Complete Works of Emile Zola (213 page)

“Baptiste,” asked Renée, “has monsieur come in?”

“Yes, madame, he is dressing,” replied the valet, with a bend of the head which a prince bowing to the crowd might have envied.

Renée slowly climbed the staircase, drawing off her gloves.

The hall was very luxurious. There was a slight sense of suffocation on entering. The thick carpets that covered the floor and the stairs, the broad red velvet hangings that concealed the walls and the doorways, made the air heavy with silence, with the tepid fragrance of a chapel. Draperies hung high, and the very lofty ceiling was decorated with bosses projecting from a trellis-work of golden ribs. The staircase, whose double balustrade of white marble had a hand-rail covered with crimson velvet, commenced in two slightly converging flights, between which, at the back, was placed the door of the big drawing-room. On the first landing an immense mirror filled the whole wall. Below, at the foot of the branching staircase, stood, on marble pedestals, two bronze-gilt women, bare to the waist, upholding great lamps set with five burners, whose bright light was softened by ground-glass globes. And on both sides was a row of admirable majolica vases, in which rare plants displayed their growth.

Renée climbed the staircase, and at each step her image rose in the glass; she wondered, with the feeling of doubt common to the most popular actresses, whether she was really delicious, as people told her.

Then, when she had reached her rooms, which were on the first floor and overlooked the Parc Monceau, she rang for Céleste, her maid, and had herself dressed for dinner. This took fully an hour and a quarter. When the last pin had been inserted, she opened a window, as the room was very warm, and, leaning her elbows on the sill, sat thinking. Behind her, Céleste moved about discreetly, putting away the things.

A sea of shadow filled the gardens below. The tall, inky masses of foliage, shaken by sudden gusts of wind, swayed heavily to and fro as with the flux and reflux of the tide, the sound of their dead leaves recalling the lapping of waves on a pebbly beach. Only now and then this ebb and flow of darkness would be pierced by the two yellow eyes of a carriage, appearing and disappearing between the shrubberies, along the road connecting the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense with the Boulevard Malesherbes. In the presence of this autumnal melancholy, Renée felt her heart once more fill with sadness. She fancied herself a child in her father’s house, in that still house in the Île Saint-Louis, where for two centuries the Bérauds du Châtel had sheltered their grim, magisterial gravity. Then she thought of the suddenness of her marriage, of that widower who had sold himself to become her husband and bartered his name of Rougon for that of Saccard, the two dry syllables of which, when she first heard them, had sounded in her ears with the brutal cadence of two rakes gathering up gold; he took her and cast her into this life of excess, in which her poor head was becoming more and more disordered every day. Then she fell to dreaming, with childlike joy, of the pleasant games of battledore she had played with her little sister Christine in the old days. And how some morning she would wake from her dream of enjoyment of the past ten years, mad, soiled by one of her husband’s speculations, in which he himself would go under. It came to her as a quick foreboding. The trees soughed more loudly. Renée, distressed by these thoughts of shame and punishment, yielded to the instincts, slumbering within her, of the honest old middle-class; she made a promise to the black night that she would reform, spend less on her dress, seek some innocent amusement, as in the happy school-days, when the girls sang “Nous n’irons plus aux bois,” as they danced sweetly under the plane-trees.

At this moment, Céleste, who had been downstairs, returned, and murmured in her mistress’s ear:

“Monsieur begs madame to go down. There are several people already in the drawing-room.”

Renée shivered. She had not noticed the keen air that had frozen her shoulders. As she passed before the mirror, she stopped, glanced at herself automatically. She smiled involuntarily, and went downstairs.

Most of the guests had, in fact, arrived. She found downstairs her sister Christine, a young girl of twenty, very simply dressed in white muslin; her aunt Elisabeth, the widow of Aubertot the notary, in black satin, a little old woman of sixty, of an exquisite charm of manner; her husband’s sister, Sidonie Rougon, a lean, mealy-mouthed woman, of uncertain age, with a face like soft wax, which the dull hue of her dress threw even more in the shade; then the Mareuils; the father, M. de Mareuil, who had just left off mourning for his wife, a tall, handsome man, shallow and serious, bearing a striking resemblance to the valet, Baptiste; and the daughter, that poor Louise, as she was called, a child of seventeen, puny, a little hump-backed, wearing with a sickly grace a white foulard dress with red spots; then a whole group of serious men, men with many decorations, official gentlemen with silent, sallow faces, and, further on, another group, young men these, with vicious looks and low-cut waistcoats, standing round five or six ladies of extreme elegance, foremost among whom were the two inseparables, the little Marquise d’Espanet, in yellow, and the fair-haired Mme. Haffner, in violet. M. de Mussy, the horseman whose bow Renée had not acknowledged, was there too, with the restless look of a lover who feels his dismissal coming. And, among the long trams spread over the carpet, two contractors, two bricklayers who had made money, Mignon and Charrier, with whom Saccard was to settle a matter of business on the morrow, moved about heavily in their clumsy boots, their hands behind their backs, wretchedly unhappy in their dress-clothes.

