Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 12

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On the drive home, the calash could make but little way against the obstruction of carriages returning by the edge of the lake. At one moment the block became such that it was even necessary to pull up.

The sun was setting in a pale gray October sky, streaked on the horizon with thin clouds. One last ray, falling from the distant shrubberies of the cascade, pierced the roadway, and flooded the long array of stationary carriages with pale red light. The golden glints, the bright flashes thrown by the wheels, seemed to have settled along the straw-coloured edges of the calash, while the dark-blue panels reflected bits of the surrounding landscape. And higher up, full in the red light that lit them up from behind, and gave effulgence to the brass buttons of their capes half-folded across the back of the box, sat the coachman and footman, in their dark-blue liveries, their drab breeches, and their yellow-and-black striped waistcoats, erect, solemn and patient, after the manner of well-bred servants who are in no way put out by a block of carriages. Their hats, adorned with black cockades, looked very dignified. The horses alone, a pair of splendid bays, snorted with impatience.

“Look,” said Maxime, “Laure d’Aurigny, over there, in that brougham…. Do look, Renée.”

Renée raised herself slightly, and blinked her eyes with the exquisite grimace caused by the shortness of her sight.

“I thought she had vanished from the scene,” said Renée…. “She has changed the colour of her hair, has she not?”

“Yes,” replied Maxime, laughing; “her new lover hates red.”

Awakened from the melancholy dream that for an hour had kept her silent, stretched out in the back seat of the carriage as in an invalid’s long-chair, Renée leaned forward and looked, resting her hand on the low door of the calash. Over a gown consisting of a mauve silk polonaise and tunic, trimmed with wide plaited flounces, she wore a little coat of white cloth with mauve velvet lapels, which gave her a look of great smartness. Her strange, pale, fawn-coloured hair, whose shade recalled the colour of good butter, was barely concealed by a tiny bonnet adorned with a cluster of Bengal roses. She continued to screw up her eyes with her look of an impertinent boy, her pure forehead furrowed by one long wrinkle, her upper lip protruding like a sulky child’s. Then, finding that she could not see, she took her eyeglass, a man’s double eyeglass framed in tortoiseshell, and, holding it in her hand without placing it on her nose, at her ease examined the fat Laure d’Aurigny, with an air of absolute calmness.

The carriages were still blocked. Among the massed dark patches made by the long line of broughams, of which numbers that autumn afternoon had crowded to the Bois, gleamed the glass of a carriage-window, the bit of a bridle, the plated socket of a lamp, the braid on the livery of a lackey perched on his box. Here and there a bit of stuff, a bit of a woman’s dress, silk or velvet, flashed from an open landau. Little by little a deep silence had taken the place of all the bustle that now stood dead and motionless. The occupants of the carriages could distinguish the conversation of the people on foot. Silent glances were exchanged from window to window; and all ceased talking during this wait, whose silence was broken only by the creaking of a set of harness, or the impatient pawing of a horse’s hoof. The blurred voices of the Bois died away in the distance.

All Paris was there, in spite of the lateness of the season: the Duchesse de Sternich, in a chariot; Mme. de Lauwerens, in a smart victoria and pair; the Baronne de Meinhold, in an enchanting light-brown cab; the Comtesse Vanska, with her piebald ponies; Mme. Daste, with her famous black steppers; Mme. de Guende and Mme. Teissière in a brougham; little Sylvia in a dark-blue landau. And then there was Don Carlos, in mourning, with his solemn, old-fashioned liveries; and Selim Pasha, with his fez and without his tutor; the Duchesse de Rozan, in a miniature brougham, with her powdered livery; the Comte de Chibray, in a dogcart; Mr. Simpson, driving his perfectly-appointed drag; and the whole American colony. Then, finally, two Academicians in a hired cab.

The front carriages were released, and one by one the whole line began to move slowly on. It resembled an awakening. A thousand lively coruscations sprang up, quick flashes played among the wheels, sparks flew from the horses’ harness. On the ground, on the trees, were broad reflections of trotting glass. This glitter of wheels and harness, this blaze of varnished panels glowing with the red gleam of the setting sun, the bright notes of colour cast by the dazzling liveries perched up full against the sky, and by the rich costumes projecting beyond the carriage-doors, were carried along amid a hollow, sustained rumbling sound, timed by the trot of the horses. And the procession went on, with the same noise, the same effects of light, unceasingly and with one impulse, as though the foremost carriages were dragging all the others behind them.

Renée yielded to the first slight jolt of the calash, and lowering her eyeglass, threw herself back on the cushions. Shivering, she drew towards her a corner of the bearskin that filled the body of the carriage as with a sheet of silky snow, and plunged her gloved hands into the long, soft, curly hair. The wind began to blow from the North. The warm October day, which had given the Bois an aftermath of spring and brought the great ladies out in open carriages, threatened to end in a bitterly cold evening.

For a moment Renée remained huddled in the warmth of her corner, giving way to the pleasurable lullaby of wheels turning before her. Then, raising her head towards Maxime, whose eyes were calmly undressing the women spread out in the adjacent broughams and landaus:

“Tell me,” she said, “do you really think that Laure d’Aurigny handsome? How you sang her praises the other day, when they were discussing the sale of her diamonds!… By the way, did you not see the necklace and the aigrette your father bought me at the sale?”

“Yes, he does things well,” said Maxime, without answering, laughing mischievously. “He finds means to pay Laure’s debts and to give diamonds to his wife.”

Renée made a slight movement with her shoulders.

“Wretch!” she murmured, with a smile.

But Maxime was leaning forward, following with his gaze a lady whose green dress interested him. Renée had thrown back her head, and with half-closed eyes glanced listlessly at the two sides of the avenue, seeing nothing. On the right, copses and low-cut plantations with reddened leaves and slender branches passed slowly by; at intervals, on the track reserved for riders, slim-waisted gentlemen galloped past, their steeds raising little clouds of fine dust behind them. On the left, at the foot of the narrow grassplots that run down intersected by flowerbeds and shrubs, the lake, clear as crystal, without a ripple, lay as though neatly trimmed along its edges by the gardeners’ spades; and on the further side of this translucent mirror, the two islands, with between them the gray bar formed by the connecting bridge, displayed their smiling slopes and the theatrical outlines of fir-trees and evergreens, whose black foliage, resembling the fringe of curtains cunningly draped along the edge of the horizon, was reflected in the water. This scrap of nature, that seemed like a newly-painted piece of scenery, lay bathed in a faint shadow, in a pale blue vapour which succeeded in lending to the background an exquisite charm, an air of entrancing artificiality. On the other bank, the Châlet des Îles, as though newly varnished, shone like an unused toy; and the paths of yellow sand, the narrow garden walks that wind among the lawns and run along the lake, edged with iron hoops in imitation of rustic woodwork, stood out more curiously, in this last hour of daylight, against the softened green of grass and water.

Accustomed to the ingenious charms of this perspective, Renée, once more yielding to her languor, had lowered her eyelids altogether, and looked only at her slender fingers twisting the long hairs of the bearskin. But there came a jolt in the even trot of the line of carriages. And, raising her head, she nodded to two ladies lolling languidly, amorously, side by side, in a chariot which was nosily leaving the road that skirts the lake, in order to go down one of the side avenues. The Marquise d’Espanet, whose husband, lately an aide-de-camp to the Emperor, had just created a great scandal by allying himself with the discontented members of the old nobility, was one of the most prominent leaders of society of the Second Empire; her companion, Mme. Haffner, was the wife of a celebrated manufacturer of Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was transforming into a politician. Renée, a schoolfellow of the two inseparables, as people nicknamed them with a knowing air, called them by their Christian names, Adeline and Suzanne.

As, after smiling to them, she was about to sink afresh into her corner, a laugh from Maxime made her turn round.

“No, really, I feel too sad: don’t laugh, I mean what I say,” she said, seeing that the young man was watching her ironically, making merry over her huddled attitude.

Maxime put on a comedy voice:

“How unhappy we are: how jealous!”

She seemed quite amazed.

“I!” she said. “Jealous of what?”

And then added, with a pout of contempt, as though remembering:

“Ah, to be sure, that fat Laure! I had not given her a thought, believe me. If Aristide has, as you say, paid that woman’s debts and saved her from having to pack up her trunks, it only proves that he is less fond of money than I thought. This will restore him to the ladies’ good graces…. The dear man, I leave him every liberty.”

She smiled, and pronounced the words “the dear man” in a voice full of friendly indifference. And suddenly, becoming very sad again, casting around her the despairing glance of women who do not know in what form of amusement to take refuge, she murmured:

“Oh, I should like to…. But no, I am not jealous, not at all jealous.”

She stopped, doubtfully:

“You see, I am bored,” she said at last, abruptly.

Then she sat silent, with her lips pressed together. The line of carriages still rolled along the lake with its even trot and a noise singularly resembling a distant waterfall. Now, on the left, there rose, between the water and the roadway, little bushes of evergreens with thin straight stems, forming curious little clusters of pillars. On the right, the copses and plantations had come to an end; the Bois opened out into broad lawns, into vast expanses of grass, with here and there a clump of tall trees; the greensward ran on, with gentle undulations, to the Porte de la Muette, whose low gates, that seemed like a piece of black lace stretched on the level of the ground, could be distinguished at a very great distance; and on the slopes, at the places where the undulations sank in, the grass seemed quite blue. Renée stared fixedly before her, as though this widening of the horizon, these gentle meadows, soaked in the evening air, had caused her to feel more keenly the void in her existence.

