Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 18

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Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings which in Paris recall the dimness and murky humidity of winter, Aristide Saccard got out of a cab in the Place du Château-d’Eau and turned with four other gentlemen into the space in the middle of the demolitions upon the site of what was to become the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène. They formed a committee of inspection which had been sent by the compensations commission to value certain houses on the spot, their owners not having been able to come to terms with the Ville.

Saccard was repeating the stroke of fortune of the Rue de la Pépinière. So that his wife’s name might remain quite out of it, he began by a spurious sale of the building-plots and the music-hall. Larsonneau handed over the lot to an imaginary creditor. The deed of sale bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This figure was so outrageous that the committee at the Hotel de Ville, when the expropriation-agent, in the name of the non-existing landlord, claimed the amount of the purchase-money as an indemnity, refused for one moment to allow more two millions and a half, despite the mute efforts of M. Michelin and the speeches of M. Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud. Saccard had foreseen this repulse; he refused the offer, let the case go before the jury, of which he happened to be a member, together with M. de Mareuil, by an accident to which he had no doubt contributed. And it was thus that, with four of his colleagues, he found himself appointed to make an enquiry upon his own site.

M. de Mareuil accompanied him. The three other committeemen consisted of a doctor, who smoked a cigar without caring the least in the world for the heaps of lime-rubbish he stepped over, and two business men, of whom one, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly turned a grindstone in the streets.

The path which these gentlemen followed was abominable. It had been raining all night. The ground, soaked through and through, was turning into a river of mud, running between the demolished houses over a path cutting across the soft ground in which the dobbin-carts sank up to their axles. On either side, great pieces of wall, crenulated by the pickaxe, remained erect; tall, gutted buildings, displaying their pallid entrails, opened to mid-air their wells stripped of stairs, their gaping rooms suspended on high and resembling the broken drawers of a big, ugly piece of furniture. Nothing could be more woebegone than the wallpapers of these rooms, blue or yellow squares falling in tatters, marking the positions, five or six stories high, close under the roofing, of wretched little garrets, cramped cabins to which perhaps a whole human existence had been limited. On the bare walls, ribbons of flues ascended side by side, lugubriously black and with abrupt bends. A forgotten weathercock grated at the extremity of a roof, while gutters, half detached, depended like rags. And the gap yawned still wider in the midst of these ruins, like a breach opened by cannon; the roadway, as yet hardly set out, filled with rubbish, with mounds of earth and deep pools of water, stretched along under the leaden sky, amid the sinister pallor of the falling plaster-dust, edged with the black strips of chimneys as with a mourning border.

The gentlemen, with their well-blackened boots, their frockcoats and tall hats, struck a strange note in this muddy, dirty yellow landscape, across which there passed nothing but sallow workmen, horses splashed to their backs, carts whose sides were hidden beneath a coating of dust. They went in Indian file, hopping from stone to stone, avoiding the pools of liquid mire, sometimes sinking in up to their ankles and then cursing as they shook their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the Rue de Charonne, by which they would have avoided this tramp over broken ground; but unfortunately they had several plots of land to visit on the long line of the boulevard; curiosity impelled them, they had decided to go right through the works. And moreover it interested them greatly. Sometimes they stopped, balancing themselves on a piece of plaster that had fallen into a rut, lifted their noses, called out to point out to one another a yawning flooring, a flue pointing into the air, a joist that had fallen on to a neighbouring roof. This bit of razed city at the end of the Rue du Temple seemed to them quite droll.

“It’s really curious,” said M. de Mareuil. “See, Saccard, look at that kitchen, up there; an old fryingpan has remained hanging there over the stove…. I can see it quite plainly.”

But the doctor, his cigar between his teeth, had planted himself before a demolished house of which there remained only the ground-floor rooms, filled with the debris of the other stories. A solitary large piece of walling rose from the heap of brick-rubbish; and in order to overthrow it with one effort they had tied round it a rope at which some thirty workmen were tugging.

“They won’t do it,” muttered the doctor. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”

The four others retraced their steps to see the wall come down. And all five of them, with staring eyes, with bated breath waited for the fall with a thrill of rapture. The workmen, relaxing, and then suddenly stiffening themselves, cried, “Oh! heave oh!”

“They won’t do it,” repeated the doctor.

Then, after a few seconds of anxiety:

“It’s moving, it’s moving,” joyously said one of the businessmen.

And when the wall at last gave way and came down with a thundering crash, raising a cloud of plaster, the gentlemen looked at one another with smiles. They were enchanted. Their frockcoats were covered with a fine dust, which whitened their arms and shoulders.

