Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 16

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Saccard was haunted by the thought of the kiss he had pressed upon his wife’s neck. He had long ceased to avail himself of his marital rights; the rupture had come naturally, neither one nor the other caring about a connection which inconvenienced them. Saccard would never think of returning to Renée’s chamber, if some good piece of business were not the ultimate aim of his conjugal devotion.

The lucky speculation at Charonne progressed favourably, although he was still anxious as to its termination. Larsonneau, with his dazzling shirtfront, had a way of smiling which he did not like. He was no more than an intermediary, a man of straw, whose assistance he paid for by allowing him a commission of ten per cent, on the ultimate profits. But although the expropriation-agent had not paid a sou into the enterprise, and Saccard had not only found the money for the music-hall but taken every precaution, a deed of retrocession, undated letters, antedated receipts, the latter none the less felt an inward fear, a presentiment of some treachery. He suspected his accomplice of an intention to blackmail him by means of the false inventory which he had preciously preserved and which alone he had to thank for his share in the business.

So the two fellows shook one another vigorously by the hand. Larsonneau addressed Saccard as “dear master.” At bottom he had a real admiration for this acrobat, and watched his performances on the tight-rope of speculation with the eye of a connoisseur. The idea of taking him in tickled him as a rare and pungent voluptuousness. He nursed a plan, as yet vague, not knowing how to make use of the weapon he possessed, lest he should do himself a damage with it. He felt beside that he was at his former colleague’s mercy. The ground and the buildings, which the cunningly-prepared inventories already estimated at closely two millions although not worth a quarter of that amount, must end by being swallowed up in a colossal smash, if the fairy of expropriation failed to touch them with her golden wand. According to the original plans which they had been able to consult, the new boulevard, opened to connect the artillery-park of Vincennes with the Prince-Eugène Barracks, and to bring the guns into the heart of Paris, while avoiding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, cut off a part of the ground; but there still remained the danger that this would be only just grazed, and that the ingenious speculation might fall through by reason of its very shamelessness. In that case Larsonneau would be left stranded with a delicate adventure on his hands. Still, despite the inferior part he was compelled to play, this danger did not prevent him from feeling disgusted when he thought of the paltry ten per cent, which he was to pocket in this colossal robbery of millions. And at these moments he could not resist a furious longing to stretch out his hand and carve out a slice for himself.

Saccard had not even permitted him to lend money to his wife; he took pleasure himself in this crass piece of theatrical trickery, which delighted his weakness for complicated transactions.

“No, no, my dear fellow,” he said, with his Provençal accent, which he exaggerated whenever he wished to add zest to a joke, “don’t let us mix up our accounts…. You are the only man in Paris whom I have sworn never to owe any money to.”

Larsonneau contented himself with telling him that his wife was a sink. He advised him not to give her another sou, so that she might be compelled to make over the property to them at once. He would have preferred to have had business with Saccard alone. He tried him occasionally, and carried things so far as to say to him, with his languid and indifferent man-about-town manner:

“All the same, I shall have to put my papers in order a bit…. Your wife frightens me, old man. I don’t want to have certain documents at my office attached.”

Saccard was not the man to submit patiently to hints of this kind, especially as he was well acquainted with the cold and fastidious orderliness that prevailed in this individual’s office. All his active, cunning little being revolted against the terror with which this great coxcomb of a yellow-gloved usurer sought to inspire him. The worst was that he felt seized with shudders when he thought of the possibility of a scandal; and he saw himself remorselessly exiled by his brother and living in Belgium by some shabby little trade. One day he grew angry and went so far as to address Larsonneau in the second person singular.

“Look here, my boy,” he said, “you’re a decent chap, but it would be just as well if you gave up the document you know of. You’ll see that bit of paper will end by making us quarrel.”

The other feigned astonishment, pressed his “dear master’s” hands, and assured him of his devotion. Saccard regretted his momentary impatience. It was at this period that he began to think seriously of resuming relations with his wife; he might have need of her against his accomplice, and he, moreover, said to himself that business matters are wonderfully easy to talk over with one’s head on the pillow. That kiss on the neck tended little by little to reveal an entirely new policy.

However, he was in no hurry, he husbanded his resources. He devoted the whole winter to ripening his plan, bothered by a hundred affairs, one more involved than the other. It was a horrible winter for him, full of shocks, a prodigious campaign, during which he had daily to vanquish bankruptcy. Far from cutting down his domestic expenses, he gave entertainment upon entertainment. But if he successfully faced every obstacle, he was compelled to neglect Renée, whom he reserved for a triumphant stroke when the Charonne operation became ripe. He contented himself with preparing the catastrophe by continuing to give her no money except by the intermediary of Larsonneau. When he had a few thousand francs lying idle, and she complained of her poverty, he brought them to her, saying that Larsonneau’s people required a note of hand for twice the amount. This farce amused him enormously, the story of those promissory notes delighted him because of the air of romance they imparted to the affair. Even at the period of his clearest profits he had served out his wife’s income in a very irregular fashion, making her princely presents, throwing her handfuls of banknotes, and then for weeks leaving her in the lurch for a paltry amount. Now that he found himself seriously embarrassed, he spoke of the household expenses, he treated her as a creditor to whom one is unwilling to confess one’s ruin, gaining time by making excuses. She barely listened to him; she signed anything he asked; she only pitied herself for not being able to sign more.

Already, however, he held two hundred thousand francs’ worth of her promissory notes, which cost him barely one hundred and ten thousand francs. After having these notes endorsed by Larsonneau, in whose favour they were made out, he put them in circulation in a prudent manner, intending to employ them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have been able to hold out to the end of that terrible winter, lending money to his wife at usury and keeping up his household expenses, but for the sale of his building-plots on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier bought of him for cash down, deducting, however, a formidable discount.

For Renée this same winter was a long joy. She suffered only from the want of ready money. Maxime proved a great expense; he still treated her as his stepmother, and allowed her to pay wherever they went. But this secret poverty was for her a delight the more. She taxed her ingenuity and racked her brains so that “her dear child” should want for nothing; and when she had persuaded her husband to find her a few thousand francs, she ran through them with her lover in costly frivolities like two schoolboys let out on their first escapade. When they had spent the last sou, they remained at home, they revelled in the great piece of masonry built with such new and such insolently meaningless luxury. The father was never there. The lovers sat by the fireside more often than formerly. The fact was that Renée had at last filled the icy emptiness of those gilded ceilings with a warm joy. The disorderly house of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she secretly practised a new religion. Maxime did not merely strike in her the shrill note that matched her extravagant costumes; he was the lover fashioned for this house, with its windows wide as shopwindows and its flow of sculpture from garret to base; he gave life to all this plaster, from the two chubby Cupids who in the courtyard let flow a sheet of water from their shell to the great naked women who supported the balconies and played with apples and ears of corn amid the pediments; he gave a meaning to the over-decorated hall, the circumscribed garden, the dazzling rooms in which one saw too many armchairs and no single work of art. Renée, who had bored herself to death in this house, began suddenly to take pleasure in it, using it as she might use a thing whose purpose she had not at first understood. And it was not only in her own rooms, in the buttercup drawingroom, and in the hothouse that she carried her love, but through the whole house. She even ended by finding pleasure in lying on the divan in the smoking-room; she lingered there, saying that the room had a vague and very agreeable smell of tobacco.

She had two days every week now instead of one. On Thursdays any called who pleased. But Mondays were reserved to bosom friends. Men were excluded. Maxime alone was admitted to these select gatherings, which took place in the small drawingroom. One evening she conceived the amazing idea of dressing him up as a woman and introducing him as her cousin. Adeline, Suzanne, Baronne Meinhold, and the other ladies present rose and bowed, astonished at this face, which they vaguely recognized. Then, when they understood, they laughed a great deal, they absolutely refused to let the young man go and undress. They kept him with them in his skirts, teasing him and permitting themselves equivocal pleasantries. When he had seen these ladies out by the front door, he went round the gardens and returned by the conservatory. Renée’s dear friends never had the slightest suspicion of the truth. The lovers could not be more familiar than they already were when they used to declare themselves boon companions. And if a servant happened to see them pressing rather close together, in the doorways, he felt no surprise, being accustomed to the frolicsomeness of madame and of the son of monsieur.

This complete sense of liberty and impunity made them still bolder. They fastened the door at night, but in the daytime they embraced in every room in the house. On rainy days they invented a thousand little pastimes. But Renée’s great delight still was to heap up a tremendous fire and doze away before the grate. Her linen was marvellously luxurious that winter. She wore chemises and wrappers of ruinous costliness, whose cambric and lace insertions barely covered her with a cloud of white smoke. And in the red glow of the firelight she lay as though naked, with rosy lace and skin, the heat penetrating through the thin stuff to her flesh. Maxime, crouched at her feet, kissed her knees without even feeling the cambric, which had the warmth and colour of that beautiful body. The daylight was not fully admitted, it fell like a twilight into the gray silk room, while Céleste behind them went to and fro with her quiet step. She had become their accomplice, quite naturally. One morning when they had forgotten themselves in bed, she found them there and retained the impassiveness of her cold-blooded, servant-maid’s nature. They then ceased to restrain themselves, she came in at all hours without the sound of their kisses causing her to turn her head. They relied on her to warn them in case of danger. They did not purchase her silence. She was a very economical, very good girl, and had never been known to have a lover.

However, Renée had not encloistered herself. Taking Maxime in her train, like a fair-haired page in dress-clothes, she threw herself into society, where she tasted even keener pleasures. The season was a long triumph for her. Never had she imagined bolder toilettes or headdresses. It was then that she had the courage to wear that famous gown of forest-coloured satin on which was embroidered a complete stag-hunt with its accessories, powder-flasks, hunting-horns, big-bladed knives. It was then also that she set the fashion of dressing the hair in the classical style; Maxime was sent to make sketches for her in the Musée Campana, which had been recently opened. She grew younger, she was at the acme of her turbulent beauty. Incest lent her a fire that glowed in the depths of her eyes and warmed her laughter. Her eyeglass looked supremely insolent at the tip of her nose, and she glanced at the other women, at the dear friends pluming themselves upon the enormity of some vice or other, with the air of a boastful boy, with a fixed smile that said: “I have my crime.”

Maxime for his part considered society tedious to a degree. It was to seem “smart” that he pretended to bore himself there, for he did not really amuse himself anywhere. At the Tuileries, at the ministers’ houses, he disappeared behind Renée’s skirts. But he resumed the reins so soon as there was a question of some escapade. Renée wanted to see the private-room on the boulevard again, and the width of the sofa made her smile. Then he took her to all sorts of places, to the houses of fast women, to the opera-balls, to the stage-boxes of the burlesque theatres, to every equivocal place where they could rub shoulders with animal vice and taste the delights of their incognito. When they stealthily returned home, worn out with fatigue, they fell asleep in each other’s arms, sleeping off the intoxication of obscene Paris, with snatches of ribald couplets still singing in their ears. The next day Maxime imitated the actors, and Renée, seated at the piano in the small drawingroom, endeavoured to reproduce the raucous voice and jaunty attitudes of Blanche Muller as la Belle Hélène. Her convent music-lessons now only assisted her to murder the verses of the new burlesques. She had a holy horror of serious airs. Maxime “humbugged” German music with her, and he felt it his duty to go and hiss Tannhäuser both by conviction and in defence of his stepmother’s sprightly refrains.