After a pause she repeated, querulously:

“Oh, I am bored, bored to death.”

“This is not amusing, you know,” said Maxime, calmly. “Your nerves are out of order, undoubtedly.”

Renée threw herself back in the carriage.

“Yes, my nerves are out of order,” she replied, dryly.

Then she became motherly:

“I am growing old, my dear child; I shall soon be thirty. It’s terrible. Nothing gives me pleasure…. You, who are twenty, cannot know….”

“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me out?” interrupted the young man. “It would take the devil of a long time.”

She received this impertinence with a faint smile, as though it were the outburst of a spoilt child that knows no restraint.

“I should recommend you to complain,” continued Maxime. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your dress, you live in a sumptuous house, you have splendid horses, your caprices are law, and the papers discuss each of your new gowns as an event of the most serious importance; the women envy you, the men would give ten years of their lives for leave to kiss the tips of your fingers…. Is what I say true?”

She nodded affirmatively, without replying. Her eyes cast down, she had resumed her task of curling the hairs of the bearskin.

“Come, don’t be modest,” Maxime continued; “confess roundly that you are one of the pillars of the Second Empire. We need not hide these things from one another. Wherever you go, at the Tuileries, at the houses of ministers, at the houses of mere millionaires, high or low, you reign a queen. There is not a pleasure of which you have not had your fill, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not restrain me, I should say….”

He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence cavalierly:

I should say you had bitten at every apple.”

She moved no muscle.

“And you are bored!” resumed the young man, with droll vivacity. “But it’s scandalous!… What is it you want? What on earth do you dream of?”

She shrugged her shoulders to imply that she did not know. Though she kept her head down, Maxime was able to see that she looked so serious, so melancholy, that he thought it best to hold his tongue. He watched the line of carriages, which, when they reached the end of the lake, spread out, filling the whole of the open space. The carriages, packed less closely, swept round with majestic grace; the quicker trot of the horses sounded noisily on the hard ground.

The calash, on going the round to join the line, rocked in a way that filled Maxime with vague enjoyment. Then, yielding to his wish to crush Renée:

“Look here,” he said, “you deserve to ride in a cab! That would serve you right!… Why, look at these people returning to Paris, people who are all at your feet. They hail you as their queen, and your sweetheart, M. de Mussy, can hardly refrain from blowing kisses to you.”

A horseman was, in fact, bowing to Renée. Maxime had been talking in a hypocritical, mocking voice. But Renée barely turned round, and shrugged her shoulders. At last the young man made a gesture of despair.

“Really,” he said; “have we come to that?… But, good God, you have everything: what do you want more?”

Renée raised her head. In her eyes was a glow of light, the ardent desire of unsatisfied curiosity.

“I want something different,” she replied, in a low voice.

“But since you have everything,” resumed Maxime, laughing, “there is nothing different…. What is the ‘something different’?”

“What?” she repeated.

And she did not continue. She had turned right round, and was watching the strange picture fading behind her. It was almost night; twilight was falling slowly like fine ashes. The lake, seen from the front, in the pale daylight that still hovered over the water, became rounder, like a huge tin dish; on either side the plantations of evergreens, whose slim straight stems seemed to issue from its slumbering surface, assumed at this hour the appearance of purple colonnades, delineating with the evenness of their architecture the studied curves of the shores; and again, in the background, rose shrubberies, confused masses of foliage, whose large black patches closed up the horizon. Behind these patches shone the glow of the expiring sunset, that set fire to but a small portion of the gray immensity. Above this placid lake, these low copses, this singularly flat perspective, stretched the vault of heaven, infinite, deepened and widened. This great slice of sky hanging over this small morsel of nature caused a thrill, an undefinable sadness; and from these paling heights fell so deep an autumnal melancholy, so sweet and so heartbreaking a darkness, that the Bois, wound little by little in a shadowy shroud, lost its mundane graces, widened, full of the puissant charm that forests have. The trot of the carriages, whose bright colouring was swept away in the twilight, sounded like the distant voices of leaves and running water. All died away as it went. In the centre of the lake, in the general evanescence, the lateen sail of the great pleasure-boat stood out, strongly defined against the glow of the sunset. And it was no longer possible to distinguish anything but this sail, this triangle of yellow canvas, immeasurably enlarged.

Renée, satiated as she was, experienced a singular sensation of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognizable, of this bit of nature, so worldly and artificial, which the great vibrating darkness transformed into a sacred grove, one of the ideal glades in whose recesses the gods of old concealed their Titanic loves, their adulteries, and their divine incests. And, as the calash drove away, it seemed to her that the twilight was carrying off behind her, in its tremulous veil, the land of her dream, the flagitious, celestial alcove in which her sick heart and weary flesh might at last have been assuaged.

When, fading into the shadow, the lake and the bushes showed only as a black bar against the sky, Renée turned round abruptly, and, in a voice that contained tears of vexation, resumed her interrupted phrase:

“What?… something different, of course; I want something different. How do I know what! If I did know…. But, look here, I am sick of balls, sick of suppers, sick of that sort of entertainment. It is so monotonous. It is deadly…. And the men are insufferable, ah! yes, insufferable.”

Maxime began to laugh. A certain eagerness became apparent under the aristocratic aspect of the woman of fashion. She no longer blinked her eyelids, the wrinkle on her forehead became more harshly accentuated; her lip, that was so like a sulky child’s, protruded in hot quest of the nameless enjoyments she pined for. She observed her companion’s laughter, but was too excited to stop; lying back, swayed by the rocking of the carriage, she continued in short, sharp sentences:

“Yes, certainly, you are insufferable…. I don’t include you, Maxime, you are too young…. But if I were to tell you how ponderous Aristide used to be in the early days! And the others! the men who have been my lovers…. You know, we are good friends, you and I: I don’t mind what I say to you; well then, there are really days when I am so tired of living this life of a rich woman, adored and worshipped, that I feel I should like to become a Laure d’Aurigny, one of those ladies who live like bachelors.”

And on Maxime laughing still lower, she insisted:

“Yes, a Laure d’Aurigny. It would surely be less insipid, less monotonous.”

She sat silent for a few minutes, as though picturing to herself the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, with a note of discouragement in her voice:

“After all,” she resumed, “those women must have their own annoyances too. There is nothing amusing in life. It is killing work…. As I said, one ought to have something different; you understand, I can’t guess what; but something else, something that would happen to nobody but one’s self, that would not be met with every day, that would give a rare, unknown enjoyment….

She spoke more slowly. She uttered these last words as though seeking something, giving way to absent reverie. The calash went up the avenue that leads to the entrance of the Bois. The darkness increased; the copses ran along on either side like gray walls; the yellow iron chairs upon which, on fine evenings, the middle-class loves to attitudinize in its Sunday best, filed away along the footways, all unoccupied, with the gloomy melancholy air common to garden furniture overtaken by the winter; and the rumbling, the dull rhythmical noise of the returning carriages passed down the deserted avenues like a sad refrain.

Maxime doubtless appreciated the bad form of thinking life amusing. Though young enough to give himself over to an outburst of contented admiration, his egoism was too great, his indifference too cynical, he already experienced too much real weariness, not to proclaim himself disgusted, sick, and played-out. And, as a rule, he took a certain pride in making the confession.

He threw himself back like Renée, and assumed a plaintive voice.

“Yes, you are right,” he said; “it is killing work. As for that, I amuse myself no more than you do; I, too, have often dreamt of something different…. There is nothing so stupid as travelling. Making money: I prefer to run through it, though even that is not always so amusing as one at first imagines. Loving and being loved: we soon get sick of that, don’t we?… Yes, we get sick of it!”

Renée made no reply, and he went on, desiring to astound her with a piece of gross blasphemy:

I should like to have a nun in love with me. Eh? that might be amusing…. Have you never dreamt of loving a man of whom you would not be able even to think without committing a crime?”

But her gloom continued, and Maxime, seeing that she remained silent, concluded that she was not listening. She seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open, the nape of her neck resting against the padded edge of the calash. She lay listlessly thinking, a prey to the dreams that kept her depressed, and at times a slight nervous movement passed over her lips. She was softly overcome by the shadow of the twilight; all that this shadow contained of sadness, of discreet pleasures, of hopes unacknowledged, penetrated her, covered her with an air of morbid languor. Doubtless, while staring at the round back of the footman on his box, she was thinking of those delights of yesterday, of those entertainments that had so palled upon her, that she was weary of; she contemplated her past life, the instantaneous satisfaction of her appetites, the fulsomeness of luxury, the appalling monotony of the same loves and the same betrayals. Then, with a ray of hope, there came to her, with shivers of longing, the idea of that “something different” which her mind could not strain itself to fix upon. There, her dream wandered. Constantly the word that she strove to find escaped into the falling night, became lost in the continuous rolling of the carriages. The soft vibration of the calash was an impediment the more that prevented her from formulating her desire. And an immense temptation rose from the empty space, from the copses asleep in the shadow on either side of the avenue, from the noise of wheels and from the gentle oscillation that filled her with a delicious torpor. A thousand tremulous emotions passed over her flesh: dreams unrealized, nameless delights, confused longings, all the monstrous voluptuousness that a drive home from the Bois under a paling sky can infuse into a woman’s worn heart. She kept both her hands buried in the bearskin, she was quite warm in her white cloth coat with the mauve velvet facings. She put out her foot, as she stretched herself in her feeling of well-being, and with her ankle lightly touched Maxime’s warm leg; he took no notice of this contact. A jolt aroused her from her lethargy. She raised her head and with her gray eyes looked strangely at the young man, who sat lounging in an attitude of sheer elegance.

