Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 15

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The distinct and exquisite longing that had risen to Renée’s heart, amid the perturbing perfumes of the conservatory, while Maxime and Louise sat laughing on a sofa in the little buttercup drawingroom, seemed to vanish like a nightmare that leaves behind it nothing but a vague shudder. All through the night, Renée had the bitter taste of the tanghin-plant on her lips; it seemed to her, when she felt the burning of the malignant leaf, as if a mouth of flame were pressing itself to hers, breathing into her a devouring love. Then this mouth escaped her, and her dream was drowned in the vast waves of shadow that rolled over her.

In the morning she slept a little. When she awoke, she fancied herself ill. She had the curtains drawn, spoke to her doctor of sickness and headache, and for two days positively refused to go out. And as she pretended that she was being besieged, she forbade her door. Maxime came and knocked at it in vain. He did not sleep in the house, preferring to be free to do as he pleased in his rooms; and in fact he led the most nomadic life in the world, living in his father’s new houses, selecting the floor that pleased him, moving every month, often from caprice, sometimes to make room for serious tenants. He dried the walls in the company of some mistress. Accustomed to his stepmother’s caprices, he feigned great sympathy, and went upstairs to enquire after her with a distressed look, four times a day, solely to tease her. On the third day he found her in the little drawingroom, pink and smiling, looking calm and reposed.

“Well! have you had a good time with Céleste?” he asked, alluding to her long tête-à-tête with her maid.

“Yes,” she replied, “she is a priceless girl. Her hands are always cold; she used to lay them on my forehead and soothe my poor head a little.”

“But that girl’s a nostrum!” cried Maxime. “If ever I have the misfortune to fall in love, you’ll lend her to me, won’t you? to lay her two hands on my heart.”

They jested, they went for their usual drive in the Bois. A fortnight passed. Renée had thrown herself more madly into her life of visits and balls; her head seemed to have turned once more, she complained no longer of lassitude and disgust. One might only have suspected that she had committed some secret fault which she kept to herself, but which she betrayed by a more strongly marked contempt for herself and by a more reckless depravity in her fashionable caprices. One night she confessed to Maxime that she was dying to go to a ball which Blanche Muller, a popular actress, was giving to the princesses of the footlights and the queens of the fast world. This avowal surprised and embarrassed even Maxime, who, after all, had no great scruples. He tried to catechize his stepmother: really, that was no place for her; besides, she would see nothing very amusing there; and then, if she were recognized, what a scandal there would be. To all these good arguments she answered with clasped hands, smiling and entreating:

“Come, my little Maxime, be nice, I want to go…. I’ll put on a very dark domino, and we’ll only just walk through the rooms.”

Maxime always ended by giving way, and would have taken his stepmother to every brothel in Paris for the asking. When he consented to escort her to Blanche Muller’s ball, she clapped her hands like a child that is given an unexpected holiday.

“Ah! you’re a dear,” she said. “It’s tomorrow, is it not? Come and fetch me very early. I want to see the women arrive. You must tell me their names, and we’ll have great fun.”

She reflected, and then added:

“No, don’t come here. Wait for me in a cab on the Boulevard Malesherbes. I shall go out through the garden.”

This mysteriousness was an added spice to her escapade, a simple refinement of pleasure, for she might have gone out at midnight by the front-door without her husband’s so much as putting his head out of window.

The next day, after telling Céleste to sit up for her, she crossed the dark shadows of the Parc Monceau with exquisite timorous shivers. Saccard had taken advantage of his good understanding with the Hotel de Ville to have a key given him of a little gate in the gardens, and Renée had asked for one for herself as well. She almost lost her way, and only found the cab thanks to the two yellow eyes of the lamps. At this period the Boulevard Malesherbes, barely finished, was still perfectly lonely at nighttime. Renée glided into the vehicle in great emotion, her heart beating rapturously, as though she were going to an assignation. Maxime smoked philosophically, half asleep in a corner of the cab. He wanted to throw away his cigar, but she prevented him, and in trying to hold back his arm in the darkness she put her hand full in his face, which amused them both greatly.

“I tell you I like the smell of tobacco,” she cried. “Go on smoking…. Besides, we are having a debauch tonight…. I’m a man, see?”

The boulevard was not yet lighted up. While the cab drove down to the Madeleine it was so dark inside that they could not see one another. Now and again, when the young man lifted his cigar to his lips, a red spot pierced the thick darkness. This red spot interested Renée. Maxime, who was half-covered by the folds of the black satin domino that filled the inside of the cab, continued smoking in silence, with an expression of weariness. The truth was that his stepmother’s caprice had prevented him from following a party of women who had made up their minds to begin and end Blanche Muller’s ball at the Café Anglais. He was in a huff, and she felt conscious of his sulkiness in the darkness.

“Are you ill?” she asked.

“No, I’m cold,” he replied.

“Dear me! I’m burning. I think it’s stifling in here…. Take the end of my skirts over your knees.”

“Oh! your skirts,” he muttered, ill-humouredly. “I’m up to my eyes in your skirts.”

But this remark made him laugh himself, and little by little he grew livelier. She told him how frightened she had felt in the Parc Monceau. After that she confessed to him another of her longings: she should like one night to go for a row on the little lake of the gardens in the skiff that she could see from her windows, moored at the edge of a pathway. He thought she was growing sentimental. The cab rolled on, the darkness remained impenetrable, they leant towards one another so as to hear one another amid the noise of the wheels, touching each other when they moved their hands, and at times, when they approached too closely, inhaling one another’s warm breath. And at regular intervals, Maxime’s cigar glowed afresh, throwing a red blur in the darkness, and casting a pale pink flash over Renée’s face. She was adorable, seen by this fleeting light; so much so that the young man was struck by it.

“Oh oh!” he said. “We seem to be very pretty this evening, stepmamma…. Let’s have a look.”

He brought his cigar nearer, and drew a few rapid puffs. Renée in her corner was lit up with a warm, palpitating light. She had slightly raised her hood. Her bare head, covered with a mass of little curls, adorned with a simple blue ribbon, looked like a real boy’s head over the great black satin blouse which came up to her neck. She thought it very amusing to be thus examined and admired by the light of a cigar. She threw herself back tittering, while he added with an air of comical gravity:

“The deuce! I shall have to look after you, if I am to bring you back safe and sound to my father.”

Meantime the cab turned round the Madeleine and joined the current of the boulevards. Here it became filled with a leaping light, with the reflections from the shops with their flaring windows. Blanche Muller lived close by in one of the new houses that have been built on the raised ground of the Rue Basse-du-Rempart. There were but few carriages as yet at the door. It was only ten o’clock. Maxime wanted to drive down the boulevards and wait an hour; but Renée, whose curiosity was becoming keener, told him decidedly that she would go up all alone if he did not accompany her. He followed her, and was glad to find more people upstairs than he expected. Renée had put on her mask. Leaning on Maxime’s arm, and whispering to him peremptory commands which he submissively obeyed, she ferreted about in all the rooms, lifted the corners of the door-hangings, examined the furniture, and would have gone so far as to search the drawers had she not feared being seen.

The apartment, though richly decorated, had Bohemian corners that at once suggested the chorus-girl. It was here especially that Renée’s pink nostrils quivered, and that she constrained her companion to walk slowly, so as to lose no particle of things or of their smell. She lingered particularly in a dressing-room left wide open by Blanche Muller, who, when she received her friends, gave up everything to them, even to her alcove, where the bed was pushed aside to make room for the card-tables. But the dressing-room did not please her: it seemed to her common, and even a little dirty, with its carpet covered with little round burns from cigarette-ends, and its blue silk hangings stained with pomade and splashed with soapsuds. Then, when she had fully inspected the rooms, and fixed the smallest details of the place in her memory, so as to describe them later to her friends, she passed on to the guests. The men she knew; for the most part they were the same financiers, the same politicians, the same young men-about-town who came to her Thursdays. She fancied herself in her own drawingroom at times, when she came face to face with a group of smiling dress-coats, who, the previous evening, had worn the same smile in her house when talking to the Marquise d’Espanet or the fair-haired Mme. Haffner. Nor was the illusion completely dispelled when she looked at the women. Laure d’Aurigny was in yellow like Suzanne Haffner, and Blanche Muller, like Adeline d’Espanet, wore a white dress which left her bare down to the middle of her back. At last Maxime besought her to take pity on him, and she consented to sit down with him on a sofa. They stayed there a moment, the young man yawning, Renée asking him the ladies’ names, undressing them with her look, adding up the number of yards of lace they wore round their skirts. Seeing her absorbed in this serious study, he ended by slipping away in obedience to a sign which Laure d’Aurigny made him with her hand. She chaffed him about the lady he was escorting. Then she made him swear to come and join them at the Café Anglais at one o’clock.

“Your father will be there,” she called to him, as he rejoined Renée.

The latter found herself surrounded by a group of women laughing very loud, while M. de Saffré had availed himself of the seat left vacant by Maxime to slip down beside her and pay her unmannerly compliments. Next, M. de Saffré and the women had all begun to shout, to smack their thighs, so much so that Renée, fairly deafened, and yawning in her turn, rose and said to her companion:

“Let’s go away, they’re too stupid!”

As they were leaving, M. de Mussy entered. He seemed delighted to meet Maxime, and paying no attention to the masked woman he had with him:

“Ah, my friend,” he murmured with a lovesick air, “she will be the death of me. I know she is better, and she still forbids me her door. Do tell her you have seen me with tears in my eyes.”

“Be still, she shall have your message,” said the young man, with a curious laugh. And on the stairs:

“Well, stepmamma, hasn’t the poor fellow touched you?” She shrugged her shoulders without replying. Outside, on the pavement, she paused before getting into the cab, which had waited for them, and looked hesitatingly towards the Madeleine and towards the Boulevard des Italiens. It was barely half-past eleven, the boulevard was still very animated.

“So we are going home,” she murmured, regretfully.

“Unless you care to take a drive along the boulevards,” replied Maxime.

She agreed. Her feast of feminine curiosity was turning out badly, and she hated the idea of returning home with an illusion the less and an incipient headache. She had long imagined that an actresses’ ball was killingly funny. There seemed to be a return of Spring, as happens sometimes in the last days of October; the night had a May warmth, and the occasional cold breezes passing gave additional gaiety to the atmosphere. Renée, with her head at the window, remained silent, looking at the crowd, the cafés, the restaurants, whose interminable line scudded past. She had become quite serious, lost in the depths of those vague longings that fill the reveries of women. The wide pavement, swept by the streetwalkers’ skirts, and ringing with peculiar familiarity under the men’s boots, the gray asphalt, over which it seemed to her that the gallop of pleasure and facile love was passing, awoke her slumbering desires, and made her forget the idiotic ball which she had left, to allow her a glimpse of other and more highly-flavoured joys. At the windows of the private rooms at Brébant’s, she perceived the shadows of women on the whiteness of the curtains. And Maxime told her a very improper story, of a husband who had thus detected, on a curtain, the shadow of his wife and the shadow of a lover in the act. She hardly listened to him. But he grew livelier, and ended by taking her hands and teasing her by talking of that poor M. de Mussy.