One of their great delights was skating; that winter skating was fashionable, the Emperor having been one of the first to try the ice on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Renée ordered a complete Polish suit of Worms, in velvet and fur; she made Maxime wear doeskin boots and a foxskin cap. They reached the Bois in an intense cold which stung their lips and noses as though the wind had blown fine sand into their faces. It amused them to feel cold. The Bois was quite gray, with snow threading the branches with narrow strips of lace. And under the pale sky, above the congealed and dimmed lake, only the fir-trees on the islands still displayed, on the edge of the horizon, their theatrical drapery, on which also the snow had stitched broad bands of lace. They darted along together through the icy air, with the rapid flight of swallows skimming the ground. With one hand carried behind their backs and one upon each other’s shoulders, they went off erect, smiling, side by side, turning on themselves, in the wide space marked out by thick ropes. The sightseers stared at them from the roadway. From time to time they came and warmed themselves at the braziers lighted at the edge of the lake. They shot off again. They enlarged the circle of their flight, their eyes watering with pleasure and with cold.

Then, when springtime came, Renée recalled her old sentimental ideas. She made Maxime stroll with her at night in the Parc Monceau in the moonlight. They went into the grotto, and sat down on the grass in front of the colonnade. But when she evinced a desire for a row on the little lake, they found that the boat they saw from the house, moored at the edge of a pathway, was without oars. These were evidently removed at night. This was a disappointment. Moreover, the great shadows of the gardens disquieted the lovers. They would have liked a Venetian fête to be given there, with red lanterns and a band. They preferred it in the daytime, in the afternoon, and often they stationed themselves at one of the windows of the house to watch the carriages following the graceful curve of the main avenue. They enjoyed looking at this charming corner of new Paris, this clean, smiling bit of nature, these lawns like skirts of velvet, figured with flowerbeds and choice shrubs, and bordered with magnificent white roses. Carriages passed by one another, as numerous as on the boulevards; the ladies on foot trailed their skirts languorously, as though they had not lifted a foot from the carpets of their drawingrooms. And they criticized the dresses across the foliage, pointed to the horses, taking a genuine pleasure in the soft colours of this great garden. A scrap of gilded railing flashed between two trees, a flock of ducks swam across the lake, the little Renaissance bridge stood out white and new amid the foliage, while on either side of the big avenue, mothers, seated on yellow chairs, chatted and forgot the little boys and girls who looked at each other prettily, with the graces of precocious children.

The lovers doted on new Paris. They often drove through the town, going out of their way so as to pass along certain boulevards which they loved with a personal affection. The tall houses, with their great carved doors, their heavy balconies, with, in great gold letters, names, signs, names of firms, delighted them. As the brougham rolled on, they followed with a friendly glance the gray bands of wide, interminable pavement, with its seats, its variegated columns, its exiguous trees. This bright gap, which ran to the limit of the horizon, growing narrower, and opening upon a pale-blue square of space, this uninterrupted twofold row of great shops, where the shopmen smiled upon their fair customers, these currents of stamping, swarming crowds filled them little by little with an absolute and entire contentment, with a feeling of perfection in the life of the streets. They loved even the jets of the watering-hose, which passed like white vapour before their horses, spreading out and falling like fine rain under the wheels of the brougham, darkening the ground, and raising a light cloud of dust. They rolled on, and it seemed to them that the carriage was rolling over carpets along that straight, endless roadway, which had been made solely to save them from the dark back-streets. Every boulevard became a lobby of their house. The gay sunshine smiled upon the new façades, lit up the windowpanes, fell upon the awnings of the shops and cafés, and heated the asphalt beneath the busy footsteps of the crowd. And when they returned home, a little confused by the dazzling hubbub of these long bazaars, they found relief in the contemplation of the Parc Monceau, which was the natural border of this new Paris which displayed its luxury in the first warmth of spring.

When fashion absolutely forced them to leave Paris, they went to the seaside, but regretfully, dreaming of the boulevard pavements while on the shores of the ocean. Their love itself faded there. It was a flower of the hothouse that needed the great gray-and-pink bed, the naked flesh of the dressing-room, the gilded dawn of the small drawingroom. Alone in the evenings, in front of the sea, they no longer found anything to say to each other. Renée tried to sing her collection of songs from the Théâtre des Variétés at an old piano that was at its last gasp in a corner of her room at the hotel; but the instrument, damp with the breezes from the open, had the melancholy voice of the great waters, La Belle Hélène sounded fantastic and lugubrious, Renée consoled herself by astonishing the people on the beach with her wonderful costumes. All her crowd of ladies was there, yawning, waiting for winter, casting about in despair for a bathing-dress that would not make them look too ugly. Renée could never prevail on Maxime to bathe. He was horribly frightened of the water, turned quite pale when the tide rose up to his boots, and for nothing in the world would have approached the edge of a cliff; he kept away from the sand-holes, and made long circuits to avoid the least bit of steep beach.

Saccard came down once or twice to see “the children.” He was overwhelmed with worry, he said. It was not until October, when they were all three back in Paris, that he thought seriously of effecting a reconciliation with his wife. The Charonne affair was ripening. His plan was a simple and a brutal one. He proposed to capture Renée by the same trick that he would have practised upon a strumpet. She was living amid an increasing need of money, and was too proud to apply to her husband save as a last resource. The latter resolved to take advantage of her first request for money to play the gallant, and to resume the long-severed relations in the delight brought about by the payment of some big debt.

Terrible embarrassments awaited Renée and Maxime in Paris. Several of the promissory notes made out to Larsonneau were overdue; but as Saccard naturally left them slumbering at the lawyer’s, they did not cause the young wife much uneasiness. She was far more alarmed by her debt to Worms, which now amounted to nearly two hundred thousand francs. The tailor insisted on a payment on account, and threatened to stop her credit. She shuddered keenly when she thought of the scandal of a lawsuit, and above all of a quarrel with the illustrious dressmaker. Moreover, she was in need of pocket-money. They would be bored to death, Maxime and she, without a few louis a day to spend. The dear child was quite without resources since he had begun to rummage his father’s drawers in vain. His fidelity, his exemplary behaviour during the last seven or eight months, were largely due to the absolute emptiness of his purse. He rarely had twenty francs with which to take a poll out to supper. And so he philosophically returned to the house. Renée, on each of their escapades, handed him her purse so that he might pay at the restaurants, at the balls, and at the boulevard theatres. She continued to treat him as a mother; and she even paid, with the tips of her gloved fingers, at the pastrycook’s, where they got out almost every afternoon to eat little oyster patties. In the morning he often found in his waistcoat a few louis which he did not know he had, and which she had put there, like a mother filling a schoolboy’s pockets. And to think that this charming life of odd snacks, of contented caprices and of facile pleasures was to cease! But a still greater dread came to terrify them. Sylvia’s jeweller, to whom Maxime owed ten thousand francs, grew angry and talked of Clichy. The costs had so accumulated on the acceptances which he held in hand and had long protested, that the debt had increased by some three or four thousand francs. Saccard plainly declared that he could do nothing. To have his son sent to Clichy would look well, and when he took him out he would make a great fuss about his paternal liberality. Renée was in despair; she beheld her dear child in prison, in a veritable dungeon, lying on damp straw. One night she seriously proposed to him not to leave her again, to live there unknown to everyone, and sheltered from the bailiff’s men. Then she swore she would find the money. She never spoke of the origin of the debt, of that Sylvia who confided her amours to the mirrors of private rooms. She wanted about fifty thousand francs, fifteen thousand for Maxime, thirty thousand for Worms, and five thousand for pocket-money. Then they would have a long fortnight’s happiness before them. She embarked on her campaign.

Her first idea was to ask her husband for the fifty thousand francs. She did not decide to do so without some repugnance. The last time he came to her room to bring her money, he had pressed fresh kisses on her neck, and had taken her hands and talked of his affection. Women have a very subtle sense that enables them to guess men’s feelings. And so she was prepared for a demand, for a tacit bargain clinched with a smile. And indeed, when she asked him for the fifty thousand francs, he protested, exclaimed that Larsonneau would never lend such an amount as that, that he himself was still too much embarrassed. Then, changing his voice, as though conquered and seized with sudden emotion:

“One can refuse you nothing,” he murmured. “I will trot about Paris and accomplish the impossible…. I want you to be happy, my dear.”

And putting his lips to her ear, kissing her hair, his voice trembling a little:

“I will bring it to you tomorrow evening, in your room… without any promissory note…”

But she interrupted hastily that she was in no hurry, that she did not want to trouble him to do that. Saccard, who had just thrown all his heart into that dangerous “without any promissory note,” which he had allowed to slip out and which he regretted, pretended not to have received a disagreeable rebuff. He rose, and said:

“Well, I am at your disposal… I will get the money for you when you want it. Larsonneau will have nothing to do with it, you know. It’s a present I want to make you.”

He smiled goodnaturedly. Renée remained in a state of cruel anguish. She felt that she would lose the little equilibrium left her, if she gave herself to her husband. Her last pride was that she was married to the father but was the wife of the son alone. Often, when Maxime seemed cold to her, she endeavoured by very plain allusions to make him grasp this situation; it must be confessed that the young man, whom she expected to see fall at her feet after this revelation, remained perfectly indifferent, thinking doubtless that she was trying to reassure him as to the possibility of a meeting between his father and himself in the gray silk room.

When Saccard had left her, she impetuously dressed herself, and had the horses put to. While her brougham was conveying her to the Île Saint-Louis, she rehearsed the manner in which she would ask her father for the fifty thousand francs. She flung herself into this sudden idea without consenting to discuss it, feeling a great coward at heart, and seized with invincible fright at the thought of the step she was taking. When she arrived, the courtyard of the Hotel Béraud froze her with its dreary, cloistral dampness, and she felt a longing to run away as she climbed the broad stone staircase, on which her little high-heeled boots rang out ominously. She had been foolish enough in her hurry to choose a costume of feuillemort silk, with long flounces of white lace, trimmed with bows of satin, and cut crosswise by a plaited sash. This dress, which was finished off with a little flat toque with a large white veil, struck so singular a note in the dark gloom of the staircase that she herself became conscious of the strange figure she cut there. She trembled as she traversed the austere array of huge rooms, in which the vague figures of the tapestry seemed surprised at the sight of this flow of skirts passing through the twilight of their solitude.

She found her father in a drawingroom looking out upon the courtyard, where he habitually sat. He was reading a large book placed on a desk fastened to the arms of his chair. Before one of the windows sat Aunt Elisabeth knitting with long wooden needles; and in the silence of the room the ticktack of those needles was the only sound heard.

