Those two fellows didn't count; they could enter into her
feelings. And they both stood and admired her in silent abstraction
while she finished buttoning her gloves. She alone kept her feet amid
the heaped-up riches of her mansion, while a whole generation of men lay
stricken down before her. Like those antique monsters whose redoubtable
domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human
skulls. She was ringed round with catastrophes. There was the furious
immolation of Vandeuvres; the melancholy state of Foucarmont, who was
lost in the China seas; the smashup of Steiner, who now had to live
like an honest man; the satisfied idiocy of La Faloise, and the tragic
shipwreck of the Muffats. Finally there was the white corpse of Georges,
over which Philippe was now watching, for he had come out of prison but
yesterday. She had finished her labor of ruin and death. The fly that
had flown up from the ordure of the slums, bringing with it the leaven
of social rottenness, had poisoned all these men by merely alighting on
them. It was well done--it was just. She had avenged the beggars and
the wastrels from whose caste she issued. And while, metaphorically
speaking, her sex rose in a halo of glory and beamed over prostrate
victims like a mounting sun shining brightly over a field of carnage,
the actual woman remained as unconscious as a splendid animal, and in
her ignorance of her mission was the good-natured courtesan to the last.
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