At this moment the calash left the Bois. The Avenue de l’Impératrice stretched out straight into the darkness, with the two green lines of its fences of painted wood, which met at the horizon. In the side-path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance cut out a bright patch in the gray horizon. Here and there, on the other side, along the roadway, were belated pedestrians, groups of black spots, making slowly for Paris. And right up above, at the end of the rumbling, confused procession of carriages, the Arc de Triomphe, seen from one side, displayed its whiteness against a vast expanse of sooty sky.

While the calash ascended at an increased pace, Maxime, charmed with the English appearance of the scene, looked out at the irregular architecture of the private houses on both sides of the avenue, with their lawns running down to the sidewalks. Renée, still dreaming, amused herself by watching the gaslights of the Place de l’Étoile being lit, one by one, on the edge of the horizon, and as each of these bright jets splashed the dying day with its little yellow flame, she seemed to hear a mysterious appeal; it seemed to her that Paris flaring in its winter’s night was being lighted up for her, and making ready for her the unknown gratification that her glutted senses yearned for.

The calash turned down the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense, and pulled up at the end of the Rue Monceau, a few steps from the Boulevard Malesherbes, in front of a large private house standing between a courtyard and a garden. The two gates, heavily ornamented with gilt enrichments, which opened into the courtyard were flanked by a pair of lamps, shaped like urns, and similarly covered with gilding, in which flared broad gasjets. Between the two gates, the concierge lived in a pretty lodge vaguely suggestive of a little Greek temple.

Maxime sprang lightly to the ground as the carriage was about to enter the courtyard.

“You know,” said Renée, detaining him by the hand, “we dine at half-past seven. You have more than an hour to dress in. Don’t keep us waiting.”

And she added, with a smile:

“The Mareuils are coming…. Your father wishes you to pay Louise every attention.” Maxime shrugged his shoulders.

“What a bore!” he murmured, peevishly. “I don’t mind marrying, but wooing is too silly…. Ah! how nice it would be of you, Renée, if you would rescue me from Louise this evening.”

He put on his comedy look, the accent and grimace which he borrowed from Lassouche whenever he was about to launch one of his constant conceits:

“Will you, stepmother dear?”

Renée shook hands with him in masculine fashion. And quickly, with nervous, jesting boldness:

“If I had not married your father, I believe you would have made love to me.”

The young man appeared to think the idea very funny, for he was still laughing when he turned the corner of the Boulevard Malesherbes.

The calash entered and drew up before the steps.

These steps, which were broad and shallow, were sheltered by a great glass awning, with a scalloped bordering of golden fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose up above the servants’ offices, whose square windows, glazed with frosted glass, appeared just above the level of the ground. At the top of the steps the hall-door projected, flanked by slender columns recessed into the wall, thus forming a slight break, marked at each story by a bay-window, and ascending to the roof, where it finished in a pediment. The stories had five windows on each side, placed at regular intervals along the façade, and simply framed in stone. The roof was cut off square above the attic windows, with broad and almost perpendicular sides.

But on the garden side the façade was far more sumptuous. A regal flight of steps led to a narrow terrace which skirted the whole length of the ground-floor; the balustrade of this terrace, designed to match the railings of the Parc Monceau, was even more heavily gilded than the awning or the lamps in the courtyard. Above this rose the mansion, having at either corner a pavilion, a sort of tower half enclosed in the body of the building, and containing rooms of a circular form. In the centre there bulged out slightly a third turret, more deeply contained in the building. The windows, tall and narrow in the turrets, wider apart and almost square on the flat portions of the façade, had on the ground-floor stone balustrades and on the upper stories gilded wrought-iron railings. The display of decoration was profuse to oppressiveness. The house was hidden under its sculpture. Around the windows and along the cornices ran swags of flowers and branches; there were balconies shaped like baskets full of blossoms, and supported by great naked women with straining hips, with breasts jutting out before them; then, here and there, were planted fanciful escutcheons, clusters of fruit, roses, every flower that it is possible for stone or marble to represent. The higher the eye ascended, the more the building burst into blossom. Around the roof ran a balustrade on which stood, at equal intervals, urns blazing with flames of stone. And there, between the bull’s-eye windows of the attics, which opened on to an incredible confusion of fruit and foliage, mantled the crowning portions of this stupendous scheme of decoration, the pediments of the turrets, amid which reappeared the great naked women, playing with apples, attitudinizing amidst sheaves of rushes. The roof, loaded with these ornaments, and surmounted besides with a cresting of embossed lead, with two lightning conductors, and with four huge symmetrical chimney-stacks, carved like all the rest, seemed the supreme effort of this architectural firework.

On the right was a vast conservatory, built on to the side of the house, and communicating with the ground-floor through the glass door of a drawingroom. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low railing concealed by a hedge, had a considerable slope. Too small for the house, so narrow that a grassplot and a few clumps of evergreens filled it up entirely, it was there simply as a mound, a green pedestal on which the house stood proudly planted in its gala dress. Seen from the gardens, across the well-trimmed grass and the glistening foliage of the shrubs, this great structure, still new and absolutely pallid, showed the wan face, the purse-proud, foolish importance of a female parvenu, with its heavy headdress of slates, its gilded flounces, and the rustling of its sculptured skirts. It was a reduced copy of the new Louvre, one of the most characteristic specimens of the Napoleon III style, that fecund bastard of every style. On summer evenings, when the rays of the setting sun lit up the gilt of the railings against its white façade, the strollers in the gardens would stop to look at the crimson silk curtains draped behind the ground-floor windows; and, through sheets of plate glass so wide and so clear that they seemed like the window-fronts of a big modern shop, arranged so as to display to the outer world the wealth within, the small middle-class could catch glimpses of the corners of chairs or tables, of portions of hangings, of patches of ceilings of a profuse richness, the sight of which would root them to the spot with envy and admiration, right in the middle of the pathways.

But at this moment the shades were falling from the trees, and the façade slept. On the other side, in the courtyard, the footman was respectfully assisting Renée to alight. At the further end of a glass covered-way on the right, the stables, banded with red brick, opened wide their doors of polished oak. On the left, as if for a balance, there was built into the wall of the adjacent house a highly-decorated niche, within which a sheet of water flowed unceasingly from a shell which two Cupids held in their outstretched arms. Renée stood for a moment at the foot of the steps, gently tapping her dress, which refused to fall properly. The courtyard, which had just been traversed by the noise of the equipage, resumed its solitude, its high-bred silence, broken by the continuous song of the flowing water. And as yet, in the black mass made by the house where the first of the great autumn dinner-parties was presently to cause light to be set to the chandeliers, the bottom windows alone shed their light, all glowing and casting the bright reflections of a conflagration upon the little pavement of the courtyard, neat and regular as a draught-board.

Renée pushed open the hall-door, and found herself face to face with her husband’s valet, who was on his way to the basement, carrying a silver kettle. The man looked magnificent, dressed all in black, tall, broad-shouldered, pale-complexioned, with the conventional side-whiskers of an English diplomat, and the solemn and dignified air of a magistrate.

“Baptiste,” asked Renée, “has monsieur come in?”

“Yes, madame, he is dressing,” replied the valet, with a bend of the head which a prince bowing to the crowd might have envied.

Renée slowly climbed the staircase, drawing off her gloves.

The hall was very luxurious. There was a slight sense of suffocation on entering. The thick carpets that covered the floor and the stairs, the broad red velvet hangings that concealed the walls and the doorways, made the air heavy with silence, with the tepid fragrance of a chapel. Draperies hung high, and the very lofty ceiling was decorated with bosses projecting from a trelliswork of golden ribs. The staircase, whose double balustrade of white marble had a handrail covered with crimson velvet, commenced in two slightly converging flights, between which, at the back, was placed the door of the big drawingroom. On the first landing an immense mirror filled the whole wall. Below, at the foot of the branching staircase, stood, on marble pedestals, two bronze-gilt women, bare to the waist, upholding great lamps set with five burners, whose bright light was softened by ground-glass globes. And on both sides was a row of admirable majolica vases, in which rare plants displayed their growth.

Renée climbed the staircase, and at each step her image rose in the glass; she wondered, with the feeling of doubt common to the most popular actresses, whether she was really delicious, as people told her.