Renée sat down, ill at ease, unable to move without disturbing the severity of the lofty ceiling with a noise of rustling silk. Her lace looked a crude white against the dark background of tapestry and old-fashioned furniture. M. Béraud du Châtel gazed at her with his hands resting on the edge of his reading-desk. Aunt Elisabeth spoke of the approaching wedding of Christine, who was about to marry the son of a very well-to-do attorney; she had gone shopping with an old family-servant; and the good aunt talked on all by herself, in her placid voice, knitting unceasingly, gossiping about her household affairs, and casting smiling glances at Renée over her spectacles.

But Renée became more and more uneasy. The silence of the whole house weighed upon her shoulders, and she would have given much for the lace of her dress to have been black. Her father’s look made her so uncomfortable that she considered Worms really ridiculous to have thought of such wide flounces.

“How smart you look, my girl!” said Aunt Elisabeth, suddenly. She had not even noticed her niece’s lace before.

She stopped her needles, and adjusted her spectacles, in order to see better. M. Béraud du Châtel gave a faint smile.

“It is rather white,” he said. “A woman must feel very uncomfortable in that on the pavements.”

“But, father, we don’t go out on foot!” cried Renée, who immediately regretted this ingenuous utterance.

The old man made as though to reply. Then he rose, drew up his tall stature, and walked slowly up and down, without giving his daughter another look. The latter remained quite pale with trepidation. Every time she exhorted herself to take courage, and sought a transition in order to lead up to her request for money, she felt a twitching at her heart.

“We never see you now, father,” she complained.

“Oh!” replied the aunt, without giving her brother time to open his lips, “your father never goes out, except very rarely to go to the Jardin des Plantes. And I have to grow angry with him before he will do that! He maintains that he loses himself in Paris, that the town is no longer fit for him…. Ah, you would do well to scold him!”

“My husband would be so pleased to see you at our Thursdays from time to time,” continued Renée.

M. Béraud du Châtel took a few steps in silence. Then in a quiet voice:

“Thank your husband for me,” he said. “He seems to be an energetic fellow, and I hope for your sake that he conducts his business honestly. But our ideas are not the same, and I do not feel comfortable in your fine house in the Parc Monceau.”

Aunt Elisabeth seemed vexed by this reply:

“How perverse you men are with your politics!” she said merrily. “Shall I tell you the truth? Your father is furious with both of you because you go to the Tuileries.”

But the old man shrugged his shoulders, as though to imply that his dissatisfaction had much more serious causes. He thoughtfully resumed his slow walk. Renée was silent for a moment, with the request for the fifty thousand francs on the tip of her tongue. Then she was seized with a greater fit of cowardice, kissed her father, and went away.

Aunt Elisabeth accompanied her to the staircase. As they crossed the suite of rooms, she continued to chatter in her thin, old voice:

“You are happy, dear child. I am so pleased to see you looking well and handsome; for if your marriage had turned out badly, you know, I should have thought myself to blame…. Your husband loves you, you have all you want, have you not?”

“Of course,” replied Renée, forcing herself to smile, though feeling sick at heart.

The aunt still detained her, her hand on the balustrade of the staircase.

“You see, I have only one fear, lest you should lose your head with all this happiness. Be prudent, and above all sell none of your property…. If one day you had a baby, you would have a little fortune all ready for it.”

When Renée was back in her brougham, she heaved a sigh of relief. Drops of cold sweat stood on her temples; she wiped them off, thinking of the icy dampness of the Hotel Béraud. Then, when the brougham rolled into the bright sunshine of the Quai Saint-Paul, she remembered the fifty thousand francs, and all her suffering was revived, more poignant than before. She who was considered so audacious, what a coward she had just been! And yet it was a question of Maxime, of his liberty, of their mutual joys! Amid the bitter reproaches which she heaped upon herself, an idea suddenly occurred to her that put the finishing touch to her despair: she ought to have spoken of the fifty thousand francs to her Aunt Elisabeth on the stairs. What had she been thinking of? The kind woman would perhaps have lent her the money, or at least have helped her. She was leaning forward to tell her coachman to drive back to the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, when she thought she again saw the image of her father slowly crossing the solemn darkness of the big drawingroom. She would never have the courage to return immediately to that room. What should she say to explain this second visit? And, at the bottom of her heart, she felt she had no longer even the courage to mention the matter to Aunt Elisabeth. She told her coachman to drive her to the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière.

Mme. Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw her opening the discreetly-curtained door of the shop. She was there by accident, she was just going out to run to the court where she was suing a customer. But she would let judgment go by default, she would try again another day; she was so happy that her sister-in-law had had the kindness to pay her a little visit at last. Renée smiled with an air of embarrassment. Mme. Sidonie positively refused to allow her to stay downstairs; she took her up to her room, by way of the little staircase, after removing the brass knob from the shop-door. She removed and replaced this knob, which was held by a single nail, twenty times a day.

“There, my beauty,” she said, making her sit down on a long-chair, “now we can have a nice chat…. Just fancy, you came in the nick of time. I was coming to see you this evening.”

Renée, who knew the room, experienced that indefinite feeling of uneasiness which a traveller feels on finding that a strip of timber has been felled in a favourite landscape.

“Ah,” she said at last, “you’ve moved the bed, have you not?”

“Yes,” the lace-dealer replied, quietly, “one of my customers prefers it facing the mantelpiece. It was she too who advised me to have red curtains.”

“That’s what I was thinking, the curtains used not to be red…. A very common colour, red.”

And she put up her eyeglass, and looked round this room that displayed the luxury of a big furnished hotel. On the mantelshelf she saw some long hairpins which had certainly not come from Mme. Sidonie’s meagre chignon. In the place where the bed used to stand, the wallpaper was all torn, discoloured, and soiled by the mattresses. The business-woman had indeed endeavoured to hide this eyesore behind the back of two armchairs: but these backs were rather low, and Renée’s eyes became fixed on this worn strip of paper.

“Have you something to tell me?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s a whole story,” said Mme. Sidonie, folding her hands, with the mien of a gastronome who is about to describe what she has had for dinner. “Just think, M. de Saffré has fallen in love with the beautiful Madame Saccard…. Yes, with your pretty self.”

Renée did not even make a coquettish gesture.

“Why,” said she, “you said he was so smitten with Mme. Michelin.”

“Oh, that’s all over, over and done with… I can prove it to you if you like… haven’t you heard that the little Michelin has attracted the Baron Gouraud? It’s inconceivable. All who know the baron are astounded…. And now, you know, she is on the way to obtain the red riband for her husband!… Ah, she’s a clever woman that. She knows her way about, you can’t teach her anything!”

She said this with an air of admiration not unmingled with regret.

“But to return to M. de Saffré…. He seems to have met you at an actresses’ ball, muffled up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly asked you to supper…. Is it true?”

The younger woman was quite surprised.

“Perfectly true,” she murmured; “but who could have told him?”

“Wait, he says that he recognized you later on, after you had left the room, and that he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm…. Since that time he has been madly in love with you. It has sprouted up in his heart, don’t you see? a fancy…. He has been to see me, to beseech me to make you his apologies…”

“Well, tell him I forgive him,” interrupted Renée, carelessly.

Then, all her anguish returning, she went on:

“Ah, my kind Sidonie, I am terribly worried. I must positively have fifty thousand francs tomorrow morning. I came to talk to you about this. You know people who lend money, you told me.”

The woman of business, offended at the abrupt way in which her sister-in-law broke up her recital, made her wait some time for an answer.

“Yes, certainly, only I advise you first of all to look about among your friends…. Were I in your place I know very well what I should do…. I should just simply apply to M. de Saffré.”

Renée gave a constrained smile.

“But,” she retorted, “that would be hardly proper, considering you pretend that he is so much in love.”

The old woman looked at her with a stare; then her flaccid face melted gently into a smile of affectionate pity.

“You poor dear,” she murmured, “you’ve been crying; don’t deny it, I can see it by your eyes. You must be brave and take life as it comes…. Now then, let me arrange this little matter for you.”

Renée rose, twisting her fingers, making her gloves crack. And she remained standing, completely shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She opened her lips, to accept perhaps, when suddenly the bell rang lightly in the next room. Mme. Sidonie hastily went out, leaving the door ajar, which showed a double row of pianos. Renée next heard a man’s step and the stifled sound of a conversation carried on in an undertone. She mechanically went and examined more closely the yellow streak with which the mattresses had stained the wall. This stain disturbed her, made her feel uncomfortable. Forgetting everything, Maxime, the fifty thousand francs, M. de Saffré, she returned to the side of the bed, reflecting: that bed looked much better placed as it used to be; some women really had no taste; surely, if you went to bed like that, you would have the light in your eyes. And vaguely, in the depths of her memory she saw rising the image of the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul, her romance in two assignations, that chance amour which she had indulged over there, where the bed used to stand. The wearing away of the wallpaper was all that remained of it. Then the room filled her with uneasiness, and she lost patience with the hum of voices that still went on in the adjoining room.

When Mme. Sidonie returned, circumspectly, opening and closing the door, she made repeated signs with her fingers to induce Renée to speak very low. Then, in her ear:

“You have no idea, this is most fortunate: it is M. de Saffré who has called.”

“You haven’t told him, surely, that I was here?” asked Renée, uneasily.

The woman of business seemed surprised, and very innocently answered:

“I did indeed…. He is waiting for me to tell him to come in. Of course, I said nothing to him of the fifty thousand francs….”

Renée, very pale, had drawn herself up as though struck with a whip. An infinite pride rose to her heart. The rude creaking of boots which she now heard more distinctly in the room next door, exasperated her.

“I am going,” she said, curtly. “Come and open the door for me.”

Mme. Sidonie tried to smile.

“Don’t be childish…. I can’t be left with that lad on my hands, now that I’ve told him you are here…. You compromise me, really….”

But Renée had already descended the little staircase. She repeated before the closed shop-door:

“Open it, open it.”

The lace-dealer had a habit of putting the brass knob in her pocket after she had withdrawn it from the door. She wanted to continue arguing. At last, seized with anger herself, and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes, the sour barrenness of her nature, she cried:

“But what on earth do you want me to tell the man?”

“That I’m not for sale,” replied Renée, with one foot on the pavement.

And it seemed to her that she heard Madame Sidonie mutter, as she banged the door to: “Ah, get out, you jade! you shall pay me for this.”

“My God!” thought she, as she stepped into her brougham, “I prefer my husband to that.”

She drove straight back home. After dinner she asked Maxime not to come; she was unwell, she needed rest. And the next day, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia’s jeweller, she was embarrassed in the midst of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had had a good stroke of business. But from that day forward she was more wayward, she frequently changed the hour of the appointments she gave Maxime, and often even watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not trouble much about these changes of mood; he took pleasure in being an obedient thing in the hands of women. What more annoyed him was the moral turn which their lovers’-meetings took at times. She became quite dismal; and it even happened that she had great tears in her eyes. She left off her refrain of “le beau jeune homme” in La Belle Hélène, played the hymns she had learnt at school, asked her lover if he did not think that sin was punished sooner or later.