They now talked of the workmen, while resuming their cautious progress across the puddles. There were not many good ones amongst them. They were all sluggards, spendthrifts, and obstinate into the bargain, having but one dream, the ruin of their employers. M. de Mareuil, who for the last minute had with a shudder been watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof hacking at a wall with their pickaxes, expressed the opinion that those fellows were very plucky all the same. The others stopped once more, raised their eyes to the labourers balancing themselves, leaning over, striking with all their might; they shoved down the stones with their feet and quietly watched them smashing beneath them: had their pickaxe gone wide of the mark, the mere momentum of their arms would have hurled them to the bottom.

“Bah! they’re used to it,” said the doctor, replacing his cigar between his lips. “They’re brutes.”

They now reached one of the houses they had to inspect. They hurried through their task in a quarter of an hour, and resumed their walk. They gradually lost their disgust for the mud; they walked straight across the pools, giving up all hope of keeping their boots clean. When they had passed the Rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the ex-knife-grinder, became restless. He examined the ruins around him, failed to recognize the neighbourhood. He said he had lived thereabouts, more than thirty years ago, on his first arrival in Paris, and that he should much like to find the place again. He kept on searching with his eyes, when the sight of a house which the labourers’ picks had already cut into two made him stop short in the middle of the road. He studied the door, the windows. Then, pointing with his finger to a corner of the demolished building, right up above:

“There it is,” he cried. “I recognize it!”

“What?” asked the doctor.

“My room, of course! That’s it!”

It was on the fifth floor, a little room which must formerly have looked out on a courtyard. A breach in the wall showed it, quite bare, already cut into on one side, with its wallpaper with a pattern of big yellow flowers, a broad torn strip of which trembled in the wind. On the left they could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And beside it was the aperture for a stove-pipe, with a bit of piping left in it.

The ex-workman was seized with emotion.

“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “I didn’t have a good time in those days; but no matter, I was young…. You see the cupboard; that’s where I put my three hundred francs, sou by sou. And the hole for the stove-pipe, I can still remember the day I made it. There was no fireplace in the room, it was bitterly cold, the more so as there were not often two of us.”

“Come, come,” interrupted the doctor, joking, “we don’t ask you for any confidences. You sowed your wild oats like the rest of us.”

“That’s true enough,” ingenuously resumed the worthy man. “I still remember an ironing-girl who lived over the way…. Do you see, the bed was on the right, near the window…. Ah, my poor room, what a state they’ve put it in!”

He was really very much upset.

“Get out,” said Saccard. “There’s no harm done in pulling down those old rookeries. We’re going to build fine freestone houses in their stead…. Would you still live in a hole like that? Whereas there is nothing to prevent you from taking up your quarters on the new boulevard.”

“That’s true enough,” replied the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled.

The committee of enquiry halted again two houses further on. The doctor remained outside, smoking, looking at the sky. When they reached the Rue des Amandiers, the houses became more scattered; they now passed through large enclosures, pieces of waste land, where straggled some tumbledown ruins. Saccard seemed enraptured by this walk through devastations. He had just remembered the dinner he had once had with his first wife on the Buttes Montmartre, and he clearly recollected how he had pointed out to her, with the edge of his hand, the cutting that went from the Place du Château-d’Eau to the Barrière du Trône. The realization of this faraway prophecy delighted him. He followed the cutting with the secret joys of authorship, as though he himself had struck the first blows of the pickaxe with his iron fingers. And he skipped over the puddles, reflecting that three millions were awaiting him beneath a heap of building-rubbish, at the end of this stream of greasy mire.

Meanwhile the gentlemen began to fancy themselves in the country. The road passed through gardens, whose separating walls had been pulled down. There were large clumps of budding lilac. The foliage was a very delicate, pale green. Each of these gardens, looking like a retreat hung with the verdure of the shrubs, was hollowed out with a narrow basin, a miniature cascade, bits of wall on which were painted optical delusions in the shape of foreshortened groves, blue backgrounds of landscape. The buildings, disseminated and discreetly hidden, resembled Italian pavilions, Greek temples: moss was crumbling away the bases of the plaster columns, while lichens had already loosened the mortar of the pediments.

“Those are ‘follies,’” said the doctor, with a wink.

But as he saw that the gentlemen did not understand him, he explained to them that under Louis XV the Court nobility kept up houses for their select parties. It was the fashion. And he added:

“Those places were called their ‘follies.’ The neighbourhood is full of them…. I tell you, some stiff things used to happen here.”