Then, when she had reached her rooms, which were on the first floor and overlooked the Parc Monceau, she rang for Céleste, her maid, and had herself dressed for dinner. This took fully an hour and a quarter. When the last pin had been inserted, she opened a window, as the room was very warm, and, leaning her elbows on the sill, sat thinking. Behind her, Céleste moved about discreetly, putting away the things.

A sea of shadow filled the gardens below. The tall, inky masses of foliage, shaken by sudden gusts of wind, swayed heavily to and fro as with the flux and reflux of the tide, the sound of their dead leaves recalling the lapping of waves on a pebbly beach. Only now and then this ebb and flow of darkness would be pierced by the two yellow eyes of a carriage, appearing and disappearing between the shrubberies, along the road connecting the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense with the Boulevard Malesherbes. In the presence of this autumnal melancholy, Renée felt her heart once more fill with sadness. She fancied herself a child in her father’s house, in that still house in the Île Saint-Louis, where for two centuries the Bérauds du Châtel had sheltered their grim, magisterial gravity. Then she thought of the suddenness of her marriage, of that widower who had sold himself to become her husband and bartered his name of Rougon for that of Saccard, the two dry syllables of which, when she first heard them, had sounded in her ears with the brutal cadence of two rakes gathering up gold; he took her and cast her into this life of excess, in which her poor head was becoming more and more disordered every day. Then she fell to dreaming, with childlike joy, of the pleasant games of battledore she had played with her little sister Christine in the old days. And how some morning she would wake from her dream of enjoyment of the past ten years, mad, soiled by one of her husband’s speculations, in which he himself would go under. It came to her as a quick foreboding. The trees soughed more loudly. Renée, distressed by these thoughts of shame and punishment, yielded to the instincts, slumbering within her, of the honest old middle-class; she made a promise to the black night that she would reform, spend less on her dress, seek some innocent amusement, as in the happy school-days, when the girls sang “Nous n’irons plus aux bois,” as they danced sweetly under the plane-trees.

At this moment, Céleste, who had been downstairs, returned, and murmured in her mistress’s ear:

“Monsieur begs madame to go down. There are several people already in the drawingroom.”

Renée shivered. She had not noticed the keen air that had frozen her shoulders. As she passed before the mirror, she stopped, glanced at herself automatically. She smiled involuntarily, and went downstairs.

Most of the guests had, in fact, arrived. She found downstairs her sister Christine, a young girl of twenty, very simply dressed in white muslin; her aunt Elisabeth, the widow of Aubertot the notary, in black satin, a little old woman of sixty, of an exquisite charm of manner; her husband’s sister, Sidonie Rougon, a lean, mealy-mouthed woman, of uncertain age, with a face like soft wax, which the dull hue of her dress threw even more in the shade; then the Mareuils; the father, M. de Mareuil, who had just left off mourning for his wife, a tall, handsome man, shallow and serious, bearing a striking resemblance to the valet, Baptiste; and the daughter, that poor Louise, as she was called, a child of seventeen, puny, a little humpbacked, wearing with a sickly grace a white foulard dress with red spots; then a whole group of serious men, men with many decorations, official gentlemen with silent, sallow faces, and, further on, another group, young men these, with vicious looks and low-cut waistcoats, standing round five or six ladies of extreme elegance, foremost among whom were the two inseparables, the little Marquise d’Espanet, in yellow, and the fair-haired Mme. Haffner, in violet. M. de Mussy, the horseman whose bow Renée had not acknowledged, was there too, with the restless look of a lover who feels his dismissal coming. And, among the long trams spread over the carpet, two contractors, two bricklayers who had made money, Mignon and Charrier, with whom Saccard was to settle a matter of business on the morrow, moved about heavily in their clumsy boots, their hands behind their backs, wretchedly unhappy in their dress-clothes.

Aristide Saccard, standing by the door, managed to greet each new arrival while holding forth to the group of serious men with his Southern twang and sprightliness. He shook his guests by the hand, with a cordial word of welcome. Short, mean in appearance, he bent and bowed like a puppet; and the most salient feature of all his shrill, cunning, swarthy little person was the red splash of the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, which he wore very wide.

Renée’s entrance provoked a murmur of admiration. She was really divine. Upon a tulle skirt, garnished behind with a flow of flounces, she wore a body of pale-green satin, bordered with English lace, caught up and fastened with large bunches of violets; a single flounce adorned the front of the skirt, and bunches of violets, held together by garlands of ivy, fastened a light muslin drapery. Her head and bust appeared adorably gracious above these petticoats of regal fulness and richness overloaded. Her neck was uncovered down to the points of her breasts, her arms were bare and had clusters of violets at the shoulders: she seemed to emerge quite naked from her case of tulle and satin, similarly to one of those nymphs whose busts issue from the sacred oaks. Her white neck and shoulders, her supple body, seemed so happy already in their semi-freedom, that the eye expected every moment to see the bodice and skirts glide down, like the dress of a bather enraptured with her flesh. Her fine yellow hair, gathered up high, helmet-shaped, with trailing through it a sprig of ivy retained by a knot of violets, still further accentuated her nudity by uncovering the nape of her neck, which was lightly shaded by little wanton curls, like threads of gold. Round her throat was a necklace with pendants, of brilliants of wonderful water, and on her forehead an aigrette made of sprigs of silver set with diamonds. And so she stood for some seconds on the threshold, erect in the magnificence of her dress, her shoulders shimmering in the hot light like watered silk. She had come down quickly, and was a little out of breath. Her eyes, which the blackness of the Parc Monceau had filled with shadow, blinked in that quick flood of light, giving her that air of hesitation of the shortsighted which in her was so gracious.

On perceiving her, the little marquise sprang from her seat, came running up to her, took her by both hands, and, examining her from head to foot, murmured in fluted tones:

“You dear, beautiful creature….”

Meanwhile there was much moving about; all the guests came and did homage to the beautiful Mme. Saccard, as Renée was known to everyone in society. She touched hands with most of the men. Then she kissed Christine, and asked after her father, who never came to the house in the Parc Monceau. And smiling, still bowing, her arms languidly rounded, she remained standing before the circle of ladies, who examined anxiously the necklace and the aigrette.

The fair-haired Mme. Haffner could no longer withstand the temptation. She drew nearer, and after a wistful look at the gems, asked with envy in her voice:

“That is the necklace and aigrette, is it not?”

Renée nodded. Thereupon all the women burst out into praise; the jewels were delicious, divine; then they proceeded to discuss, with admiration full of envy, Laure d’Aurigny’s sale, at which Saccard had bought them for his wife; they complained that those creatures got the prettiest of everything: soon there would be no diamonds left for the honest women. And through their complaints there filtered the longing to feel on their bare skins some of the jewellery that all Paris had seen on the shoulders of a noted courtesan, that might perhaps whisper in their ears scandals of the alcoves in which the thoughts of these great ladies so gladly lingered. They knew of the high prices, they mentioned a gorgeous cashmere shawl, some magnificent lace. The aigrette had cost fifteen thousand francs, the necklace fifty thousand. These figures roused Mme. d’Espanet to enthusiasm. She called Saccard over, exclaiming:

“Come and let me congratulate you! What a good husband you are!”

Aristide Saccard came up, bowed, made little of it. But his grinning features betrayed a lively satisfaction. And he watched from the corner of his eye the two contractors, the two bricklayers who had made their fortunes, as they stood a few steps off, listening with evident respect to the sound of such figures as fifteen and fifty thousand francs.

At this moment Maxime, who had just come in, charmingly pinched in his dress-clothes, leant familiarly on his father’s shoulder, and whispered to him as to a schoolfellow, glancing towards the bricklayers. Saccard wore the discreet smile of an actor called before the curtain.

Some more guests arrived. There were at least thirty persons in the drawingroom. Conversation was resumed; in intervals of silence the faint clatter of silver and crockery was heard through the walls. At last Baptiste opened the folding-doors, and majestically pronounced the sacramental phrase:

“Dinner is served, madame.”

Then, slowly, the procession formed. Saccard gave his arm to the little marquise; Renée took the arm of an old gentleman, a senator, the Baron Gouraud, before whom everybody bowed down with great humility; as to Maxime, he was obliged to offer his arm to Louise de Mareuil; then followed the rest of the guests, in double file; and right at the end, the two contractors, swinging their arms.

The dining-room was a huge, square room, whose wainscotting of stained and varnished pear-wood rose to the height of a man, and was decorated with slender headings of gold. The four large panels had evidently been prepared so that they might be filled up with paintings of still life; but this had never been done, the landlord having doubtless recoiled before a purely artistic expenditure. They had been hung simply with dark-green velvet. The chairs, curtains, and door-hangings of the same material gave the room a look of sober seriousness, calculated to concentrate on the table all the splendour of the light.