“There is no doubt she’s growing old,” thought he. “It will be the utmost if she’s amusing for another year or two.”

The truth was that she was suffering cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Madame Sidonie’s she had revolted, she had yielded to instinctive pride, to disgust for that coarse bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything within her foundered, and she felt herself to be so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man that pushed open the door of the room with the pianos. Up to then, the thought of her husband had sometimes passed before her, in her incest, like a voluptuous accentuation of horror, but now the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that changed her most delicate sensations into intolerable pain. She, who found pleasure in the refinement of her sin, and who dreamt gladly of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods enjoyed their own kindred, was now drifting towards vulgar debauchery, and making herself the common property of two men. In vain did she endeavour to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. Her curiosity penetrated to the depth of those accursed enjoyments; she went so far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son in the embraces of the father. And she emerged yet more scared, more bruised from this journey into the unknown regions of sin, from this ardent darkness in which she confused her twofold lovers, with terrors that were as the death-rattle of her joys.

She kept this tragedy for herself alone, and redoubled its anguish by the fever of her imagination. She would have died rather than confess the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear lest the young man might revolt and leave her; above all she had so absolute a belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the eternity of her damnation, that she would rather have crossed the Parc Monceau naked than have confessed her shame in a whisper. On the other hand, she still remained the scatter-brain who astonished Paris with her eccentricities. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices, which were discussed in the newspapers with her name disguised under initials. It was at this period that she seriously wanted to fight a duel, with pistols, with the Duchesse de Sternich, who had purposely, she said, upset a glass of punch over her gown; her brother-in-law, the minister, had to speak angrily to her before she would relinquish her idea. On another occasion she bet Madame de Lauwerens that she could run round the track at Longchamps in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her. Maxime himself began to be frightened of this head in which madness was shooting up, and in which he thought he could hear, at night, on the pillow, all the hubbub of a city on heat for enjoyment.

One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. They had not even looked at the bill. They wanted to see a great Italian actress, Ristori, who was at that time being run after by all Paris, and who was so much in fashion that they were forced to take an interest in her. The play was Phèdre. He remembered his classical repertory sufficiently well, and she knew enough Italian, to follow the performance. And this tragedy even gave them a special emotion, played in this foreign language whose sonorousness seemed to them at times to be a simple orchestral accompaniment to the pantomime of the actors. The Hippolyte was a tall, pale fellow, a very poor actor, who wept through his part.

“What an ass!” muttered Maxime.

But Ristori, with her broad shoulders shaken by sobs, with her tragic features and large arms, moved Renée profoundly. Phèdre was of Pasiphaé’s blood, and she asked herself of whose blood she could be, she, the incestuous one of modern time. And she saw nothing of the piece save this tall woman dragging across the stage the crime of antiquity. In the first act, when Phèdre confides her criminal affection to Œnone; in the second when, all burning, she declares herself to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when the return of Thésée overwhelms her, and she curses herself, in a crisis of sombre fury, she filled the house with such a cry of savage passion, with so great a yearning for superhuman voluptuousness, that Renée felt every shudder of her desire and of her remorse pass through her own flesh.

“Wait,” whispered Maxime in her ear, “you will hear Théramène tell his story. What an old fat-head!”

And he muttered in a hollow voice:

“Scarce had we issued forth from Trœzen’s gates,

“He on his chariot…”

But while the old man spoke, Renée had neither eyes nor ears. The light from the roof blinded her, a stifling heat came to her from all those pale faces stretched out towards the stage. The monologue continued, interminable. She was back in the hothouse, under the ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She suffered hideously, she was losing consciousness, when the last death-rattle of Phèdre, repenting and dying in the convulsions of poison, made her re-open her eyes. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself some day? How mean and shameful was her tragedy by the side of the idyl of antiquity! And while Maxime fastened her opera-cloak under her chin, she still heard Ristori’s rough voice growling behind her, and Œnone’s complacent murmur replying.

In the brougham Maxime did all the talking. He thought tragedy “disgusting” as a rule, and preferred the plays at the Bouffes. Nevertheless Phèdre was pretty “thick.” He felt interested because…. And he squeezed Renée’s hand to complete his thought. Then a funny notion came into his head, and he yielded to the impulse to make a joke.

“I was wise,” he murmured, “not to go too near the sea at Trouville.”

Renée, lost in the depths of her melancholy dream, was silent. He had to repeat his sentence.

“Why?” she asked, astonished, unable to understand.

“Why, the monster…”

And he tittered. The jest froze Renée. Everything was becoming unhinged in her head. Ristori was no longer anything but a great buffoon who pulled up her peplon and stuck out her tongue at the audience like Blanche Muller in the third act of La Belle Hélène, Théramène danced a can-can, and Hippolyte ate bread and jam, and stuffed his fingers up his nose.

When a more piercing remorse than usual made Renée shudder, she felt an insolent reaction. What was her crime after all, and why should she blush? Did she not tread on greater infamies every day? Did she not rub shoulders at the ministries, at the Tuileries, everywhere, with wretches like herself, who wore millions on their bodies and were adored on both knees? And she thought of the shameful intimacy of Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, at which one smiled now and again at the Empress’s Mondays. And she recalled the traffic driven by Madame de Lauwerens, whose praises were sung by husbands for her propriety, her orderly conduct, her promptness in paying her bills. She called up the names of Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, the Baronne de Meinhold, those creatures who let their lovers pay for their luxuries, and who were quoted in fashionable society as shares are quoted on the Bourse. Madame de Guende was so stupid and so beautifully made, that she had three superior officers for her lovers at the same time, and was unable to tell one from the other, because of their uniform; wherefore that demon of a Louise said that she first made them strip to their shirts so as to know which of the three she was talking to. The Comtesse Vanska for her part could remember courtyards in which she had sung, pavements on which she had been seen, dressed in calico, prowling along like a she-wolf. Each of these women had her shame, her open, triumphant sore. And lastly, overtopping them all, uprose the Duchesse de Sternich, old, ugly, wornout, with the halo of a night passed in the Imperial bed; she typified official vice, from which she derived as it were a majesty of debauch and a sovereignty over this band of illustrious strumpets.

Then the incestuous woman grew accustomed to her sin as to a gala-dress whose stiffness had at first inconvenienced her. She followed the fashions of the period, she dressed and undressed as others did. She ended by believing herself to live in a world above common morality, in which the senses became refined and developed, and in which one was allowed to strip one’s self naked for the benefit of all Olympus. Sin became a luxury, a flower set in the hair, a diamond fastened on the brow. And she again saw, as a justification and a redemption, the Emperor passing on the general’s arm through the two rows of bowing shoulders.

One man alone, Baptiste, her husband’s valet, continued to disquiet her. Since Saccard had been showing himself gallant, this tall, pale, dignified valet seemed to walk around her with the solemnity of mute disapprobation. He never looked at her, his cold glances passed higher, above her chignon, with the modesty of a church-beadle refusing to defile his eyes by allowing them to rest on the hair of a sinner. She imagined that he knew everything, she would have purchased his silence had she dared. Then she became filled with uneasiness, she felt a sort of confused respect whenever she met Baptiste, and she said to herself that all the respectability of her household had withdrawn and concealed itself under this lackey’s dress-coat.

One day she asked Céleste:

“Does Baptiste make jokes in the kitchen? Have you ever heard any stories about him, has he a mistress?”

“What a question!” was all the maid replied.

“Come, has he made love to you?”

“Eh! but he never looks at women. We hardly ever see him…. He is always either with monsieur or in the stables…. He says he’s very fond of horses.”

Renée was irritated at this respectability. She insisted, she would have liked to be able to despise her servants. Although she had taken a liking to Céleste, she would have rejoiced to hear of her having lovers.

“But you yourself, Céleste, don’t you think Baptiste is a good-looking fellow?”

“I, madame!” cried the maid, with the stupefied air of a person who has just been told of something prodigious, “oh! I have very different ideas in my head. I don’t want a man. I have my own plan, you will see later. I’m not a blockhead, believe me.”

Renée could not draw anything more definite from her. Her cares, besides, increased. Her rackety life, her mad escapades, met with numerous obstacles which it became necessary for her to surmount, however much she might sometimes be bruised by them. It was thus that Louise de Mareuil one day rose up between her and Maxime. She was not jealous of “the hunchback,” as she scornfully called her; she knew that she was condemned by the doctors, and could never believe that Maxime would marry an ugly creature like that, even at the price of a dowry of a million. In her fall she had retained a middle-class simplicity with regard to people she loved; though she despised herself, she readily believed them to possess superior and very estimable natures. But whilst rejecting the possibility of a marriage which would have seemed to her a sinister piece of debauchery and a theft, she felt pained at the familiarity and intimacy of the young people. When she spoke of Louise to Maxime, he laughed with sheer satisfaction, he repeated the child’s sayings to her, he told her:

“She calls me her little man, you know, the chit.”

And he took things so easily that she did not venture to explain to him that this chit was seventeen, and that their way of pulling each other about, their eagerness, when they met in a drawingroom, to seek a shady corner from which to make fun of everybody, grieved her and spoilt her most enjoyable evenings.

An incident occurred which imparted a singular character to the situation. Renée often felt a need of bravado, she had whims of unreasoning audacity. She dragged Maxime behind a curtain, behind a door, and kissed him at the risk of being seen. One Thursday evening, when the buttercup drawingroom was full of people, she was seized with the brilliant idea of calling the young man to her, as he sat talking with Louise; she came towards him, from the heart of the conservatory where she was standing, and suddenly kissed him on the mouth, between two clumps of shrubbery, thinking herself sufficiently concealed. But Louise had followed Maxime. When the lovers raised their heads, they saw her, a few steps away, looking at them with a strange smile, with no blush nor sign of astonishment, but with the quiet appreciative air of a companion in vice, knowing enough to understand and appreciate a kiss of that sort.

Maxime felt really alarmed that day, and it was Renée who showed herself indifferent and almost lighthearted. That put an end to it. It was impossible now for the hunchback to take her lover from her. She thought to herself:

“I should have done it on purpose. She knows now that ‘her little man’ belongs to me.”

Maxime felt reassured when he again found Louise as frolicsome and entertaining as before. He pronounced her to be “very smart, a very good sort.” And that was all.