They turned back, and as they once more passed in front of Brébant’s:

“Do you know,” she said, suddenly, “that M. de Saffré asked me to supper this evening?”

“Oh! you would have fared badly,” he replied, laughing. “Saffré has not the slightest culinary imagination. He has not got beyond a lobster salad.”

“No, no, he spoke of oysters and of cold partridge…. But he addressed me in the second person singular, and that bothered me ….”

She stopped short, looked again at the boulevard, and added after a pause, with an air of distress:

“The worst of it is that I am awfully hungry.”

“What, you are hungry!” exclaimed the young man. “That’s very simple, we will go and have supper together…. What do you say?’’

He spoke quietly, but she refused at first, declaring that Céleste had put out something for her to eat at home. Meantime Maxime, who did not want to go to the Café Anglais, had stopped the cab at the corner of the Rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche; he even alighted, and as his stepmother still hesitated:

“As for that,” he said, “if you are afraid of my compromising you, say so…. I will get up beside the driver and take you back to your husband.”

She smiled, and alighted from the cab with the air of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The pavement which she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious sensation of fear and of gratified caprice quivering over her skin. Ever since the cab had been rolling on, she had had a mad longing to jump out upon the pavement. She crossed it with short steps, stealthily, as though she felt a keener pleasure from the fear that she might be seen. Her escapade was decidedly turning into an adventure. She certainly did not regret having refused M. de Saffré’s offhand invitation. But she would have come home terribly cross if Maxime had not thought of letting her taste forbidden fruit. He ran upstairs quickly, as though at home. She followed him a little out of breath. Slight fumes of fish and game hung about, and the stair-carpet, secured to the steps with brass rods, had a smell of dust that increased her excitement.

As they reached the first landing, they met a dignified-looking waiter, who drew back to the wall to let them pass.

“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll wait on us, won’t you?… Give us the white room.”

Charles bowed, went up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was lowered, it seemed to Renée as if she was penetrating into the twilight of a dubious and charming resort.

A continuous rumbling came in through the wide-open window, and on the ceiling, in the reflection cast by the café below, the shadows of the people in the street passed swiftly by. But with a twist of his thumb the waiter turned on the gas. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, the room filled with a crude light that fell full upon Renée’s head. She had already thrown back her hood. The little curls had become slightly disarranged, but the blue ribbon had not stirred. She began to walk about, confused by the way in which Charles looked at her; he blinked his eyes and screwed up the lids in order to see her better in a way which plainly argued: “Here’s one I haven’t seen before.”

“What shall I serve, monsieur?” he asked aloud.

Maxime turned towards Renée.

“What do you say to M. de Saffré’s supper?” he asked. “Oysters, a partridge….”

And seeing the young man smile, Charles discreetly imitated him, murmuring:

“Wednesday’s supper, then, if that will suit?”

“Wednesday’s supper….” repeated Maxime.

Then, remembering:

“Yes, I don’t care, give us Wednesday’s supper.”

When the waiter had gone, Renée took her eyeglass, and went inquisitively round the room. It was a square room in white and gold, furnished with the coquetry of a boudoir. Besides the table and the chairs, there was a sort of low slab that served as a sideboard, and a broad divan, a veritable bed, which stood between the window and the fireplace. A Louis XVI clock and candlesticks adorned the white marble mantel. But the curiosity of the room was the mirror, a handsome long-shaped mirror, which had been scrawled over by the ladies’ diamonds with names, dates, doggrel verses, prodigious sentiments and astounding avowals. Renée thought she caught sight of something beastly, and lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, experiencing fresh embarrassment, and at last, to give herself countenance, began gazing at the ceiling and the copper-gilt chandelier with its five jets. But the uneasiness she felt was delicious. While she raised her forehead as if to examine the cornice, seriously, and with her eyeglass in her hand, she derived profound enjoyment from this equivocal furniture which she felt about her; from that limpid, cynical mirror whose pure surface, barely wrinkled by those filthy scrawls, had helped in the adjusting of so many false chignons; from that divan whose breadth shocked her; from the table and the very carpet, in which she found the same smell as on the stairs, a subtle, penetrating, and almost religious odour of dust.

Then, when she was driven at last to lower her eyes.

“What is this supper of Wednesday?” she asked of Maxime.

“Nothing,” he replied. “A bet one of my friends lost.”

In any other place he would have told her without hesitation that he had supped on Wednesday with a lady he had met on the boulevard. But since entering the private room, he had instinctively treated her as a woman whose good graces one seeks to obtain and whose jealousy must be spared. She did not insist; she went and leant on the rail of the window, where he joined her. Behind them Charles came and went, with a sound of crockery and plate.

It was not yet midnight. On the boulevard below, Paris was growling, prolonging its ardent day, before deciding to go to bed. The rows of trees separated with a confused line the whiteness of the pavement from the uncertain darkness of the roadway, on which passed the rumble and the fleeting lamps of the carriages. On either edge of this dark belt, the newsvendors’ kiosks shed their light from spot to spot, like great Venetian lanterns, tall and fantastically variegated, set on the ground at regular intervals for some colossal illumination. But at this time their subdued brilliancy was lost in the flare of the neighbouring shop-fronts. Not a shutter was up, the pavement stretched out without a line of shadow, under a shower of rays that lighted it with a golden dust, with the warm and resplendent glare of daylight. Maxime showed Renée the Café Anglais, whose windows shone out in front of them. The lofty branches of the trees interfered with them a little, however, when they tried to see the houses and pavement opposite. They leant over, and looked below them. There was a continual coming and going; men walked past in groups, prostitutes in couples dragged their skirts, which they raised from time to time with a languid movement, casting weary, smiling glances around them. Right under the window, the tables of the Café Riche were spread out in the blaze of the gaslamps, whose brilliancy extended half across the roadway; and it was especially in the centre of this burning focus that they saw the pallid faces and pale smiles of the passersby. Around the little tables were men and women mingled together, drinking. The girls were in showy dresses, their hair dressed low down in their necks; they lounged about on chairs and made loud remarks, which the clatter prevented one from hearing. Renée noticed one in particular, sitting alone at a table, dressed in a bright-blue costume, garnished with white guipure; thrown back in her chair, she finished, sip by sip, a glass of beer, her hands on her stomach, a heavy and resigned expectant look on her face. The women on foot disappeared slowly among the crowd, and Renée, who was interested in them, followed them, gazing from one end of the boulevard to the other, into the noisy, confused depths of the avenue, full of the black swarm of pedestrians, where the lights became mere sparks. And the endless procession, a crowd strangely mixed and always alike, passed by with tiring regularity in the midst of the bright colours and patches of darkness, in the fairylike confusion of the thousand leaping flames that swept like waves from the shops, lending colour to the transparencies of the windows and the kiosks, running along the pavements in fillets, letters and designs of fire, piercing the darkness with stars, gliding unceasingly along the roadway. The deafening noise that rose on high had a clamour, a prolonged monotonous rumbling, like an organ-note accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. Renée at one moment thought an accident had taken place. A stream of people moved on the left, a little beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. But, taking her eyeglass, she recognized the omnibus-office. There was a crowd of people on the pavement, standing waiting, and rushing forward as soon as an omnibus arrived. She heard the rough voice of the ticket-examiner calling out the numbers, and then the tinkle of the registering bell reached her with a crystal ringing. Her eyes lighted upon the advertisements on a kiosk, glaringly coloured like Épinal prints; on a pane of glass, in a green-and-yellow frame, there was the head of a grinning devil with hair on end, a hatter’s advertisement, which she failed to understand. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed, with its red lamps and yellow sides, turning the corner of the Rue le Peletier, shaking the house with its din, and she saw the men on the knifeboard raise tired faces and look at them, Maxime and her, with the curious glance of famished people peering through a keyhole.

“Ah!” she said. “The Parc Monceau is fast asleep by this time.”

It was the only remark she made. They stayed there for nearly twenty minutes in silence, surrendering themselves to the intoxication of the noise and light. Then, the table being laid, they went and sat down, and as she seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime dismissed him.

“Leave us…. I will ring for dessert.”

Renée’s cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled; one would think she had just been running. She brought from the window a little of the din and animation of the boulevard. She would not let her companion close the window.

“Why, it’s the orchestra!” she said, when he complained of the noise. “Don’t you think it a funny sort of music? It will make a fine accompaniment to our oysters and partridge.”

The escapade gave youth to her thirty years. She had quick movements and a touch of fever, and this private room, this supping alone with a young man amid the uproar of the street excited her, gave her the look of a fast woman. She attacked the oysters resolutely. Maxime was not hungry; he watched her bolt her food with a smile.

“The devil!” he murmured. “You would have made a good supper-girl.”

She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.

“Do I look hungry? What can you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that exhausted me…. Ah, my poor friend, I pity you for living in a world like that!”

“You know very well,” he said, “that I have promised to give up Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny on the day your friends consent to come to supper with me.”

She made a haughty gesture.

“I should rather think so! We are rather more amusing than those women, you must confess…. If one of us were to bore her lover as your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore all of you, why the poor little woman would not keep her lover a week!… You never will listen to me. Just try it, one of these days.”

Maxime, to avoid summoning the waiter, rose, removed the oysters, and brought the partridge which was on the slab. The table had the luxurious look of the first-class restaurants. A breath of adorable debauchery passed over the damask cloth, and Renée experienced little thrills of contentment as she let her slender hands stroll from her fork to her knife, from her plate to her glass. She, who usually drank water barely tinged with claret, now drank white wine neat. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, and waiting on her with comical obsequiousness, resumed:

“What can M. de Saffré have said to make you so furious? Did he tell you you were ugly?”

“Oh, he!” she replied. “He’s a nasty man. I could never have believed that a gentleman who is so distinguished, so polite when at my house, could have used such language. But I forgive him. It was the women that irritated me. One would have thought they were apple-women. There was one who complained of a boil on her hip, and a little more and I believe she would have pulled up her petticoat to show all of us her sore.”

Maxime was splitting with laughter.

“No, really,” she continued, working herself up, “I can’t understand you men; those women are dirty and dull…. And to think that when I saw you going off with your Sylvia I imagined wonderful scenes, ancient banquets that you see in pictures, with creatures crowned with roses, goblets of gold, extraordinary voluptuousness… Ah! no doubt. You showed me a dirty dressing-room, and women swearing like troopers. That’s not worth being immoral for.”

He wanted to protest, but she silenced him, and holding between her fingertips a partridge-bone which she was daintily nibbling, she added, in a lower voice:

“Immorality ought to be an exquisite thing, my dear… When I, a straight woman, feel bored and commit the sin of dreaming of impossibilities, I am sure I think of much jollier things than all your Blanche Mullers.”