And indeed, at this hour, the table, standing in the centre of the wide, dark Persian carpet, which deadened the sounds of the footsteps, and under the glaring light of the chandelier, surrounded by chairs whose black backs, with fillets of gold, encircled it with a dark frame, seemed like an altar, like a mortuary chapel, as the bright scintillations of the crystal glass and silver plate sparkled on the dazzling whiteness of the cloth. Beyond the carved chairbacks, one could just perceive, in a floating shadow, the wainscotting of the walls, a large low sideboard, ends of velvet hanging here and there. The eye was of necessity drawn back to the table, and became filled with the splendour of it. A beautiful dead-silver centre-piece, glittering with its chased work, stood in the middle of the table; it represented a troop of satyrs carrying off nymphs; above the group, issuing from a large cornucopia, an enormous bouquet of real flowers hung down in clusters. At either end of the table stood vases with more flowers, a pair of candelabra, matching the centre group, and each consisting of a satyr running off with a swooning woman on one arm, and holding in the other a ten-branched candlestick which added the brilliancy of its candles to the lustre of the central chandelier. Between these principal ornaments the first dishes, large and small, were ranged symmetrically, flanked by shells containing the hors d’œuvre, and separated by Porcelain bowls, crystal vases, flat plates and tall preserve-stands, filled with that portion of the dessert that was already on the table. Along the line of plates ran an army of glasses, of water-bottles, of decanters, of salt-cellars, and all this glass was as thin and light as muslin, uncut, and so transparent that it cast no shadow. And the centre-piece and candelabra seemed like fountains of fire; sparks glittered in the burnished silver dishes; the forks, the spoons, and the knives with handles of mother-of-pearl were as bars of flame; colours kaleidoscopic filled the glasses; and, in the midst of this rain of light, of this mass of incandescence, the decanters threw red stains upon the white-hot cloth.

On entering, a discreet expression of felicity overspread the faces of the men, as they smiled to the ladies on their arms. The flowers imparted a freshness to the heavy atmosphere. Delicately the fumes of cooked food mingled with the perfume of the roses. The sharp odour of prawns predominated, and the sour scent of citrons.

Then, when each had found his name written on the back of his menu-card, there was a noise of chairs, a great rustling of silken dresses. The bare shoulders, studded with diamonds, separated by black coats, which served to throw up their pallor, added their creamy whiteness to the gleam of the table. The dinner began amidst little smiles exchanged between neighbours, in a semi-silence only broken as yet by the muffled clattering of spoons. Baptiste fulfilled his office of majordomo with his serious diplomatic attitudes; under his orders were, in addition to the two footmen, four assistants whom he only engaged for the great dinners. As he removed each dish to the end of the room and carved it at a side-table, three of the servants passed noiselessly round the table, dish in hand, naming the contents in an undertone as they handed them. The others served the wine, and saw to the bread and the decanters. The removes and entrées thus slowly went round and disappeared; the ladies’ pearly laughter grew no shriller.

The guests were too many for the conversation easily to become general. Nevertheless, at the second course, when the game and side-dishes had replaced the removes and entrées, and the generous wines of Burgundy, Pomard and Chambertin, succeeded the Léoville and Chateau-Lafitte, the sound of voices increased, and bursts of laughter caused the light glass to ring again. Renée, seated at the middle of the table, had on her right the Baron Gouraud, and on her left M. Toutin-Laroche, a retired candle-manufacturer, and now a Municipal Councillor, a director of the Crédit Viticole, and a member of the committee of inspection of the Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco, a lean, important person, whom Saccard, sitting opposite between Mme. d’Espanet and Mme. Haffner, addressed at one moment, in unctuous tones, as “My dear colleague,” and at another as “Our great administrator.” Next came the politicians: M. Hupel de la Noue, a provincial préfet, who spent eight months of the year in Paris; three deputies, among whom M. Haffner displayed his broad Alsatian face; then M. de Saffré, a charming young man, secretary to one of the ministers; and M. Michelin, the First Commissioner of Roads. M. de Mareuil, a perpetual candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, sat square, facing the préfet, whom he ogled persistently. As to M. d’Espanet, he never accompanied his wife into society. The ladies of the family were placed between the most prominent of these personages. Saccard had, however, kept his sister Sidonie, whom he had placed further off, for the seat between the two contractors, the Sieur Charrier on her right, the Sieur Mignon on her left, as being a post of trust where it was a question of conquest. Mme. Michelin, the wife of the First Commissioner, a plump, pretty, dark woman, sat next to M. de Saffré, with whom she carried on an animated conversation in a low voice. And at either end of the table were the young people, auditors to the Council of State, sons of useful fathers, budding millionaires, M. de Mussy, casting despairing glances at Renée, and Maxime, apparently quite vanquished by Louise de Mareuil, who sat on his right. Little by little they had begun to laugh very loudly. It was from their corner that the first outbursts of gaiety proceeded.

Meanwhile M. Hupel de la Noue enquired courteously:

“Shall we have the pleasure of seeing his Excellency this evening?”

“I fear not,” answered Saccard with an air of importance that concealed a secret annoyance. “My brother is so busy…. He has sent us his secretary, M. de Saffré, to make his apologies to us.”

The young secretary, whom Mme. Michelin was decidedly monopolizing, raised his head on hearing his name mentioned, and cried at random, thinking that he had been spoken to:

“Yes, yes, there is to be a cabinet council this evening at nine o’clock at the office of the Keeper of the Seals.”

All this time, M. Toutin-Laroche, who had been interrupted, was continuing seriously, as though he were delivering a peroration amid the attentive silence of the Municipal Council:

“The results are superb. The city loan will be remembered as one of the finest financial operations of the period. Ah! messieurs….”

But at this point his voice was again drowned in the laughter that broke out suddenly at one end of the table. In the midst of this outburst of merriment could be heard Maxime’s voice, as he concluded an anecdote: “But wait, I have not finished. The fair equestrian was picked up by a road-labourer. They say she is having him brilliantly educated with a view to marrying him later on. No man but her husband, she says, shall boast of having seen a certain black mole just above her knee.” The laughter redoubled; Louise laughed unreservedly, louder than the men. And noiselessly amid this laughter, as though deaf, a footman at this moment thrust his pale serious face between each guest, offering in a low voice slices of wild duck.

Aristide was annoyed at the want of attention paid to M. Toutin-Laroche. He repeated, to show that he had been listening:

“The city loan….”

But M. Toutin-Laroche was not the man to lose the thread of an idea:

“Ah! messieurs,” he continued when the laughter had subsided, “yesterday was a great consolation to us whose administration is exposed to such base attacks. They accuse the council of leading the city to destruction, and you see, no sooner does the city issue a loan, than they all bring us their money, even those who complain.”

“You have performed wonders,” said Saccard. “Paris has become the capital of the world.”

“Yes, it is really astounding,” interposed M. Hupel de la Noue. “Can you imagine that I, old Parisian that I am, no longer know my Paris. I lost my way yesterday in going from the Hotel de Ville to the Luxembourg. It’s astounding, astounding!”

There was a pause. All the serious people were now listening.

“The transformation of Paris,” continued M. Toutin-Laroche, “will be the glory of the reign. The nation is ungrateful; it ought to kiss the Emperor’s feet. As I said this morning in the council, when they were talking of the great success of the loan: ‘Gentlemen, let those brawlers of the opposition say what they will; to plough up Paris is to make it productive.’“

Saccard smiled, and closed his eyes, as though the better to relish the subtlety of the epigram. He leant behind the back of Mme. d’Espanet, and said to M. Hupel de la Noue, loud enough to be heard:

“He is adorably witty.”

Meantime, while they were discussing the alterations being made in Paris, the Sieur Charrier had been stretching out his neck, as though to take part in the conversation. His partner Mignon was fully occupied with Mme. Sidonie, who was giving him plenty to do. Saccard had been watching the two contractors from the corner of his eye since the commencement of dinner.

“The administration,” he said, “has met with so much devotion. Everyone was eager to contribute to the great work. Without the wealthy companies that came to its assistance, the city would never have done so well nor so quickly.”

He turned round, and with a sort of fawning brutality:

“MM. Mignon and Charrier know something of that; they have had their share of the labour, and they will have their share of the glory.”

The bricklayers who had made their fortunes received this uncouth compliment with radiant faces. Mignon, to whom Mme. Sidonie was saying, in her mincing tones: “Ah, monsieur, you flatter me; no, pink would be too young for me….” left her in the middle of her sentence to reply to Saccard:

“You are too kind; we merely did our business.”

But Charrier was more polished. He drank off his glass of Pomard, and managed to deliver himself of a phrase:

“The alterations of Paris,” he said, “have given a living to the workman.”

“And we may add,” resumed M. Toutin-Laroche, “that they have given a magnificent impulse to industry and finance.”

“And do not forget the artistic side of the question: the new thoroughfares are majestic in their beauty,” added M. Hupel de la Noue, who prided himself on his taste.

“Yes, yes, it is a fine undertaking,” murmured M. de Mareuil, for the sake of saying something.

“As to the cost,” declared Haffner seriously, the deputy who never opened his mouth except on great occasions, “that will be for our children to bear, nothing could be fairer.”

And as, in speaking, he looked towards M. de Saffré, who appeared to have given a momentary offence to the pretty Mme. Michelin, the young secretary, to shew that he had been following the conversation, repeated:

“Nothing could be fairer indeed.”