Renée had reason to be disturbed. Saccard had for some time been thinking of his son’s marriage with Mademoiselle de Mareuil. There was a dowry of a million there which he did not mean to let out of his reach, intending later on to lay hands on the money himself. Louise, in the beginning of the winter, had stayed in bed for nearly three weeks, and Saccard was so afraid of seeing her die before the contemplated wedding that he resolved to have the children married forthwith. He did indeed think them a trifle young, but then the doctors feared the month of March for the consumptive girl. On his side M. de Mareuil was in a delicate position. At the last poll he had at length succeeded in being returned as deputy. Only the Corps Législatif had just quashed his election, which was the great scandal of the revisions. This election was quite a mock-heroic poem, on which the newspapers lived for a month. M. Hupel de la Noue, the préfet of the department, had displayed such vigour that the other candidates had been prevented even from placarding their election addresses or distributing their voting-papers. Acting on his advice, M. de Mareuil had covered the constituency with tables at which the peasants ate and drank for a week. He promised, moreover, a railway line, a new bridge, and three churches, and on the eve of the poll he forwarded to the influential electors portraits of the Emperor and Empress, two large engravings covered with glass and set in gilt frames. This gift was an enormous success, and the majority was overwhelming. But when the Chamber, in presence of the outburst of laughter of the whole of France, found itself compelled to send M. de Mareuil back to his electors, the minister flew into a terrible passion with the préfet and the unfortunate candidate, who had really shown themselves to be too “hot.” He even spoke of selecting another name as the official candidate. M. de Mareuil was thunderstruck; he had spent three hundred thousand francs on the department, he owned large estates in it in which he was bored, and he would lose money if he sold them. And so he came to beseech his dear colleague to pacify his brother, and to promise him in his name an absolutely decorous election. It was on this occasion that Saccard again spoke of the children’s marriage, and that the two parents definitely decided upon it.

When Maxime was sounded on this subject, he felt embarrassed. Louise amused him, the dowry tempted him still more. He said yes, he agreed to all the dates that Saccard proposed, so as to avoid the tedium of an argument. But to himself he confessed that, unfortunately, things would not be arranged so prettily nor so easily. Renée would never consent; she would cry, she would make scenes; she was capable of creating some great scandal that would astound Paris. It was very unpleasant. She frightened him now. She watched him with perturbing eyes, she possessed him so despotically that he thought he could feel claws digging into his shoulder when she laid her white hand upon it. Her turbulence turned to roughness, and there was a cracked sound beneath her laughter. He really feared that she would one night go mad in his arms. In her remorse, the fear of being surprised, the cruel joys of adultery, did not manifest themselves as in other women in tears and dejection, but in more pronounced eccentricity, in a still more irresistible longing for racket. And amid her growing distraction, one began to hear a rattling, the breaking-up of this adorable and bewildering machine, which was going to pieces.

Maxime patiently awaited an occasion which would rid him of this irksome mistress. He repeated once more that they had been foolish. Though their intimacy had at first lent an additional voluptuousness to their amorous relationship, it now prevented him from breaking off, as he certainly would have done with any other woman. He would have stayed away; that was his method of ending his amours, so as to avoid all effort or dispute. But he felt himself unequal to an explosion, and he still even willingly forgot himself in Renée’s embraces: she was motherly, she paid for him, she was ready to help him out of a difficulty whenever a creditor lost patience. Then the thought of Louise returned to him, the thought of the dowry of a million, and made him reflect, even amid Renée’s kisses, that “this was all very fine, but it was not serious and must come to an end some time or other.”

One night Maxime was so rapidly cleaned out at the house of a lady where cards were often played till daylight, that he experienced one of those fits of dumb anger common to the gambler whose pockets have been emptied. He would have given anything in the world to be able to fling a few more louis on the table. He took up his hat, and, with the mechanical step of a man impelled by a fixed idea, went to the Parc Monceau, opened the little gate, and found himself in the conservatory. It was past midnight. Renée had told him not to come that night. When she now closed her door to him, she no longer even sought to invent an explanation, and he thought only of making the most of his holiday. He did not clearly remember Renée’s injunction until he had reached the glass door of the small drawingroom, which was closed. As a rule, when he was expected, Renée undid the fastening of this door beforehand.

“Bah!” he thought, seeing a light in the dressing-room window, “I will whistle and she will come down. I sha’n’t disturb her, and if she has a few louis I’ll go away at once.”

And he whistled softly. He often, for that matter, used this signal to announce his arrival. But this evening he whistled several times in vain. He grew obstinate, whistled more loudly, not wishing to abandon his idea of an immediate loan. At last he saw the glass door opened with infinite precaution, though he had heard no sound of footsteps. Renée appeared in the twilight of the hothouse, her hair undone, almost without clothes, as though she were just going to bed. Her feet were bare. She pushed him towards one of the arbours, descending the steps and treading on the gravel of the pathways without seeming to feel the cold or the roughness of the ground.

“How stupid of you to whistle so loudly,” she murmured with restrained anger….”I told you not to come. What do you want?”

“Oh, let’s go up,” said Maxime, surprised at this reception. “I will tell you upstairs. You will catch cold.”

But as he made a step forward she held him back, and he then noticed that she was horribly pale. She was bowed with a silent terror. Her petticoats, the lace of her underclothing, hung down like tragic shreds upon her trembling skin.

He examined her with growing astonishment.

“What is the matter? Are you ill?”

And he instinctively raised his eyes and glanced through the glass panes of the conservatory at the dressing-room window where he had seen a light.

“But there’s a man in your room!” he said suddenly.

“No, no, it’s not true,” she stammered, beseeching, distraught.

“Nonsense, my dear, I can see his shadow.”

Then for a minute they remained there, face to face, not knowing what to say to one another. Renée’s teeth chattered with terror, and it seemed to her as if buckets of ice-cold water were being emptied over her feet. Maxime felt more annoyance than he would have believed; but he still remained sufficiently self-possessed to reflect, and to say to himself that the opportunity was a good one for breaking off the connection.

“You won’t make me believe that Céleste wears a top-coat,” he continued. “If the panes of the conservatory were not so thick, I might perhaps recognize the gentleman.”

She pushed him deeper into the gloom of the foliage, and seized with a growing terror, said, with clasped hands:

“I beg of you, Maxime…”

But all the young man’s mischievousness was aroused, a fierce sense of mischief that sought for vengeance. He was too puny to find relief in anger. Spite compressed his lips; and instead of striking her, as he had at first felt inclined to do, he rejoined in a strident voice:

“You should have told me, I should not have come to disturb you…. That happens every day, that people cease to care for one another. I was beginning to have enough of it myself…. Come, don’t grow impatient. I’ll let you go up again; but not till you have told me the gentleman’s name….”

“Never, never!” murmured Renée, forcing back her tears.

“It’s not to challenge him, I only want to know…. His name, tell me his name quick, and I’ll go.”

He was holding her by the wrists, and he looked at her with his bad laugh. And she struggled, distraught, refusing to open her lips, lest the name he asked for should escape her.

“We shall make a noise soon, then you’ll be much better off. What are you afraid of? we’re good friends, are we not?… I want to know who replaces me, that’s fair enough…. Wait, let me assist you. It’s M. de Mussy, whose grief has touched you?”

She made no reply. She bowed her head beneath this interrogatory.

“Not M. de Mussy?… The Duc de Rozan, then? Really, not he either?… The Comte de Chibray, perhaps? Not even he?…”

He stopped, he reflected.

“The deuce, I can’t think of anybody…. It’s not my father, after what you told me?…”

Renée started as though she had been scalded, and in a hollow voice:

“No, you know he no longer comes to me. I wouldn’t allow it, it would be too degrading.”

“Then who is it?”

And he tightened his grasp on her wrists. The poor woman struggled a few moments longer.

“Oh, Maxime, if you knew!… And yet I can’t tell you….”

Then, conquered, crushed, looking up with affright at the light in the window:

“It’s M. de Saffré,” she stammered, in a whisper.

Maxime, who had taken delight in his cruel pastime, turned extremely pale before the avowal which he had evoked with so much persistence. He was vexed at the unexpected pain this man’s name caused him. He violently threw back Renée’s wrists, came up to her, and said to her, full in her face, between his clenched teeth:

“Look here, if you want to know, you’re a…!”

He said the word. And he was going away when she ran to him, sobbing, and took him in her arms, murmured words of love, appeals for forgiveness, swore to him that she still adored him, and that she would explain everything the next day. But he disengaged himself, and banging the door of the conservatory, replied:

“No, no, no! it’s over, I’ve had quite enough of it.”

She remained crushed. She watched him crossing the garden. The trees of the hothouse seemed to be revolving around her. Then she slowly dragged her bare feet over the gravel of the pathways, climbed up the steps, her skin mottled with cold, she still more tragical in the disorder of her lace. Upstairs she said, in reply to her husband’s questions, who was waiting for her, that she thought she would have been able to remember where a little memorandum-book might have got to that had been lost since the morning. And when she was in bed, she suddenly felt an infinite despair when she reflected that she ought to have told Maxime that his father had come in with her and had followed her into her room in order to discuss some question of money with her.

It was on the next day that Saccard resolved to bring to a head the Charonne business. His wife belonged to him; he had just felt her soft and inert in his hands, like a yielding thing. On the other hand the direction of the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène was about to be settled, and it was necessary that Renée should be despoiled before the news got about of the approaching expropriation. Saccard put an artist’s love of his work into this piece of business; he watched his plan ripen with devotion, and set his traps with the refinement of a sportsman who takes a special pride in catching his game skilfully. In his case it was simply the self-satisfaction of an expert gamester, of a man who derives a peculiar enjoyment from ill-gotten gains; he wanted to buy the ground for an old song, and was quite ready then to give his wife a hundred thousand francs’ worth of jewellery in the exaltation of his triumph. The simplest operations became complicated so soon as he touched them, and turned into sombre tragedies: he became impassioned, he would have beaten his father for a five-franc piece. And afterwards he scattered his gold right royally.

But before obtaining from Renée the transfer of her share of the property, he had the foresight to go and sound Larsonneau as to the blackmailing intentions of which he suspected him. His intuition saved him in this instance. The expropriation-agent had thought, on his side, that the fruit was now ripe and waiting to be gathered. When Saccard walked into the office in the Rue de Rivoli, he found his associate overcome, giving signs of the most violent despair.

“Ah, my friend,” murmured the latter, taking hold of Saccard’s hands, “we are lost…. I was just coming round to you to discuss the best way out of this terrible scrape….”

While he wrung his hands, and endeavoured to force out a sob, Saccard noticed that he had been engaged in signing letters as he came in, and that the signatures were admirably firm. He looked at him calmly, and then said:

“Pooh, what has happened, then?”

But the other did not at once reply; he threw himself into his armchair in front of his writing-table, and there, with his elbows on his blotting-book, and his forehead between his hands, furiously shook his head. At last, in a hollow voice:

“They have stolen the ledger, I tell you….”

And he told how one of his clerks, a rogue fit for the galleys, had abstracted a large number of books, among which was the famous ledger. The worst of it was that the thief had realized to what use he could put that book, and would only sell it back again for a hundred thousand francs.

Saccard reflected. The story struck him as altogether too clumsy. Obviously Larsonneau did not at heart much care whether he believed it or not. He simply sought a pretext for giving him to understand that he wanted a hundred thousand francs out of the Charonne affair; and in fact that on this condition he would restore the compromising papers in his possession. The bargain seemed too dear to Saccard. He would not have minded allowing his ex-colleague a share; but this ambush prepared for him, this vain attempt to dupe him, irritated him. On the other hand he was not quite easy in his mind; he knew his man, and he knew him to be quite capable of carrying the documents to his brother the minister, who would certainly have paid him to prevent any scandal.

