Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 14

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Maxime remained at school at Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was a few months over thirteen, and had just passed the fifth class. It was then that his father decided to let him come to Paris. He reflected that a son of that age would give him a certain position, would fix him definitively in the part he played of a wealthy widower, twice married, and serious in his views. When he informed Renée, towards whom he prided himself upon his extreme gallantry, of his intention, she answered, negligently:

“That’s right, have the boy up…. He will amuse us a little. One is bored to death in the mornings.”

The boy arrived a week later. He was already a tall, spare stripling, with a girl’s face, a delicate, forward look, and very light flaxen hair. But great God! how oddly he was got up! He was cropped to the ears, his hair was cut so short that the whiteness of his cranium was barely covered with a shadow of pale down, he wore trousers too short for him, hobnailed shoes, a hideously threadbare tunic that was much too wide and made him look almost hunchbacked. In this garb, surprised at the new things he saw, he looked about him, not at all timidly, but with the savage, cunning air of a precocious child, that is loth to come out of its shell at first sight.

A servant had just fetched him from the station, and he was waiting in the big drawingroom, charmed with the gilding on the ceiling and furniture, thoroughly delighted with this luxury in which he was about to spend his life, when Renée, returning from her tailor, swept in like a gust of wind. She threw off her hat and the white burnoose which she had placed over her shoulders to protect her from the cold, which was already keen. She appeared before Maxime, who was stupefied with admiration, in all the brilliancy of her marvellous attire.

The child thought she was dressed up. She wore a delicious skirt of blue faille, with deep flounces, and over that a sort of French-guard’s coat in pale-gray silk. The flaps of the coat, lined with blue satin of a deeper shade than the faille of the skirt, were bravely caught up and secured with knots of ribbon; the cuffs of the flat sleeves, the broad lapels of the bodice stood out wide, trimmed with the same satin. And as a supreme effort of trimming, as a bold stroke of eccentricity, two rows of large buttons imitating sapphires and fastening into blue rosettes, adorned the front of the coat. It was ugly and entrancing.

When Renée perceived Maxime:

“It’s the boy, is it not?” asked she of the servant, surprised to find him as tall as herself.

The child was devouring her with his eyes. This lady with a skin so white, whose bosom showed through a gap of her plaited shirtfront, this sudden and charming apparition, with her hair dressed high, her elegant, gloved hands, her little Wellington boots with pointed heels that dug into the carpet, delighted him, seemed to him to be the good fairy of this warm, gilded room. He began to smile, and he was just sufficiently awkward to retain his urchin gracefulness.

“Why, he is quite amusing!” cried Renée….”But what a shame! how they have cut his hair!… Listen, my little friend, your father will probably not come in till dinnertime, and I shall have to make you at home…. I am your stepmother, monsieur. Will you give me a kiss?”

“Yes, if you like,” answered Maxime, boldly.

And he kissed Renée on both cheeks, taking her by the shoulders, whereby the French-guard’s coat was a little rumpled. She freed herself, laughing, saying:

“Oh dear, how amusing he is, the little shaveling!…”

She came back to him, more serious.

“We shall be friends, sha’n’t we?… I want to be a mother to you. I was thinking about it while I was waiting for my tailor, who was engaged, and I said to myself that I must be very kind and bring you up quite properly…. That will be nice!”

Maxime continued to stare at her with his blue forward girl’s eyes, and suddenly:

“How old are you?” he asked.

“But you should never ask that!” she cried, clasping her hands together….”He knows nothing, poor little wretch! He will have to be taught everything…. Luckily I can still tell my age. I am twenty-one.”

“I shall soon be fourteen…. You might be my sister.”

He did not go on, but his look added that he had expected to find his father’s second wife much older. He was standing quite close to her, and examining her neck so attentively that she almost ended by blushing. Her giddy head, moreover, was turning: it was never able to fix itself long on the same subject; and she began to walk about, to speak of her tailor, forgetting she was talking to a child.

“I wanted to be here to receive you. But think, Worms brought me this dress this morning…. I tried it on and I thought it rather successful. It is very smart, is it not?”

She had moved before a mirror. Maxime walked to and fro behind her so as to examine her on every side.

“Only,” she continued, “when I put on the coat, I noticed there was a large fold, there, on the left shoulder, d’you see?… That fold is very ugly, it makes me look as if I had one shoulder higher than the other.”

He came up to her and pressed his finger over the fold as though to smooth it down, and his vicious schoolboy hand seemed to linger on that spot with a certain satisfaction.

“Well,” she continued, “I couldn’t wait. I had the horses put to, and I went to tell Worms what I thought of his outrageous carelessness…. He promised me to put it right.”

Thereupon she remained before the mirror, still looking at herself, lost in a sudden reverie. She ended by laying one finger on her lips, with an air of contemplative impatience. And quite low, as if talking to herself:

“It wants something…. Yes, really, it wants something….”

Then, with a quick movement, she turned round, placed herself in front of Maxime, and asked him:

“Is it really right?… Don’t you think it wants something, a trifle, a bow somewhere or other?”

The schoolboy was reassured by Renée’s familiarity, and resumed all the assurance of his forward nature. He drew back, came nearer, screwed up his eyes, and murmured:

“No, no, it wants nothing, it’s very pretty, very pretty indeed…. If anything, I think there is something too much.”

He blushed a little, despite his audacity, came nearer still, and with his fingertip tracing an acute angle on Renée’s breast:

“If I were you,” he continued, “I would hollow out that lace so, and wear a necklace with a great big cross.”

She clapped her hands, radiant with delight.

“That’s it, that’s it,” she exclaimed…. “I had the great big cross on the tip of my tongue.”

She folded back the chemisette, left the room for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. And resuming her place in front of the mirror she murmured triumphantly:

“Oh, perfect, quite perfect…. But he’s no fool, that little shaveling! Used you to dress the girls in the country, then? You and I are sure to get on well together. But you will have to do as I tell you. In the first place, you must let your hair grow and never wear that horrid tunic again. Then you must faithfully follow my lessons in good manners. I want you to become a smart young man.”

“But, of course,” said the child naïvely; “since papa is rich now and you are his wife.”

She smiled, and with her customary vivacity:

“Then let us begin by dropping the plural. I have been saying thou and you anyhow. It’s too silly…. Will you love me very much?”

“I will love you with all my heart,” he replied, with the effusiveness of a boy towards his sweetheart.

Such was the first interview between Maxime and Renée. The child did not go to school till a month later. During the first few days his stepmother played with him as with a doll; she brushed off his country manners, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, newly arrayed from head to foot by his father’s tailor, she uttered a cry of joyous surprise: he looked as pretty as a daisy, she said. Only his hair took an unconscionable time in growing. Renée used always to say that all one’s face lay in one’s hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long time she had been maddened by the colour of it, that peculiar pale yellow colour which reminded one of good butter. But when yellow hair came into fashion she was delighted, and to make believe that she did not follow the fashion because she could not help herself, she swore she dyed it every month.

Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. He was one of those frail, precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he knew the meaning of desire. He had twice narrowly escaped being expelled from school. Had Renée’s eyes been accustomed to provincial graces, she would have perceived that, strangely got-up though he was, the little shaveling, as she called him, had a way of smiling, of turning his neck, of putting out his arms prettily, with the feminine air of the love-boys at school. He took great pains over his hands, which were long and slender; and though his hair was cropped short by order of the headmaster, an ex-colonel of engineers, he owned a little looking-glass which he drew from his pocket during school-time and placed between the leaves of his book, looking at himself in it for hours, examining his eyes, his gums, pulling pretty faces, studying the art of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a petticoat, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had the slim waist and undulating hips of a grown woman. True it was, he received as many kicks as kisses. And so the school at Plassans, a den of little miscreants like most provincial schools, was a hotbed of pollution in which were singularly developed that epicene temperament, that childhood fraught with evil from some mysterious hereditary cause. Fortunately, age was about to improve him. But the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effemination of his whole being what time he had played the girl, was destined to remain in him, and to strike a lasting blow at his virility.

