Lamps were brought in and imparted additional brilliancy to the occasion, but announced that it was very near its end, as several persons who had no interest in the great event were already moving toward the door. And the Jansoulets did not come. Suddenly there was a heavy, hurried step. The Nabob appeared, alone, buttoned into his black frock-coat, correctly gloved and cravatted, but with distorted features and haggard eye, still trembling from the terrible scene in which he had just taken part. She had refused to come. In the morning he had told Madame's women to have her dressed at three o'clock, as he was accustomed to do whenever he took the Levantine abroad with him, for he found it necessary to impart motion to that indolent creature, who, being incapable of assuming any responsibility whatsoever, allowed others to think, to decide and to act for her, although she was quite willing to go wherever he chose, when she was once started. And he relied upon that willingness to enable him to take her to Hemerlingue's house. But when, after breakfast, Jansoulet, fully dressed, magnificent, perspiring in his struggles to put on his gloves, sent to ask if Madame would soon be ready, he was told that Madame was not going out. It was a serious crisis, so serious that, discarding the mediation of valets and maids, through whom their conjugal interviews were usually conducted, he ran upstairs four stairs at a time, and entered the Levantine's luxurious apartments like a gust of the mistral. She was still in bed, clad in the ample open-work tunic in silk of two colors, which the Moors call a _djebba_, and in one of their gold-embroidered caps from which her beautiful heavy black mane escaped in tangled masses around her moon-like face, flushed by the hearty meal she had just finished. The sleeves of the _djebba_ were turned back, disclosing two enormous, shapeless arms, laden with bracelets, with long slender chains wandering amid a wilderness of little mirrors, red chaplets, boxes of perfume, microscopic pipes, cigarette cases, the trivial toy-shop display of a Moorish beauty at her hour for rising. The bedroom, heavy with the opium-laden, suffocating odor of Turkish tobacco, presented the same disorderly aspect. Negresses went in and out, slowly removing their mistress's coffee service, her favorite gazelle was lapping a cup which he had overturned on the carpet with his slender nose, while the dark-browed Cabassu, seated at the foot of the bed with touching familiarity, was reading aloud to Madame a drama in verse soon to be produced at Cardaillac's theatre. The Levantine was amazed, absolutely stupefied by the work. "My dear," she said to Jansoulet, in her thick Flemish accent, "I don't know what our manager is thinking about. I am just reading that play, _Revolte_, that he is so crazy over. Why, it's a frightful thing! It's never been on the stage."