The committee of enquiry had become very attentive. The two businessmen had eyes that glittered, they smiled, looked with lively interest at these gardens, these pavilions which they had barely honoured with a glance prior to their colleague’s explanations. They stood long before a grotto. But when the doctor, seeing a house already attacked by the pickaxe, said that he recognized the Comte de Savigny’s ‘folly,’ well-known by reason of that nobleman’s orgies, the whole of the committee deserted the boulevard to go and inspect the ruins. They climbed on to the rubbish-heaps, entered the ground-floor rooms by the windows, and as the workmen were at dinner, they were able to linger there quite at their ease. They stayed a good half-hour, examining the rose-work of the ceilings, the frescoes over the door, the tortuous mouldings of the plaster yellowed with age. The doctor reconstructed the house.

“Look here,” he said, “this room must be the banqueting-hall. There, in that recess of the wall, must certainly have stood a huge divan. And see, I am positive there was a mirror over the divan; there are the feet of the mirror…. Oh! those scamps knew jolly well how to enjoy life!”

They would never have left those old stones, which tickled their curiosity, had not Aristide Saccard, seized with impatience, said to them, laughing:

“You may look as long as you like, the ladies are gone…. Let’s get on with our business.”

But before leaving, the doctor climbed on to a mantelshelf in order delicately to detach, with a blow from a pickaxe, a little painted Cupid’s head, which he put into the pocket of his frockcoat.

They arrived at last at the end of their journey. The land that was formerly Mme. Aubertot’s was very extensive; the music-hall and the garden took up barely the half of it, the rest had here and there a few houses of no importance. The new boulevard cut diagonally across this huge parallelogram, which circumstance had allayed one of Saccard’s fears: he had long imagined that only a corner of the music-hall would be cut off. And accordingly Larsonneau had been instructed to talk very big, as the bordering plots ought to increase at least five-fold in value. He was already threatening against the municipality to avail himself of a recent decree that authorized the landowners to deliver up no more than the ground absolutely necessary for the public works.

The expropriation-agent received the gentlemen in person. He walked them through the garden, made them go over the music-hall, showed them a huge bundle of documents. But the two business men had gone down again, accompanied by the doctor, whom they still questioned about the Comte de Savigny’s folly, of which their minds were full. They listened to him with gaping mouths, all three standing beside a jeu de tonneau. And he talked to them of the Pompadour, told them of the amours of Louis XV, while M. de Mareuil and Saccard continued the enquiry alone.

“That’s finished,” said the latter, returning to the garden, you allow me, messieurs, I will undertake to draw up the report.”

The surgical-instrument maker did not even hear. He was deep in the Regency.

“What queer times, all the same!” he muttered.

Then they found a cab in the Rue de Charonne, and they drove off, splashed up to their knees, but as satisfied with their walk as though they had had a day in the country. The conversation changed in the cab, they talked politics, they said that the Emperor was doing great things. They had never seen anything like what they had seen just now. That great, long, straight street would be splendid when the houses were built.

Saccard drew up the report, and the jury granted three millions. The speculator was at the end of his tether, he could not have waited another month. This money saved him from ruin and even from the dock. He paid five hundred thousand francs on account of the million which he owed to his upholsterer and his builder, for the house in the Parc Monceau. He stopped up other holes, flung himself into new companies, deafened Paris with the sound of the real crown-pieces which he shovelled out on to the shelves of his iron safe. The golden stream had a source at last. But it was not yet a solid, entrenched fortune, flowing with an even, continuous current. Saccard, saved from a crisis, thought himself a beggar with the crumbs of his three millions, said frankly that he was still too poor, that he could not stop. And soon the ground cracked once more beneath his secretaries to help me.”

Larsonneau had behaved so admirably in the Charonne business that Saccard, after a short hesitation, had the honesty to give him his ten per cent, and his bonus of thirty thousand francs. The expropriation-agent thereupon started a banking-house. When his accomplice peevishly accused him of being richer than himself, the yellow-gloved coxcomb replied with a laugh:

“You see, dear master, you’re very clever at making the five-franc pieces rain down, but you don’t know how to pick ‘em feet.”

Madame Sidonie profited by her brother’s stroke of luck to borrow ten thousand francs of him, with which she went and spent two months in London. She returned without a sou. It was never known where the ten thousand francs had gone to.

“Good gracious!” she replied, when they questioned her, “it all costs money. I ransacked all the libraries. I had three up.”