Renée called him “Mademoiselle,” not knowing that six months earlier she would have hit the truth. He seemed to her very docile, very affectionate, and indeed his caresses often made her feel ill-at-ease. He had a way of kissing that heated the skin. But what delighted her was his roguishness; he was as entertaining as could be, and bold, already talking of women with a smile, holding his own against Renée’s friends, against dear Adeline who had just married M. d’Espanet, and the fat Suzanne, wedded quite recently to Haffner, the big manufacturer. When he was fourteen he fell in love with the latter. He confided his passion to his stepmother, who was intensely amused.

“For myself I should have preferred Adeline,” she said, “she is prettier.”

“Perhaps so,” replied the scapegrace, “but Suzanne is much stouter…. I like fine women…. If you were very goodnatured, you would put in a word for me.”

Renée laughed. Her doll, this tall lad with the girl’s ways, seemed to her inimitable now that he had fallen in love. The time came when Mme. Haffner had seriously to defend herself. For the rest the ladies encouraged Maxime by their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes they assumed in presence of the precocious child. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in this. All three, in the midst of their life of tumult, scorched by passion, lingered over the boy’s delicious depravity as over a novel and harmless spice that stimulated their palates. They allowed him to touch their dresses, to pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the anteroom to help them on with their wraps; they passed him from hand to hand, laughing like madwomen when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, on the place where the skin is so soft; and then they became motherly, and learnedly instructed him in the art of being a smart man and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little toy man of ingenious workmanship, that kissed, and made love, and had the sweetest vices in the world, but remained a plaything, a little cardboard man that one need not be too much afraid of, only just sufficiently to feel a very pleasant thrill at the touch of his childish hand.

After the holidays Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the fashionable public school, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The child, soft and light-headed though he was, had by that time a very quick intelligence; but he applied himself to far other things than his classical studies. He was nevertheless a well-behaved pupil, who never descended to the Bohemian level of dunces, and who forgathered with the proper and well-dressed young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his boyhood was a veritable cult of dress. Paris opened his eyes, turned him into a smart young man, with tight-fitting clothes of the latest fashion. He was the Brummel of his form. He appeared there as he would in a drawingroom, daintily booted, correctly gloved, with prodigious neckties and unutterable hats. There were about twenty like him in all, who formed a sort of aristocracy, offering one another, as they left the school, Havannah cigars out of gold-clasped cigar-cases, and having servants in livery to carry their parcels of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse, which were the admiration of his schoolfellows. He drove himself, while a footman sat with folded arms on the back seat, holding on his knees the schoolboy’s knapsack, a real ministerial portfolio in brown grained leather. And you should have seen how lightly, how cleverly, and with what excellent form Maxime drove in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew up his horse before the school-door, threw the reins to the footman, and said:

“Jacques, at half-past four, see?”

The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the fine grace of this fair-haired spark whom they saw regularly twice a day arriving and leaving in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women, splashed the passersby, as though they were returning from the races. An astonishing little world, a foolish, foppish brood which you can see any day in the Rue du Havre, smartly dressed in their dandy jackets, aping the ways of rich and wornout men, while the Bohemian contingent of the school, the real schoolboys, come shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their thick shoes, with their books hung over their backs by a strap.

Renée, who took herself seriously as a mother and as a governess, was delighted with her pupil. She left nothing undone, in fact, to complete his education. She was at that time passing through a period of mortification and tears; a lover had jilted her openly, before the eyes of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchesse de Sternich. She dreamt of Maxime as her consolation, she made herself older, she racked her brains to appear maternal, and became the most eccentric mentor imaginable. Often would Maxime’s tilbury be left at home, and Renée come to fetch the schoolboy in her big calash. They hid the brown portfolio under the seat and drove to the Bois, then in all the freshness of novelty. There she put him through a course of tip-top elegance. She pointed everyone out to him in the fat and happy Paris of the Empire, still under the ecstasy of that stroke of the wand which had changed yesterday’s starvelings and swindlers into great lords and millionaires snorting and swooning under the weight of their cashboxes. But the child questioned her above all about the women, and as she was very familiar with him, she gave him exact particulars: Madame du Guende was stupid but admirably made; the Comtesse Vanska, a very rich woman, had been a street-singer before marrying a Pole who beat her, so they said; as to the Marquise d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, they were inseparable, and though they were Renée’s intimate friends, she added, compressing her lips as if to prevent herself from saying more, that some very nasty stories were told about them; the beautiful Madame de Lauwerens also was a terribly compromising woman, but she had such fine eyes, and after all everybody knew that she herself was quite above reproach, although she was a little too much mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who frequented her, Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, and the Baronne de Meinhold. Maxime obtained the portraits of these ladies, and with them filled an album that lay on the table in the drawingroom. With that vicious artfulness which was the dominant note in his character, he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking for particulars about the fast women, pretending to take them for ladies in society. Renée became serious and moral, and told him that they were horrid creatures and that he must be careful and keep away from them; and then forgetting herself, she spoke of them as of people whom she had known intimately. One of the youngster’s great delights, again, was to get her on to the subject of the Duchesse de Sternich. Each time her carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never failed to mention the duchess’s name, with wicked slyness and an under-glance that showed that he knew of Renée’s last adventure. Whereupon in a harsh voice she tore her rival to pieces: how old she was growing! Poor woman! She made-up her face, she had lovers hidden in all her cupboards, she had sold herself to a chamberlain that she might procure admission to the imperial bed. And she ran on, while Maxime, to exasperate her, declared that he thought Madame de Sternich delicious. Such lessons as these singularly developed the schoolboy’s intelligence, the more so as the young teacher repeated them wherever they went, in the Bois, at the theatre, at parties. The pupil became very proficient.

What Maxime loved was to live among women’s skirts, in the midst of their finery, in their rice-powder. He always remained more or less of a girl, with his slim hands, his beardless face, his plump white neck. Renée consulted him seriously about her gowns. He knew the good makers of Paris, summed each of them up in a word, talked about the cunningness of such an one’s bonnets and the logic of such another’s dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not probed, not a bootmaker whom he had not studied through and through. This quaint abortion, who during his English lessons read the prospectuses which his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have delivered a brilliant lecture on the fashionable Paris world, customers and purveyors included, at an age when country urchins dare not look their housemaid in the face. Frequently, on his way home from school, he would bring back in his tilbury a bonnet, a box of soap, or a piece of jewellery which his stepmother had ordered the preceding day. He had always some strip of musk-scented lace hanging about in his pockets.

But his great treat was to go with Renée to the illustrious Worms, the tailor genius to whom the queens of the Second Empire bowed the knee. The great man’s show-room was wide and square, and furnished with huge divans. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Dresses undoubtedly have a perfume of their own; silk, satin, velvet and lace had mingled their faint aromas with those of hair and of amber-scented shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained that sweet-smelling warmth, that fragrance of flesh and of luxury, which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to wait for hours; a series of anxious women sat there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, helping themselves from the great table in the middle, which was covered with bottles and plates full of cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked without restraint, and when they ensconced themselves around the room, it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawingroom. Maxime, whom they endured and loved for his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted delights divine; he glided along the sofas like a supple adder; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, between two dresses, where he made himself quite small and kept very quiet, inhaling the warm fragrance of his neighbours with the demeanour of a choirboy partaking of the sacrament.

“That child pokes his nose in everywhere,” said the Baronne de Meinhold, tapping his cheeks.

He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by making him tipsy with the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He made astounding speeches to them, which made them laugh till they cried. However, it was the Marquise d’Espanet who found the right word to describe the position. One day when Maxime was discovered behind her back in a corner of the divan:

“That boy ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured, on seeing him so pink, blushing, penetrated with the satisfaction he had enjoyed from her proximity.