“The devil!” he muttered, sitting down, in his turn, “that’s an ugly business…. And could I see the rogue in question?”

“I will send for him,” said Larsonneau. “He lives close by, in the Rue Jean-Lantier.”

Ten minutes had not elapsed when a short young man, squint-eyed, pale-haired, with a face covered with red patches, entered softly, taking care that the door should make no noise. He was dressed in a badly-cut black frockcoat, too large for him and horribly threadbare. He stood at a respectful distance, watching Saccard out of the corner of his eye, calmly. Larsonneau, addressing him as Baptistin, submitted him to a series of questions to which he replied in monosyllables without being in the least disconcerted; and he received with complete indifference the epithets of thief, swindler, and scoundrel, with which his employer thought fit to accompany each of his questions.

Saccard admired the wretch’s coolness. At one moment the expropriation-agent flew from his chair as though to strike him; and he contented himself with taking a step backwards, squinting with greater humility.

“That will do, leave him alone,” said the financier…. “So, monsieur, you ask a hundred thousand francs to give up those papers?”

“Yes, a hundred thousand francs,” replied the young man. And he went away. Larsonneau seemed unable to calm himself.

“Ugh! what a reptile!” he stuttered. “Did you see his deceitful looks?… Those fellows have a timid look, but they’d murder a man for twenty francs.”

But Saccard interrupted him and said:

“Bah! he’s nothing to be afraid of. I think we shall be able to make terms with him…. I came to see you about a much more distressing matter…. You were right to distrust my wife, my dear friend. Try and realize that she wants to sell her share in the property to M. Haffner. She needs money, she says. Her friend Suzanne must have egged her on.”

The other abruptly ceased his lamentations; he listened, rather pale, adjusting his stand-up collar, which had become bent during his anger.

“This transfer,” continued Saccard, “means ruin to our expectations. If M. Haffner becomes your co-partner, not only will our profits be compromised, but I am dreadfully afraid we shall find ourselves in a very unpleasant position in regard to that fastidious person, who will insist on examining the accounts.”

The expropriation-agent began walking up and down with an agitated step, his patent-leather boots creaking on the carpet.

“You see,” he muttered, “in what a position one puts one’s self to oblige people!… But, my dear fellow, in your place I should absolutely prevent my wife from doing anything so foolish. I would rather beat her.”

“Ah, my friend!…” said the financier, with a cunning smile, “I have no more power over my wife than you seem to have over that low scoundrel of a Baptistin.”

Larsonneau stopped short before Saccard, who went on smiling, and glanced up at him with a penetrating look. Then he resumed his walk to and fro, but with a slow and measured step. He went up to a mirror, pulled up the bow of his cravat, and walked on again, regaining his elegant manner. And suddenly:

“Baptistin!” he cried.

The little young man with the squint came in, but through another door. He no longer carried a hat, but twisted a pen between his fingers.

“Go and fetch the ledger,” said Larsonneau to him.

And when he was gone, he discussed the amount they were to give him.

“Do this for my sake,” he ended by saying, quite bluntly.

Then Saccard consented to give thirty thousand francs out of the future profits of the Charonne undertaking. He considered that he had escaped cheaply from the usurer’s gloved hands. The latter had the promise made out to his name, keeping up the pretence to the end, saying that he would account for the thirty thousand francs to the young man. It was with a laugh of relief that Saccard burnt the ledger in the flames of the fire, page by page. Then, this operation over, he shook Larsonneau vigorously by the hand, and left him, saying:

“You are going to Laure’s tonight, are you not?… Look out for me. I shall have settled everything with my wife; we shall make our final arrangements.”

Laure d’Aurigny, who often changed her address, was at that time living in a large apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, opposite the Chapelle Expiatoire. She had taken to having a day every week, like the ladies in the real world. It enabled her to bring together at the same time all the men who saw her, separately, during the week. Aristide Saccard exulted in these Tuesday evenings; he was the acknowledged protector; and he turned away his head, with a vacuous laugh, whenever the mistress of the house deceived him in the doorways by granting an assignation for the same night to one of those gentlemen. He stayed till all the rest had gone, lit another cigar, talked business, joked a moment about the gentleman who was dancing attendance in the street, while waiting for him to go, and then, after calling Laure “his dear child” and giving her a little pat on the cheek, he quietly went out by one way while the gentleman came in by another. The secret treaty of alliance, which had consolidated Saccard’s credit and provided the d’Aurigny with two sets of furniture in one month, continued to amuse them. But Laure wanted a finale to this comedy. This finale, arranged beforehand, was to consist in a public rupture, in favour of some idiot who would pay a heavy price for the right of becoming the serious protector and of being known as such to all Paris. The idiot was forthcoming. The Duc de Rozan, tired of wearying the women of his own set to no purpose, dreamt of acquiring the reputation of a debauchee, in order to lend some relief to his insipid personality. He was an assiduous visitor at Laure’s Tuesdays, and had conquered her by his absolute innocence. Unfortunately, although thirty-five years of age, he was still dependent upon his mother, so much so that the most he could dispose of was some ten louis at a time. On the evenings when Laure deigned to take his ten louis, pitying herself, talking of the hundred thousand francs she stood in need of, he sighed, he promised to give it her on the day when he should be his own master. Thereupon she conceived the bright idea of causing him to make friends with Larsonneau, one of the familiars of the house. The two men breakfasted together at Tortoni’s; and at dessert Larsonneau, while describing his love affair with a delicious Spaniard, professed to know some money-lenders; but he strongly advised Rozan never to fall into their clutches. This disclosure excited the duc, who ended by wringing a promise from his good friend that he would interest himself in “his little affair.” He took so practical an interest in it that he was to bring the money on the very evening when Saccard had arranged to meet him at Laure’s.

When Larsonneau entered the d’Aurigny’s great white-and-gold drawingroom, there had arrived only five or six women, who seized his hands and hung round his neck with a great display of affection. They called him “that big Lar!” a caressing diminutive invented by Laure. And he replied, in fluted tones:

“There, there, my turtle-doves; you’ll crush my hat.”

They calmed down, and gathered close round him on a couch, while he told them about a stomach-ache of Sylvia’s with whom he had supped the night before. Then, taking a bag of sweets from the pocket of his dress-coat, he handed round some burnt almonds. But Laure came in from her bedroom, and as many gentlemen were arriving, she drew Larsonneau into a boudoir at one end of the drawingroom, from which it was separated by a double set of hangings.

“Have you the money?” she asked, when they were alone.

She addressed him in the second person singular on important occasions. Larsonneau made no reply, but bowed humorously, and tapped the inside pocket of his coat.

“Oh, that big Lar!” murmured the young woman, enchanted.

And she seized him round the waist and kissed him.

“Wait,” she said, “I want the curl-papers at once…. Rozan is in my room, I will fetch him.”

But he held her back, and kissing her on the shoulders in his turn:

“You know what commission I asked of you?”

“Why, yes, you great stupid, that’s all right.”

She returned with Rozan. Larsonneau was dressed more correctly than the duc, with better fitting gloves and a more artistic cravat. They touched hands carelessly, and talked of the races of two days ago, when one of their friends had run a loser. Laure stamped about.

“Come, never mind all that, dear,” she said to Rozan, “that big Lar has the money, you know. We had better settle up.”

Larsonneau pretended to remember.

“Ah yes, that’s true,” he said, “I have the amount…. But how much wiser you would have been to have listened to me, old chap! To think that those rogues asked me fifty per cent!… However, I agreed at any cost, as you told me it made no difference….”

Laure d’Aurigny had procured some bill-stamps during the day. But when it became a question of a pen and ink, she looked at the two men with an air of consternation, doubting whether she had such a thing in the house. She proposed to go and look in the kitchen, when Larsonneau took from his pocket, the same pocket that held the bag of sweets, two marvels, a silver penholder that screwed out, and an inkstand in steel and ebony, finished off as daintily as a trinket. And as Rozan sat down:

“Make the notes payable to me,” he said. “You understand, I did not want to compromise you. We will settle that between ourselves…. Six bills of twenty-five thousand francs each, see?”

Laure counted the “curl-papers” at a corner of the table. Rozan did not even see them. When he had signed, and raised his head, they had disappeared in the woman’s pocket. But she came up to him and kissed him on both cheeks, to his evident delight. Larsonneau watched them philosophically as he folded up the bills, and replaced the inkstand and the penholder in his pocket.

Laure was still with her arms round Rozan’s neck, when Aristide Saccard lifted a corner of the door-hangings.

“That’s right, don’t mind me,” he said, laughing.

The duc blushed. But Laure went and shook hands with the financier, exchanging a wink of intelligence with him. She was radiant.

“It’s done, my dear,” she said; “I warned you. You’re not very angry with me?”

Saccard shrugged his shoulders goodnaturedly. He pulled back the hangings, and standing aside to allow Laure and the duc to pass, he cried, in the shrill voice of a gentleman-usher:

“Monsieur the duc, madame the duchesse!”

This joke met with immense success. The newspapers printed it the next day, giving Laure d’Aurigny’s real name, and describing the two men by very transparent initials. The rupture between Aristide Saccard and the fat Laure caused even more stir than their pretended love-affair.

Meantime Saccard had let fall the curtain on the burst of merriment which his joke had occasioned in the drawingroom.

“Eh! what a jolly girl!” he said, turning towards Larsonneau. “And so depraved!… It’s you, you scamp, who get the most out of all this. What are you to have?”

But the other protested with smiles; and he pulled down his shirt-cuffs, which were working up. At last he came and sat down near the door on a couch to which Saccard beckoned him.

“Come here, I don’t want to confess you, dash it all!… Let’s get to serious business, old chap. I had a long conversation with my wife tonight…. It’s all settled.”

“Does she consent to transfer her share?” asked Larsonneau.

“Yes, but it was not without difficulty…. Women are so obstinate! You know my wife had promised an old aunt of hers not to sell out. There was no end to her scruples…. Fortunately I had a quite unanswerable story ready.”

He rose to light a cigar at the candle which Laure had left on the table, and returning stretched himself at his ease on the couch:

“I told my wife,” he continued, “that you were completely ruined…. You had gambled on the Bourse, squandered your money on women, plunged into stupid speculations: in short, you are on the verge of a terrible bankruptcy…. I even gave her to understand that I did not consider you perfectly honest…. Then I explained to her that the Charonne affair would be swallowed up in your disaster, and that the best would be for her to accept the proposal you had made me to release her and to buy her out for an old song, no doubt.”

“I don’t call that clever,” muttered the expropriation-agent. “Do you think your wife will believe such rot as that?”

Saccard smiled. He was in one of his communicative moods.

