Standing behind her motionless, the chevalier watched the marquise, who wrote at first with all her heart, passionately. Then she reflected, stopped, and passed her hand over her shrewd little nose. She grew impatient, a witness confused her. At last she made up her mind and made an erasure, we must admit it was nothing more than a scribble.

Opposite the chevalier, at the other side of the table shone a fine mirror of Venetian glass. Our extremely shy messenger hardly dared to raise his eyes. Yet it was difficult not to see in this mirror, over the marquise’s head, the charming perplexed face of the new lady of the palace.

‘How beautiful she is,’ he was thinking. ‘It’s a pity I am in love with somebody else, but Athenaïs is more lovely, and besides, it would be such a frightful disloyalty for me—’

‘What are you speaking about?’ said the marquise. (The chevalier as he often did, had uttered his thoughts aloud without knowing it.) ‘What did you say?’

‘I, madame? I am waiting.’

‘There, that’s done,’ answered the marquise, taking another sheet of paper. But with the slight movement she had just made to turn round the dressing gown had slipped from her shoulder.

Fashion is a strange thing. Our grandmothers found it quite all right to go to court with immense robes which left their bosoms almost uncovered, and none saw any indecency in that, but they religiously kept their backs hidden, and the fair ladies to-day display their backs in the opera balcony. It is a newly invented form of beauty.

On Madame de Pompadour’s fragile, snow-white, dainty shoulder, there was a little black mark which looked like a fly fallen in the milk. The chevalier, as serious as a blunderer who wants to try to keep himself in countenance, looked at this mark, and the marquise, holding her pen in the air, looked at the chevalier in the mirror.

In this mirror a rapid glance was exchanged, a glance which a woman never mistakes, and which meant on the one side, ‘You are charming’, and on the other, ‘I am not angry’.

Nevertheless the marquise drew up her gown.

‘You are looking at my beauty spot, sir.’

‘I am not looking, madame. I see it and I admire.’

‘Look, here’s my letter, take it to the king along with your petition.’

‘But, madame—’

‘What is it now?’

‘His majesty is hunting. I have just heard the horns in Satory wood.’

‘That is true. I wasn’t thinking about that. Well, tomorrow, the day after to-morrow, it doesn’t matter—No, this very moment. Go, you will give that to Lebel. Farewell, sir. Try to remember that beauty spot you have just seen; in all this kingdom there is only the king who has seen it. And as to your friend Chance, tell him, if you please, to get the habit of not talking all alone to himself as loudly as he did just now. Farewell, chevalier.’

She touched a little bell, then, tossing up on her sleeve a foamy mass of lace, she extended her bare arm to the young man.