Aristide Saccard, standing by the door, managed to greet each new arrival while holding forth to the group of serious men with his Southern twang and sprightliness. He shook his guests by the hand, with a cordial word of welcome. Short, mean in appearance, he bent and bowed like a puppet; and the most salient feature of all his shrill, cunning, swarthy little person was the red splash of the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, which he wore very wide.

Renée’s entrance provoked a murmur of admiration. She was really divine. Upon a tulle skirt, garnished behind with a flow of flounces, she wore a body of pale-green satin, bordered with English lace, caught up and fastened with large bunches of violets; a single flounce adorned the front of the skirt, and bunches of violets, held together by garlands of ivy, fastened a light muslin drapery. Her head and bust appeared adorably gracious above these petticoats of regal fulness and richness overloaded. Her neck was uncovered down to the points of her breasts, her arms were bare and had clusters of violets at the shoulders: she seemed to emerge quite naked from her case of tulle and satin, similarly to one of those nymphs whose busts issue from the sacred oaks. Her white neck and shoulders, her supple body, seemed so happy already in their semi-freedom, that the eye expected every moment to see the bodice and skirts glide down, like the dress of a bather enraptured with her flesh. Her fine yellow hair, gathered up high, helmet-shaped, with trailing through it a sprig of ivy retained by a knot of violets, still further accentuated her nudity by uncovering the nape of her neck, which was lightly shaded by little wanton curls, like threads of gold. Round her throat was a necklace with pendants, of brilliants of wonderful water, and on her forehead an aigrette made of sprigs of silver set with diamonds. And so she stood for some seconds on the threshold, erect in the magnificence of her dress, her shoulders shimmering in the hot light like watered silk. She had come down quickly, and was a little out of breath. Her eyes, which the blackness of the Parc Monceau had filled with shadow, blinked in that quick flood of light, giving her that air of hesitation of the short-sighted which in her was so gracious.

On perceiving her, the little marquise sprang from her seat, came running up to her, took her by both hands, and, examining her from head to foot, murmured in fluted tones:

“You dear, beautiful creature….”

Meanwhile there was much moving about; all the guests came and did homage to the beautiful Mme. Saccard, as Renée was known to everyone in society. She touched hands with most of the men. Then she kissed Christine, and asked after her father, who never came to the house in the Parc Monceau. And smiling, still bowing, her arms languidly rounded, she remained standing before the circle of ladies, who examined anxiously the necklace and the aigrette.

The fair-haired Mme. Haffner could no longer withstand the temptation. She drew nearer, and after a wistful look at the gems, asked with envy in her voice:

“That is the necklace and aigrette, is it not?”

Renée nodded. Thereupon all the women burst out into praise; the jewels were delicious, divine; then they proceeded to discuss, with admiration full of envy, Laure d’Aurigny’s sale, at which Saccard had bought them for his wife; they complained that those creatures got the prettiest of everything: soon there would be no diamonds left for the honest women. And through their complaints there filtered the longing to feel on their bare skins some of the jewellery that all Paris had seen on the shoulders of a noted courtesan, that might perhaps whisper in their ears scandals of the alcoves in which the thoughts of these great ladies so gladly lingered. They knew of the high prices, they mentioned a gorgeous cashmere shawl, some magnificent lace. The aigrette had cost fifteen thousand francs, the necklace fifty thousand. These figures roused Mme. d’Espanet to enthusiasm. She called Saccard over, exclaiming:

“Come and let me congratulate you! What a good husband you are!”

Aristide Saccard came up, bowed, made little of it. But his grinning features betrayed a lively satisfaction. And he watched from the corner of his eye the two contractors, the two bricklayers who had made their fortunes, as they stood a few steps off, listening with evident respect to the sound of such figures as fifteen and fifty thousand francs.