And when she was asked if she had at last any positive information about the three milliards, she smiled at first with a mysterious air, and then ended by muttering:

“You’re a lot of unbelievers…. I have discovered nothing, but it makes no difference. You’ll see, you’ll see some day.”

She had not, however, wasted all her time while she was in England. Her brother the minister profited by her journey to entrust her with a delicate commission. When she returned she obtained large orders from the ministry. It was a fresh incarnation. She made contracts with the government, she undertook every imaginable kind of supply. She sold it provisions and arms for the troops, furniture for the préfectures and public departments, firewood for the museums and government-offices. The money she made did not induce her to change her everlasting black gowns, and she kept her yellow, dismal face. Saccard then reflected that it was indeed she whom he had seen long ago furtively leaving their brother Eugène’s house. She must have kept up secret relations with him all through, for reasons with which not a soul was acquainted.

Amid these interests, these burning, unquenchable thirsts, Renée suffered agonies. Aunt Elisabeth was dead; her sister had married and left the Hotel Béraud, where her father alone remained erect in the gloomy shadow of the large rooms. Renée in one season ran through her aunt’s inheritance. She gambled now. She had found a house where ladies sat at the card-table till three o’clock in the morning, losing hundreds of thousands of francs, a night. She made an endeavour to drink; but she could not, she experienced invincible uprisings of disgust. Since she had found herself alone again, a prey to the mundane flood that carried her with it, she abandoned herself more than ever, not knowing with what to kill time. She succeeded in tasting of everything. And nothing touched her amid the boundless ennui which overwhelmed her. She grew older, her eyes were circled with blue, her nose became thinner, her lips pouted with sudden, uncalled-for laughter. It was the breaking-up of a woman.

When Maxime had married Louise, and the young couple had left for Italy, she no longer troubled herself about her lover, she even seemed entirely to forget him. And when after six months Maxime returned alone, having buried “the hunchback” in the cemetery of a small town in Lombardy, her feeling towards him was one of hatred. She remembered Phèdre, she doubtless recollected that poisonous love to which she had heard Ristori lend her sobs. Then, to avoid meeting the young man at home in future, to dig for ever an abyss of shame between the father and son, she forced her husband to take cognizance of the incest, she told him that on the day when he had surprised her with Maxime, the latter, who had long been running after her, was trying to ravish her. Saccard was terribly annoyed by her persistency in her desire to open his eyes. He was compelled to quarrel with his son, to cease to see him. The young widower, rich with his wife’s dowry, took a small house in the Avenue de l’Impératrice, where he lived alone. He gave up the Council of State, he ran racehorses. Renée experienced one of her last satisfactions. She took her revenge, she flung back the infamy these two men had set in her into their faces; she said to herself that now she would never again see them laughing at her, arm in arm, familiarly.

Amid the crumbling of Renée’s affections there came a time when she had none but her maid left to love. She had gradually developed a motherly fondness for Céleste. Perhaps this girl, who was all that remained near her of Maxime’s love, recalled to her hours of enjoyment for ever dead. Perhaps she simply found herself touched by the faithfulness of this servant, of this honest heart whose tranquil solicitude nothing seemed to shake. From the depth of her remorse she thanked her for having witnessed her shame without leaving her in disgust; she pictured self-denials, a whole life of renunciation, before becoming able to understand the calmness of the lady’s maid in the presence of incest, her icy hands, her respectful and serene attentions. And she was all the happier in the girl’s devotion as she knew her to be virtuous and thrifty, with no lovers, no vices.

Sometimes in her sad moments she would say to her:

“Ah, my good girl, it will be your duty to close my eyes.”

Céleste made no reply, gave a curious smile. One morning she quietly told Renée that she was leaving, that she was going back to the country. Renée stood trembling all over, as though some great misfortune had overtaken her. She protested, she plied her with questions. Why was she deserting her when they agreed so well together? And she offered to double her wages.

But the lady’s-maid, to all her kind words, replied no with a gesture, placidly and obstinately.

“Listen, madame,” she ended by replying; “you might offer me all the gold in Peru, and I could not remain a week longer. Lord, you don’t know me…. I have been eight years with you, haven’t I? Well, then, ever since the first day I said to myself, ‘As soon as I have got five thousand francs together, I will go back home; I will buy Lagache’s house, and I shall live very happily.’… It’s a promise I made myself, you see. And I made up the five thousand francs yesterday, when you paid me my wages.”