And with a serious air, she concluded with this profound and frankly cynical remark:

“It is a question of education, don’t you see?”

She laid the little bone gently on her plate. The rumbling of the carriages continued, with no clearer sound rising above it. She had been obliged to raise her voice for him to hear her, and the flush on her cheeks grew redder. There were still on the slab some truffles, a sweet, and some asparagus, which was out of season. He brought the lot over, so as not to have to disturb himself again; and as the table was rather narrow, he placed on the floor between them a silver pail, full of ice, containing a bottle of champagne. Renée’s appetite had ended by communicating itself to him. They tasted all the dishes, they emptied the bottle of champagne with brusque liveliness, launching out into ticklish theories, leaning their elbows on the table like two friends who relieve their hearts after drinking. The noise on the boulevard was diminishing; but to her ears, on the contrary, it seemed to increase, and at moments all these wheels would seem to be whirling round in her head.

When he spoke of ringing for dessert, she rose, shook the crumbs from her long satin blouse, and said:

“That’s it… You can light your cigar, you know.”

She was a little giddy. She went to the window, attracted by a peculiar noise which she could not explain to herself. The shops were being closed.

“Look,” she said, turning towards Maxime, “the orchestra is emptying.”

She leant out again. In the middle of the road, the coloured eyes of the cabs and omnibuses, fewer and faster, were still crossing one another. But on either side, along the pavements, great pits of darkness had opened out in front of the closed shops. The cafés alone were still flaming, streaking the asphalt with sheets of light. From the Rue Drouot to the Rue du Helder she thus perceived a long line of white squares and black squares, in which the last wayfarers sprang up and disappeared in a curious fashion. The streetwalkers in particular, with their long-trained dresses, glaringly illuminated and immersed in darkness by turns, seemed like apparitions, like ghostly puppets crossing the limelight of some extravaganza. She amused herself for a moment with this sight. There was no longer any widespread light; the gasjets were being turned out; the variegated kiosks marked the darkness more definitely. From time to time a flood of people, issuing from some theatre, passed by. But soon there was vacancy, and there came under the window groups of men in twos or threes whom a woman accosted. They stood debating. Some of their remarks rose audibly in the subsiding din; and then the woman generally went off on the arm of one of the men. Other girls wandered from café to café, strolled round the tables, pocketed the forgotten lumps of sugar, laughed with the waiters, and gazed fixedly with a silent, questioning, proffering look at the belated customers. And just after Renée had followed with her eyes the all but empty knifeboard of a Batignolles omnibus, she recognized, at the corner of the pavement, the woman in the blue dress with the white lace, erect, glancing about her, still in search of a man.

When Maxime came to fetch Renée from the window where she stood lost, he smiled as he looked towards one of the half-opened windows of the Café Anglais; the idea of his father, supping there on his side, struck him as humorous; but that evening he was under the influence of a peculiar form of modesty which interfered with his customary love of fun. Renée left the window-rail with regret. An intoxication and languor rose up from the vaguer depths of the boulevard. In the enfeebled rumbling of the carriages, in the obliteration of the bright lights, there was a coaxing summons to voluptuousness and sleep. The whispers that sped by, the groups assembled in shadowy corners, turned the pavement into the passage of some great inn at the hour when the travellers repair to their casual beds. The gleam and the noise continued to grow fainter and fainter, the town fell asleep, a breath of love passed over the housetops.

When Renée turned round, the light of the little chandelier made her blink her eyes. She was a little pale now, and felt slight quivers at the corners of her mouth. Charles was putting out the dessert: he went out, came in again, opening and shutting the door slowly, with the self-contained air of a man of the world.

“But I’m no longer hungry!” cried Renée. “Take away all those plates, and bring the coffee.”

The waiter, accustomed to the whims of the ladies he waited on, cleared away the dessert and poured out the coffee. He filled the room with his importance.

“Do get rid of him,” said Renée, who was feeling sick, to Maxime.

Maxime dismissed him; but scarcely had he disappeared before he returned once again to draw the great window-curtains closely together with an air of discretion. When he had at last retired, the young man, seized in his turn with impatience, rose, and going to the door:

“Wait,” he said, “I know a way to keep him out.”

And he pushed the bolt.

“That’s it,” she rejoined, “we are by ourselves at last.”

Their confidential, intimate chatting recommenced. Maxime had lighted a cigar. Renée sipped her coffee and even indulged in a glass of chartreuse. The room grew warmer and became filled with blue smoke. She ended by leaning her elbows on the table and resting her chin between her half-closed fists. Under this slight pressure her mouth became smaller, her cheeks were slightly raised, and her eyes, diminished in size, shone more brightly. Thus rumpled, her little face looked adorable under the rain of golden curls that now fell down upon her eyebrows. Maxime examined her through the smoke of his cigar. He thought her quaint. At times he was no longer quite sure of her sex: the great wrinkle that crossed her forehead, the pouting projection of her lips, the undecided air derived from her shortsightedness, made a big young man of her; the more so as her long black satin blouse came so high that one could barely espy, under her chin, a line of plump white neck. She let herself be looked at with a smile, no longer moving her head, her eyes lost in vacancy, her lips silent.

Then she woke up suddenly; she went and looked at the mirror towards which her dreamy eyes had been turning the last few moments. She raised herself on tip-toe, and leant her hands on the edge of the mantel, to read the signatures, the coarse remarks which before supper had frightened her off. She spelt out the syllables with some difficulty, laughing, reading on like a schoolboy turning over the pages of a Piron in his desk.

“‘Ernest and Clara,’“ she said, “and there is a heart underneath that looks like a funnel…. Ah! this is better: ‘I like men because I like truffles.’ Signed, ‘Laure.’ Tell me, Maxime, was it the d’Aurigny woman who wrote that?… Then here is the coat-of-arms of one of these ladies, I imagine: a hen smoking a big pipe…. And more names, the whole calendar of saints, male and female: Victor, Amélie, Alexandre, Edouard, Marguerite, Paquita, Louise, Renée…. So there’s one called after me….”

Maxime could see her face glowing in the glass. She raised herself still higher, and her domino, drawn more tightly behind, outlined the curve of her figure, the undulation of her hips. The young man followed the line of satin, which fitted her like a shirt. He rose in his turn, and threw away his cigar. He was ill at ease and restless. Something he was accustomed to was wanting in him.

“Ah! here is your name, Maxime,” cried Renée …. “Listen…. ‘I love….’“

But he had sat down on the corner of the divan, almost at Renée’s feet. He succeeded in taking hold of her hands with a quick movement; he turned her away from the looking-glass, and said, in a singular voice:

“Please, don’t read that.”

She struggled, laughing nervously.

“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”

But he insisted in a more suppressed tone:

“No, no, not tonight.”

He still held her, and she tried to free herself with little jerks of the wrists. There was an unknown light in their eyes, a touch of shame in their long constrained smile. She fell on her knees at the edge of the divan. They continued struggling, although she no longer made any movement to return to the mirror, and was already surrendering herself. And as Maxime threw his arms round her body, she said with her embarrassed, expiring laugh:

“Don’t, let me alone…. You are hurting me.”

It was the only murmur that rose to her lips. In the profound silence of the room, where the gas seemed to flare up higher, she felt the ground tremble and heard the clatter of the Batignolles omnibus turning the corner of the boulevard. And it was all over. When they recovered their position, side by side on the divan, he stammered out amid their mutual embarrassment:

“Bah! it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

She said nothing. She examined the pattern of the carpet with a dumfounded air.

“Had you ever dreamt of it?…” continued Maxime, stammering still more. “I hadn’t for a moment…. I ought to have mistrusted that private room.”

But in a deep voice, as if all the middle-class respectability of the Bérauds du Châtel had been awakened by this supreme sin:

“This is infamous, what we have just done,” she muttered, sobered, her face aged and very serious.

She was stifling. She went to the window, drew back the curtains, and leant out. The orchestra was hushed; her sin had been committed amid the last quiver of the basses and the distant chant of the violins, the vague, soft music of the boulevard asleep and dreaming of love. The roadway and pavement below stretched out and merged into gray solitude. All the growling cab-wheels seemed to have departed, carrying with them the lights and the crowd. Beneath the window, the Café Riche was closed; no shred of light gleamed through the shutters. Across the road, shimmering lights alone lit up the front of the Café Anglais, and one half-open window in particular, whence issued a faint laughter. And all along this riband of darkness, from the turn at the Rue Drouot to the other extremity, as far as her eyes could reach, she saw nothing but the symmetrical blurs of the kiosks staining the night red and green, without illuminating it, and resembling night-lights spaced along a giant dormitory. She raised her head. The trees outlined their tall branches against a clear sky, while the irregular line of the houses died away, assuming the clustering appearance of a rocky coast on the shore of a faint blue sea. But this belt of sky saddened her still more, and only in the darkness of the boulevard could she find consolation. What lingered on the surface of the deserted road of the noise and vice of the evening made excuses for her. She thought she could feel the heat of the footsteps of all those men and women ascend from the pavement that was growing cold. The shamefulness that had lingered there, momentary lusts, whispered offerings, prepaid weddings of a night, was evaporating, was floating in a heavy mist dissipated by the breath of morning. Leaning out into the darkness, she inhaled this quivering silence, that alcove fragrance, as an encouragement that reached her from below, as an assurance of shame shared and accepted by an approving city. And when her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she saw the woman in the blue dress trimmed with lace standing in the same place, alone in the gray solitude, waiting and offering herself to the empty night.

On turning round, Renée perceived Charles, who was looking around for what he could see. He ended by discovering Renée’s blue ribbon, lying rumpled and forgotten on a corner of the sofa. And with his civil air he hastened to take it to her. Then she realized all her shame. Standing before the glass, with awkward hands she endeavoured to refasten the ribbon. But her chignon had slipped down, her little curls had flattened on her temples, and she was unable to tie the bow. Charles came to her assistance, saying, as though he were offering an everyday thing, a finger-bowl or a toothpick:

“Would madame like the comb?…”

“Oh no, don’t trouble,” interrupted Maxime, giving the waiter an impatient look. “Go and call a cab.”

Renée decided simply to pull down the hood of her domino. And as she was about to leave, she again lightly raised herself to see the words which Maxime’s embrace had prevented her from reading. Slanting upwards towards the ceiling, and written in a large, hideous hand, there was this declaration, signed Sylvia: “I love Maxime,” She bit her lips and drew her hood a little lower.

In the cab they experienced a horrible sense of awkwardness. They sat facing one another, as when driving down from the Parc Monceau. They could not think of a word to say to each other. The cab was full of opaque darkness, and Maxime’s cigar did not even mark it with a red dot, a glimmer of crimson charcoal. The young man, hidden again among the skirts in which he was “up to his eyes,” suffered from this gloom and this silence, from the silent woman he felt beside him, whose eyes he imagined he could see staring wide open into the night. To seem less stupid he ended by feeling for her hand, and when he held it in his own, he was relieved, and found the situation tolerable. Renée abandoned her hand languidly and dreamily.

