The Painter and the Countess (Part One, opening chapters)

Olivier Bertin was one of the most famous painters in Paris. He was past forty-five — nearer fifty — and still handsome, with a fine head of white hair and a black moustache, a strong, broad-shouldered man who fenced and rode and went into society, where he was welcomed everywhere. He had made his fortune painting portraits of beautiful women; he lived in a great studio-house, with tapestries and old furniture and a vast glass roof.

Twelve years before, he had painted the portrait of the young Countess de Guilleroy, the wife of a rich, pompous, kindly deputy from Normandy. She had come to his studio for the sittings, day after day, with her little daughter, Annette, who played on the carpet while her mother posed; and during those sittings painter and sitter had fallen in love. She had resisted a long time, and then given way; and since then — for twelve years — she had been his mistress. It was an old love now, a settled love, almost a marriage: he dined at her house three or four times a week, as a friend of the family; her husband liked him and suspected nothing; he went to her little salon every afternoon, and they talked, and he told her everything.

Anne de Guilleroy was nearly forty now. She was still beautiful — fair, delicate, elegant — and she took care to remain so, with all the art of a Parisian woman; but she had begun, in secret, to be afraid of the mirror. She loved Bertin now more than ever, with a deep, anxious, possessive tenderness, the love of a woman who feels that her youth is going and that this love is all she has.

And Bertin, without telling her, had begun to feel tired: of his work, which seemed to him to repeat itself; of society; of himself. He was restless and melancholy; he did not know what he wanted.

The world of the Guilleroys' drawing-room was the world of Paris society: the Count, full of his speeches in the Chamber and his opinions on agriculture; an old Duchess, a great lady and a great gossip; a fussy, talkative official of the Fine Arts named Musadieu, who knew everybody and everything that was said; writers, politicians, idle men of fashion. Bertin moved among them easily, admired and flattered, and was bored. Only in the Countess's little salon, alone with her, in the late afternoon, did he feel at home — and lately, even there, he had felt the old tenderness grown a little grey, like a fire that is warm but no longer bright.

She felt it, without his saying anything. She watched him as a woman in love watches; she knew every shade of his voice. And she told herself that it was only his work, his nerves, the spring.

Annette, the daughter, had been living for some years in the country, at the family's estate of Roncières, with her grandmother. Now she came home to Paris for good — a girl of eighteen, fresh from the fields.