At this moment Maxime, who had just come in, charmingly pinched in his dress-clothes, leant familiarly on his father’s shoulder, and whispered to him as to a schoolfellow, glancing towards the bricklayers. Saccard wore the discreet smile of an actor called before the curtain.

Some more guests arrived. There were at least thirty persons in the drawing-room. Conversation was resumed; in intervals of silence the faint clatter of silver and crockery was heard through the walls. At last Baptiste opened the folding-doors, and majestically pronounced the sacramental phrase:

“Dinner is served, madame.”

Then, slowly, the procession formed. Saccard gave his arm to the little marquise; Renée took the arm of an old gentleman, a senator, the Baron Gouraud, before whom everybody bowed down with great humility; as to Maxime, he was obliged to offer his arm to Louise de Mareuil; then followed the rest of the guests, in double file; and right at the end, the two contractors, swinging their arms.

The dining-room was a huge, square room, whose wainscotting of stained and varnished pear-wood rose to the height of a man, and was decorated with slender headings of gold. The four large panels had evidently been prepared so that they might be filled up with paintings of still life; but this had never been done, the landlord having doubtless recoiled before a purely artistic expenditure. They had been hung simply with dark-green velvet. The chairs, curtains, and door-hangings of the same material gave the room a look of sober seriousness, calculated to concentrate on the table all the splendour of the light.

And indeed, at this hour, the table, standing in the centre of the wide, dark Persian carpet, which deadened the sounds of the footsteps, and under the glaring light of the chandelier, surrounded by chairs whose black backs, with fillets of gold, encircled it with a dark frame, seemed like an altar, like a mortuary chapel, as the bright scintillations of the crystal glass and silver plate sparkled on the dazzling whiteness of the cloth. Beyond the carved chair-backs, one could just perceive, in a floating shadow, the wainscotting of the walls, a large low sideboard, ends of velvet hanging here and there. The eye was of necessity drawn back to the table, and became filled with the splendour of it. A beautiful dead-silver centre-piece, glittering with its chased work, stood in the middle of the table; it represented a troop of satyrs carrying off nymphs; above the group, issuing from a large cornucopia, an enormous bouquet of real flowers hung down in clusters. At either end of the table stood vases with more flowers, a pair of candelabra, matching the centre group, and each consisting of a satyr running off with a swooning woman on one arm, and holding in the other a ten-branched candlestick which added the brilliancy of its candles to the lustre of the central chandelier. Between these principal ornaments the first dishes, large and small, were ranged symmetrically, flanked by shells containing the hors d’œuvre, and separated by Porcelain bowls, crystal vases, flat plates and tall preserve-stands, filled with that portion of the dessert that was already on the table. Along the line of plates ran an army of glasses, of water-bottles, of decanters, of salt-cellars, and all this glass was as thin and light as muslin, uncut, and so transparent that it cast no shadow. And the centre-piece and candelabra seemed like fountains of fire; sparks glittered in the burnished silver dishes; the forks, the spoons, and the knives with handles of mother-of-pearl were as bars of flame; colours kaleidoscopic filled the glasses; and, in the midst of this rain of light, of this mass of incandescence, the decanters threw red stains upon the white-hot cloth.

On entering, a discreet expression of felicity overspread the faces of the men, as they smiled to the ladies on their arms. The flowers imparted a freshness to the heavy atmosphere. Delicately the fumes of cooked food mingled with the perfume of the roses. The sharp odour of prawns predominated, and the sour scent of citrons.

Then, when each had found his name written on the back of his menu-card, there was a noise of chairs, a great rustling of silken dresses. The bare shoulders, studded with diamonds, separated by black coats, which served to throw up their pallor, added their creamy whiteness to the gleam of the table. The dinner began amidst little smiles exchanged between neighbours, in a semi-silence only broken as yet by the muffled clattering of spoons. Baptiste fulfilled his office of major-domo with his serious diplomatic attitudes; under his orders were, in addition to the two footmen, four assistants whom he only engaged for the great dinners. As he removed each dish to the end of the room and carved it at a side-table, three of the servants passed noiselessly round the table, dish in hand, naming the contents in an undertone as they handed them. The others served the wine, and saw to the bread and the decanters. The removes and entrées thus slowly went round and disappeared; the ladies’ pearly laughter grew no shriller.