Then, when the great Worms at last received Renée, Maxime followed her into the consultation room. He had ventured to speak on two or three occasions while the master remained absorbed in the contemplation of his client, as the high-priests of the Beautiful hold that Leonardo da Vinci did in the presence of la Gioconda. The master had deigned to smile upon the correctness of his observations. He made Renée stand up before a glass which rose from the floor to the ceiling, and pondered with knit brows, while Renée, seized with emotion, held her breath, so as not to stir. And after a few minutes the master, as though seized and moved by inspiration, sketched in broad, jerky strokes the work of art which he had just conceived, ejaculating in short phrases:

“A Montespan dress in pale-gray faille… the skirt describing a rounded basque in front… large gray satin bows to catch it up on the hips… and a puffed apron of pearl-gray tulle, the puffs separated by strips of gray satin.”

He pondered once again, seemed to descend to the very depths of his genius, and, with the triumphant facial contortion of a pythoness on her tripod, concluded:

“We will have in the hair, on the top of this bonny head, Psyche’s dreamy butterfly, with wings of changeful blue.”

But at other times inspiration was stubborn. The illustrious Worms summoned it in vain, and concentrated his faculties to no purpose. He distorted his eyebrows, turned livid, took his poor head between his hands and shook it in his despair, and beaten, throwing himself into an armchair:

“No,” he would mutter, in a pitiful voice, “no, not to-day…. It is not possible…. You ladies expect too much. The source is exhausted.”

And he showed Renée out, repeating:

“Impossible, impossible, dear lady, you must come back another day…. I don’t grasp you this morning.”

The fine education that Maxime received had a first result. At seventeen the young scapegrace seduced his stepmother’s maid. The worst of the affair was that the lady’s-maid got a baby. They had to send her into the country with the brat, and to buy her a little annuity. Renée was horribly annoyed at this incident. Saccard did not interfere except to arrange the financial part of the question; but his young wife scolded her pupil roundly. That he, of whom she wanted to make a distinguished man, should compromise himself with a girl like that! What a ridiculous, disgraceful beginning, what a discreditable exploit! He might at least have led off with a lady!

“Quite true!” he replied quietly, “if your dear friend Suzanne had been willing, it was she who might have been sent to the country.”

“Oh! the scamp!” she murmured, disarmed, enlivened with the idea of seeing Suzanne retiring to the country with an annuity of twelve hundred francs.

Then a funnier thought occurred to her, and forgetting that she was playing the indignant mother, bursting into pearly laughter which she restrained with her fingers, she stammered, giving him a sidelong glance:

“I say, how you would have caught it from Adeline, and what a scene she would have made her….”

She did not finish. Maxime and she were screaming. Such was the fine catastrophe of Renée’s lecture on this incident.

Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself not at all about the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them absolute liberty, glad to see them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy merriment. A singular apartment, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were slamming to and fro all day long. The servants talked loud; its new and dazzling luxury was continually traversed by a flood of vast, floating skirts, by processions of tradespeople, by the uproar of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s chums and Saccard’s callers. From nine to eleven the last received the strangest set imaginable: senators and bailiffs’ clerks, duchesses and old-clothes-women, all the scum that the tempests of Paris hurled at his door every morning, silk gowns, dirty skirts, blouses, dress-coats, all of whom he received with the same hurried manner, the same impatient, nervous gestures; he clinched bits of business with two words, got rid of twenty difficulties at a time, and gave solutions at a run. One would have thought that this restless little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, and with the furniture, tumbling head over heels, knocking his head against the ceiling to make his ideas flash out, and always falling triumphantly on his feet. Then at eleven o’clock he went out; he was not seen again during the day; he breakfasted out, he often even dined out. From that time the house belonged to Renée and Maxime; they took possession of the father’s study; they unpacked the tradesmen’s parcels there, and articles of finery lay about among the business-papers. Sometimes serious people had to wait for an hour at the study-door while the schoolboy and the young married woman discussed a bow of ribbon, seated at either end of Saccard’s writing-table. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They rarely had a meal together; two of the three would be rushing about, forgetting themselves, staying out till midnight. An apartment of racket, of business, and of pleasure, through which modern life, with its noise of jingling gold, of rustling skirts, swept like a whirlwind.

Aristide Saccard was in his element at last. He had revealed himself a great speculator, a brewer of millions. After the masterstroke in the Rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the struggle which was beginning to fill Paris with shameful wreckages and lightning triumphs. He began by gambling on certainties, repeating his first successful stroke, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilizing his friends in order to obtain fat compensation. The moment came when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so curiously, as though they were acquaintances of his, in the days when he was only a poor surveyor of roads. But these were the mere first steps of art. There was no great cleverness wanted to run out leases, conspire with the tenants, and rob the State and individuals; nor did he think the game worth the candle. For which reason he soon made use of his genius for transactions of a more complicated character.

Saccard first invented the trick of making secret purchases of house-property on the city’s account. A decision of the Council of State had placed the Municipality in a difficult position. It had acquired by private contract a large number of houses, in the hope of running out the leases and turning the tenants out without compensation. But these purchases were pronounced to be genuine acts of expropriations, and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city: he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed over the property at a fixed date. And he even ended by playing a double game: he acted as buyer both for the Municipality and for the préfet. Whenever the thing was irresistibly tempting, he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his assistance he received building concessions for bits of streets, for open spaces, which he disposed of in his turn even before the new thoroughfare was commenced. It was a fierce gamble, the new streets were speculated in as one speculates in stocks and shares. Certain ladies were in the swim, handsome girls, intimately connected with some of the higher functionaries; one of them, whose white teeth are world-renowned, has nibbled up whole streets on more than one occasion. Saccard was insatiable, he felt his greed grow at the sight of the flood of gold that glided through his fingers. It seemed to him as though a sea of twenty-franc pieces extended about him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a sound of strange waves, a metallic music that tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, plunging more boldly every day, diving and coming up again, now on his back, then on his belly, swimming through this immensity in fair weather and foul, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.

Paris was at that time disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The days predicted by Saccard on the Buttes Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed with sabre-cuts, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He had belonging to him demolished houses in every quarter of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astounding story of the pit which was dug by a company in order to carry away five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in gigantic works, and which had afterwards to be filled up, on the failure of the company, by bringing the soil back from Saint-Ouen. Saccard came out of this with an easy conscience and full pockets, thanks to the friendly intervention of his brother Eugène. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont d’Alma. In the direction of Passy it was he who conceived the idea of scattering the refuse of the Trocadero over the high level, so that to this day the good soil is buried two metres below the surface, and the very weeds refuse to grow through the rubbish. He was to be found in twenty places at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a heap of rubbish that no one knew what to do with, a hollow that could not be filled up, a great mass of soil and plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but in which he rummaged with his nails, and invariably ended by finding some bonus or some speculation to his taste. On the same day he ran from the works at the Arc de Triomphe to those at the Boulevard Saint-Michel, from the clearings in the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments at Chaillot, dragging after him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and swindlers.

But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director; he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this connection Eugène had done his brother another good turn. Thanks to him the Government authorized the company and watched over its career with great good nature. On one delicate occasion, when a malignant journal ventured to criticise one of the company’s operations, the Moniteur went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion of so honourable an undertaking, one which the State deigned to protect. The Crédit Viticole was based upon an excellent financial system: it lent the wine-growers half of the estimated value of their property, ensured the repayment of the loan by a mortgage, and received interest from the borrowers in addition to installments of the principal. Never was there mechanism more prudent or more worthy. Eugène had declared to his brother, with a knowing smile, that the Tuileries expected people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by allowing the wine-growers’ loan-office to work quietly, and founding by its side a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching out into every sort of adventure. Thanks to the formidable impulse it received from its director, the Crédit Viticole soon achieved a well-established reputation for solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in order to offer at the Bourse in one job a mass of shares on which no dividend had yet been paid, and to give them the appearance of having been long in circulation, Saccard had the ingenuity to have them trodden on and beaten, a whole night long, by the bank-messengers, armed with birch-brooms. The place resembled a branch of the Bank of France. The house occupied by the offices, with its courtyard full of private carriages, its austere iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious reception-rooms, its world of clerks and of liveried lackeys, seemed to be the grave, dignified temple of Mammon; and nothing filled the public with a more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier’s office, which was approached by a corridor of hallowed bareness and contained the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple lock, its massive flanks, its air of a brute divinity.