Each member of the group of serious men at the middle of the table had had his say. M. Michelin, the Chief Commissioner, smiled and wagged his head: this was his ordinary method of taking part in a conversation: he had smiles of greeting, of response, of approval, of thanks, of leave-taking, quite a pretty collection of smiles which saved him almost any necessity for speech, an arrangement which he looked upon as doubtless more polite and more favourable to his advancement.

Yet one other personage had kept silence, the Baron Gouraud, who munched his food slowly like a drowsy ox. Up to that moment he had appeared absorbed in the contemplation of his plate. Renée, who paid him every attention, received nothing for it but little grunts of satisfaction. And consequently it was a surprise to see him lift his head and observe, as he wiped his greasy lips:

“As a landlord, whenever I have a flat done up and painted, I raise the rent.”

M. Haffner’s expression: “The cost will be for our children to bear” had had the effect of arousing the senator. All discreetly clapped their hands, and M. de Saffré exclaimed:

“Ah, charming, charming, I must send that to the papers tomorrow.”

“You are quite right, messieurs, these are good times we live in,” said Mignon, by way of summing up, in the midst of the smiles and admiration aroused by the baron’s epigram. “I know a few who have made a good thing out of them. You see, everything is fine so long as you make money by it.”

These last words seemed to freeze the serious men. The conversation dropped flat, and each appeared to avoid his neighbour’s eyes. The bricklayer’s aphorism struck home, deadly as the paving-stone of la Fontaine’s bear. Michelin, who happened to be beaming upon Saccard with a pleasant air, ceased smiling, very anxious lest he should seem for one instant to have applied the contractor’s words to the master of the house. The latter threw a glance to Mme. Sidonie, who tackled Mignon afresh, saying, “And so you like pink, monsieur…?” And Saccard paid an elaborate compliment to Mme. Espanet; his dark, sorry face almost touched her milky shoulders, as she threw herself back and tittered.

They were at the dessert. The lackeys moved round the table at a quicker pace. There was a pause while the cloth was being covered with the remainder of the fruit and sweets. At Maxime’s end of the table the laughter increased in brightness; Louise’s little shrill voice was heard saying: “I assure you, Sylvia wore blue satin as Dindonette;” and another childish voice added: “Yes, but her dress was trimmed with white lace.” Tepid fumes pervaded the air. The flushed faces seemed to be softened by a sense of inward felicity. Two lackeys went round the table serving Alicante and Tokay.

Renée had worn a look of vacancy ever since the beginning of dinner. She fulfilled her duties as hostess with a mechanical smile. At every outburst of merriment that came from the end of the table where Maxime and Louise sat side by side, jesting like boon companions, she threw a lurid glance in their direction. She felt bored. The serious men were too much for her. Mme. d’Espanet and Mme. Haffner looked towards her in despair.

“And what are the prospects of the forthcoming elections?” asked Saccard, suddenly, of M. Hupel de la Noue.

“Very promising,” answered the latter, smiling: “only I have had no candidates appointed as yet for my department. The minister has not made up his mind, it would seem.”

M. de Mareuil, who had thanked Saccard with a glance for broaching this subject, appeared to be on hot coals. He blushed, and bowed disconcertedly when the préfet turned to him and continued:

“I have heard much of you in the country, monsieur. Your extensive property there has won you many friends, and your devotion to the Emperor is well known. Your chances are excellent.”

“Papa, isn’t it true that little Sylvia used to sell cigarettes at Marseilles in 1849?” cried Maxime at this moment from the end of the table.

Aristide Saccard pretended not to hear, and his son continued in a lower tone:

“My father has known her intimately.”

This aroused some smothered laughter. Meantime, while M. de Mareuil kept up his bowing, M. Haffner had resumed in sententious tones:

“Devotion to the Emperor is the only virtue, the only patriotism, in these days of self-interested democracy. Who loves the Emperor loves France. It would give us unfeigned pleasure if monsieur were to become our colleague.”

“Monsieur will succeed,” said M. Toutin-Laroche in his turn. “All large fortunes should gather round the throne.”

Renée could bear it no longer. The marquise was stifling a yawn in front of her. And as Saccard was about to resume, she said to him, with her pretty smile:

“Take pity on us, dear, and spare us any more of your horrid politics.”

Then M. Hupel de la Noue, with a préfet’s gallantry, exclaimed that the ladies were right. And he began to tell an indecent story of something that had happened in his district. The marquise, Mme. Haffner, and the other ladies, laughed heartily at certain of the details. The préfet told his story in a very pungent style, with suggestions, reservations and inflections of voice that gave a very improper meaning to the most inoffensive expressions. Then they talked of the first of the duchesse’s Tuesdays, of a burlesque that had been produced the night before, of the death of a poet, and of the end of the autumn racing-season. M. Toutin-Laroche, who had his amiable moments, drew a comparison between women and roses, and M. de Mareuil, in the confusion in which he had been plunged by his electoral expectations, gave vent to profound observations on the new fashion in bonnets. Renée retained her vacant look.

Meanwhile the guests had ceased eating. A hot breath seemed to have passed over the table, clouding the glasses, crumbling the bread, blackening the fruit-peel on the plates, and destroying the fine symmetry of the cloth. The flowers drooped in the great cornucopia of chased silver. And the guests had a moment of self-oblivion, in the presence of the remains of the dessert, lacking the energy to rise from their seats. Leaning half forward, with one arm resting on the table, they had the listless aspect, the indefinite dejection, that accompanies the cautious, circumspect inebriation of men and women of fashion fuddling themselves by degrees. All laughter had subsided, and but few words were spoken. Much had been drunk and eaten, and the group of men with decorations were more solemn than ever. In the heavy atmosphere of the room, the ladies felt a dampness rising to their necks and temples. They awaited the signal to adjourn to the drawingroom, serious, a little pale, as though their heads were gently swimming. Mme. Espanet was pink all over, while Mme. Haffner’s shoulders had assumed a waxen whiteness. And M. Hupel de la Noue examined the handle of his knife; M. Toutin-Laroche continued to fling disconnected sentences towards M. Haffner, who wagged his head in reply; M. de Mareuil mused, with his eyes fixed on M. de Michelin, who smiled upon him archly. As for the pretty Mme. Michelin, she had long ceased talking; very red in the face, she let one of her hands hang under the table, where it was doubtless held by M. de Saffré, who leant awkwardly against the edge of the table, with knit eyebrows and the grimace of a man solving an algebraical problem. Madame Sidonie, too, had made her conquests; the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, both leaning on their elbows with their faces turned towards her, seemed enraptured at receiving her confidences; she confessed that she loved everything that was made with milk, and that she was frightened of ghosts. And Aristide Saccard himself, his eyes half-closed, plunged in the beatitude of an amphitryon who realizes that he has conscientiously fuddled his guests, had no thought of leaving the table; with respectful tenderness he surveyed the Baron Gouraud laboriously digesting his dinner, his right hand spread over the white cloth, the hand of a sensual old man, short, thick, blotched with purple patches and covered with short red hairs.

Renée drank up automatically the few drops of Tokay that remained at the bottom of her glass. Her face tingled; the little yellow hairs on her neck and temples escaped rebelliously as though moistened by a humid breath. Her lips and nose were nervously contracted, she had the silent expression of a child that has drunk neat wine. The good middle-class thoughts that had come to her as she sat looking at the shadows of the Parc Monceau were now drowned in the stimulation of food and wine and light, and of the disturbing surroundings, impregnated with hot breath and merriment. She no longer exchanged quiet smiles with her sister Christine and her aunt Elisabeth, both of them modest and retiring, barely uttering a word. With a stony glance she had compelled the poor M. de Mussy to lower his eyes. Though her thoughts were apparently wandering, and she carefully refrained from turning round, and remained leaning back in her chair, against which the satin of her bodice rustled gently, she allowed an imperceptible shudder of the shoulders to escape her at each renewed burst of laughter that came to her from the corner where Maxime and Louise were still making merry, as loudly as ever, amid the dying hum of conversation.

And behind her, on the edge of the shadow, his tall figure beetling over the disordered table and the torpid guests, stood Baptiste, pale and solemn, in the scornful attitude of a flunky that has gorged his masters. He alone, in the air laden with drunkenness, beneath the vivid light that was turning to yellow, continued correct, with his silver chain round his neck, his cold eyes, in which the sight of the women’s shoulders kindled no spark, his air of a eunuch waiting on Parisians of the decadence and retaining his dignity.

At last Renée rose, with a nervous movement. All followed her example. They adjourned to the drawingroom, where coffee was served.

The large drawingroom was an immense, long room, with a sort of gallery that ran from one pavilion to the other, taking up the whole of the façade on the garden side. A large French window opened on to the steps. This gallery glittered with gold. The ceiling, gently arched, had fanciful scrolls winding round great gilt medallions, that shone like bucklers. Bosses and dazzling garlands encircled the arch; fillets of gold, resembling threads of molten metal, ran round the walls, framing the panels, which were hung with red silk; festoons of roses, topped with tufts of full-blown blossoms, hung down along the sides of the mirrors. An Aubusson carpet spread its purple flowers over the polished flooring. The furniture of red silk damask, the door-hangings and window-curtains of the same material, the huge ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, the porcelain vases standing on the consoles, the legs of the two long tables inlaid in Florentine mosaic, the very flower-stands placed in the recesses of the windows, oozed and sweated with gold. At the four corners of the room were four great lamps placed on pedestals of red marble, to which they were fastened by chains of bronze gilt, that fell with symmetrical grace. And from the ceiling hung three lustres with crystal pendants, streaming with drops of blue and pink light, whose hot glare drew a responding gleam from all the gold in the room.

