Complete Works of Emile Zola (237 page)

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 bank-notes, 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 shop-windows 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 arm-chairs 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 drawing-room, and in the hot-house 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 drawing-room. 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 head-dresses. 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 eye-glass 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 drawing-room, 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 flower-beds 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 drawing-rooms. 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 window-panes, 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 hot-house that needed the great gray-and-pink bed, the naked flesh of the dressing-room, the gilded dawn of the small drawing-room. 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.