Renée felt a chill at her heart. She saw Céleste moving behind her and Maxime while they embraced each other, and she saw her with her indifference, her perfect unconcern, thinking of her five thousand francs. She made one more endeavour, for all that, to retain her, frightened at the void that threatened her existence, hoping, in despite of everything, to keep by her this obstinate mule whom she had looked upon as devoted and whom she discovered to be merely egotistical. The girl smiled, still shaking her head, muttering:

“No, no, I can’t do it. I would refuse my own mother…. I shall buy two cows. I may start a little haberdasher’s shop. It’s very nice in our part. Oh, as to that, I don’t mind if you like to come and see me. It is near Caen. I will leave you the address.”

Then Renée ceased insisting. She wept scalding tears when she was alone. The next day, with the capriciousness of a sick person, she decided to accompany Céleste to the Gare de l’Ouest in her own brougham. She gave her one of her travelling-rugs, made her a present of money, fussed around her like a mother whose daughter is about to undertake a long and arduous journey. In the brougham she looked at her with humid eyes. Céleste chatted, said how pleased she was to go away. Then, emboldened, she spoke out and gave her mistress some advice.

“I should never have taken up life as you did, madame. I often said to myself, when I found you with M. Maxime: ‘How is it possible to be so foolish for men!’ It always ends badly…. Well, for my part, I always mistrusted them!”

She laughed, she threw herself back in the corner of the brougham.

“How my money would have danced!” she continued. “And at this moment I might have been crying my eyes out. And that is why, whenever I saw a man, I took up a broomstick…. I never dared tell you all this. Besides, it wasn’t my business. You were free to do as you pleased, and I had only to earn my money honestly.”

At the railway-station Renée said she would pay her fare, and took a first-class ticket for her. As they had arrived before their time, she detained her, pressed her hands, reiterated:

“And mind you take great care of yourself, look after yourself well, my dear Céleste.”

The latter let herself be petted. She stood looking happy, with a fresh, smiling face under her mistress’s eyes, which were swimming in tears. Renée again spoke of the past. And suddenly the other exclaimed:

“I was forgetting: I never told you the story of Baptiste, monsieur’s valet…. I suppose they did not care to tell you….”

Renée owned that as a matter of fact she did not know.

“Well, then, you remember his grand, dignified airs, his scornful look, you yourself spoke to me about them…. All that was play-acting…. He didn’t like women, he never came down to the servants’ hall when we were there: and he even, I can tell you now, pretended that it was disgusting in the drawingroom, because of the low-necked dresses. I well believe it, that he didn’t like women!”

And she leant toward Renée’s ear; she made her blush, the while she herself retained her virtuous composure.

“When the new stable-lad,” she continued, “told everything to monsieur, monsieur preferred to dismiss Baptiste rather than have him prosecuted. It seems that filthy sort of thing had been going on in the stables for years…. And to think that great rascal pretended to be fond of horses! It was the grooms he was after.”

The bell interrupted her. She hurriedly caught up the nine or ten packages from which she had refused to be parted. She allowed herself to be kissed. Then she went off, without looking back.

Renée remained in the station till the engine whistled. And when the train had gone, she did not know what to do in her despair; her days seemed to stretch before her as empty as this great hall where she had been left alone. She stepped back into her brougham, she told the coachman to drive her home. But on the way she changed her mind; she was afraid of her room, of the tediousness awaiting her there; she had not even the spirit to go in and change her dress for her customary drive round the lake. She felt a need of sunlight, a need of crowd.

She ordered the coachman to drive to the Bois.

It was four o’clock. The Bois was awakening from the drowsiness of the warm afternoon. Clouds of dust flew along the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and one could see in the distance the expanse of verdure contained by the slopes of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes, crowned by the gray mass of Mont-Valérien. The sun, high on the horizon, swept down, filling the hollows of the foliage with a golden dust, lighting up the tall branches, changing that sea of leaves into a sea of light. But past the fortifications, in the drive of the Bois leading to the lake, the roads had been watered, the carriages rolled over the brown earth as over the pile of a carpet, amid a freshness, a rising fragrance of moist earth. On either side the trees of the copses reared their crowd of young trunks amid the low bushes, losing themselves in the greenish twilight, which streaks of light pierced here and there with yellow clearings; and as the lake drew nearer, the chairs on the side-paths became more numerous, families sat with quiet, silent faces, watching the endless procession of wheels. Then, on reaching the open space before the lake, there was an effulgence; the slanting sun transformed the round sheet of water into a great mirror of polished silver, reflecting the blazing disk of the luminary. Eyes blinked, one could only distinguish on the left, near the bank, the dark patch of the pleasure-boat. The sunshades in the carriages inclined with a gentle, uniform movement towards this splendour, and were not raised until they reached the avenue skirting the water which, from above the bank, now assumed a metallic darkness streaked with burnished gold. On the right, the clumps of fir-trees stretched forth their colonnades of straight, slender stems, whose soft violet tint was reddened by the flames of the sky; on the left, the lawns, bathed in light, spread out like fields of emeralds to the distant lacework of the Porte de la Muette. And on approaching the cascade, while the dimness of the copses was renewed on one side, the islands at the further end of the lake rose up against the blue sky, with their sunlit banks, the bold shadows of their pine-trees, and the Chalet at their feet looked like a child’s plaything lost in the corner of a virgin forest. The whole park laughed and quivered in the sun.