Saccard carried through a big job with the Municipality. The latter was greatly in debt, was crushed by its debts, dragged into this dance of gold which it had led off to please the Emperor and to fill certain people’s pockets, and was now reduced to borrowing covertly, not caring to confess its violent fever, its stone-and-pickaxe madness. It had begun to issue what were called delegation bonds, really bills of exchange payable at a distant date, so that the contractors might be paid on the day the agreements were signed, and thus enabled to obtain money by discounting the bonds. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper at the contractors’ hands. One day when the Municipality was in want of money, Saccard went and tempted it. It received a considerable advance on an issue of delegation bonds, which M. Toutin-Laroche swore he held from contracting companies, and which he dragged through every gutter of speculation. From thenceforward the Crédit Viticole was safe from attack; it held Paris by the throat. The director now talked only with a smile of the famous Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; and yet it still continued to exist, and the newspapers continued regularly to extol its great commercial stations. One day when M. Toutin-Laroche endeavoured to induce Saccard to take shares in this society, the latter laughed in his face, and asked him if he thought he was such a fool as to invest his money in the Société Générale of the Arabian Nights.

Up to that time Saccard had speculated successfully, with safe profits, cheating, selling himself, making money on deals, deriving some sort of gain from each of his operations. Soon, however, this gambling in differences ceased to suffice him; he disdained to glean and pick up the gold which men like Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud let drop behind them. He plunged his arms into the sack to the elbows. He went into partnership with Mignon, Charrier and Co., those famous contractors, who were then just starting and who were destined to make colossal fortunes. The Municipality had already decided no longer to carry out the works itself, but to have the boulevards laid out by contract. The tendering companies agreed to deliver a complete thoroughfare, with its trees planted, it benches and lampposts fixed, in return for a specified indemnity; sometimes even they delivered the thoroughfare for nothing, finding themselves amply remunerated by retaining the bordering building-ground, for which they asked a considerably enhanced price. Saccard through his connections obtained a concession to lay out three lots of boulevards. He was the ardent and somewhat blundering soul of the partnership. The Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, his creatures at the outset, were a pair of fat, cunning cronies, master-masons who knew the value of money. They laughed in their sleeves at Saccard’s horses and carriages; oftenest they kept on their blouses, always ready to shake hands with their workmen, and returning home covered with plaster. They came from Langres both of them. They brought into this burning and insatiable Paris their Champenois caution, their calm brains, not very open to impressions, not very intelligent, but exceedingly quick at profiting by opportunities for filling their pockets, contented to enjoy themselves later on. If Saccard pushed the business, infused his vigour into it, and his rage for greed, the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, by their matter-of-fact ways, their methodical, narrow management, saved it a score of times from being capsized by the extraordinary imagination of their partner. They would never agree to having superb offices in a house which he wanted to build to astonish Paris. They refused moreover to entertain the subordinate speculations that sprouted each morning in his head the erection of concert-halls and immense baths on the building-ground bordering their thoroughfares; of railways along the line of the new boulevards; of glass-roofed galleries which would increase the rent of the shops tenfold, and allow Paris to walk about without getting wet. The contractors, in order to put a stop to these alarming projects, decided that these pieces of ground should be apportioned among the three partners, and that each of them should do as he please with his share. They wisely continued to sell theirs. Saccard built upon his. His brain seethed. He would have proposed in all seriousness to place Paris under an immense bell-glass, so as to transform it into a hothouse for forcing pineapples and sugar-canes.

Before long, turning over money by the shovelful, he had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and one of them, in fact, a vast enclosure of planks from which a magnificent house was to arise, had not got further than the flooring of the first story. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to his fingers’ ends, so many interests to watch over and puppets to work, that he slept barely three hours a night, and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous part was that his coffers seemed inexhaustible. He held shares in every company, built houses with a sort of mania, turned to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, and yet he was never seen to realize a genuine clear profit, to pocket a big sum of gold shining in the sun. This flood of gold with no known source, which seemed to flow from his office in rapidly-recurring waves, astonished the cockneys and made of him, at one moment, the prominent figure to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms that came from the Bourse.

With such a husband Renée was as little married as she could be. She remained entire weeks almost without seeing him. For the rest he was perfect: he opened his cashbox quite wide for her. At bottom she liked him as she would have liked an obliging banker. When she visited the Hotel Béraud, she praised him highly before her father, whose cold austerity was in no way changed by his son-in-law’s good-fortune. Her contempt had disappeared; this man seemed so convinced that life is a mere business, he was so obviously born to coin money with whatever fell into his hands: women, children, paving-stones, sacks of plaster, consciences, that she was no longer able to reproach him for their marriage-bargain. Since that bargain he looked upon her in a measure as upon one of those fine houses which did him credit and which would, he hoped, yield him a large profit. He liked to see her well-dressed, noisy, attracting the attention of all Paris. That consolidated his position, doubled the probable figure of his fortune. He seemed handsome, young, amorous and giddy because of his wife. She was his partner, his unconscious accomplice. A new pair of horses, a two-thousand-crown dress, a surrender to some lover facilitated and often ensured the success of his most remunerative transactions. Also he often pretended to be tired out and sent her to a minister, to some functionary or other, to solicit an authorization or receive a reply. He said to her: “And be good!” in a tone all his own, bantering and coaxing in one. And when she returned, successful, he rubbed his hands, repeating his famous, “I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too active to desire a Madame Michelin. Only he loved coarse pleasantries and improper hypotheses. For the rest, had Renée not “been good,” he would have experienced only the mortification of having really paid for the minister’s or functionary’s complaisance. To dupe people, to give them less than their money’s worth, was his delight. He often said: “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods: that is too foolish.”

This madcap of a Renée, who had shot one night into the Parisian firmament as the eccentric fairy of fashionable voluptuousness, was the most complex of women. Had she been brought up at home, she would doubtless by the aid of religion or some other nervous satisfaction have blunted the edge of the desire whose pricks at times maddened her. Her mind was of the middle-class: she was absolutely straightforward, loved logical views, feared Heaven and Hell, and was crammed with prejudice; she was the daughter of her father, of that placid, prudent race among which flourish the virtues of the fireside. And in this nature there sprouted and grew her prodigious fantasies, her ever reviving curiosity, her unspeakable longings. Among the ladies of the Visitation, free, her mind roaming amid the mystic voluptuousness of the chapel and the carnal attachments of her little friends, she had framed for herself a fantastic education, learning vice, throwing the frankness of her nature into it, and disordering her brain to the extent of singularly embarrassing her confessor by telling him that one day at mass she had experienced an irrational desire to get up and kiss him. Then she struck her breast, and turned pale at the thought of the Devil and his caldrons. The fault which later brought on her marriage with Saccard, the brutal rape which she underwent with a sort of frightened expectation, made her despise herself, and accounted in a great measure for the subsequent abandonment of her whole life. She thought that she need no longer struggle against evil, that it was in her, that logic authorized her to pursue the study of wickedness to the end. She had still more curiosity than appetite. Thrown into the world of the Second Empire, abandoned to her imagination, kept in money, encouraged in her loudest eccentricities, she gave herself, then regretted it, and finally succeeded in killing her expiring good principles, for ever lashed, for ever pushed onwards by her insatiable desire for knowledge and sensation.