The cab crossed the Place de la Madeleine. Renée reflected that she was not to blame. She had not desired the incest. And the deeper her introspection, the more innocent she thought herself at the commencement of her escapade, at the moment of her stealthy departure from the Parc Monceau, at Blanche Muller’s, on the boulevard, even in the private room at the restaurant. Then why had she fallen on her knees on the edge of that sofa? She could not think. She had certainly not thought of “that” for a moment. She would have angrily refused to give herself. It was for fun, she was amusing herself, nothing more. And in the rolling of the cab she found again the deafening orchestra of the boulevard, the coming and going of men and women, while bars of fire scorched her tired eyes.

Maxime, in his corner, was also pondering, with a certain annoyance. He was angry at the adventure. He laid the blame on the black satin domino. Whoever saw a woman rig herself out like that! You couldn’t even see her neck. He had taken her for a boy and romped with her, and it was not his fault that the game had become serious. He certainly would not have touched her with the tip of his fingers, if she had shown only a tiny bit of her shoulders. He would have remembered that she was his father’s wife. Then, as he did not care for disagreeable reflections, he forgave himself. So much the worse, after all! he would try and not do it again. It was a piece of nonsense.

The cab stopped, and Maxime got down first to assist Renée. But, at the little gate of the gardens, he did not dare to kiss her. They touched hands as was their habit. She was already on the other side of the railing, when, for the sake of saying something, unwittingly confessing a preoccupation that had vaguely filled her thoughts since leaving the restaurant:

“What is that comb,” she asked, “the waiter spoke of?”

“That comb,” repeated Maxime, embarrassed. “I’m sure I don’t know….”

Renée suddenly understood. The room, no doubt, had a comb that formed part of its apparatus, like the curtains, the bolt and the sofa. And without waiting for an explanation which was not forthcoming, she plunged into the darkness of the Parc Monceau, hastening her steps and thinking she could see behind her those tortoiseshell teeth in which Laure d’Aurigny and Sylvia had left fair hair and black. She was in a high fever. Céleste had to put her to bed and sit up with her till morning. Maxime stood for a moment on the pavement of the Boulevard Malesherbes, consulting with himself whether he should join the festive party at the Café Anglais; and then, with the idea that he was punishing himself, he determined that he ought to go home to bed.

The next morning Renée woke late from a heavy, dreamless sleep. She had a large fire lighted, and said she would spend the day in her room. This was her refuge at serious moments. Towards mid-day, as her husband did not see her come down to breakfast, he asked leave to speak with her for an instant. She was already refusing the request, with a touch of nervousness, when she thought better of it. The day before she had sent down to Saccard a bill of Worms’s for a hundred and thirty-six thousand francs, a rather high figure; and doubtless he wished to indulge in the gallantry of bringing her the receipt in person.

The thought came to her of yesterday’s little curls. Mechanically she looked in the glass at her hair, which Céleste had plaited into great tresses. Then she ensconced herself by the fireside, burying herself in the lace of her peignoir. Saccard, whose rooms were also on the first floor, corresponding to his wife’s, entered in his slippers, a husband’s privilege. He set foot barely once a month in Renée’s room, and always for some delicate question of money. That morning he had the red eyes and pallid complexion of a man who has not slept. He kissed his wife’s hand gallantly.

“Are you unwell, my dear?” he asked, sitting down on the opposite side of the fireplace. “A little headache, eh?… Forgive me for coming to worry you with my business jargon, but the thing is rather serious….”

He drew from the pocket of his dressing-gown Worms’s account, the cream-laid paper of which Renée recognized.

“I found this bill on my desk yesterday,” he continued, “and I’m more than sorry, but I am absolutely unable to pay it at present.”

With a sidelong look he watched the effect his words produced on her. She seemed profoundly astonished. He resumed with a smile:

“You know, my dear, I am not in the habit of finding fault with your expenses, though I confess that certain items of this bill have surprised me a little. As for instance, on the second page, I find: ‘Ball dress: material, 70 francs; making up, 600 francs; money lent, 5,000 francs; eau du Docteur Pierre, 6 francs.’ That seems pretty expensive for a seventy-franc dress…. But as you know I understand every kind of weakness. Your bill comes to a hundred and thirty-six thousand francs, and you have been almost moderate, comparatively speaking, I mean to say…. Only, as I said before, I can’t pay it, I am short of money.”

She held out her hand with a gesture of suppressed mortification.

“Very well,” she said, curtly, “give me back the bill. I will think it over.”

“I see you don’t believe me,” murmured Saccard, taking pleasure in his wife’s incredulity on the subject of his embarrassment as though in a personal triumph. “I don’t say that my position is threatened, but business is very shaky at present…. Allow me, although I may seem insistent, to explain to you how we stand; you have confided your dowry to me, and I owe you complete frankness.”

He laid the bill on the mantel, took up the tongs, and began to stir the fire. This passion for raking the cinders while talking business was with him a system that had ended by becoming a habit. Whenever he came to an irksome figure or phrase, he brought about a subsidence which subsequently he laboriously built up, bringing the logs together, collecting and heaping up the little splinters. At another time he almost disappeared into the fireplace in search of a stray piece of charcoal. His voice grew indistinct, you grew impatient, you became interested in his cunning constructions of glowing firewood, you omitted to listen to him, and as a rule you left his presence beaten and satisfied. Even at other people’s houses he despotically took possession of the tongs. In summer-time he played with a pen, a paper-knife, a penknife.

“My dear,” he said, giving a great blow that sent the fire flying, “I once more beg your pardon for entering into these details…. I have punctually made over to you the interest on the money you placed in my hands. I can even say, without hurting your feelings, that I have only looked upon that interest as your pocket-money for your private disbursements, and that I have never asked you to contribute your share to the common household expenses.”

He paused. Renée suffered, as she watched him making a large hole in the cinders to bury the end of a log. He was approaching a delicate confession.

“I have had, you understand, to make your money pay a high interest. You can be easy, the principal is in good hands…. As to the amounts coming from your property in the Sologne, they have partly gone to pay for the house we live in; the remainder is invested in an excellent company, the Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco…. We have not got to settle accounts yet, have we? But I want to show you that we poor husbands are sometimes not half appreciated.”

A powerful motive must have impelled him to lie less than usual. The truth was that Renée’s dowry had long ceased to exist; it had become a fictitious asset in Saccard’s safe. Although he paid out interest on it at the rate of two or three hundred per cent, or more, he could not have produced the least security or found the smallest solid particle of the original capital. As he half confessed, moreover, the five hundred thousand francs of the Sologne property had been used to pay a first installment on the house and the furniture, which together cost close upon two millions. He still owed a million to the upholsterer and the builders.

“I make no claim on you,” Renée said at last; “I know I am very much in your debt.”

“Oh, my dear,” he cried, taking his wife’s hand, without relinquishing the tongs, “what a horrid thing to say!… Listen, in two words, I have been unlucky on the Bourse, Toutin-Laroche has made a fool of himself, and Mignon and Charrier are a pair of crooks who have taken me in. And that is why I can’t pay your bill. You forgive me, don’t you?”

He seemed genuinely moved. He dug the tongs in among the logs, and made the sparks burst out like fireworks. Renée remembered how restless he had been for some time past. But she was unable to realize the astonishing truth. Saccard had reached the point of having to perform a daily miracle. He resided in a house that cost two millions, he lived on a princely footing, and there were mornings when he had not a thousand francs in his safe. His expenditure did not seem to diminish. He lived upon debt among a race of creditors who swallowed up from day to day the scandalous profits that he realized from certain transactions. In the meantime and at the same moment companies crumbled beneath his feet, new and deeper pits yawned before him, over which he had to leap, unable to fill them up. He thus trod over sapped ground, amid a chronic crisis, settling bills of fifty thousand francs and leaving his coachman’s wages unpaid, marching on with a more and more regal assurance, emptying over Paris with increasing frenzy his empty cashbox, from which continued to flow the golden stream with the fabulous source.

Speculation was passing through a bad period at that moment. Saccard was a worthy offspring of the Hotel de Ville. He had undergone the rapidity of transformation, the frenzy for enjoyment, the blindness to expense that was shaking Paris. He now again resembled the Municipality in finding himself face to face with a formidable deficit which it was necessary secretly to make good; for he would not hear speak of prudence, of economy, of a calm and respectable existence. He preferred to keep up the useless luxury and real penury of those new thoroughfares whence he had derived his colossal fortune, which came into being each morning to be swallowed up at night. Passing from adventure to adventure, he now only possessed the gilded façade of a missing capital. In this period of eager madness, Paris itself did not risk its future with greater rashness or march straighter towards every folly and every trick of finance. The winding-up threatened to be disastrous.

The most promising speculations turned out badly in Saccard’s hands. As he said, he had just written off considerable losses on the Bourse. M. Toutin-Laroche had almost caused the Crédit Viticole to founder through a gamble for a rise that had suddenly turned against him; fortunately the Government, intervening under the rose, had set the famous wine-growers’ mortgage loan-machine on its legs again. Saccard, badly shaken by this sudden blow, seriously upbraided by his brother for the danger that had threatened the delegation bonds of the Municipality, which was involved with the Crédit Viticole, was even still more unfortunate in his speculations in house-property. The Mignon and Charrier pair had broken with him entirely. If he accused them it was because he was secretly enraged at his mistake of having built on his share of the ground while they prudently sold theirs. While they were making their fortune, he was left behind with houses on his hands that he was often unable to dispose of save at a loss. Among others he sold a house in the Rue de Marignan, on which he still owed three hundred and eighty thousand francs, for three hundred thousand francs. He had certainly invented a trick of his own which consisted in asking ten thousand francs a year for an apartment worth eight thousand at most. The terrified tenant only signed a lease when the landlord had consented to forego the first two years’ rent. In this way the apartment was brought down to its real value, but the lease bore the figure of ten thousand francs a year, and when Saccard found a purchaser and capitalized the income from the house, the calculation became an absolute phantasmagoria. He was not able to practise this swindle on a large scale: his houses would not let; he had built them too early; the clearings in which they stood, lost in the mud of winter, isolated them, and considerably reduced their value. The affair that affected him the most was the coarse piece of trickery of the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, who bought back from him the house on the Boulevard Malesherbes, the building of which he had had to abandon. The contractors were at last smitten with the desire to inhabit “their boulevard.” As they had sold their share of the ground above its value, and suspected the embarrassment of their former partner, they offered to relieve him of the enclosure in the centre of which the house stood completed up to the flooring of the first story, whose iron girders were partly laid. Only they treated the solid freestone foundations as useless rubbish, saying that they would have preferred the ground bare, so as to build on it according to their taste. Saccard was obliged to sell, without taking into account the hundred and odd thousand francs he had already expended, and what exasperated him still further was that the contractors persistently refused to take back the ground at two hundred and fifty francs the metre, the figure fixed at the time of the division. They beat him down twenty-five francs a metre, like those secondhand clothes-women who give only four francs for a thing they have sold for five the day before. Two days later Saccard had the mortification of seeing an army of bricklayers invade the boarded enclosure and go on building upon the “useless rubbish.”

