Frederick rents a room on the Rue Tronchet. He buys the rarest perfumery. He selects a piece of imitation guipure to replace the red cotton foot-coverlet. He finds a pair of blue satin slippers. He arranges the curtains himself, puts heather in the fireplace, covers the chest of drawers with violets. “With more devotion than those who are erecting processional altars, he altered the position of the furniture.” Then he carries off the key in his pocket, “as if the happiness which slept there might have flown away along with it.”
The room is for Madame Arnoux. She has agreed to meet him on Tuesday, between two and three.
On Tuesday, revolution begins in Paris. Frederick waits on the Rue Tronchet from two o’clock until six. He watches the shops, memorizes the harness in the saddler’s window, counts coins for omens. She does not come. The gas-lamps are lit. She has not come.
We learn why only after he has given up. Her son woke coughing in the night. All day the child struggled to breathe — face bluish, body soaked in cold sweat, the cough like a barbarous mechanical toy. She waited for the doctor, applied ice, sang a lullaby from when he was an infant. When the doctor finally pronounced the child saved, the thought of Frederick “presented itself to her mind in a clear and inexorable fashion. It was a warning sent to her by Providence.” She vowed to God she would sacrifice her only passion.
Frederick knows none of this. He goes home. Rain falls. He sleeps badly. By morning his love has become rage.
He walks into the streets where revolution is happening. He passes the Maréchale’s building. She is frightened, alone, the Prince has fled. He catches her round the waist. She lets herself fall back on the divan.
They spend the afternoon watching the revolution from the window. They dine together. Walking home through the illuminated streets, every time they hear the crowds shout “Long live Reform!” the two lovers laugh. Then musketry erupts on the Boulevard des Capucines — the massacre that will bring down the monarchy. “Ha! a few of the citizens are getting a crack,” says Frederick calmly.
He leads Rosanette to the room on the Rue Tronchet.
“The flowers were not withered. The guipure was spread out on the bed. He drew forth from the cupboard the little slippers. Rosanette considered this forethought on his part a great proof of his delicacy of sentiment.”
That is the sentence. The room was prepared for one woman. Another woman enters it. Every object — flowers, fabric, slippers — was placed there as a declaration of love for someone who is not present. Rosanette reads these objects as a declaration of love for her. The text records her reading without correcting it. No aside, no qualification. “Rosanette considered this forethought on his part a great proof of his delicacy of sentiment.” The narrator delivers her interpretation as flat fact.
The objects have not changed. The flowers are the same flowers. The slippers are the same slippers. But the woman has changed, and with her, the meaning of everything in the room. Nothing on the slippers says who they are for. Nothing on the guipure records the name of the woman whose body was supposed to lie under it. The preparations are transferable. The room does not care who enters it.
About one o’clock she wakes and sees that he is sobbing with his head buried in the pillow.
“What’s the matter with you now, my own darling?”
“’Tis the excess of happiness,” said Frederick. “I have been too long yearning after you!”
Every word is true in one direction and false in every other. He has been yearning too long. He is in excess. The tears are real. But they are not for her. He is sobbing for the woman who did not come, in the room that was built for the woman who did not come, beside the woman who is there. Rosanette accepts his answer. The chapter ends.
In The Engraving, the object is forgotten — the desire that produced it was satisfied by something else. In The Bouquet, the object is thrown away — what it carried was too real. Here the objects are neither forgotten nor discarded. They are used. They perform exactly the function they were designed for — to receive a woman, to impress her, to make her feel wanted — only not the woman they were designed for. The gap is not between object and abandonment. It is between preparation and arrival. Everything is in place. The wrong person walks in. And the preparations work.
Outside, a revolution is replacing one government with another. The crowds shout for reform. Frederick and Rosanette laugh. The musketry sounds like silk tearing. History substitutes one regime for the next while, in a room on the Rue Tronchet, one woman substitutes for another, and the flowers do not wither, and the slippers fit.