“How simple you are, my dear fellow!” he resumed. “What has the plot of the story to do with it? It’s the details, the gesture, the accent: that’s the thing. Call Rozan over, and I bet I persuade him it’s broad daylight. And my wife has no more brains than Rozan…. I gave her a glimpse of an abyss. She has no suspicion of the coming expropriation. As she expressed surprise that in the midst of a catastrophe you could think of taking over a still heavier burden, I told her that she no doubt stood in the way of some ugly trick you proposed to play your creditors…. At last I advised her to consent, as being the only way to avoid being mixed up in endless lawsuits and to get some money out of her property.”

Larsonneau still thought the story rather clumsy. His own method was less melodramatic; each of his transactions was put together and unravelled with all the elegance of a drawingroom comedy.

“Personally, I should have thought of something different,” he said. “However, everyone has his own system…. So all we have to do now is to pay up.”

“It is on this subject,” replied Saccard, “that I want to come to an arrangement with you…. Tomorrow I will take the deed of transfer to my wife, and she will only have to send you this deed in order to receive the stipulated price…. I prefer to avoid an interview.”

As a matter of fact he had never allowed Larsonneau to visit them on an intimate footing. He did not ask him to the house, and he went with him to Renée whenever it was absolutely necessary for the two partners to meet; that had happened thrice. He nearly always acted with a power of attorney from his wife, not seeing the use of allowing her to know too much of his affairs.

He opened his pocketbook, and added:

“Here are the two hundred thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by my wife; you must give her those in payment, and add one hundred thousand francs, which I will bring you tomorrow in the course of the morning…. I am ruining myself, my dear friend. This business will cost me a fortune.”

“But that,” observed the expropriation-agent, “will only make three hundred thousand francs…. Will the receipt be made out for that sum?”

“A receipt for three hundred thousand francs!” rejoined Saccard, laughing. “I should think so! We should be in a nice fix later on. According to our inventories, the property must now be estimated at two million five hundred thousand francs. The receipt will be for half that, of course.”

“Your wife will never sign it.”

“Yes, she will. I tell you it’s all right…. Why, I told her it was your first condition. You hold a pistol to our heads, don’t you see, with your bankruptcy? And it is in that matter that I pretended to doubt your honesty and accused you of wishing to cheat your creditors…. Do you think my wife understands a word of all that?”

Larsonneau shook his head and murmured:

“No matter, you ought to have thought of something simpler.”

“But my story is simplicity itself!” said Saccard, in great astonishment. “Where the devil do you find it complicated?”

He was quite unconscious of the incredible number of threads with which he interwove the most ordinary piece of business. He derived a real joy from the cock-and-bull story he had just told Renée; and what enraptured him was the impudence of the lie, the heaping up of impossibilities, the astonishing complication of the plot. He could have had the building-land long ago had he not worked out all this drama; but he would have found less enjoyment in obtaining it easily. He set to work, on the contrary, with the utmost naïveté to make a whole financial melodrama out of the Charonne speculation.

He rose, and taking Larsonneau’s arm, walked towards the drawingroom.

“You have quite understood me, have you not? Be content to follow my instructions, and later on you’ll applaud me…. I say, my dear fellow, you ought not to wear yellow gloves, they spoil the look of your hands.”

The expropriation-agent only smiled and murmured:

“Oh, gloves have their advantages, my dear master: you can touch anything without being defiled.”

As they entered the drawingroom, Saccard was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find Maxime on the other side of the hangings. The young man was seated on a couch beside a blonde lady who was telling him, in a monotonous voice, a long story, her own no doubt. He had, in point of fact, overheard his father’s conversation with Larsonneau. The two accomplices seemed to him a pair of cunning dogs. Still annoyed by Renée’s betrayal, he felt a cowardly pleasure in learning of the theft of which she was to be the victim. It avenged him a little. His father came and shook hands with him with a suspicious look, but Maxime whispered to him, motioning to the blonde lady:

“She’s not bad, is she? I’m going to ‘bag’ her for tonight.”

Then Saccard began to pose and play the gallant. Laure d’Aurigny joined them for a moment; she complained that Maxime barely called on her once a month. But he professed to have been very busy, whereat everyone laughed. He added that in future they would see him wherever they went.

“I have been writing a tragedy,” he said, “and I only hit upon the fifth act yesterday…. I now mean to seek repose in the bosoms of all the pretty women in Paris.”

He laughed. He relished his allusions, which only he could understand. Meantime there was no one left in the drawingroom except Rozan and Larsonneau, at either side of the chimney. The Saccards rose to go, as did the blonde lady, who lived in the same house. Then the d’Aurigny went and spoke to the duc in a low voice. He seemed surprised and annoyed. Seeing that he could not make up his mind to leave his chair:

“No, really, not tonight,” she said in an undertone. “I have a headache!… Tomorrow, I promise you.”

Rozan could not but obey. Laure waited till he was on the landing, and then said quickly in Larsonneau’s ear:

“See, big Lar? I keep my word…. Stuff him into his carriage.”

When the blonde lady took leave of the gentlemen to go up to her apartment, which was on the floor above, Saccard was astonished not to see Maxime follow her.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, no,” replied the young man. “I’ve thought better of it….”

Then he had an idea that struck him as very funny:

“I’ll resign in your favour if you like. Hurry up, she hasn’t shut her door yet.”

But the father shrugged his shoulders, and said:

“Thanks, I have something better than that at present.”

The four men went downstairs. Outside the duc insisted on taking Larsonneau in his carriage; his mother lived in the Marais, he could drop the expropriation-agent at his door in the Rue de Rivoli. The latter refused, closed the door himself, and told the coachman to drive on. And he remained on the pavement of the Boulevard Haussmann with the two others, talking, staying where he was.

“Ah! poor Rozan!” said Saccard, who suddenly understood.

Larsonneau swore that it was not so, that he didn’t care a rush for that, that he was a practical man. And as the two others continued to joke, and as the cold was very sharp, he ended by exclaiming:

“Upon my word, I don’t care, I’m going to ring…. You are two busybodies, messieurs.”

“Good night!” cried Maxime, as the door closed to.

And taking his father’s arm, he walked up the boulevard with him. It was one of those clear, frosty nights when it is so pleasant to walk on the hard ground through the icy atmosphere. Saccard said that Larsonneau made a mistake, that he ought merely to be the d’Aurigny’s friend. From there he went on to declare that the love of those women was really a bad thing. He assumed an air of morality, gave utterance to maxims and precepts of astonishing propriety.

“You see,” he said to his son, “that only lasts for a time, my boy…. You lose your health at it, and you don’t taste real happiness. You know I’m not a Puritan. Well, I tell you, I’ve had enough of it; I’m going to settle down.”

Maxime chuckled; he stopped his father, looked at him in the moonlight, and told him he was “an old fat-head.” But Saccard became still more serious:

“Joke as much as you like. I tell you again, there is nothing like marriage to keep a man in good condition and make him happy.”

Then he spoke to him of Louise. And he walked more slowly, to finish the business, he said, as they were once on the subject. The thing was completely arranged. He even informed him that he and M. de Mareuil had fixed the date for signing the contract for the Sunday following the Thursday in midLent. On that Thursday there was to be a great entertainment at the house in the Parc Monceau, and he would then take the opportunity publicly to announce the marriage. Maxime thought all this very satisfactory. He was rid of Renée, he saw no further obstacle, he surrendered himself to his father as he had surrendered himself to his stepmother.

“Well then, that’s settled,” he said. “Only don’t talk about it to Renée. Her friends would chaff me and tease me, and I prefer that she should know of it at the same time as everybody else.”

Saccard promised to be silent. Then, as they approached the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes, he again gave him a heap of excellent advice. He told him how he ought to set about in order to make his home a paradise.

“Above all, never break off with your wife. It’s folly. A wife with whom you cease having connection costs you a fortune…. In the first place, you have to keep a woman, don’t you? And then the house expenses are much greater: there are dresses, madame’s private amusements, her dearest friends, the devil and all his retinue.”

He was in a mood of extraordinary virtue. The success of his Charonne business had filled his heart with idyllic affection.

“As for me,” he continued, “I was born to live in happy obscurity down in some village, with all my family around me…. People don’t know me, my boy…. I give the impression of being very frivolous. Well, that’s quite a mistake. I should love to be always near my wife, I would willingly exchange my business for a modest income that would enable me to retire to Plassans…. You are going to be a rich man; make yourself a home with Louise in which you will live like two turtle-doves. It’s so pleasant! I will come and see you. That will do me good.”

He ended with tears in his voice. Meanwhile they had reached the gate of the house, and they stood talking on the kerbstone. A North wind was sweeping over the heights of Paris. No sound arose in the pale night, white with frost; Maxime, surprised at his father’s emotion, had had a question on his lips for the past minute.

“But you,” he said at last, “it seems to me….”

“What?”

“Well, with your wife!”

Saccard shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, just so! I was a fool. That is why I am able to speak to you from experience…. But we have come together again, oh, entirely! It is almost six weeks ago. I go into her at night when I don’t get home too late. Tonight the poor little dear will have to do without me; I have to work till daylight. I tell you, she’s jolly well made!…”

As Maxime held out his hand to him, he kept him back, and added, in a confidential whisper:

“You know Blanche Muller’s figure; well, it’s like that, only ten times more supple. And then such hips! they have a curve, an elegance… !”

And he concluded by saying to the younger man, who was going off:

“You are like me, you have a heart, you will make your wife happy…. Goodnight, my boy!”

When Maxime at last escaped from his father, he went quickly round the gardens. What he had just heard surprised him so greatly that he experienced an irresistible desire to see Renée. He wanted to beg forgiveness for his brutality, to know why she had told him that lie about M. de Saffré, to learn the story of her husband’s affection. But all this confusedly, with the one clear wish to smoke a cigar in her rooms and to resume their friendly relations. If she was in the right humour, he would even announce his marriage to her, to make her see that their love-affair must remain dead and buried. When he had opened the little gate, of which he had fortunately kept the key, he ended by convincing himself that his visit, after his father’s revelations, was necessary and absolutely proper.

In the conservatory he whistled as he had done the preceding evening; but he was not kept waiting. Renée came and unfastened the glass door of the small drawingroom, and led the way upstairs without a word. She had that instant come back from a ball at the Hotel de Ville. She still wore her dress of white puffed tulle, covered with satin bows; the skirts of the satin bodice were edged with a broad border of white bugles, which the light of the candles tinged with blue and pink. Upstairs, when Maxime looked at her, he was touched by her pallor and the deep emotion that stifled her utterance. She had evidently not expected him, she still quivered all over at seeing him arrive as usual, with his quiet, wheedling air. Céleste returned from the wardrobe-room, where she had been to fetch a nightdress, and the lovers remained silent, waiting for the girl to go. As a rule they did not mind what they said before her; but they felt ashamed of the things that were on their lips. Renée told Céleste to undress her in the bedroom, where there was a big fire. The lady’s-maid removed the pins, took off each article of finery separately, without hurrying herself. And Maxime, bored, mechanically took up the nightdress, which was lying on a chair beside him, and warmed it before the fire, leaning forward with arms outstretched. He had been used in happier times to do this little service for Renée. She felt moved when she saw him daintily holding, the nightgown to the fire. Then, as Céleste had not yet finished:

“Did you enjoy yourself at the ball?” he asked.