For the rest she had as yet turned only the first page of the book of vice. She was fond of talking in a low tone, and laughing, about the extraordinary cases of the tender friendship of Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, of the ticklish trade of Madame de Lauwerens, and of the Comtesse Vanska’s tariffed kisses; but she still looked upon these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them, perhaps; and this indefinite longing that arose within her at evil hours still further increased her turbulent anxiety, her mad search after an unique, exquisite enjoyment of which she alone should partake. Her first lovers had not spoilt her; three times she had thought herself seized with a grand passion; love burst in her head like a cracker whose sparks failed to reach the heart. She went mad for a month, exhibiting herself with her heart’s lord all over Paris; and then one morning, amid all the racket of her amorousness, she became conscious of a crushing silence, an immense void. The first, the young Duc de Rozan, was a feast of sunshine that led to nothing; Renée, who had noticed him for his gentleness and his excellent manner, found him absolutely shallow, colourless and tedious when they were alone together. Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American Legation, who came next, all but beat her, and thanks to this remained with her for more than a year. Then she took up the Comte de Chibray, one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp, an absurdly vain, good-looking man who was beginning to hang terribly on her hands when the Duchesse de Sternich took it into her head to become enamoured of him and to take him away from her; whereupon she wept for him and gave her friends to understand that her heart was bruised, and that she should never be in love again. And thus she drifted towards M. de Mussy, the most insignificant creature in the world, a young man who was making his way in diplomacy by leading cotillons with especial grace; she never knew exactly how she had come to give herself to him, and she kept him a long time, a prey to idleness, disgusted with the unknown that is explored in an hour, and deferring the trouble of a change until she met with some extraordinary adventure. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Her boredom appeared to her all the more insupportable as her homely virtues took advantage of the hours when she was bored to complain and to disquiet her. She bolted her door, she had horrible headaches. And then, when she opened the door again, it was a flood of silk and lace that surged through it with a great noise, a luxurious, joyous being with no care nor blush upon her brow.

Yet she had had a romance amid the fashionable commonplace of her life. One day, when she had gone out on foot to see her father, who disliked the noise of carriages at his door, she perceived, as she was walking back in the twilight along the Quai Saint-Paul, that she was being followed by a young man. It was warm; and the daylight was waning with amorous gentleness. She, who was never followed except on horseback in the lanes of the Bois, thought the adventure piquant, she felt flattered by it as by a new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very coarseness appealed to her. Instead of returning home, she turned down the Rue du Temple, and walked her admirer along the boulevards. The man, however, grew bolder and became so persistent that Renée, a little dismayed, lost her head, followed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, and took refuge in the shop of her husband’s sister. The man came in after her. Mme. Sidonie smiled, seemed to understand, and left them alone. And when Renée made as if to follow her, the stranger held her back, addressed her with respectful fervour, and won her forgiveness. He was a clerk, he was called Georges, and she never asked him his surname. She came twice to see him; she came in through the shop, and he by the Rue Papillon. This chance love affair, picked up and accepted in the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame, but with a singular smile of regret. Mme. Sidonie profited by the adventure in that she at last became the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a part to which she had been aspiring since the day of the wedding.

That poor Madame Sidonie had experienced a disappointment. While intriguing for the match she had expected to marry Renée a little herself, to make her one of her customers and derive a heap of profits from her. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horseflesh. And so her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to settle down, she perceived Mme. de Lauwerens enthroned in the centre of the drawingroom, and realized that she was already too late. Mme. de Lauwerens, a fine woman of six-and-twenty, made a business of launching new arrivals. She came of a very old family, and was married to a man in the higher financial world, who had the bad taste to refuse to pay her tailor’s and milliner’s bills. The lady, a very intelligent person, made money and kept herself. She loathed men, she said, but she supplied all her friends with them; there was always a full array of customers in the apartment which she occupied in the Rue de Provence over her husband’s offices. You always found a snack there. You met your friends there in an unpremeditated and charming fashion. There was no harm in a young girl’s going to see her dear Mme. de Lauwerens, and if chance brought men there who were, at all events, respectful, and moved in the best set — so much the worse. The hostess was adorable in her long lace tea-gowns. Many a visitor would have chosen her in preference to her collection of blondes and brunettes. But rumour asserted that she was absolutely good. The whole secret of the affair lay there. She kept up her high position in society, had all the men for her friends, retained her pride as a virtuous woman, and derived a secret enjoyment from bringing others down and profiting by their fall. When Mme. Sidonie had enlightened herself as to the mechanism of the new invention, she was thunderstruck. It was the classical school, the woman in the old black dress carrying love-letters at the bottom of her basket, brought face to face with the modern, the lady of quality, who sells her friends in her boudoir while sipping a cup of tea. The modern school triumphed. Mme. Lauwerens looked coldly upon the shabby attire of Mme. Sidonie, in whom she scented a rival. And it was she who provided Renée with her first bore, the young Duc de Rozan, whom the fair financier had found much difficulty in disposing of. The classical school did not win the day till later on, when Mme. Sidonie lent her entresol to her sister-in-law so that she might gratify her caprice for the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained her confidante.

But one of Mme. Sidonie’s faithful friends was Maxime. From his fifteenth year, he had been in the habit of prowling around at his aunt’s, sniffing at the gloves that he found lying forgotten on the furniture. She who hated clear situations and never owned up to her little complacencies, ended by lending him the keys of her apartments on certain days, saying that she was going to stay in the country till the next day. Maxime talked of some friends whom he wanted to entertain, and whom he dared not ask to his father’s house. It was in the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl who had to be sent to the country. Mme. Sidonie borrowed her nephew’s money, and went into ecstasies before him, murmuring in her soft voice that he was “smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Maxime meantime had grown. He was now a nice-looking, slender young man, who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that “girl look” that so enchanted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with her soft expression and blonde paleness. But he was not even the equal of that indolent, shallow woman. The race of the Rougons became refined in him, grew delicate and vicious. Born of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and, so to say, scattered mixture of his father’s furious appetites and his mother’s self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental shortcomings were fulfilled and aggravated. This family lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in suspense; he represented, not a greedy eagerness for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a mean nature devouring readymade fortunes, a strange hermaphrodite making its entrance at the right moment in a society that was growing rotten. When Maxime rode in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman, lightly dancing in the saddle, in which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of that age, with his swelling haunches, his long, slender hands, his sickly, lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his comic-opera slang. He was twenty years old, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most unheard-of filth. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth. It waved over his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, dressed him in his clothes. But his special characteristic was his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, coquette’s mirrors, behind which one perceived all the emptiness of the brain. Those harlot’s eyes were never lowered: they roamed in quest of pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue, which one summons and receives.

The everlasting whirlwind that swept through the apartment in the Rue de Rivoli and made its doors slam to and fro blew stronger in the measure that Maxime grew up, that Saccard enlarged the sphere of his operations, and that Renée threw more fever into her search for an unknown joy. These three beings ended by leading an astonishing existence of liberty and folly. It was the ripe and prodigious fruit of an epoch. The street invaded the apartment with its rumbling of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its license of language. The father, the stepmother and the step-son acted, talked and made themselves at home as though each of them had found himself leading a bachelor life alone. Three boon companions, three students sharing the same furnished room, could not have made use of that room with less reserve for the installation of their vices, their loves, their noisy, adolescent gaiety. They accepted one another with a handshake, never seeming to suspect the reasons that united them under one roof, treating each other cavalierly, joyously, and thus assuming each the most entire independence. The family idea was replaced with them by a sort of partnership whose profits are divided in equal shares; each one drew his part of the pleasure to himself, and it was tacitly agreed that each should dispose of that part as best seemed to him. They went so far as to take their enjoyment in each other’s presence, displaying it, describing it, without awakening any feeling but a little envy and curiosity.