He was thus all the better able to play before his wife at being pressed for money, as his affairs were becoming more and more involved. He was not the man to confess from sheer love of truth.

“But, monsieur,” said Renée, with an air of doubtfulness, “if you are in difficulties for money, why have you bought me that aigrette and necklace which cost you, I believe, sixty-five thousand francs?… I have no use for those jewels, and I shall have to ask your permission to dispose of them so as to pay Worms something on account.”

“Take care not to do that!” he cried anxiously. “If you were not seen wearing those diamonds at the ministry ball tomorrow, people would invent stories about my position….”

He was in a genial mood that morning. He ended by smiling and murmuring with a wink:

“We speculators, my dear, are like pretty women, we have our little artifices…. Keep your aigrette and necklace, I beg, for love of me.”

He could not tell the story, a very pretty one but a little risky. It was after supper one night that Saccard and Laure d’Aurigny had entered into an alliance. Laure was over head and ears in debt, and her one thought was to find a good young man who would elope with her and take her to London. Saccard on his side felt the ground crumbling beneath his feet; his imagination, driven to bay, sought an expedient which would display him to the public sprawling on a bed of gold and banknotes. The courtesan and the speculator had come to an understanding amid the semi-intoxication of dessert. He hit upon the idea of that sale of diamonds which set all Paris agog; and there, with a deal of fuss, he bought jewels for his wife. Then with the product of the sale, about four hundred thousand francs, he managed to satisfy Laure’s creditors, to whom she owed nearly twice as much. It is even to be presumed that he recouped part of his sixty-five thousand francs. When he was seen settling the d’Aurigny affairs, he was looked upon as her lover, and believed to be paying her debts in full and committing extravagances for her. Every hand was stretched out to him, his credit revived formidably. And on the Bourse he was chaffed about his passion, with smiles and insinuations that entranced him. Meanwhile Laure d’Aurigny, brought into prominence by this hubbub, although he had never spent a single night with her, pretended to deceive him with nine or ten idiots enticed by the notion of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. In one month she had two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had sold. Saccard had got into the way of going to smoke a cigar with her in the afternoon on leaving the Bourse; he often caught sight of coat-tails flying through the doorways in terror. When they were alone, they could not look at one another without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead as though she were a wayward wench whose roguery delighted him. He did not give her a sou, and on one occasion she even lent him money to pay a gambling debt.

Renée tried to insist, and spoke of at least pawning the diamonds; but her husband gave her to understand that that was not possible, that all Paris expected to see her wear them on the morrow. Then Renée, who was much worried about Worms’s bill, sought another way out of the difficulty.

“But,” she suddenly exclaimed, “my Charonne property is going on all right, is it not? You were telling me only the other day that the profit would be superb…. Perhaps Larsonneau would advance me a hundred and thirty-six thousand francs?”

Saccard had for a moment forgotten the tongs between his legs. He now hastily seized them again, leant forward, and almost disappeared in the fireplace, whence the young woman indistinctly heard his voice muttering:

“Yes, yes, Larsonneau might perhaps….”

She was at last coming of her own accord to the point to which he had been gently leading her since the beginning of the conversation. He had already for two years been preparing his masterstroke in the Charonne district. His wife had never consented to part with Aunt Elisabeth’s estate; she had promised her to keep it intact, so as to leave it to her child if she became a mother. In the presence of this obstinacy, the speculator’s imagination had set to work, and ended by building up quite a poem. It was a work of exquisite villainy, a colossal piece of cheating, of which the Municipality, the State, his wife, and even Larsonneau were to be the victims. He no longer spoke of selling the building-plots; only every day he deplored the folly of leaving them unproductive and contenting one’s self with a return of two per cent. Renée, who was always in urgent need of money, ended by entertaining the idea of a speculation of some kind. He based his operations on the certainty of an expropriation for the cutting of the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène, the direction of which was not yet clearly resolved upon. And it was then that he brought forward his old accomplice Larsonneau as a partner, who made an agreement with his wife on the following basis: she brought the building-plots, representing a value of five hundred thousand francs; Larsonneau on the other hand agreed to spend an equal sum on building upon this ground a music-hall with a large garden attached, where games of all kinds, swings, skittle-alleys and bowling-greens would be set up. The profits were naturally to be divided, as the losses would be borne in equal shares. In the event of one of the two partners wishing to withdraw, he could do so and claim his share, which would be fixed by a valuation. Renée seemed surprised at the large figure of five hundred thousand francs, when the ground was worth three hundred thousand at the utmost. But he explained to her that it was an ingenious plan for tying Larsonneau’s hands later on, as his buildings would never represent such an amount as that.

Larsonneau had developed into an elegant man-about-town, well-gloved, with dazzling linen and astounding cravats. To go on his errands he had a tilbury as light as a piece of clockwork, with a very high seat, which he drove himself. His offices in the Rue de Rivoli were a sumptuous suite of rooms in which there was not a bundle of papers, not a business document to be seen. His clerks worked at tables of stained pear-wood, inlaid with marquetry and adorned with chased brass. He called himself an expropriation-agent, a new calling which the works of Paris had brought into being. His connection with the Hotel de Ville caused him to receive early information of the cutting of any new thoroughfare. When he had succeeded in learning the line of route of a boulevard from one of the surveyors of roads, he went and offered his services to the threatened landlords. And he turned his little plan for increasing the compensation to account by acting before the decree of public utility was issued. So soon as a landlord accepted his proposals, he took all the expenses on himself, drew up a plan of the property, wrote out a memorandum, followed up the case before the court and paid an advocate, all for a percentage on the difference between the offer of the Municipality and the compensation awarded by the jury. But to this almost justifiable branch of business he added a number of others. He more especially lent out money at interest. He was not the usurer of the old school, ragged and dirty, with eyes pale and expressionless as five-franc pieces, and lips white and drawn together like the strings of a purse. He was a radiant person, had a charming way of ogling, got his clothes at Dusautoy’s, went and lunched at Brébant’s with his victim, whom he called “old man,” and offered him Havannahs at dessert. In reality, beneath his waistcoats tightly buckled round his waist, Larsonneau was a terrible gentleman, who would have insisted on the payment of a note of hand until he had driven the acceptor to suicide, and this without losing a grain of amiability.

Saccard would gladly have looked for another partner. But he was always anxious on the subject of the false inventory, which Larsonneau preciously preserved. He preferred to take him into the affair, hoping to avail himself of some circumstance to regain possession of that compromising document. Larsonneau built the music-hall, an edifice of planks and plaster surmounted by little tin turrets, which were painted bright red and yellow. The garden and the games proved successful in the populous district of Charonne. In two years the speculation looked prosperous, although the profits in reality were very slight. Saccard had so far always spoken enthusiastically to his wife of the prospects of this fine idea.

Renée, seeing that her husband would not make up his mind to come out of the fireplace, where his voice was becoming more and more inaudible, said:

“I will go and see Larsonneau to-day. It is my only chance.”

Then he let go the log with which he was struggling.

“The errand’s done, my dear,” he replied, smiling. “Don’t I forestall all your wishes?… I saw Larsonneau last night.”

“And he promised you the hundred and thirty-six thousand francs?” she enquired anxiously.

He was building up between the two flaming logs a little mountain of embers, picking up daintily with the tongs the smallest fragments of burnt wood, looking with a satisfied air at the progress of the eminence which he was constructing with infinite art.

“Oh! how you rattle on!…” he murmured. “A hundred and thirty-six thousand francs is a large sum…. Larsonneau is a good fellow, but his means are still limited. He is quite ready to oblige you….”

He paused, blinking his eyes and rebuilding a corner of the eminence which had fallen through. This pastime began to confuse Renée’s ideas. In spite of herself she followed the work of her husband, whose awkwardness increased. She felt tempted to advise him. Forgetting Worms, the bill, her need of money, she ended by saying:

“Put that big piece at the bottom; then the others will keep up.”

Her husband obeyed her submissively, and added:

“All he can find is fifty thousand francs. That will at least be a nice bit on account…. Only he does not want to mix this up with the Charonne affair. He is only a go-between, do you understand, my dear? The person who lends the money asks an enormous interest. He wants a note of hand for eighty thousand francs at six months’ date.”

And having crowned the edifice with a pointed cinder, he crossed his hands over the tongs and looked fixedly at his wife.

“Eighty thousand francs!” she cried. “But that’s sheer robbery!… Do you advise me to commit this folly?”

“No,” he replied shortly. “But if you absolutely want the money, I won’t forbid it.”

He rose as though to go. Renée, in a state of cruel indecision, looked at her husband and at the bill which he left on the mantel. At last she took her poor head between her hands, murmuring:

“Oh, these business matters!… My head is splitting this morning…. Well, I must sign this note for eighty thousand francs. If I didn’t I should become altogether ill. I know myself, I should spend the day in a frightful struggle…. I prefer to do something stupid at once. That relieves me.”

And she spoke of ringing to send for a bill-stamp. But he insisted on rendering her this service in person. No doubt he had the bill stamp in his pocket, for he was absent for hardly two minutes. While she was writing at a little table he had pushed towards the fire, he examined her with eyes in which arose an astonished light of desire. The room was still full of the warmth of the bed she had quitted and of the fragrance of her first toilet. While talking she had allowed the folds of the peignoir in which she was wrapped to slip down, and the eyes of her husband, as he stood before her, glided over her bent head, through the gold of her hair, and very low down, into the whiteness of her neck and bosom. He wore a curious smile; the glowing fire, which had burnt his face, the close room, whose heavy atmosphere retained an odour of love, the yellow hair and white skin, which tempted him with a sort of conjugal scornfulness, set him dreaming, widened the scope of the drama in which he had just played a scene, and prompted some secret voluptuous calculation in his brutal jobber’s flesh.

When his wife handed him the acceptance, begging him to finish the matter for her, he took it without removing his eyes from her.

“You are bewitchingly beautiful….” he murmured.

And as she bent forward to push away the table, he kissed her rudely on the neck. She gave a little cry. Then she rose, quivering, trying to laugh, thinking, in spite of herself, of the other’s kisses of the night before. But he seemed to regret this unmannerly kiss. He left her, with a friendly pressure of the hand, and promised her that she should have the fifty thousand francs that same evening.