The men soon withdrew to the smoking-room. M. de Mussy went up to Maxime and took him familiarly by the arm; he had known him at school, though he was six years his senior. He led him on to the terrace, and after they had lighted their cigars he complained bitterly of Renée.

“But tell me, what is the matter with her? I saw her yesterday, and she was charming. And to-day you see, she behaves to me as if all were over between us. What can I have done? It would be kind of you indeed, my dear Maxime, if you would question her and tell her how I am suffering for her.”

“Ah! as for that — no!” replied Maxime, laughing. “Renée’s nerves are out of order, and I am not disposed to face a storm. You can settle your differences between yourselves.”

And he added, after slowly puffing out the smoke of his havanna:

“You want me to do a nice thing, don’t you?”

But M. de Mussy spoke of the sincerity of his friendship, and declared that he was only waiting for an opportunity to give Maxime a proof of his devotion. He was very unhappy, he was so deeply in love with Renée!

“Very well then, I will,” said Maxime at last, “I will speak to her, but I can promise nothing, you know: she is sure to send me to blazes.”

They returned to the smoking-room and stretched themselves at full length in two great lounging-chairs. And there, during a good half-hour, M. de Mussy related his sorrows to Maxime; he told him for the tenth time how he had fallen in love with his stepmother, how she had condescended to notice him; and Maxime, while finishing his cigar, advised him, explained Renée’s nature to him, pointed out to him how he should act in order to subjugate her.

Saccard came and sat down within a few paces of the young men, and M. de Mussy kept silence, while Maxime concluded by saying:

“If I were in your place, I would treat her very cavalierly. She likes that.”

The smoking-room was at one end of the large salon: it was one of the round rooms formed by the turrets. It was fitted up very richly and very soberly. Hung with imitation Cordova leather, it had Algerian curtains and door-hangings, and a velvet-pile carpet of Persian design. The furniture, upholstered in maroon-coloured shagreen leather, consisted of ottomans, easy-chairs, and a circular divan that ran round a part of the room. The miniature chandelier, the ornaments on the table and the fire-irons were of pale-green Florentine bronze.

There remained behind with the ladies only a few of the younger men and some old men with pale, flabby faces, who loathed tobacco. In the smoking-room reigned laughter and much free jesting. M. Hupel de la Noue diverted his fellow-guests by repeating the story he had told at dinner, embellished with exceedingly bawdy details. This was his specialty: he had two versions of every anecdote, one for the ladies and the other for men. Then, when Aristide Saccard entered, he was surrounded and complimented; and as he pretended not to understand, M. de Saffré told him, in a heartily-applauded speech, that he had deserved well of his country for preventing the fair Laure d’Aurigny from falling into the hands of the English.

“No, really, messieurs, you are mistaken,” stammered Saccard, with false modesty.

“Go on, why try to excuse yourself?” cried Maxime humorously. “It was a very fine thing to do, at your time of life.”

The young man, who had thrown away his cigar, went back to the drawingroom. A great many people had arrived. The gallery was full of men in evening clothes, standing up and talking in low tones, and of petticoats spread out wide along the settees. Flunkeys had begun to move about with silver salvers loaded with ices and glasses of punch.

Maxime, who wished to speak to Renée, passed through the full length of the drawingroom, knowing from experience the ladies’ favourite sanctum. There was, at the opposite end to the smoking-room, to which it formed a pendant, another circular room which had been made into an adorable little drawingroom. This boudoir, with its hangings, curtains and portieres of buttercup satin, had a voluptuous charm of an original and exquisite flavour. The lights of the chandelier, a piece of very delicate workmanship, sang a symphony in pale-yellow, amid all these sun-coloured silks. The effect resembled a flood of softened rays, as of the sun setting over a field of ripe wheat. The light expired upon the floor on an Aubusson carpet strewn with dead leaves. An ebony piano inlaid with ivory, two cabinets whose glass doors displayed a host of knickknacks, a Louis XVI table, a flower-bracket heaped high with blossoms furnished the room. The settees, the easy-chairs, the ottomans, were covered in quilted buttercup satin, divided at intervals by wide black satin bands embroidered with gaudy tulips. And then there were low seats, and occasional chairs, and every variety of stool, elegant and bizarre. The woodwork of these articles of furniture could not be perceived; the satin and the quilting covered all. The backs were curved with the soft fulness of bolsters. They were like so many discreet couches in whose down one could sleep and love amid the sensual symphony in pale-yellow.

Renée loved this little room, one of whose glass doors opened into the magnificent hothouse built onto the side of the house. In the daytime it was here that she spent her hours of idleness. The yellow hangings, so far from extinguishing her pale hair, gave it a strange golden radiancy; her head stood out pink and white amid a glamour of dawn like that of a fair Diana awakening in the morning light; and this was doubtless the reason why she loved this room that threw her beauty into relief.

At present she was there with her intimate friends. Her sister and aunt had just taken their leave. None but the harebrained remained in the sanctum. Half thrown back on a settee, Renée was listening to the confidences of her friend Adeline, who was whispering in her ear with kittenish airs and sudden bursts of laughter. Suzanne Haffner was in great demand; she was holding her own against a group of young men who pressed her closely, without losing her German listlessness, her provoking effrontery, cold and bare as her shoulders. In a corner Madame Sidonie in a low voice instilled her precepts into the mind of a young married woman with Madonna-like lashes. Further off stood Louise, talking to a tall, shy young man, who blushed; while the Baron Gouraud dozed in his easy chair in the full light, spreading out his flabby flesh, his wan, elephantine form in the midst of the ladies’ frail grace and silken daintiness. And a fairylike light fell in a golden shower all over the room, on the satin skirts with folds hard and gleaming as porcelain, on the shoulders whose milky whiteness was studded with diamonds. A fluted voice, a laugh like a pigeon’s cooing, rang with crystal clearness. It was very warm. Fans beat slowly to and fro like wings disseminating at each stroke into the languid air the musked perfume of the bodices.

When Maxime appeared in the doorway, Renée, who was listening absently to the marquise’s stories, rose hastily as if to attend to her duties as hostess. She went into the large drawingroom, where the young man followed her. She took a few steps, smiling, shaking hands with people, and then, drawing Maxime aside:

“Well!” she whispered, ironically, “the burden seems a pleasant one; you no longer find it so stupid to do your own wooing.”

“I don’t understand,” replied Maxime, who had come to plead for M. de Mussy.

“Yet it seems to me that I did well not to deliver you from Louise. You are getting on rapidly, you two.”

And she added, with a sort of vexation:

“It was indecent to go on like that at dinner.”

Maxime began to laugh.

“Ah, yes, we told one another stories. I did not know the little minx. She is quite amusing. She is like a boy.”

And as Renée continued her grimace of prudish annoyance, the young man, who had never known her to shew such indignation, resumed with his urbane familiarity:

“Do you imagine, stepmamma, that I pinched her knees under the table? Hang it all, I know how to behave to my future wife!…. I have something more serious to say to you. Listen…. You are listening, are you not?”

He lowered his voice still more.

“Look here, M. de Mussy is very unhappy, he has just told me so. You know, it is not for me to reconcile you, if you have had a difference. But, you see, I knew him at school, and as he really seemed in despair, I promised to put in a word for him….”

He stopped. Renée was looking at him in an indescribable manner.

“You won’t answer?…. he continued. “No matter, I have delivered my message, and you can settle things as you please…. But, honestly, I think you are unkind. I felt sorry for the poor fellow. If I were you, I would at least send him a kind word.”

Then Renée, who had not ceased to keep her eyes, filled with a glittering light, fixed upon Maxime, said:

“Go and tell M. de Mussy that he’s a nuisance.”

And she resumed her slow walk amidst the groups of guests, smiling, bowing, shaking hands with people. Maxime stood where he was, lost in surprise; then he laughed silently to himself.

In no way eager to deliver his message to M. de Mussy, he strolled round the large drawingroom. The reception was dragging itself to its end, marvellous and commonplace, like all receptions. It was close upon midnight; the guests were dropping off one by one. Not caring to go to sleep upon an unpleasant impression, he decided to look for Louise. He was passing before the hall-door, when he saw standing in the vestibule the pretty Madame Michelin, whom her husband was wrapping up daintily in a blue-and-pink opera-cloak.

“He was charming, quite charming,” she was saying. “We talked of you all through dinner. He will speak to the minister; only it is not in his province ….”

And as a footman, close by them, was helping the Baron Gouraud on with a great fur coat:

“That’s the old boy who could carry the thing through!” she added in her husband’s ear, while he was tying the ribbon of her hood under her chin. “He can do anything he likes with the minister. Tomorrow, at the Mareuil’s, I must see what ….”

