Complete Works of Emile Zola (231 page)

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

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

Maxime was splitting with laughter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he pushed the bolt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please, don’t read that.”

She struggled, laughing nervously.

“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”

But he insisted in a more suppressed tone:

“No, no, not to-night.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would madame like the comb?…”

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

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

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