Renée dozed all day before the fire. At critical periods she had the languor of a Creole. All her turbulent nature would then become indolent, numbed, chill. She shivered with cold, she needed blazing fires, a stifling heat that brought little drops of perspiration to her forehead and lulled her. In this burning atmosphere, in this bath of flames, she almost ceased to suffer; her pain became as a light dream, a vague oppression, whose very uncertainty ended by becoming voluptuous. Thus she lulled till the evening the remorse of yesterday, in the red glow of the firelight, in front of a terrible fire, that made the furniture crack around her, and that at moments deprived her of the consciousness of her existence. She was able to think of Maxime as of a flaming enjoyment whose rays burnt her; she had a nightmare of strange passions amid flaring logs on white-hot beds. Céleste moved to and fro through the room, with her calm face, the face of a cold-blooded waiting-maid. She had orders to admit no one, she even sent away the inseparables, Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, who called after breakfasting together in a summer-house they rented at Saint-Germain. However, when, towards the evening, Céleste came to tell her mistress that Madame Sidonie, monsieur’s sister, asked to see her, she received orders to show her up.

Madame Sidonie as a rule did not call till dusk. Her brother had nevertheless prevailed upon her to wear silk gowns. But, no one knew why, for all that the silk she wore came fresh from the shop, it never looked new; it was shabby, lost its sheen, looked a rag. She had also consented to leave off bringing her basket to the Saccards. By way of retaliation, her pockets bulged over with papers. She took an interest in Renée, of whom she was unable to make a reasonable client, resigned to the necessities of life. She called on her regularly, with the discreet smiles of a physician who does not care to frighten his patient by telling her the name of her complaint. She commiserated with her in her little worries, treating them as little aches and pains which she could cure in a minute if Renée wished it. The latter, who was in one of those moments when one feels the need of pity, received her only to tell her that she had intolerable pains in her head.

“Why, my beautiful pet,” murmured Mme. Sidonie as she glided through the shade of the room, “but you’re stifling here!… Still your neuralgic pains, is it? It comes from worry. You take life too much to heart.”

“Yes, I have a heap of anxiety,” replied Renée, languishingly.

Night was falling. She had not allowed Céleste to light the lamp. The fire alone shed a great red glow that lighted her up fully, outstretched in her white peignoir, whose lace was assuming rose tints. At the edge of the shadow one could just see a corner of Mme. Sidonie’s black dress, and her two crossed hands, covered with gray cotton gloves. Her soft voice emerged from the darkness.

“Money-troubles again?” she asked, as though she had said troubles of the heart, in a voice full of gentleness and compassion.

Renée lowered her eyelids and nodded assent.

“Ah! if my brothers would listen to me, we should all be rich. But they shrug their shoulders when I speak to them of that debt of three milliards, you know…. Still I have good hopes. For the last ten years I have been wanting to go across to England. I have so little time to spare!… At last I resolved to write to London, and I am waiting the reply.”

And as the younger woman smiled:

“I know you are an unbeliever yourself. Still you would be very pleased if I made you a present one of these days of a nice little million…. Look here, the story is quite simple: there was a Paris banker who lent the money to the son of the King of England, and as the banker died without direct heirs, the State is to-day entitled to claim payment of the debt with compound interest. I have worked it out, it comes to two milliards, nine hundred and forty-three millions, two hundred and ten thousand francs…. Never fear, it will come, it will come.”

“In the meantime,” said Renée, with a dash of irony, “I wish you would get some one to lend me a hundred thousand francs…. I could then pay my tailor, who is making himself a great nuisance.”

“A hundred thousand francs can be found,” replied Mme. Sidonie, tranquilly. “It is only a question of what you will give in exchange.”

The fire was glowing; Renée, still more languid, stretched out her legs, showed the tips of her slippers at the edge of her dressing-gown. The agent resumed her sympathetic voice:

“My poor dear, you are really not reasonable. I know many women, but I have never seen one so little careful of her health as you. That little Michelin, for instance, see how well she manages! I cannot help thinking of you whenever I see her in good health and spirits…. Do you know that M. de Saffré is madly in love with her, and that he has already given her close upon ten thousand francs’ worth of presents? I believe her dream is to have a house in the country.”

She grew excited, she fumbled in her pocket. “I have here again a letter from a poor young married woman…. If it was light enough, I would let you read it…. Just think, her husband takes no notice of her. She had accepted some bills, and was obliged to borrow the money from a gentleman I know. I went myself and rescued the bills from the bailiff’s clutches, and it was no easy matter…. Those poor children, do you think they do wrong? I receive them at my place as though they were my son and daughter.”

“Do you know anyone who would lend me the money?” asked Renée, casually.

“I know a dozen…. You are too kindhearted. One can say anything between women, can’t one? and it’s not because your husband is my brother that I would excuse him for running after the hussies and leaving a love of a woman like you to mope at the fireside…. That Laure d’Aurigny costs him heaps and heaps. I should not be surprised to hear that he had refused you money. He has refused you, has he not?… Oh, the wretch!”

Renée listened complacently to this mellifluous voice, that issued from the shadow like the echo, vague as yet, of her own dreams. With eyelids half-closed, lying almost at length in her easy-chair, she was no longer conscious of Mme. Sidonie’s presence, she thought she was dreaming of evil thoughts that came to her and tempted her very gently. The business-woman kept up a long prattle like the monotonous flow of tepid water.

“It is Mme. de Lauwerens who has marred your life. You never would believe me. Ah! you wouldn’t be reduced to crying in your chimney-corner, if you hadn’t mistrusted me…. And I love you like my eyes, you beautiful thing. What a bewitching foot you have. You will laugh at me, but I must tell you how silly I am: when I have gone three days without seeing you, I feel absolutely obliged to come and admire you; yes, I feel I want something; I feel the need of feasting my eyes on your lovely hair, your face, so white, so delicate, your slender figure…. Really I have never seen such a figure.”

Renée ended by smiling. Her lovers themselves did not display such warmth, such rapt ecstasy, in speaking to her of her beauty. Mme. Sidonie observed the smile.

“Well then, it’s agreed,” she said, rising briskly…. “I run on and on, and forget that I am making your head split…. You will come tomorrow, will you not? We will talk of money, we will look about for a lender…. Understand, I want you to be happy.”

Still motionless, enervated by the heat, Renée replied, after a pause, as though it had cost her a laborious effort to understand what was being said to her:

“Yes, I will come, that’s agreed, and we will talk; but not tomorrow…. Worms will be satisfied with an installment. When he worries me again, we will see…. Don’t talk to me of all that any more. My head is shattered with business.”

Mme. Sidonie seemed very much vexed. She was on the point of sitting down again, of resuming her caressing monologue; but Renée’s weary attitude decided her to postpone her attack until later. She drew a handful of papers from her pocket, and searched among them until she found an article enclosed in a sort of pink box.

“I came to recommend to you a new soap,” she said, resuming her business voice. “I take a great interest in the inventor, who is a charming young man. It is a very soft soap, very good for the skin. You will try it, won’t you? and talk of it to your friends… I will leave it here, on the mantelpiece.”

She had reached the door, when she returned once more, and standing erect in the crimson glow of the fire, with her waxen face, she began to sing the praises of an elastic belt, an invention intended to take the place of corsets.

“It gives you a waist absolutely round, a genuine wasp’s waist,” she said….”I saved it from bankruptcy. When you come you can try on the samples if you like…. I had to run after the lawyers for a week. The documents are in my pocket, and I am going straight to my bailiff now to put a stop to a final opposition…. Goodbye for the present, darling. You know, I shall expect you: I want to dry those pretty eyes of yours.”

She glided out of sight. Renée did not even hear her close the door. She stayed there before the expiring fire, continuing her dream of the whole day, her head full of dancing numerals, hearing the voices of Saccard and of Madame Sidonie talking in the distance, offering her large sums of money, in the voice in which an auctioneer puts up a lot of furniture. She felt her husband’s coarse kiss on her neck, and when she turned round, she fancied the woman of business was at her feet, making passionate speeches to her, praising her perfections, and begging for an assignation with the attitude of a lover on the verge of despair. This made her smile. The heat of the room became more and more stifling. And Renée’s stupor, the fantastic dreams she had, were no more than a light slumber. An artificial slumber, in the depths of which constantly recurred to her the little private room on the boulevard, the large sofa upon which she had fallen on her knees. She no longer suffered in the least. When she opened her eyes, Maxime’s image passed through the crimson firelight.

The next day, at the ministry ball, the beautiful Madame Saccard was wondrous. Worms had accepted the fifty thousand francs on account, and she emerged from her financial straits with the laughter of convalescence. When she traversed the reception rooms in her great dress of rose faille with its long Louis XIV train, edged with deep white lace, there was a murmur, men jostled each other to see her. And those who were her friends bowed low, with a discreet smile of appreciation, doing homage to those beautiful shoulders, so well known to all official Paris and looked upon as the firm pillars of the Empire. She had bared her bosom with so great a contempt for the looks of others, she walked so serene and gentle in her nakedness, that it almost ceased to be indecent. Eugène Rougon, the great politician, felt that this nude bosom was even more eloquent than his speeches in the Chamber, softer and more persuasive in making people relish the charms of the reign and in convincing the doubtful. He went up to his sister-in-law to compliment her on her happy stroke of audacity in lowering her bodice yet another inch. Almost all the Corps Législatif was there, and from the air with which the deputies looked at the young married woman, the minister foresaw a fine success on the morrow in the delicate matter of the loans of the City of Paris. It was impossible to vote against a power that raised on the compost of millions a flower like this Renée, a so strange flower of voluptuousness, with silken flesh and statuesque nudity, a living joy that left behind it a fragrance of tepid pleasure. But what set the whole ballroom whispering was the necklace and aigrette. The men recognized the jewels. The women furtively called each other’s attention to them with a glance. Nothing else was talked of the whole evening. And the suite of reception rooms stretched away in the white light of the chandeliers, filled with a glittering throng like a medley of stars fallen into too confined a corner.

At about one o’clock Saccard disappeared. He relished his wife’s triumph as a successful piece of clap-trap. He had once more consolidated his credit. A matter of business required his presence at Laure d’Aurigny’s; he went off, and begged Maxime to take Renée home after the ball.

Maxime spent the evening staidly by the side of Louise de Mareuil, both very much taken up in saying shocking things about the women who passed to and fro. And when they had uttered some coarser piece of nonsense than usual, they stifled their laughter in their pocket-handkerchiefs. When Renée wished to leave, she had to come and ask the young man for his arm. In the carriage she showed a nervous gaiety; she still quivered with the intoxication of light, perfumes and sounds that she had just passed through. She seemed besides to have forgotten their “folly” of the boulevard, as Maxime called it. She only asked him, in a singular tone of voice:

“Is that little hunchback of a Louise so very amusing, then?”

“Oh, very amusing…” replied the young man, still laughing. “You saw the Duchess de Sternich with a yellow bird in her hair, didn’t you?… Well, Louise pretends that it’s a clockwork bird that flaps its wings every hour and cries, ‘Cuckoo! cuckoo!’ to the poor duke.”

Renée thought this pleasantry of the emancipated schoolgirl very entertaining. When they had reached home, as Maxime was about to take leave of her, she said to him:

“Are you not coming up? Céleste has no doubt got me something to eat.”

He came up in his usual compliant fashion. There was nothing to eat upstairs, and Céleste had gone to bed. Renée had to light the tapers in a little three-branched candlestick. Her hand trembled a little.