Maxime now instructed Renée. When he went to the Bois with her, he told her stories about the fast women which entertained her vastly. A new woman could not appear by the lake, but he would lay himself out to ascertain the name of her lover, the allowance he made her, the style in which she lived. He knew these ladies’ homes, and was acquainted with intimate details; he was a real living catalogue in which all the prostitutes in Paris were numbered, with a very complete description of each of them. This gazette of scandal was Renée’s delight. On race-days, at Longchamps, when she drove by in her calash, she listened eagerly, albeit retaining the haughtiness of a woman of the real world, to how Blanche Muller deceived her attaché with a hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his drawers in the alcove of a skinny red-haired celebrity who was nicknamed the Crayfish. Each day brought its tittle-tattle. When the story was rather too warm, Maxime lowered his voice, but told it to the end. Renée opened wide her eyes, like a child to whom a funny trick is being told, restrained her laughter, and then stifled it in her embroidered handkerchief, which she pressed daintily upon her lips.

Maxime also brought these ladies’ photographs. He had actresses’ photographs in all his pockets, and even in his cigar-case. From time to time he cleared them out and placed these ladies in the album that lay about on the furniture in the drawingroom, and that already contained the photographs of Renée’s friends. There were men’s photographs there too, MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, de Mussy, as well as actors, writers, deputies, who had come to swell the collection nobody knew how. A strangely mixed society, a symbol of the jumble of persons and ideas that crossed Renée’s and Maxime’s lives. Whenever it rained or they felt bored, this album was the great subject of conversation. It always ended by falling under one’s hand. Renée opened it with a yawn, for the hundredth time perhaps. Then her curiosity would reawaken, and the young man came and leant behind her. And then followed long discussions about the Crayfish’s hair, Madame de Meinhold’s double chin, Madame de Lauwerens’ eyes, and Blanche Muller’s bust; about the marquise’s nose, which was a little on one side, and little Sylvia’s mouth, which was renowned for the thickness of its lips. They compared the women with one another.

“If I were a man,” said Renée, “I would choose Adeline.”

“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” replied Maxime. “She is so quaint!… I must say I prefer Sylvia.”

The pages were turned over; sometimes the Duc de Rozan appeared, or Mr. Simpson, or the Comte de Chibray, and he added, jeering at her:

“Besides, your taste is perverted, everybody knows that…. Can anything more stupid be imagined than the faces of those men! Rozan and Chibray are both like Gustave, my hairdresser.”

Renée shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that she was beyond the reach of sarcasm. She again forgot herself in the contemplation of the pallid, smiling, or cross-grained faces contained in the album; she lingered longest over the portraits of the fast women, studying with curiosity the exact microscopic details of the photographs, the minute wrinkles, the tiny hairs. One day even she sent for a strong magnifying-glass, fancying she had perceived a hair on the Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the glass did reveal a thin golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose. This hair diverted them, for a long time. For a week long the ladies who called were made to assure themselves in person of the presence of this hair. Thenceforward the magnifying-glass served to pick the women’s faces to pieces. Renée made astonishing discoveries: she found unknown wrinkles, coarse skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder, until Maxime finally hid the glass, declaring that it was not right to disgust one’s self like that with the human countenance. The truth was that she scrutinized too rigorously the thick lips of Sylvia, for whom he cherished a particular fondness. They invented a new game. They asked this question: “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and they opened the album which was to supply for the answer. This brought about some very joyous couplings. The friends played this game for several evenings. Renée was in this way married successively to the Archbishop of Paris, to the Baron Gouraud, to M. de Chibray, which caused much laughter, and to her husband himself, which distressed her mightily. As to Maxime, either by chance, or through the mischievousness of Renée, who opened the album, he always fell to the marquise. But they never laughed so much as when fate coupled two men or two women together.

The familiarity between Renée and Maxime went so far that she told him the sorrows of her heart. He consoled and advised her. His father did not seem to exist. Then they came to confide in one another about their childhood. It was especially during their drives in the Bois that they felt a vague languor, a longing to tell one another things that are difficult to say, that are never told. The delight that children take in whispering about forbidden things, the fascination that exists for a young man and a young woman in lowering themselves to sin, if only in words, brought them back unceasingly to suggestive topics. They there partook deeply of a voluptuousness in which they felt no self-reproaching, and in which they revelled, lazily reclining in the two corners of the carriage like two old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. They ended by becoming braggarts of immorality. Renée confessed that the little girls at the boarding-school were very smutty. Maxime went further and had the courage to relate some of the infamy of the college at Plassans.

“Ah! I can’t tell you,” murmured Renée.

Then she bent towards his ear as if the sound of her voice alone would have made her blush, and she confided to him one of those convent stories that are spun out in lewd songs. He had too rich a collection of similar anecdotes to be left behindhand. He hummed some very bawdy couplets in her ear. And little by little they entered upon a peculiar state of beatitude, rocked by the carnal ideas they stirred up, tickled by little undefined desires. The carriage rolled gently on, and they returned home deliriously fatigued, more exhausted than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned like two young men who, wandering down country lanes without mistresses, content themselves with an interchange of reminiscences.

A still greater familiarity and license existed between father and son. Saccard had realized that a great financier must love women and commit extravagances for them. He was a rough lover, and preferred money; but it formed part of his programme to frequent alcoves, to scatter banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to affix some noted strumpet as a signboard to his speculations. When Maxime had left school they used to meet in the same women’s rooms and laugh over it. They were even rivals in a measure. Occasionally when the young man was dining at the “Maison d’Or” with some boisterous crew he heard Saccard’s voice in an adjacent private room.

“I say! papa’s next door!” he cried, with the grimace which he borrowed from the popular actors.

He went and knocked at the door of the private room, curious to see his father’s conquest.

“Ah! it’s you,” said the latter, jovially. “Come in. You make so much noise that a man can’t hear himself eat. Who are you with?”

“Why, there’s Laure d’Aurigny, and Sylvia, and the Crayfish, and two more besides, I believe. They are wonderful: they dig their fingers into the dishes, and chuck handfuls of salad at our heads. My coat is covered with oil.”

The father laughed, thinking this very amusing.

“Ah! young folk, young folk,” he murmured. “That’s not like us, is it, pet? We’ve had a nice quiet dinner, and now we’re going to by-by.”

And he took the woman by his side by the chin, and cooed with his Provençal snuffle, producing a queer sort of love music.

“Oh! the old cully!”… cried the woman. “How are you, Maxime? Musn’t I be fond of you, eh! to consent to sup with your scapegrace of a father…. I never see you now. Come the day after tomorrow, in the morning, early…. No, really, I have something to tell you.”

Saccard finished an ice or a fruit, taking small mouthfuls, blissfully. He kissed the woman on the shoulder, saying jestingly:

“You know, my loves, if I’m in the way I’ll go out…. You can ring when I may come in again.”

Then he carried the lady off, or sometimes went with her and joined in the noise of the next room. Maxime and he shared the same shoulders; their hands met around the same waists. They called to one another on the sofas, and repeated to one another aloud the confidences the women had whispered in their ears. And they carried their intimacy to the pitch of plotting together to carry off from the company the blonde or the brunette whom one of them had selected.

They were well known at Mabille. They went there arm in arm, after a good dinner, strolling round the garden, nodding to the women, tossing them a remark as they went by. They laughed out loud, without unlocking their arms, and came to one another’s aid if necessary whenever the conversation became too lively. The father, who was very strong on this point, negotiated his son’s love-affairs advantageously. At times they sat down and drank with a party of girls. Then they changed their table, or resumed their stroll. And till midnight they were seen, their arms always linked in their intimacy, following the petticoats along the yellow pathways, under the glaring flame of the gasjets.

When they returned home they brought with them from outside, in their coats, a something of the women they had been with. Their jaunty attitudes, the tags of certain suggestive phrases and certain vulgar gestures filled the flat in the Rue de Rivoli with the fragrance of an equivocal alcove. The easy, wanton way in which the father shook hands with his son was enough to proclaim whence they came. It was in this atmosphere that Renée inhaled her sensual caprices and longings. She chaffed them nervously.

“Where on earth do you come from?” she asked them. “You smell of musk and tobacco…. I know I shall have a headache.”

And the strange aroma did in fact perturb her profoundly. It was the persistent perfume of that singular household.

