"As for me I nearly burst out," said the marchioness, "when I saw Monsieur Toutin-Laroche's big nose looking at me in the distance!" "I think that I have a stiff neck," languidly remarked the fair-haired Suzanne. "No, really, if it had lasted a minute longer I should have replaced my head in a natural position, my neck hurt me so much." From the embrasure into which Monsieur Hupel de la Noue had pushed Mignon and Charrier, he cast nervous glances at the group formed around the two young women; he was afraid that people were poking fun at him. The other nymphs arrived one after the other; they had all resumed their costumes as precious stones; the Countess Vanska, as coral, met with prodigious success when one was able to closely examine the ingenious details of her dress. Then Maxime entered, correct in his dress coat and with a smiling air; and a flow of women enveloped him, he was placed in the centre of the circle, he was joked about his part as a flower, and his passion for looking-glasses. Without any embarrassment, as if delighted with his part, he continued smiling, answered the jokes, confessed that he adored himself, and that he was sufficiently cured of women to prefer himself to them. People laughed the louder at this, the group grew larger, and took possession of the whole centre of the drawing-room, while the young man, drowned amid this people of shoulders, this medley of bright costumes, retained his perfume of monstrous love, his vicious fair flower's gentleness. When Renée, however, at last came down, there was semi-silence. She had attired herself in a new costume of such original grace and such audacity that the gentlemen and the ladies, although accustomed to the young woman's eccentricities, at first gave a movement of surprise. She was dressed as an Otaheitian. This costume, it appears, is most primitive: as she wore it, it comprised soft tinted tights which rose from her feet to her bosom, leaving her shoulders and arms bare; and over these tights a simple muslin blouse, short and trimmed with two flounces so as to slightly hide the hips. In her hair a wreath of wild flowers; and gold rings round her ankles and her wrists. Nothing more. She was naked. The tights had the suppleness of flesh under the paleness of the blouse; the pure line of her nudity could be detected from her knees to her arm-pits, vaguely bedimmed by the flounces, but reappearing at the slightest movement, and becoming more distinct between the threads of the lace. She was an adorable savage, a barbarous, voluptuous girl scarcely hidden by a white vapour, a patch of sea fog, amid which her whole body could be divined.