“That foolish creature,” she said, speaking of her maid, “must have misunderstood what I told her…. I shall never be able to undress myself all alone.”

She passed into her dressing-room. Maxime followed her, to tell her a fresh jest of Louise’s that recurred to his mind. He was as much at ease as though he had been loitering at a friend’s and was feeling for his cigar-case to light a Havannah. But when Renée had set down the candlestick, she turned round and fell into the young man’s arms, speechless and disquieting, gluing her mouth to his mouth.

Renée’s private apartment was a nest of silk and lace, a marvel of luxurious coquetry. A tiny boudoir led into the bedroom. The two rooms formed but one, or at least the boudoir was nothing more than the threshold of the bedroom, a large recess, furnished with long-chairs, and with a pair of hangings instead of a door. The walls of both rooms were hung with the same material, a heavy pale-gray silk, figured with huge bouquets of roses, white lilac, and buttercups. The curtains and door-hangings were of Venetian lace over a silk lining of alternate gray and pink bands. In the bedroom the white marble chimney-piece, of real jewel, displayed like a basket of flowers its incrustations of lapis lazuli and precious mosaic, repeating the roses, white lilac, and buttercups of the tapestry. A large gray-and-pink bed, whose woodwork was hidden beneath padding and upholstery, and whose head stood against the wall, filled quite one-half of the room with its flow of drapery, its lace and its silk figured with bouquets, falling from ceiling to carpet. As one should say a woman’s dress, rounded and slashed and decked with puffs and bows and flounces; and the large curtain, swelling out like a skirt, raised thoughts of some tall, amorous girl, leaning over, swooning, almost falling back upon the pillows. Beneath the curtains it was a sanctuary: cambric finely plaited, a snowy mass of lace, all sorts of delicate diaphanous things immersed in religious dimness. By the side of the bedstead, of this monument whose devout ampleness recalled a chapel decorated for some festival, the rest of the furniture subsiding into nothingness: low chairs, a cheval-glass six feet high, presses provided with innumerable drawers. Under foot, the carpet, blue-gray, was covered with pale full-blown roses. And on either side of the bed lay two great black bearskin rugs, edged with crimson velvet, with silver claws, and with their heads turned towards the window, gazing fixedly through their glass eyes at the empty sky.

Soft harmony, muffled silence reigned in this chamber. No shrill note, no metallic reflection, no bright gilding broke through the dreamy chant of pink and gray. Even the chimney ornaments, the frame of the mirror, the clock, the little candlesticks, were of old Sevres, and the mountings of copper-gilt were scarcely visible. Marvellous ornaments, the clock especially, with its ring of chubby Cupids, who climbed and leaned over the dial-plate like a troop of naked urchins mocking at the quick flight of time. This subdued luxury, these colours and ornaments which Renée’s taste had chosen soft and smiling, lent to the room a crepuscular light like that of an alcove with curtains drawn. The bed seemed to prolong itself till the room became one immense bed, with its carpets, its bearskin rugs, its padded seats, its stuffed hangings which continued the softness of the floor along the walls and up to the ceiling. And as in a bed, Renée left upon all these things the imprint, the warmth, the perfume of her body. When one drew aside the double hangings of the boudoir, it seemed as if one were raising a silken counterpane and entering some great couch, still warm and moist, where one found on the fine linen the adorable shape, the slumber and the dreams of a Parisian woman of thirty.

An adjoining closet, a spacious chamber hung with antique chintz, was simply furnished on every side with tall rosewood wardrobes, containing an army of dresses. Céleste, always methodical, arranged the dresses according to their dates, labelled them, introduced arithmetic amid her mistress’s blue and yellow caprices, and kept this closet as reposeful as a sacristy and as clean as a stable. There was no furniture in the room; not a rag lay about. The wardrobe-doors shone cold and clean like the varnished panels of a brougham.

But the wonder of the apartment, the room that was the talk of Paris, was the dressing-room. One said: “The beautiful Madame Saccard’s dressing-room,” as one says: “The Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles.” This room was situated in one of the towers, just above the little buttercup drawingroom. On entering, one was reminded of a large circular tent, an enchanted tent, pitched in a dream by some love-lorn Amazon. In the centre of the ceiling a crown of chased silver upheld the drapery of the tent, which ran, with a curve, to the walls, whence it fell straight down to the floor. This drapery, these rich hangings, consisted of pink silk covered with very thin muslin, plaited in wide folds at regular intervals. A band of lace separated the folds, and fillets of wrought silver ran down from the crown and glided down the hangings along either edge of each of the bands. The pink and gray of the bedroom grew brighter here, became a pink and white, like naked flesh. And under this bower of lace, under these curtains that hid all the ceiling save a pale blue cavity inside the narrow circlet of the crown, where Chaplin had painted a wanton Cupid looking down and preparing his dart, one would have thought one’s self at the bottom of a comfit-box, or in some precious jewel-case enlarged as though to display a woman’s nudity instead of the brilliancy of a diamond. The carpet, white as snow, stretched out without the least pattern or flower. The furniture consisted of a cupboard with plate-glass doors, whose two panels were inlaid with silver; a long-chair, two ottomans, some white satin stools; and a great toilet-table with a pink marble slab and legs hidden under flounces of muslin and lace. The glasses on the toilet-table, the bottles, the basin were of antique Bohemian crystal, streaked pink and white. And there was yet another table, inlaid with silver like the looking-glass cupboard, on which all the paraphernalia and toilet utensils were laid out, like the contents of a fantastic surgeon’s case, displaying a large number of little instruments of puzzling purpose, back-scratchers, nail-polishers, files of every shape and dimension, straight scissors and curved, every species of tweezer and pin. Each one of these articles of silver and ivory was marked with Renée’s monogram.

But the dressing-room had a delightful corner, which corner in particular made it famous. In front of the window the folds of the tent parted and disclosed, in a kind of long, shallow alcove, a bath, a tank of pink marble sunk into the floor, with sides fluted like those of a large shell and rising to a level with the carpet. Marble steps led down into the bath. Above the silver taps, shaped like swans’ necks, the back of the alcove was filled with a Venetian mirror, frameless, with curved edges, and a ground design on the crystal. Every morning Renée took a bath that lasted some minutes. This bath filled the dressing-room for the whole day with moisture, with a fragrance of fresh, wet flesh. Sometimes an unstoppered scent-bottle, a cake of soap left out of its dish, struck a more violent note in this somewhat insipid languor. Renée was fond of staying there till mid-day, almost naked. The round tent for its part was naked also. The pink bath, the pink slabs and basins, the muslin of the walls and ceiling, under which a pink blood seemed to course, acquired the curves of flesh, the curves of shoulders and breasts; and, according to the time of day, one would have thought of the snowy skin of a child or the hot skin of a woman. It was a vast nudity. When Renée left her bath, her fair-complexioned body added but a little more pink to all the pink flesh of the room.

It was Maxime who undressed Renée. He understood that sort of thing, and his quick hands divined pins and glided round her waist with innate science. He undid her hair, took off her diamonds, dressed her hair for the night. He added jests and caresses to the performance of his duties as lady’s-maid and hairdresser, and Renée laughed, with a broad stifled laugh, while the silk of her bodice cracked and her petticoats were loosened one by one. When she saw herself naked, she blew out the tapers of the candlestick, caught Maxime round the body, and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication. In her fever she was conscious of the previous day spent by the fireside, of that day of ardent stupor, of vague and smiling dreams. She still heard the harsh voice of Saccard and Madame Sidonie talking, calling out figures through their noses like lawyers. Those were the people who overwhelmed her, who drove her to crime. And even now, when she sought his lips in the depths of the vast, dark bed, she still saw Maxime’s image in the firelight of yesterday, looking at her with eyes that scorched her.

The young man did not leave her till six in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceau, and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawingroom by a servants’ staircase hidden in the wall, which connected all the rooms in the tower. From the drawingroom it was easy to pass into the conservatory and reach the gardens.

On going out at daylight in a thick fog, Maxime was a little bewildered by his adventure. He accepted it, however, with the epicene complacency that formed part of his being.

“So much the worse!” he thought. “It’s she who wishes it after all…. She is deucedly well made; and she was right, she is twice as jolly in bed as Sylvia.”

They had drifted towards incest since the day when Maxime, in his threadbare schoolboy tunic, had hung on Renée’s neck, creasing her French-guard’s coat. From that time forward there had been a long and constant perversion between them. The strange education the young woman gave the child; the familiarities that made boon companions of them; later on, the laughing audacity of their confidences; all this dangerous promiscuity had ended by linking them together by a singular bond, in which the delights of friendship came near to carnal indulgence. They had given themselves to one another for years; the animal act was but the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of passion. In the maddened world in which they lived, their sin had sprouted as on a dunghill oozing with equivocal juices; it had developed with strange refinements amid special conditions of debauch.

When the great calash carried them to the Bois and rolled them softly along the drives, their whispering of obscenities into each other’s ears, their searching to recall the spontaneous dirty practices of their childhood, was but a digression by the way and a tacit gratification of their passions. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as though they had just slightly touched one another; and even this first sin, this languor born of filthy conversations, though it wearied them with a voluptuous fatigue, tickled them yet more sweetly than plain, positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus the slow progress of two lovers, and was inevitably bound to lead them one day to the private room in the Café Riche and to Renée’s great pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have thought them two old lovers, whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had lost so many hours what time their whole beings had been in contact, that in spite of themselves they talked of that past which was full of their unconscious love.

“Do you remember, the day I came to Paris,” said Maxime, “what a funny dress you wore? and I drew an angle on your chest with my finger and advised you to cut down the bodice in a point…. I felt your skin under your shirt, and my finger went in a little…. It was very nice….”

Renée laughed, kissed him and murmured:

“You were nice and vicious already…. How you amused us at Worms’s, do you remember? We used to call you ‘our little toy man.’ I always believed that the fat Suzanne would have let you do anything you liked, if the marquise had not watched her with such furious eyes.”

“Ah, yes, we had some good laughs….” murmured Maxime. “The photograph album, what? and all the rest, our drives through Paris, our feeds at the pastrycook’s on the boulevard; you know, those little strawberry-tarts you were so fond of?… I shall never forget the afternoon when you told me the story of Adeline at the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed herself ‘Arthur d’Espanet’ like a man, and proposed to elope with her….”

The lovers grew merry again over this anecdote; and then Maxime continued in his coaxing voice:

“When you came to fetch me from school in your carriage, how funny we must have looked, you and I…. I used to disappear under your skirts, I was so little.”

“Yes, yes,” she stammered, quivering, and drawing Maxime towards her, “it was very delightful, as you say…. We loved one another without knowing it, did we not? I knew it before you did. The other day, driving back from the Bois, I just touched your leg, and I gave a start…. But you didn’t notice anything. Eh? you were not thinking of me?”

“Oh yes,” he replied, somewhat embarrassed. “Only I did not know, you see…. I did not dare.”