M. Michelin smiled. He carried his wife off gingerly, as though he had something valuable and fragile under his arm. Maxime, after glancing round to assure himself that Louise was not in the hall, went straight to the small drawingroom. And he found her still there, almost alone, waiting for her father who had spent the evening in the smoking-room with the politicians. Most of the ladies, the marquise, Madame Haffner, had left. Only Madame Sidonie remained behind, explaining to some wives of officials how fond she was of animals.

“Ah! here is my little husband,” cried Louise. “Sit down here and tell me where my father has fallen asleep. He must have fancied that he was already in the Chamber.”

Maxime replied in a similar strain, and the two young people began laughing again as loudly as at dinner. Sitting on a very low stool at her feet, he ended by taking her hands, by playing with her as with a schoolfellow. And, in fact, in her frock of white foulard with red spots, with her high-cut bodice, her flat breast, and her ugly, cunning little street-boy’s head, she might have passed for a boy dressed up as a girl. Yet at times her shrivelled arms, her distorted form, would assume a pose of abandonment, and a light would flash from the depths of her eyes, still full of callowness; but not the least blush in the world was brought to her cheeks by Maxime’s romping. And they both laughed on, thinking themselves alone, without perceiving Renée, who stood half-hidden in the middle of the conservatory, watching them from a distance.

A moment before, as she was crossing a walk, the sight of Maxime and Louise had suddenly caused Renée to stand still behind a shrub. Around her the hothouse, resembling the nave of a church, with an arched glass roof supported by straight, slender iron columns, displayed its fat vegetation, its masses of lusty verdure, its spreading rockets of foliage.

In the middle, in an oval tank level with the flooring, lived, with the mysterious sea-green life of water-plants, all the aquatic flora of the tropics. Cyclanthus-plants, displaying their streaks of variegated green, raised a monumental girdle around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end, two tall tornelias reared their quaint brushwood above the water, their dry, bare stems contorted like agonizing serpents, and let fall aerial roots, that seemed like a fisherman’s nets hung up in the open air. Near the edge, a Javanese pandanus spread its cluster of green leaves streaked with white, thin as swords, prickly and fretted as Malay creeses. And on the surface, in the warmth of the tepid sheet of slumbering water, great water-lilies opened out their pink petals, and euryales trailed their round leaves, their leprous leaves, floating like the backs of monstrous blistered toads.

By way of turf, a broad edging of selaginella encircled the tank. This dwarf fern formed a thick mossy carpet of a light green shade. And beyond the great circular path, four enormous clusters of plants shot vigorously right up to the roof: palms, drooping gently in their elegance, spreading their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, hung down their leaves like oars wearied by their perpetual voyage through the blue; tall Indian bamboos rose straight, hard, slender, dropping from on high their light shower of leaves; a ravenala, the traveller’s tree, reared its bouquet of huge Chinese hand-screens; and in a corner a plantain-tree, loaded with fruit, stretched out on all sides its long horizontal leaves, on which two lovers might easily recline clasped in each other’s embrace. In the corners were Abyssinian euphorbias, deformed prickly cactuses, covered with loathly excrescences, oozing with poison. And beneath the trees the ground was carpeted with creeping ferns, adianta and pterides, their fronds outlined daintily like fine lace. Alsophilas of a taller species tapered upwards with their rows of symmetrical foliage, hexagonal, so regular as to have the appearance of large pieces of porcelain destined to hold the fruit of some titanic desert. The shrubberies were surrounded with a border of begonias and caladiums; begonias, with twisted leaves, gorgeously streaked with red and green; caladiums whose spear-headed leaves, white, with veins of green, looked like large butterfly-wings; bizarre plants, whose foliage lives strangely with the sombre or wan splendour of noisome flowers.

Behind the shrubberies, a second and narrower pathway ran round the greenhouse. There, on stages, half concealing the hot-water pipes, bloomed marantas, soft as velvet to the touch, gloxinias, purple-belled, dracœnas, resembling blades of old lacquer.

But one of the charms of this winter-garden was the four alcoves of verdure at the corners, roomy arbours closed in by thick curtains of creepers. Scraps of virgin forest had here erected their leafy walls, their impenetrable confusion of stems, of supple shoots that clung to the branches, shot through space in reckless flight, and fell from the arched roof like tassels of ornate drapery. A stalk of vanilla, whose ripe pods emitted a pungent perfume, trailed about a moss-grown portico; Indian berries draped the thin pillars with their round leaves; bauhinias with their red clusters, quisqualias with flowers pendant like bead necklaces glided, twined and intertwined like slim adders, endlessly playing and creeping amid the darkness of the growths.

And beneath arches, placed here and there between the beds of shrubs, hung baskets suspended from wire chains, and filled with orchids, fantastic plants of the air, which pushed in every direction their crooked tendrils, bent and twisted like the limbs of cripples. There were cypripediums, whose flowers resemble a wonderful slipper with a heel adorned with a dragon-fly’s wings; ærides, so delicately scented; stanhopeas, with pale tiger flowers, which exhale from afar a strong and acrid breath, as from the putrid throats of the convalescent sick.

But what most struck the eye from every point of the walks was a great Chinese hibiscus, whose immense expanse of foliage and flowers covered the whole wall of the house on to which the conservatory was built. The huge purple flowers of this giant mallow, unceasingly renewed, live but a few hours. They resembled as who should say the eager, sensual mouths of women, the red lips, soft and moist, of some colossal Messalina, bruised by kisses, and ever reviving with their hungry, bleeding smiles.

Renée, standing by the tank, shivered in the midst of this verdant magnificence. Behind her, a great sphinx in black marble, squatting upon a block of granite, turned its head towards the fountain with a cat’s cruel and wary smile; and, with its polished thighs, it looked like the dark idol of this tropical clime. From globes of ground glass came a light that covered the leaves with milky stains. Statues, heads of women with necks thrown back, swelling with laughter, stood out white against the background of the shrubberies, with patches of shadow which distorted the mad gaiety upon their faces. Strange rays of light played about the dull, still water of the tank, throwing up vague shapes, glaucous masses with monstrous outlines. A flood of white light streamed over the ravenala’s glossy leaves, over the lacquered fans of the latanias; while from the lacework of the ferns fell drops of light in a fine shower. Up above shone the reflections from the glass roof, between the sombre tops of the tall palm-trees. And all around was massed in darkness; the arbours, with their hangings of creepers, were drowned in tenebrous gloom, like the lairs of slumbering serpents.

Renée stood musing beneath the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime in the distance. She no longer felt the fleeting fancies, the gray, twilight temptations of the chilly avenues of the Bois. Her thoughts were no longer lulled to sleep by the trot of her horses along the mundane turf, the glades in which middle-class families take their Sunday repasts. This time she was permeated with a keen and definite desire.

Unbridled love and voluptuous appetite haunted this stifling nave in which seethed the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapt in the puissant bridals of the earth which gave birth to those dark growths, those colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hot-bed, of this forest expansion, of this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia full of intoxication. At her feet steamed the tank, the mass of tepid water thickened by the saps from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours; a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with concupiscence. Overhead she could smell the palm-trees whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat of the air, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours, above all, that overpowered her. An indescribable perfume, potent, provocative, composed of a thousand perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and swooningly faint were blended with zephyrs coarse, pestilential, laden with poison. But, amid this rare music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids’ stridency, was that penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, that smell of love escaping in the morning hour from the close chamber of a bridegroom and bride.

Renée sank back slowly, leaning against the granite pedestal. In her dress of green satin, her head and breast flushed and bedewed with the bright scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled a great flower, green and pink, one of the water-lilies from the tank, swooning with heat. In this moment of enlightenment, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of dinner returned to her head, arrogant, triumphant, redoubled in force by the flames of the hothouse. She thought no longer of the freshness of the night, that had calmed her, of the murmuring shadows of the gardens, whose voices had whispered in her ear the bliss of serenity. In her were aroused the senses of a woman who desires, the caprices of a woman who is satiated. And above her head, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mystic laugh, as if it had read the longing, formulated at last, that galvanized that dead heart, the fugitive longing, the “something different” vainly sought for by Renée in the rocking of her calash, in the fine ashes of the falling night, and now suddenly revealed to her beneath the dazzling light of this blazing garden by the sight of Maxime and Louise, laughing and playing, their hands interlocked.

Now a sound of voices issued from an adjacent arbour into which Aristide Saccard had led the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier.

“No, Monsieur Saccard,” said the latter’s fat voice, “we really cannot take that back at more than two hundred francs the metre.”

And Saccard’s shrill tones retorted:

“But in my share you valued each metre of frontage at two hundred and fifty francs.”

“Well, listen, we will make it two hundred and twenty-five francs.”

And the voices went on, coarse, sounding strangely under the clumps of drooping palm-trees. But they passed like an empty noise through Renée’s dream, as there rose before her, with the fatal summons experienced by one looking over a precipice, an unknown joyance, hot with crime, more violent than all those which she had already drained, the last that remained in her cup. She felt weary no longer.

The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascar tanghin-tree with broad box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. And at a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the yellow refraction, in the sunset of the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth parched and stung, took between her lips a sprig of the tanghin-tree which came to the level of her teeth, and closed them on one of its bitter leaves.