Renée felt ashamed of her brougham, of her dress of puce-coloured silk, on this splendid day. She ensconced herself a little, and through the open windows looked out at this flood of light covering the water and the verdure. At the bends of the drives she caught sight of the line of wheels revolving like golden stars in a long track of blinding lights. The varnished panels, the gleam of the bits of brass and steel, the bright hues of the dresses passed on in the even trot of the horses, set against the background of the Bois a long moving bar, a ray fallen from the sky, stretching out and following the bends of the roadway. And in this ray Renée, blinking her eyes, at intervals saw a woman’s fair chignon, a footman’s dark back, the white mane of a horse detach itself. The rounded sunshades of watered silk shimmered like moons of metal.

Then, in the presence of this broad daylight, of these sheets of sunshine, she thought of the fine dust of twilight which she had seen falling one evening upon the yellow leaves. Maxime was with her. It was at the period when her lust for that child was awakening within her. And she saw again the lawns soaked by the evening air, the darkened copses, the deserted pathways. The line of carriages drove on with a mournful sound past the empty chairs, while to-day the rumble of the wheels, the trot of the horses, sounded with the joyousness of a fanfare of trumpets. Then all her drives in the Bois came back to her. She had lived there, Maxime had grown up there, by her side, on the cushion of her carriage. It was their garden. Rain had surprised them there, sunshine brought them back, night had not always driven them away. They drove there in every kind of weather, they tasted there the disappointments and the delights of their life. Amid the void of her existence, amid the melancholy caused by Céleste’s departure, these memories imparted to her a bitter joy. Her heart said, “Never again! never again!” And she remained frozen when she evoked the image of that winter landscape, that congealed and dimmed lake upon which they had skated; the sky was soot-coloured, the snow had stitched white bands of lace upon the trees, the wind blew fine sand into their faces.

Meantime, on the left hand, on the track reserved for riders, she had recognized the Duc de Rozan, M. de Mussy, and M. de Saffré. Larsonneau had killed the duc’s mother by presenting to her, as they fell due, the hundred and fifty thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by the son, and the duc was running through his second half million with Blanche Muller after leaving the first five hundred thousand francs in the hands of Laure d’Aurigny. M. de Mussy, who had left the Embassy in London for the Embassy at Florence, had become gallant once more; he led the cotillon with renewed grace. As to M. de Saffré, he remained the fastest and most amiable sceptic in the world. Renée saw him urging his horse towards the carriage-door of the Comtesse Vanska, with whom he was said to have been infatuated ever since the day when he had seen her as Coral at the Saccard’s.

All the ladies were there besides: the Duchesse de Sternich in her everlasting chariot, Madame de Lauwerens in a landau, with the Baronne de Meinhold and little Madame Daste in front of her; Madame Teissière and Madame de Guende in a victoria. Among these ladies, Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny displayed themselves on the cushions of a magnificent calash. Even Madame Michelin passed by, ensconced in a brougham; the pretty brunette had been on a visit to M. Hupel de la Noue’s departmental town, and on her return she had appeared in the Bois in this brougham, to which she hoped soon to add an open carriage. Renée also perceived the Marquise d’Espanet and Madame Haffner, the inseparables, hidden beneath their sunshades, stretched side by side, laughing amorously into each other’s eyes.

Then the gentlemen drove by. M. de Chibray in a drag; Mr. Simpson in a dogcart; the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, keener than ever after work despite their dream of approaching retirement, in a brougham which they left at the corner of the drives in order to go a bit of the way on foot; M. de Mareuil, still in mourning for his daughter, looking out for bows in acknowledgment of his first interruption uttered the day before at the Corps Législatif, airing his political importance in the carriage of M. Toutin-Laroche, who had once more saved the Crédit Viticole after bringing it to the verge of ruin, and who was being made still thinner and still more imposing by his work on the Senate.