He lied. The idea of possessing Renée had never clearly come to him. He had covered her with all his viciousness, without really desiring her. He was too feeble for such an effort. He accepted Renée because she forced herself upon him, and he had drifted into her bed without willing or foreseeing it. When he had once rolled there, he remained because it was warm, and because he habitually lingered at the bottom of every pit he fell into. At the commencement he even felt the satisfaction of egotism. She was the first married woman he had had. He did not reflect that the husband was his father.

But Renée brought into her sin all the ardour of a heart that has lost caste. She too had glided down the slope. Only she had not rolled to the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Lust had been kindled within her when it was too late to combat it, and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly opened up before her as a necessary consequence of her weariness, as a rare and supreme enjoyment which alone was able to rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumn drive in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her like a titillation that sent an unknown thrill over her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, lashed by jealousy, this idea became more defined, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she stood before Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved for sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that was to fill her empty existence and bring her at last to that hell of which she was still afraid, as in the days when she was a little girl. Then, the next day, through a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude, her craving had left her. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it was not so pleasant as she had fancied, and that it would really be too disgusting. The crisis was bound to be a fatal one, to come of itself, without the help of these two beings, these comrades who were destined to deceive themselves one fine evening, to unite in a sexual embrace when they imagined they were shaking hands. But after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime back to her arms, curious about him, curious as to the cruel delights of a passion which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, demanded it, resolved to taste it to the end, even to remorse, should that ever come. She was active and cognizant. She loved with the transports of a woman of fashion, with the restless prejudices of a woman of the middle class, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman drowning herself in self-disdain.

Maxime returned every night. He came through the garden at about one o’clock. Oftenest Renée would wait for him in the conservatory, which he must cross to reach the small drawingroom. For the rest they were absolutely shameless, barely hiding themselves, forgetting the most classic precautions of adultery. This corner of the house, it is true, belonged to them. Baptiste, the husband’s valet, alone had the right to enter it, and Baptiste, like a serious man, disappeared so soon as his duties were over. Maxime even pretended with a laugh that he withdrew to write his Memoirs. One night, however, just after Maxime had arrived, Renée pointed out Baptiste to him crossing the drawingroom solemnly with a candlestick in his hand. The tall valet, with his diplomatic figure, lit by the yellow light of the taper, wore that night a still more correct and severe expression than usual. Leaning forward, the lovers saw him blow out his candle and go towards the stables, where the horses and grooms lay sleeping.

“He is going his rounds,” said Maxime.

Renée stood shivering. Baptiste always made her uncomfortable. She said one day that he was the only respectable man in the house, with his coldness and his clear glances that never alighted on the women’s shoulders.

After that they evinced a certain prudence in their meetings. They closed the doors of the small drawingroom and were thus able to dispose of this room, of the conservatory, and of Renée’s own rooms in all tranquillity. It was quite a world in itself. They there tasted, during the earlier months, the most refined, the most daintily sought-out delights. They shifted their love-scenes from the great gray-and-pink bed of the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing-room and to the symphony in yellow-minor of the small drawingroom. Each room with its particular odour, its hangings, its special life, gave them a different form of passion and made of Renée a different inamorata: she was dainty and pretty in her padded patrician couch, where, in the tepid, aristocratic bedchamber, love underwent the modification of good taste; under the flesh-coloured tent, amid the perfume and the humid languor of the bathroom, she became a capricious, carnal courtesan, yielding herself as she left the bath: it was there that Maxime preferred her; then, downstairs, in the bright sunrise of the small drawingroom, in the midst of the yellow halo that gilded her hair, she became a goddess with her fair Diana-like head, her bare arms which assumed chaste postures, her unblemished body which reclined on the couches in attitudes revealing noble outlines of antique grace. But there was one place of which Maxime was almost frightened, where Renée dragged him only on bad days, on days when she needed a more acrid intoxication. Then they loved in the hothouse. It was there that they tasted incest.

One night, in an hour of anguish, Renée sent her lover for one of the black bearskin rugs. Then they lay down on this inky fur, at the edge of a tank, in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly in the limpid moonlight. Maxime arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers. The conservatory was heated to such a point that he swooned away on the bearskin. Coming from the dry, biting cold into so intense a heat, he felt a smarting as though he had been whipped with a birch-rod. When he came to himself, he saw Renée on her knees, leaning over him, with fixed eyes and an animal attitude that alarmed him. Her hair down, her shoulders bare, she leant upon her wrists, with her spine stretched out, like a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. The young man, lying on his back, perceived above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous beast that gazed upon him the marble sphinx, whose thighs gleamed in the moonlight. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the monster with the woman’s head, and, in her loosened petticoats, looked like the white sister of this black divinity.

Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating, a sultry heat that did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground like a poisonous effluvium, and its steam ascended like a storm-laden cloud. A warm dampness covered the lovers with dew, with burning sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple, nervous hams. From outside, through the little panes of the hothouse, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, clumps of trees with fine black outlines, lawns white as frozen lakes, a whole dead landscape, the exquisiteness and the light, even tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese prints. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely in the midst of the great, silent cold.

They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate, active will. Maxime submitted. Smooth-limbed, slim and graceful as a Roman stripling, fair-haired and pretty, stricken in his virility since childhood, this epicene being became a great girl in Renée’s inquisitive arms. He seemed born and bred for a perversion of sensual pleasure. Renée enjoyed her domination, and she bent under her passion this creature with the still indeterminate sex. For her it was a continual astonishment of lasciviousness, a surprise of the senses, a bizarre sensation of discomfort and of keen enjoyment. She was no longer certain: she felt doubts each time she returned to his delicate skin, his soft plump neck, his attitudes of abandonment, his fainting-fits. She then experienced an hour of repletion. By revealing to her a new ecstasy, Maxime crowned her mad toilettes, her prodigious luxury, her life of excess. He set in her flesh the top note that was already singing in her ears. He was the lover who matched the follies and fashions of the period. This pretty little fellow, whose frail figure was revealed by his clothes, this abortive girl, who strolled along the boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those debauching influences of the decadence which at certain periods among rotten nations exhaust a body and unhinge a brain.

And it was in the hothouse especially that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by many others. The hothouse loved and burned with them. In the heavy atmosphere, in the pale light of the moon, they saw the strange world of plants around them moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched across the pathway. At their feet the tank steamed full of a swarm, of a thick tangle, of plants, while the pink petals of the water-lilies opened out on the surface like virgin bodices, and the tornelias let fall their bushy tendrils like the hair of languishing water-nymphs. Around them the palm-trees and the tall Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, where they bent over and mingled their leaves with the staggering attitudes of exhausted lovers. Lower down the ferns, the pterides, the alsophilas, were like green ladies, with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, who stood mute and motionless at the edge of the pathway awaiting love. By their side the twisted red-streaked leaves of the begonias and the white spear-headed leaves of the caladiums furnished a vague series of bruises and pallors, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, though at times they discerned curves as of hips and knees, prone on the ground beneath the brutality of ensanguined kisses. And the plaintain-trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fecundity of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbias, of whose prickly, deformed, tapering stems, covered with loathly excrescences, they could catch glimpses in the shadow, seemed to sweat out sap, the overflowing flux of this fiery gestation. But, by degrees, as their glances penetrated into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness became filled with a more furious debauch of leaves and stalks; they were not able to distinguish on the stages between the marantas, soft as velvet, the gloxinias, purple-belled, the dracœnas resembling blades of old lacquer; it was one round dance of living plants pursuing one another with unsatiated fervour. At the four corners, there where the curtains of creepers closed in the arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder still, and the supple shoots of the vanilla-plants, of the Indian berries, the quisqualias and bauhinias were as the interminable arms of unseen lovers distractedly lengthening their embraces so as to collect all scattered delights. Those endless arms drooped with weariness, entwined in a spasm of love, sought each other, closed up together like a crowd bent on rut. It was the unbounded copulation of the hothouse, of this nook of virgin forest ablaze with tropical flora and foliage.

Maxime and Renée, their senses perverted, felt carried away in these mighty nuptials of the earth. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap that rose in the trunks of the trees penetrated them also, filling them with a mad longing for immediate increase, for gigantic procreation. They joined in the copulation of the hothouse. It was then, in the pale light, that they were stupefied by visions, by nightmares in which they watched at length the intrigues of the ferns and palm-trees; the foliage assumed a confused equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into sensual images; murmurs and whisperings reached them from the shrubberies, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was audible in their own embraces, and that was wafted back by the echo. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as though the very ground had burst forth into voluptuous sobs in a fit of satisfied desire.

If they had closed their eyes, if the stifling heat and the pale light had not imparted to them a vitiation of every sense, the aromas would have been sufficient to throw them into an extraordinary state of nervous irritation. The tank saturated them with a deep, pungent odour, through which passed the thousand perfumes of the flowers and plants. At times the vanilla-plant sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the stanhopeas, whose tigered throats have the strong and putrid breath of the convalescent sick. The orchids, in their baskets suspended by wire chains, emitted their exhalations like living censers. But the dominant scent, the scent in which all these vague breaths were intermingled, was a human scent, a scent of love which Maxime recognized when he kissed Renée in the neck, when he plunged his head into her flowing hair. And they lay intoxicated with this scent of an amorous woman which trailed through the hothouse, as through an alcove in which the earth was reproducing its kind.

As a rule the lovers lay down under the Madagascar tanghin-tree, under that poisoned shrub into one of whose leaves Renée had once bitten. Around them the white statues laughed as they gazed at the mighty copulation of foliage. The moon, as it turned, displaced the groups and gave life to the drama with its changing light. They were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the easy life of the Bois and official receptions, in a corner of an Indian forest, of some monstrous temple of which the black marble sphinx became the deity. They felt themselves rolling towards crime, towards accursed love, towards the caresses of wild beasts. All the germination that surrounded them, the swarming of the tank, the naked immodesty of the foliage, threw them into the innermost, dantesque inferno of passion. It was then, in the depths of this glass cage, all boiling in the summer heat, lost in the keen December cold, that they relished the flavour of incest, as though it were the criminal fruit of an overheated soil, feeling the while a secret dread of their terrifying couch.

And in the center of the black bearskin, Renée’s body seemed whiter, as she crouched like a great cat, her spine stretched out, her wrists tense like supple, nervous hams. She was all swollen with voluptuousness, and the clear outline of her shoulders and loins stood out with feline distinctness against the splash of ink with which the rug blackened the yellow sand of the pathway. She gloated over Maxime, this prey extended beneath her, abandoning itself, which she possessed entirely. And from time to time she leant forward abruptly and kissed him with her chafed mouth. Her mouth opened then with the hungry, bleeding brilliancy of the Chinese hibiscus, whose expanse covered the wall of the house. She became a sheer burning daughter of the hothouse. Her kisses bloomed and faded like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last scarcely a few hours and are unceasingly renewed, like the bruised, insatiable lips of a colossal Messalina.