citizen Pelleport, who, it was true, being a substitute deputy to the Convention, charged nothing for his visits.

Citizen Thévenin, born to the theatre, was at home everywhere; dissatisfied with the way La Tronche had washed the dishes, she was drying the plates, tumblers, and forks. While Citizen Poitrine cooked the soup, tasting it like the good innkeeper she was, Élodie sliced a four-pound loaf still warm from the oven. Watching her, Gamelin said:

“A few days ago I read a book written by a young German whose name I have forgotten, and very well translated into French. In it there is a beautiful young girl named Charlotte who, like you, Élodie, was slicing bread; and, like you, she did it with such grace and so prettily that young Werther fell in love with her as he watched.”

“And did it end in marriage?” Élodie asked.

“No,” Évariste replied. “It ended with Werther’s violent death.”

They dined well, for they were very hungry; but the fare was indifferent. Jean Blaise complained of it: he was exceedingly fond of his food and made good eating a rule of life; and no doubt what prompted him to erect his gluttony into a system was the general scarcity. The Revolution had overturned the cooking pot in every household. Ordinary citizens had nothing to put between their teeth. Shrewd men who, like Jean Blaise, made large profits from the public misery went to eating-houses, where they displayed their wit by gorging themselves. As for Brotteaux, who in Year II of Liberty subsisted on chestnuts and crusts of bread, he remembered supping at Grimod de La Reynière’s near the entrance to the Champs-Élysées. Eager to deserve the name of epicure, he confronted Madame Poitrine’s cabbage and bacon with a profusion of learned recipes and excellent gastronomic precepts. And when Gamelin declared that a republican despised the pleasures of the table, the old financier, with his love of antiquity, gave the young Spartan the true recipe for black broth.

After dinner, Jean Blaise, who never forgot serious business, set his itinerant academy to making sketches and studies of the inn, which he considered sufficiently romantic in its dilapidation. While Philippe Desmahis and Philippe Dubois drew the cattle sheds, La Tronche came to feed the pigs. Citizen Pelleport, medical officer, was at that moment leaving the downstairs room, where he had been tending little Poitrine. He approached the artists and, after complimenting them upon talents that did honour to the entire nation, pointed out La Tronche among the swine.

“You see that creature,” he said. “She is not one girl, as you might suppose: she is two girls. Understand that I speak literally. Surprised by the enormous size of her bony frame, I examined her and discovered that most of her bones are duplicated: in each thigh, two femurs fused together; at each shoulder, two humeri. Her muscles are duplicated as well. In my opinion, they are two twins closely conjoined, or, to speak more precisely, fused into one. The case is interesting. I reported it to Monsieur Saint-Hilaire, who was grateful to me. What you see there is a monster, Citizens. The people here call her ‘La Tronche.’ They ought to say ‘Les Tronches’: there are two of them. Nature has such caprices… Good evening, Citizen painters! We shall have a storm tonight…”

After supper by candlelight, the Blaise academy played blindman’s buff in the inn yard with a son and a daughter of the Poitrine family. The young men and women entered into it with an eagerness sufficiently explained by their age, without seeking to determine whether the violence and uncertainty of the times added heat to their spirits. When it was fully dark, Jean Blaise proposed that they play innocent games in the downstairs room. Élodie asked for “Hunt the Heart,” and the whole company agreed. At the young woman’s direction, Philippe Desmahis drew seven hearts in chalk upon the furniture, doors, and walls—that is, one fewer than there were players, for old Brotteaux had obligingly joined the game. They danced in a ring to “The Tower, Beware,” and at a signal from Élodie each ran to lay a hand upon a heart. Gamelin, distracted and clumsy, found them all taken: he gave a forfeit, the little knife bought for six sous at the Saint-Germain fair, which had cut the bread for the destitute mother. They began again, and in turn Blaise, Élodie, Brotteaux, and La Thévenin failed to find a heart and each gave a forfeit: a ring, a reticule, a little book bound in morocco, a bracelet. Then the forfeits were drawn by lot from Élodie’s lap, and to redeem their property each had to display some drawing-room accomplishment, sing a song, or recite verses. Brotteaux delivered the speech of the patron saint of France in the first canto of The Maid:

I am Denis, and sainthood is my trade. I love Gaul…

Citizen Blaise, though less well read, gave Richemond’s answer without hesitation:

Good Saint, there was no need for you To leave the realms of heaven…

Everyone at that time read and reread with delight the masterpiece of the French Ariosto; the gravest men smiled over the loves of Joan and Dunois, the adventures of Agnès and Monrose, and the exploits of the winged ass. Every cultivated man knew by heart the finest passages of that diverting and philosophical poem. Évariste Gamelin himself, despite his severe disposition, good-humouredly recited Grisbourdon’s entrance into hell as he took his six-liard knife from Élodie’s lap. Citizen Thévenin sang, without accompaniment, Nina’s romance, “When My Beloved Shall Return.” Desmahis sang, to the tune of “Faridondaine”:

Some fellows took the pig Of good Saint Anthony, And, putting a cowl upon its head, They made of it a monk. Only the tailoring cost them anything…

Desmahis, however, was preoccupied. At that hour he ardently loved all three women with whom he was playing forfeits, and cast upon each of them looks both burning and tender. He loved La Thévenin for her grace, her suppleness, her practised art, her glances, and her voice that went straight to the heart; he loved Élodie, whose nature he felt to be abundant, rich, and generous; he loved Julienne Hasard despite her faded hair, white eyelashes, freckles, and meagre figure, because, like the Dunois of whom Voltaire speaks in The Maid, he was always ready, in his generosity, to bestow a token of love upon the least pretty woman—all the more because, for the moment, she appeared the least engaged and consequently the most accessible. Free from all vanity, he was never certain of being accepted; nor was he ever certain that he would not be. He therefore offered himself on the chance. Profiting by the fortunate encounters afforded by the game, he addressed a few tender words to La Thévenin, who took no offence, but could scarcely answer beneath Citizen Jean Blaise’s jealous gaze. He spoke more amorously still to Citizen Élodie, whom he knew to be attached to Gamelin; but he was not so exacting as to demand a heart for himself alone. Élodie could not love him; yet she thought him handsome and did not entirely succeed in concealing it from him. Finally, he whispered his most pressing entreaties into Citizen Hasard’s ear. She answered with a look of stupefaction that might express utter surrender as readily as dreary indifference. And Desmahis did not believe that she was indifferent.

The inn contained only two bedrooms, both on the upper floor and opening upon the same landing. The room on the left, the finer of the two, was hung with flowered paper and adorned with a mirror no larger than a hand, whose gilded frame had endured the outrages of flies since the childhood of Louis XV. Beneath canopies of flowered chintz stood two beds furnished with feather pillows, eiderdowns, and counterpanes. This room was reserved for the three female Citizens.

When bedtime came, Desmahis and Citizen Hasard, each holding a candlestick, bade one another good night on the landing. The enamoured engraver slipped the colour merchant’s daughter a note in which he begged her to join him, when everyone was asleep, in the attic above the women’s room.

Prudent and wise, he had studied the lie of the house during the day and explored this attic, which was full of strings of onions, fruit drying beneath a swarm of wasps, chests, and old trunks. He had even seen there an old webbed bedstead, lame and apparently unusable, and a torn straw mattress upon which fleas were leaping.

Opposite the citizens’ room was a rather small chamber with three beds, where the travelling citizens were to sleep as they pleased. But Brotteaux, being a sybarite, had gone to the barn to sleep in the hay. As for Jean Blaise, he had disappeared. Dubois and Gamelin were soon asleep. Desmahis went to bed; but when the silence of night had covered the house like still water, the engraver rose and climbed the wooden stairs, which began to creak beneath his bare feet. The attic door stood ajar. A stifling heat and the acrid smell of rotting fruit issued from it. On a rickety webbed bed, La Tronche lay asleep, her mouth open, her shift drawn up, her legs apart. She was enormous. Passing through the dormer window, a moonbeam bathed in blue and silver her skin, which, between scales of grime and splashes of liquid manure, shone with youth and freshness. Desmahis flung himself upon her; startled awake, she took fright and cried out; but as soon as she understood what was wanted of her, she was reassured, showed neither surprise nor annoyance, and pretended still to be sunk in a half-sleep which, by depriving her of any awareness of things, permitted her some sensation…

Desmahis returned to his room, where he slept tranquilly and deeply until daybreak.

The following day, after one last day’s work, the itinerant academy set out once more for Paris. When Jean Blaise paid his host in assignats, Citizen Poitrine lamented that one saw nothing now but “square money,” and promised a fine candle to the devil of a fellow who brought the yellow coins back.

He offered flowers to the citizens. At his bidding, La Tronche, perched on a ladder in wooden shoes, her skirts tucked up and her filthy, resplendent calves displayed to the daylight, tirelessly cut roses from the climbing bushes that covered the wall. From her broad hands the roses fell in showers, in torrents, in an avalanche, into the outspread skirts of Élodie, Julienne, and La Thévenin. The coach was filled with them. Returning after nightfall, they all carried armfuls home, and their sleep and their waking were fragrant with roses.