Monsieur Jacques’s spouse was already going on one knee before Margarita and, pale with excitement, was kissing Margarita’s foot.
‘Queen ...’ Monsieur Jacques’s spouse murmured.
The queen is delighted!‘ cried Koroviev.
‘Queen ...’ the handsome Monsieur Jacques said quietly.
‘We’re delighted,’ howled the cat.
The young men, Azazello’s companions, smiling lifeless but affable smiles, were already shouldering Monsieur Jacques and his spouse to one side, towards the cups of champagne that the negroes were holding. The single man in the tailcoat was coming up the stairs at a run.
‘Earl Robert,’4 Koroviev whispered to Margarita, ‘interesting as ever. Note how funny, Queen: the reverse case, this one was a queen’s lover and poisoned his wife.’
‘We’re very glad, Earl,’ cried Behemoth.
Out of the fireplace, bursting open and falling apart, three coffins tumbled one after another, then came someone in a black mantle, whom the next one to run out of the black maw stabbed in the back with a knife. A stifled cry was heard from below. An almost entirely decomposed corpse ran out of the fireplace. Margarita shut her eyes, and someone’s hand held a flacon of smelling salts to her nose. Margarita thought the hand was Natasha’s.
The stairway began to fill up. Now on each step there were tailcoaters, looking quite alike from afar, and naked women with them, who differed from each other only in the colour of their shoes and of the feathers on their heads.
Coming towards Margarita, hobbling, a strange wooden boot on her left foot, was a lady with nunnishly lowered eyes, thin and modest, and with a wide green band around her neck for some reason.
‘Who is this ... green one?’ Margarita asked mechanically.
‘A most charming and respectable lady,’ whispered Koroviev, ‘I commend her to you: Madame Tofana.5 Extremely popular among young, lovely Neapolitans, as well as the ladies of Palermo, especially those of them who had grown weary of their husbands. It does happen, Queen, that one grows weary of one’s husband ...’
‘Yes,’ Margarita replied in a hollow voice, smiling at the same time to two tailcoaters who bent before her one after the other, kissing her knee and hand.
‘And so,’ Koroviev managed to whisper to Margarita and at the same time to cry out to someone: ‘Duke! A glass of champagne? I’m delighted! ... Yes, so then, Madame Tofana entered into the situation of these poor women and sold them some sort of water in little vials. The wife poured this water into her spouse’s soup, he ate it, thanked her for being so nice, and felt perfectly well. True, a few hours later he would begin to get very thirsty, then go to bed, and a day later the lovely Neapolitan who had fed her husband soup would be free as the spring breeze.’
‘But what’s that on her foot?’ asked Margarita, tirelessly offering her hand to the guests who came ahead of the hobbling Madame Tofana. ‘And why that green band? A withered neck?’
‘Delighted, Prince!’ cried Koroviev, and at the same time whispered to Margarita: ‘A beautiful neck, but an unpleasantness happened to her in prison. What she has on her foot, Queen, is a Spanish boot,6 and the band is explained this way: when the prison guards learned that some five hundred ill-chosen husbands had departed Naples and Palermo for ever, in the heat of the moment they strangled Madame Tofana in prison.’
‘How happy I am, O kindest Queen, that the high honour has fallen 266 to me ...’ Tofana whispered nunnishly, trying to lower herself to one knee — the Spanish boot hindered her. Koroviev and Behemoth helped her up.
‘I’m very glad,’ Margarita answered her, at the same time offering her hand to others.
Now a steady stream was coming up the stairs from below. Margarita could no longer see what was going on in the front hall. She mechanically raised and lowered her hand and smiled uniformly to the guests. There was a hum in the air on the landing; from the ballrooms Margarita had left, music could be heard, like the sea.
‘But this one is a boring woman,’ Koroviev no longer whispered, but spoke aloud, knowing that in the hubbub of voices no one would hear him. ‘She adores balls, and keeps dreaming of complaining about her handkerchief.’
Margarita’s glance picked out among those coming up the woman at whom Koroviev was pointing. She was young, about twenty, of remarkably beautiful figure, but with somehow restless and importunate eyes.
‘What handkerchief?’ asked Margarita.
‘She has a chambermaid assigned to her,’ explained Koroviev, ‘who for thirty years has been putting a handkerchief on her night table during the night. She wakes up and the handkerchief is there. She’s tried burning it in the stove and drowning it in the river, but nothing helps.’
‘What handkerchief?’ whispered Margarita, raising and lowering her arm.