And to close the procession, as a last display of majesty, came the Baron Gouraud, lolling in the sun on the two pillows with which his carriage was furnished. Renée was surprised and disgusted to recognize Baptiste seated by the coachman’s side, with his pale face and his solemn air. The tall lackey had taken service with the baron.

The copses sped past, the water of the lake grew iridescent under the more slanting rays, the line of carriages stretched out its dancing lights. And Renée, herself caught up and carried away amid this enjoyment, was vaguely conscious of all these appetites rolling along through the sunlight. She felt no indignation with these devourers of the hounds’ fee. But she hated them by reason of their joy, of this triumph which showed them full in the golden dusk that fell from the sky. They were gorgeous and smiling; the women displayed themselves white and plump; the men had the quick glances, the enamoured deportment of successful lovers. And she, down in her empty heart, found nought but lassitude, but repressed envy. Was she better, then, than others, that she should thus give way under the weight of pleasure? or was it the others who were to be praised for having stronger loins than hers? She did not know, she longed for new desires with which to begin life afresh, when, turning her head, she perceived beside her, on the side-path edging the coppice, a sight that rent her with a supreme blow.

Saccard and Maxime were walking along with short steps, arm-in-arm. The father must have been to see the son, and together they had come down from the Avenue de l’Impératrice to the lake, chatting as they went.

“Listen to me,” said Saccard, “you’re a simpleton…. A man like you, with money, doesn’t let it lie idle at the bottom of his drawers. There is a hundred per cent, to be made in the business I am telling you of. It’s a safe investment. You know very well I wouldn’t let you be done.”

But the young man seemed wearied by this persistence. He smiled in his pretty way, he looked at the carriages.

“Do you see that little woman over there, the woman in violet?” he said suddenly. “That’s a washer-girl whom that ass of a Mussy has brought out.”

They looked at the woman in violet. Then Saccard took a cigar from his pocket, and turning to Maxime, who was smoking:

“Give me a light.”

Then they stopped for a moment, facing each other, bringing their faces close together. When the cigar was alight:

“Look here,” continued the father, once more taking his son’s arm, pressing it tightly under his own, “you’re a fool if you don’t take my advice. Well! is it agreed? Will you bring me the hundred thousand francs tomorrow?”

“You know I no longer go to your house,” replied Maxime, compressing his lifts.

“Bah! rubbish! it’s time at last there was end to all that!”

And as they took a few steps in silence, at the moment when Renée, feeling about to faint away, pressed back her head against the padding of the brougham so as not to be seen, a growing rumour ran along the line of carriages. The pedestrians on the side-paths halted, turned round, openmouthed, following with their eyes something that approached. There was a quicker sound of wheels, carriages drew aside respectfully, and two outriders appeared, clad in green, with round caps on which danced golden tassels with their cords outspread all round; leaning slightly forward, they trotted on upon the backs of their large bay horses. Behind them they left an empty space. Then, in this empty space, the Emperor appeared.

He occupied alone the back seat of a landau. Dressed in black, with his frockcoat buttoned up to his chin, he wore, a little on one side, a very tall hat, whose silk glistened. In front of him, on the other seat, sat two gentlemen, dressed with that correct elegance which was in favour at the Tuileries, serious, their hands upon their knees, with the silent air of two wedding-guests taken for a drive amid the curiosity of the crowd.

Renée thought the Emperor aged. His mouth opened more feebly under his thick waxed moustache. His eyelids fell more heavily to the point of half covering his lifeless eyes, the yellow grayness of which was yet more bleared. And his nose alone retained its look of a dry fish-bone set in the vagueness of his face.

Meantime, while the ladies in the carriage smiled discreetly, the people on foot pointed the sovereign out to one another.

A fat man asserted that the Emperor was the gentleman with his back to the coachman on the left. A few hands were raised to salute. But Saccard, who had taken off his hat even before the outriders had passed, waited till the imperial carriage was exactly in front of him; and then shouted in his thick Provençal voice:

“Long live the Emperor!”

The Emperor, surprised, turned round, seemed to recognize the enthusiast, returned the bow with a smile. And everything disappeared in the sunlight, the carriages closed up, Renée could only perceive, above the manes of the horses, between the backs of the lackeys, the outriders’ green caps dancing with their golden tassels.