“Oh no, it’s always the same thing, you know,” she replied. “Far too many people, a regular crush.”

He turned the nightgown, which was hot on one side.

“What did Adeline wear?”

“Mauve, a badly thought-out dress…. She is short, and yet she dotes on flounces.”

They talked of the other women. Maxime was now burning his fingers with the chemise.

“But you’ll scorch it,” said Renée, whose voice sounded maternally caressing.

Céleste took the chemise from the young man’s hands. He rose and went over to the great pink-and-gray bed, fixing his eyes on one of the embroidered bouquets on the curtains, so as to turn away his head and not see Renée’s naked breasts. He did this by intuition. He no longer considered himself her lover, he had no longer the right to look. Then he took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it. Renée had given him permission to smoke in her room. At last Céleste withdrew, leaving the young woman by the fireside, all white in her nightdress.

Maxime walked about a few seconds longer, without speaking, glancing at Renée, who seemed to be seized with a fresh shudder. And stationing himself before the fire, with his cigar between his teeth, he asked abruptly:

“Why didn’t you tell me that it was my father who was with you last night?”

She raised her head, her eyes wide open, with a look of supreme anguish; then a rush of blood crimsoned her features, and, overwhelmed with shame, she hid her face in her hands, stammering:

“You know that? you know that?…”

She recovered herself, she tried to lie.

“It’s not true…. Who told you?”

Maxime shrugged his shoulders.

“Why, my father himself, who thinks you jolly well made and talked to me about your hips.”

He had allowed a little vexation to show itself. But he began walking about again, and continued in a scolding but friendly voice between two puffs at his cigar:

“Really, I can’t understand you. You’re a strange woman. It was your own fault if I behaved like a brute yesterday. You ought to have told me it was my father, and I should have gone away quietly, don’t you see? What right have I?… But you go and tell me it’s M. de Saffré!”

She sobbed, her hands over her face. He came up to her, knelt down before her, and forced her hands apart.

“Come, tell me why you said it was M. de Saffré!”

Then, still averting her head, she replied through her tears, in a low voice:

“I thought you would leave me if you knew that your father…”

He rose to his feet, took up his cigar, which he had laid on a corner of the mantelshelf, and contented himself with muttering:

“You’re a very funny woman, on my word!”

She no longer cried. The flames in the grate and the fire in her cheeks had dried her tears. The surprise of seeing Maxime so self-possessed in presence of a revelation which she thought would crush him made her forget her shame. She watched him walking up and down, she listened to his voice as though she were dreaming. Without abandoning his cigar he repeated to her that she was absurd, that it was quite natural that she should have connection with her husband, that he really could not think of resenting it. But to go and confess that she had a lover when it wasn’t true! And he kept on returning to this, to this point which he could not understand and which he looked upon as positively monstrous, talked of women’s “foolish fancies.”

“You’re not quite right in your mind, dear; you must be careful.”

He wound up by asking inquisitively:

“But why M. de Saffré more than another?”

“He makes love to me,” said Renée.

Maxime checked an impertinence; he was on the point of saying that she was doubtless only anticipating by a month when she owned to M. de Saffré as her lover. He only smiled wickedly at his spiteful idea, and throwing his cigar into the fire, sat down at the opposite side of the mantelpiece. There, he talked commonsense, he gave Renée to understand that they must remain good friends. Her fixed look embarrassed him, however, he had not the courage to tell her of his approaching marriage. She gazed at him, her eyes still swollen with tears. She thought him a poor creature, narrowminded and contemptible, and yet she loved him, as she might love her lace. He looked handsome in the light of the candelabra standing at the corner of the mantel by his side. As he threw back his head, the light of the candles tinged his hair with gold and glided over the soft down on his cheeks with a charmingly blonde effect.

“I must really be off,” he said several times.

He had quite decided not to stay. Besides, Renée would not have let him. They both thought so, said so: they were now merely friends. And when Maxime at last pressed Renée’s hand and was on the point of leaving the room, she detained him for a moment longer and spoke to him of his father. She sang his praises loudly.

“You see, I felt too great a remorse. I prefer that this should have happened…. You don’t know your father; I was astonished to find him so kind, so disinterested. The poor man is so much worried at present.”

Maxime examined the tips of his boots without replying, with an air of uneasiness. She persisted:

“So long as he used not to come to this room, I did not care. But afterwards…. When I saw him here, so affectionate, bringing me money that he must have scraped together in every corner of Paris, ruining himself for me without a murmur, I became ill to think of it…. If you knew how carefully he has watched over my interests!”

The young man returned quietly to the mantelpiece, and leant against it. He stood there embarrassed, with bowed head, and a smile that slowly rose to his lips.

“Yes,” he muttered, “that’s my father’s strong point, to look after people’s interests.”

Renée was astonished at the tone of his voice. She looked at him, and he, as if to defend himself, added:

“Oh, I don’t know anything…. I only say my father is a clever man.”

“You would do wrong to talk ill of him,” she replied. “You evidently judge him a little superficially…. If I were to tell you all his troubles, if I repeated to you what he told me this very evening, you would see how mistaken people are when they think he cares for money….”

Maxime could not help shrugging his shoulders. He interrupted his stepmother with an ironical laugh.

“Believe me, I know him, I know him well…. He must have told you some fine tales. Let me hear what he said.”

This bantering tone offended her. Whereupon she increased her praises, she considered her husband quite great, she talked of the Charonne affair, of that swindle, of which she had understood nothing, as though it had been a catastrophe in which Saccard’s intelligence and kindheartedness had been revealed to her. She added that she should sign the deed of transfer the next day, and that if it was really a disaster, she accepted the disaster as a punishment for her sins. Maxime let her go on, chuckling, looking at her from under his eyelids; then he said in an undertone:

“That’s it; that’s quite right….”

And louder, laying his hand on Renée’s shoulder:

“Thanks, dear, but I knew the story…. What soft stuff you must be made of!”

He moved away again as if to go. He felt a furious itching to tell everything. She had exasperated him with her eulogy of her husband, and he forgot that he had resolved not to speak, so as to avoid all unpleasantness.

“Why? what do you mean?” she asked.

“Well then, that my father has been having you as nicely as could be…. I am sorry for you, on my word; you are such a simpleton!”

And he told her what he had heard at Laure’s, told her basely, craftily, taking a secret delight in dwelling upon these infamies. It seemed to him that he was taking his revenge for a vague insult that he had received. His harlot’s temperament lingered rapturously over this denunciation, over this cruel gossip of what he had heard behind a door. He spared Renée no detail, neither the money her husband had lent her at usury, nor that which he meant to steal from her with the assistance of ridiculous fairytales fit to send children to sleep with. Renée listened, very pale, her lips compressed. Standing before the chimney-piece, she lowered her head a little, she looked into the fire. Her nightdress, the chemise which Maxime had warmed for her, opened out, revealing a motionless whiteness as of a statue.

“I am telling you all this,” the young man concluded, “so that you may not look a fool…. But you must not take it amiss of my father. He means well. He has his faults like all of us…. Till tomorrow, then.”

He retreated towards the door. Renée stopped him with a quick gesture.

“Stay!” she cried, imperiously.

And seizing him, drawing him to her, almost seating him on her knees before the fire, she kissed him on the lips, and said:

“Ah well, it would be too silly to put ourselves out after that…. I haven’t told you that since yesterday, when you wanted to break with me, I have been off my head. I feel half mad. At the ball tonight I had a mist before my eyes. The fact is that I can’t live without you now. When you leave me, I shall be done for…. Don’t laugh, I mean what I say.”

She gave him a look of infinite tenderness, as though she had not seen him for a long time.

“You were right, I was a simpleton, your father could have made me see stars in broad daylight to-day. What did I know about it? All the time he was telling his story, I heard nothing but a great buzzing, and I was so crushed that he could have made me go down on my knees, if he had wanted to, to sign his old papers. And I fancied I felt remorse!… Yes, I was silly enough to think that!”

She burst into laughter, a mad light shone in her eyes. Pressing her lover still more tightly, she continued:

“Do we sin, you and I? We are in love, and we amuse ourselves as we like. That’s what all of us have come to, have we not?… Look at your father, he does not put himself out. He is fond of money and he takes it when he can get it. He’s quite right, and it sets me at my ease…. To begin with, I sha’n’t sign a single thing, and then you must come back every evening. I was afraid you would refuse, you know, because of what I told you…. But you say you don’t mind…. Besides, I shall keep him out now, you understand.”

She rose and lit the night-light. Maxime hesitated in despair. He saw what a piece of folly he had perpetrated, and he reproached himself harshly for having talked too much. How could he now tell her of his marriage? It was his own fault, the rupture had been accomplished, there was no need for him to go up into that room again, nor above all to go and prove to Renée that her husband was swindling her. And his anger against himself increased when he found that he was not able to remember what had prompted him to act as he did. He thought for a moment of being brutal a second time, but the sight of Renée taking off her slippers filled him with insurmountable cowardice. He was frightened. He stayed.

The next day, when Saccard came to his wife to make her sign the deed of transfer, she replied quietly that she did not mean to do so, that she had thought better of it. On the other hand, she gave him no hint whatever; she had sworn to be discreet, not wishing to create worries for herself, eager only to enjoy the renewal of her amour in peace. The Charonne affair could arrange itself as it pleased; her refusal to sign was merely an act of vengeance; she did not care a scrap for the rest. Saccard was on the verge of flying into a passion. His whole dream crumbled away. His other affairs were going from bad to worse. He had come to the end of his resources, and only kept his balance by miracles of equilibrium: that very morning he had been unable to pay his baker’s bill. This did not prevent him from preparing a splendid entertainment for the Thursday in midLent. In the presence of Renée’s refusal he experienced the white rage of a vigorous man that is hindered in his work by a child’s caprice. With the deed of transfer in his pocket he had relied on being able to raise cash while waiting for the indemnity. Then, when he had calmed down a little, and looked at things clearly, he was amazed at his wife’s sudden change of mind; some one must, undoubtedly, have advised her. He suspected a lover. He had so clear a presentiment, that he ran round to his sister to question her, to ask her if she knew anything of Renée’s private life. Sidonie displayed great acrimony. She had not forgotten the affront her sister-in-law had given her in refusing to see M. de Saffré. So when she understood from her brother’s questions that he accused his wife of having a lover, she cried out that she felt certain of it. And she offered of her own accord to spy on “the turtle-doves.” She would show the minx what sort of stuff she was made of. As a rule Saccard did not seek out disagreeable truths; his interest alone compelled him to open his discreetly-closed eyes. He accepted his sister’s offer.

“I tell you, make your mind easy, I shall find out everything,” she said to him, in a voice full of compassion…. “Ah, my poor brother, Angèle would never have betrayed you! So good, so generous a husband! Those Parisian dolls have no heart…. And to think that I always gave her good advice!”