Meantime Maxime was smitten with a violent passion for little Sylvia. He bored his stepmother with this girl for several months. Renée soon knew her from one end to the other, from the sole of her feet to the crown of her head. She had a blue mark on her hip; nothing was sweeter than her knees; her shoulders had this peculiarity that the left alone was dimpled. Maxime took a malicious pleasure in filling their drives with his mistress’s perfections. One evening, on returning from the Bois, Renée’s carriage and Sylvia’s, caught in a block, had to draw up side by side in the Champs-Élysées. The two women eyed one another with keen curiosity, while Maxime, enchanted with this critical situation, tittered under his breath. When the calash began to roll on again, his stepmother preserved a gloomy silence; he thought she was sulking, and expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those strange lectures, with which she still occasionally filled up her moments of lassitude.

“Do you know that person’s jewellers?” she asked him suddenly, at the moment they reached the Place de la Concorde.

“Yes, alas!” he replied with a smile; “I owe him ten thousand francs…. Why do you ask me?”

“For nothing.”

Then, after a fresh pause:

“She had a very pretty bracelet, the one on the left wrist…. I should have liked to see it closer.”

They reached home. She said no more on the matter. Only, the next day, just as Maxime and his father were going out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in an undertone, with an air of embarrassment, and a pretty smile which pleaded for pardon. He seemed surprised and went off, laughing his wicked laugh. In the evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet, which his stepmother had begged him to show her.

“There’s what you want,” he said. “One would turn thief for your sake, stepmother.”

“She didn’t see you take it?” asked Renée, who was greedily examining the bracelet.

“I don’t think so…. She wore it yesterday, she certainly would not want to wear it to-day.”

Meantime Renée approached the window. She put on the bracelet. She raised her wrist a little and turned it round, enraptured, repeating:

“Oh! very pretty, very pretty…. I like everything immensely, except the emeralds.”

At that moment Saccard entered, and as she was still holding up her wrist in the white light of the window:

“Hullo!” he cried in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”

“Do you know this piece of jewellery?” she said, more embarrassed than he, not knowing what to do with her arm.

He had recovered himself, and threatened his son with his finger, murmuring:

“That rascal has always some forbidden fruit in his pockets…. One of these days he will bring us the lady’s arm with the bracelet on.”

“Ah! but it’s not I,” replied Maxime with mischievous cowardice. “It’s Renée who wanted to see it.”

“Ah!” was all the husband said.

And he examined the gaud in his turn, repeating like his wife:

“It is very pretty, very pretty.”

Then he went quietly away, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away like that. But he declared that his father didn’t care a pin! Then she returned him the bracelet, adding:

“You must go to the jeweller and order one exactly like it for me; only you must have sapphires put in instead of emeralds.”

Saccard was unable to keep a thing or a person near him for long without wanting to sell it or derive some sort of profit from it. His son was not twenty when he thought of turning him to account. A good-looking boy, nephew to a minister and son of a big financier, ought to be a good investment. He was a trifle young still, but one could always look out for a wife and a dowry for him, and then decide to postpone the wedding for a long time, or to hurry it on, according to the exigencies of domestic economy. Saccard was fortunate. He discovered on a board of directors of which he was a member a fine, tall man, M. de Mareuil, who in two days belonged to him. M. de Mareuil was a retired sugar-refiner of Havre, and his real name was Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young girl of noble birth, also very rich, who was looking out for a fool of imposing appearance. Bonnet obtained permission to assume his wife’s name, which was a first satisfaction for his bride; but his marriage had made him madly ambitious, and his dream was to repay Hélène for the noble name she had given him by achieving a high political position. From that time forward he had put money into new papers, bought large estates in the heart of the Nièvre, and by all the well-known means prepared for himself a candidature for the Corps Législatif. So far he had failed without losing an iota of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could come across. He was of splendid stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman; and as he had a marvellous way of listening, he gave the impression of a prodigious inner labour of comprehension and deduction. In reality he was thinking of nothing. But he succeeded in perplexing people, who no longer knew whether they had to do with a man of distinction or a fool. M. de Mareuil attached himself to Saccard as to a raft. He knew that an official candidature was about to fall vacant in the Nièvre, and he ardently hoped that the minister would nominate him: it was his last card. And so he handed himself over, bound hand and foot, to the minister’s brother. Saccard, who scented a good piece of business, put into his head a match between his daughter Louise and Maxime. The other became most effusive, thought he was the first to have had the idea of this marriage, and considered himself very fortunate to enter into a minister’s family and to give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects.

Louise, her father said, would have a million francs to her dowry. Deformed, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young; consumption was stealthily undermining her, giving her a nervous gaiety and a tender grace. Sick little girls quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was naïvely sensual, she seemed to have been born when she was fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, that healthy, stupid colossus, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother during her lifetime had also been a tall, strong woman; but stories were told about her which explained the child’s stuntedness, her manners like a millionaire gipsy’s, her vicious and charming ugliness. It was said that Hélène de Mareuil had died amid the most shameful debauchery. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband’s perceiving the lucid madness of his wife, whom he ought to have had locked up in a lunatic asylum. Borne in these diseased flanks, Louise had issued from them with impoverished blood, deformed limbs, her brain threatened, and her memory already filled with a dirty life. She occasionally fancied she had a confused recollection of a former existence; she saw unfolded before her, in a vague gloaming, bizarre scenes, men and women kissing, a whole fleshly drama in which her childish curiosity found amusement. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice continued through her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she reached for forbidden things with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, resemble a man returning home after a long absence, and having only to stretch out his arm to make himself comfortable and enjoy the pleasures of his homestead. This odd little girl, who by her evil instincts flattered Maxime, but had, moreover, in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, an ingenuous effrontery, a piquant mixture of childishness and audacity, was bound in the end to attract him, and to seem to him even more diverting than Sylvia, the daughter of a worthy stationer, who had the heart of a money-lender, and was terribly homely by nature.

The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that “the youngsters” should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived in close intimacy. M. de Mareuil worked his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination as an auditor to the Council of State among the wedding-presents.

Meanwhile the fortune of the Saccards seemed to be at its zenith. It blazed in the midst of Paris like a colossal bonfire. This was the moment when the eager division of the hounds’ fee filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of the pack, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, in the shamelessness of triumph, amid the sound of crumbling districts and of fortunes built up in six months. The town was become a sheer orgy of gold and women. Vice, coming from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread out over the ornamental waters, shot up in the fountains of the public gardens to fall down again upon the roofs in a fine, penetrating rain. And at nighttime, when one crossed the bridges, it seemed as though the Seine drew along with it, through the sleeping city, the refuse of the town, crumbs fallen from the tables, bows of lace left on couches, false hair forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices, all that the brutality of desire and the immediate satisfaction of an instinct fling into the street bruised and sullied. Then, amid the feverish sleep of Paris, and even better than during its breathless quest in broad daylight, one felt the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city madly enamoured of its gold and its flesh. The violins sounded till midnight; then the windows became dark, and shadows descended upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last remnant of shame extinguished. There was nothing left in the depths of the darkness save a great rattle of furious and wearied love; while the Tuileries, at the waterside, stretched out their arms into the night, as though for a huge embrace.

Saccard had just built his mansion in the Parc Monceau, on a plot of ground stolen from the Municipality. He had reserved for himself, on the first floor, a magnificent study, in violet ebony and gold, with tall glass doors to the bookcases, full of business-papers, but without a book to be seen; the safe, embedded in the wall, yawned like an iron alcove, large enough to accommodate the amorous exploits of a milliard of money. Here his fortune bloomed and insolently displayed itself. Everything seemed to succeed with him. When he left the Rue de Rivoli, enlarging his household, doubling his expenses, he talked to his friends of considerable winnings. According to his account, his partnership with the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier brought him in enormous profits; his speculations in house-property came off still better; while the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible milch-cow. He had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from seeing the truth. His Provençal snuffle grew more pronounced: with his short phrases and nervous gestures he let off fireworks in which millions shot up like rockets and ended by dazzling the most incredulous. This turbulent mimicry of the man of wealth was mainly responsible for the reputation he had achieved as a lucky speculator. To tell the truth, no one knew him to be possessed of a clear, solid capital. His various partners, who were necessarily acquainted with his position as regarded themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing in his absolute luck in other speculations, those in which they had no share. He spent money madly; the flow from his cashbox continued, although the sources of that stream of gold had not yet been discovered. It was pure folly, a frenzy of money, handfuls of louis flung out of window, the safe emptied each evening to its last sou, filling again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.