She remained for a moment with wide-open eyes, full of this vision, which reminded her of another moment in her life. It seemed to her as if the Emperor, by mingling with the line of carriages, had just set in it the last necessary ray, and given an intention to this triumphal procession. Now it was a glorification. All these wheels, all these men with decorations, all these women languidly reclining disappeared among the flash and the rumbling of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and so painful that Renée felt an imperious need to escape from this triumph, from that cry of Saccard’s, still ringing in her ears, from that sight of the father and son walking along with short steps, chatting arm-in-arm. She sought about, her hands folded on her breast, as though burnt with an internal fire; and it was with a sudden hope of relief, of healing coolness, that she leant forward and said to the coachman:

“To the Hotel Béraud.”

The courtyard retained its cloistral coldness; Renée went round the colonnades, happy in the dampness which fell upon her shoulders. She approached the basin, green with moss, its edges polished by wear; she looked at the lion’s head half worn away, with gaping jaws, discharging a stream of water through an iron pipe. How often had she and Christine taken this head in their childish arms to lean forward and reach the stream of water which they loved to feel flowing cold as ice over their little, hands. Then she climbed the great silent staircase, she saw her father at the end of the string of wide rooms; he drew up his tall figure, he slowly passed deeper into the shade of this old house, of this proud solitude in which he had absolutely cloistered himself since his sister’s death; and she thought of the men in the Bois, of that other old man, the Baron Gouraud, rolling his flesh in the sun, on pillows. She climbed higher, she followed the passages, the servants’ stairs, she made the journey towards the children’s room. When she reached the very top, she found the key on its usual nail, a big, rusty key, on to which spiders had spun their web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad was the children’s room! She felt a pang at her heart on finding it so deserted, so gray, so silent. She closed the open door of the aviary, with the vague idea that it must have been by that door that the joys of her childhood had flown away. She stopped before the flower-boxes, still full of soil hardened and cracked like dry mud, she broke off with her fingers a rhododendron-stalk: this skeleton of a plant, shrivelled and white with dust, was all that remained of their living clusters of verdure. And the matting, the very matting, discoloured, rat-gnawed, displayed itself with the melancholy of a shroud that has for years been awaiting the promised corpse. In a corner, amid this mute despair, this silent weeping abandonment, she found one of her old dolls; all the bran had flowed out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with its enamelled lips, above the wasted body, which seemed as though exhausted by puppet follies.

Renée was stifled amid this tainted atmosphere of her childhood. She opened the window, she looked out upon the boundless landscape. There nothing was soiled. She found again the eternal joys, the eternal youth of the open air. The sun must be sinking behind her; she saw only the rays of the setting luminary gilding with infinite softness this bit of town which she knew so well. It was a last song of daylight, a refrain of gaiety which was subsiding slowly over all things. Below, ruddy flames lit up the boom, while the lacework of the iron chains of the Pont de Constantine stood out against the whiteness of its supports. Then, more to the right, the dark foliage of the Halle aux Vins and of the Jardin des Plantes gave the impression of a great pool of stagnant, moss-covered water, whose green surface blended in the distance with the mist of the sky. On the left, the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended the same row of houses, the houses which the little girls used to see there twenty years ago, together with the same brown patches of sheds, the same red factory-chimneys. And above the trees, the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière, made blue by the suns leave-taking, appeared to her suddenly like an old friend. But what calmed her, what brought coolness to her breast, was the long gray banks, was above all the Seine, the giant, which she watched coming from the edge of the horizon, straight down to her, as in those happy days when they had been afraid lest they should see it swelling and surging up to their window. She remembered their fondness for the river, their love for its colossal flux, for this quivering of murmuring water, spreading like a sheet at their feet, opening out around them, behind them, into two arms which they could not see, though they could still feel its great, pure caress. They were coquettes already, and they used to say, on fine days, that the Seine had put on its pretty dress of green silk shot with white flames; and the eddies where the water rippled trimmed the dress with frills of satin, while in the distance, beyond the belt of the bridges, splashes of light spread out lappets of sun-coloured stuff.

And Renée, raising her eyes, looked at the vast arch of pale, blue sky, fading little by little in the effacement of the twilight. She thought of the accomplice city, of the flaring nights of the boulevards, of the sultry afternoons in the Bois, of the crude, pallid days in the great, new mansions. Then, when she lowered her head, when she glanced again upon the peaceful horizon of her childhood, this corner of a middle-class and workmen s city, where she had dreamt of a life of peace, a final bitterness mounted to her lips. With clasped hands, she sobbed in the gathering night.

Next winter, when Renée died of acute meningitis, her father paid her debts. Worms’s bill came to two hundred and fifty-seven thousand francs.

THE END