In this fortune, which clamoured and overflowed like a winter torrent, Renée’s dowry was shaken, carried off and drowned. The young wife, who had been distrustful in the earlier days and desirous of managing her property herself, soon grew weary of business; and then she felt herself poor beside her husband and, crushed by debt, she was obliged to apply to him, to borrow money from him and place herself in his hands. At each fresh bill that he paid, with the smile of a man indulgent towards human foibles, she surrendered herself a little more, confiding dividend-warrants to him, authorizing him to sell this or that. When they went to live in the house in the Parc Monceau, already she found herself almost entirely stripped. He had taken the place of the State, and paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs coming from the Rue de la Pépinière; on the other hand, he had made her sell the Sologne property in order to sink the proceeds in a great piece of business, a splendid investment, he said. She therefore had nothing left except the Charonne building-plots, which she obstinately refused to part with, so as not to sadden that excellent Aunt Elisabeth. And in that quarter again he was preparing a stroke of genius, with the help of his old accomplice, Larsonneau. For the rest, she remained his debtor; though he had taken her fortune, he paid her the income five or six times over. The interest of the hundred thousand francs, added to the revenue of the Sologne money, amounted to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to pay her hosier and bootmaker. He gave her, or spent on her, fifteen or twenty times that paltry sum. He would have worked for a week to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her like a queen. And thus, like all the world, she respected her husband’s monumental safe, without trying to penetrate into the nothingness of that stream of gold flowing under her eyes, into which every morning she flung herself.

At the Parc Monceau it was a delirium, a lightning triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses; they had an army of servants whom they dressed in a dark-blue livery with drab breeches and yellow-and-black striped waistcoats, a rather severe scheme of colour which the financier had chosen so as to appear quite serious, one of his most cherished dreams. They emblazoned their luxury on the walls, and drew back the curtains when they gave big dinners. The whirlwind of contemporary life, which had set slamming the doors of the first-floor in the Rue de Rivoli, had become, in the mansion, a genuine hurricane which threatened to carry away the partitions. In the midst of these princely rooms, along the gilded balustrades, over the fine velvet carpets, in this fairy parvenu palace, there trailed the aroma of Mabille, there danced the jauntiness of the popular quadrilles, the whole period passed with its mad, stupid laugh, its eternal hunger and its eternal thirst. It was the disorderly house of fashionable pleasure, of the unblushing pleasure that widens the windows so that the passersby may enjoy the confidence of the alcoves. Husband and wife lived there freely, under their servants’ eyes. They divided the house into two, encamped there, not appearing as though at home, but rather as if they had been dropped, at the end of a tumultuous and bewildering journey, into some palatial hotel where they had merely taken the time to undo their trunks in order to hasten more speedily towards the delights of a fresh city. They slept there at night, only staying at home on the days of the great dinner-parties, carried away by a ceaseless rush across Paris, returning sometimes for an hour as one returns to a room at an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more restless, more nervous there; her silken skirts glided with adder-like hisses over the thick carpets, along the satin of the couches; she was irritated by the idiotic gilding that surrounded her, by the high, empty ceilings, where after fête-nights there lingered nothing but the laughter of young fools and the sententious maxims of old ruffians; and to fill this luxury, to dwell amid this radiancy, she longed for a supreme amusement which her curiosity in vain sought in all the corners of the house, in the little sun-coloured drawingroom, in the conservatory with its fat vegetation. As to Saccard, he was approaching the realization of his dream; he received the high financiers, M. Toutin-Laroche, M. de Lauwerens; he received also great politicians, the Baron Gouraud, Haffner the deputy; his brother the minister had even consented to come two or three times and consolidate his position by his presence. And yet, like his wife, he experienced nervous anxieties, a restlessness that lent to his laugh a strange sound of broken windowpanes. He became so giddy, so bewildered, that his acquaintances said of him: “That devil of a Saccard! he makes too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he had been decorated, in consequence of a mysterious service he had done the préfet, by lending his name to a lady for the sale of some land.

It was about the time of their installation in the Parc Monceau that an apparition crossed Renée’s life, leaving an ineffaceable impression. Up to then the minister had resisted the entreaties of his sister-in-law, who was dying of a longing to be invited to the court balls. He gave way at last, thinking his brother’s fortune to be definitely established. Renée did not sleep for a month. The great evening came, and she sat all trembling in the carriage that drove her to the Tuileries.

She wore a costume of prodigious grace and originality, a real gem, which she had hit upon one sleepless night, and which three of Worms’s workmen had come to her house to carry out under her eyes. It was a simple dress of white gauze, but trimmed with a multitude of little flounces, scalloped out and edged with black velvet. The black velvet tunic was cut out square, very low over her bosom, which was framed with narrow lace, barely a finger deep. Not a flower, not a bit of ribbon; at her wrists, bracelets without any chasing, and on her head a narrow diadem of gold, a plain circlet which clothed her as with a halo.

When she had reached the reception-rooms, and her husband had left her for the Baron Gouraud, she experienced a momentary embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she saw that she was adorable, quickly reassured her, and she was accustoming herself to the hot air and the murmur of voices, to the crowd of dress-coats and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who puffed as though he suffered from a troublesome digestion. The shoulders drew up in two lines, while the dress-coats fell back a step with instinctive discretion. Renée found herself pushed to the end of the line of shoulders, near the second door, the one which the Emperor was approaching with a painful and faltering step. She thus saw him come towards her, from one door to the other.

He was in plain dress, with the red riband of the Grand Cordon. Renée, again seized with emotion, saw badly, and to her this bleeding stain seemed to splash the whole of the sovereign’s breast. She considered him little, with legs too short, and swaying loins; but now she was charmed, and he looked handsome to her, with his wan face and the heavy, leaden lids that fell over his lifeless eyes. Under his moustache his mouth feebly opened, and his nose alone stood out cartilaginous amid the puffiness of his face.

Worn out, vaguely smiling, the Emperor and the old general kept advancing with short steps, apparently supporting one another. They looked at the bowing ladies, and their glances, cast to right and left, glided into the bodices. The general leant on one side, spoke a word to his master, and pressed his arm with the air of a jolly companion. And the Emperor, nerveless and nebulous, duller even than usual, came nearer and nearer with his dragging step.

They were in the middle of the room when Renée felt their glances fixed upon her. The general examined her with a look of surprise, while the Emperor, half-raising his eyelids, had a red light in the gray hesitation of his bleared eyes. Renée, losing countenance, lowered her head, bowed, saw nothing more save the pattern of the carpet. But she followed their shadows, and understood that they were pausing for a few seconds before her. And she thought she heard the Emperor, that ambiguous dreamer, murmur as he gazed at her, immersed in her muslin skirt striped with velvet:

“Look, general, there’s a flower worth picking, a mystic carnation, variegated white and black.”

And the general replied, in a more brutal voice: “Sire, that carnation would look devilish well in our buttonholes.”

Renée raised her head. The vision had disappeared, the crowd was thronging round the doorway. After that evening, she frequently returned to the Tuileries: she even had the honour of being complimented aloud by His Majesty, and of becoming a little his friend; but she always remembered the sovereign’s slow heavy walk across the room between the two rows of shoulders; and whenever she experienced any new joy amid her husband’s growing prosperity, she again saw the Emperor overtopping the bowing bosoms, coming towards her, comparing her to a carnation which the old general advised him to put in his buttonhole. To her this was the shrill note of her life.