Complete Works of Emile Zola (216 page)

A moment before, as she was crossing a walk, the sight of Maxime and Louise had suddenly caused Renée to stand still behind a shrub. Around her the hot-house, resembling the nave of a church, with an arched glass roof supported by straight, slender iron columns, displayed its fat vegetation, its masses of lusty verdure, its spreading rockets of foliage.

In the middle, in an oval tank level with the flooring, lived, with the mysterious sea-green life of water-plants, all the aquatic flora of the tropics. Cyclanthus-plants, displaying their streaks of variegated green, raised a monumental girdle around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end, two tall tornelias reared their quaint brushwood above the water, their dry, bare stems contorted like agonizing serpents, and let fall aerial roots, that seemed like a fisherman’s nets hung up in the open air. Near the edge, a Javanese pandanus spread its cluster of green leaves streaked with white, thin as swords, prickly and fretted as Malay creeses. And on the surface, in the warmth of the tepid sheet of slumbering water, great water-lilies opened out their pink petals, and euryales trailed their round leaves, their leprous leaves, floating like the backs of monstrous blistered toads.

By way of turf, a broad edging of selaginella encircled the tank. This dwarf fern formed a thick mossy carpet of a light green shade. And beyond the great circular path, four enormous clusters of plants shot vigorously right up to the roof: palms, drooping gently in their elegance, spreading their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, hung down their leaves like oars wearied by their perpetual voyage through the blue; tall Indian bamboos rose straight, hard, slender, dropping from on high their light shower of leaves; a ravenala, the traveller’s tree, reared its bouquet of huge Chinese hand-screens; and in a corner a plantain-tree, loaded with fruit, stretched out on all sides its long horizontal leaves, on which two lovers might easily recline clasped in each other’s embrace. In the corners were Abyssinian euphorbias, deformed prickly cactuses, covered with loathly excrescences, oozing with poison. And beneath the trees the ground was carpeted with creeping ferns, adianta and pterides, their fronds outlined daintily like fine lace. Alsophilas of a taller species tapered upwards with their rows of symmetrical foliage, hexagonal, so regular as to have the appearance of large pieces of porcelain destined to hold the fruit of some titanic desert. The shrubberies were surrounded with a border of begonias and caladiums; begonias, with twisted leaves, gorgeously streaked with red and green; caladiums whose spear-headed leaves, white, with veins of green, looked like large butterfly-wings; bizarre plants, whose foliage lives strangely with the sombre or wan splendour of noisome flowers.

Behind the shrubberies, a second and narrower pathway ran round the green-house. There, on stages, half concealing the hot-water pipes, bloomed marantas, soft as velvet to the touch, gloxinias, purple-belled, dracœnas, resembling blades of old lacquer.

But one of the charms of this winter-garden was the four alcoves of verdure at the corners, roomy arbours closed in by thick curtains of creepers. Scraps of virgin forest had here erected their leafy walls, their impenetrable confusion of stems, of supple shoots that clung to the branches, shot through space in reckless flight, and fell from the arched roof like tassels of ornate drapery. A stalk of vanilla, whose ripe pods emitted a pungent perfume, trailed about a moss-grown portico; Indian berries draped the thin pillars with their round leaves; bauhinias with their red clusters, quisqualias with flowers pendant like bead necklaces glided, twined and intertwined like slim adders, endlessly playing and creeping amid the darkness of the growths.

And beneath arches, placed here and there between the beds of shrubs, hung baskets suspended from wire chains, and filled with orchids, fantastic plants of the air, which pushed in every direction their crooked tendrils, bent and twisted like the limbs of cripples. There were cypripediums, whose flowers resemble a wonderful slipper with a heel adorned with a dragon-fly’s wings; ærides, so delicately scented; stanhopeas, with pale tiger flowers, which exhale from afar a strong and acrid breath, as from the putrid throats of the convalescent sick.

But what most struck the eye from every point of the walks was a great Chinese hibiscus, whose immense expanse of foliage and flowers covered the whole wall of the house on to which the conservatory was built. The huge purple flowers of this giant mallow, unceasingly renewed, live but a few hours. They resembled as who should say the eager, sensual mouths of women, the red lips, soft and moist, of some colossal Messalina, bruised by kisses, and ever reviving with their hungry, bleeding smiles.

Renée, standing by the tank, shivered in the midst of this verdant magnificence. Behind her, a great sphinx in black marble, squatting upon a block of granite, turned its head towards the fountain with a cat’s cruel and wary smile; and, with its polished thighs, it looked like the dark idol of this tropical clime. From globes of ground glass came a light that covered the leaves with milky stains. Statues, heads of women with necks thrown back, swelling with laughter, stood out white against the background of the shrubberies, with patches of shadow which distorted the mad gaiety upon their faces. Strange rays of light played about the dull, still water of the tank, throwing up vague shapes, glaucous masses with monstrous outlines. A flood of white light streamed over the ravenala’s glossy leaves, over the lacquered fans of the latanias; while from the lace-work of the ferns fell drops of light in a fine shower. Up above shone the reflections from the glass roof, between the sombre tops of the tall palm-trees. And all around was massed in darkness; the arbours, with their hangings of creepers, were drowned in tenebrous gloom, like the lairs of slumbering serpents.

Renée stood musing beneath the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime in the distance. She no longer felt the fleeting fancies, the gray, twilight temptations of the chilly avenues of the Bois. Her thoughts were no longer lulled to sleep by the trot of her horses along the mundane turf, the glades in which middle-class families take their Sunday repasts. This time she was permeated with a keen and definite desire.

Unbridled love and voluptuous appetite haunted this stifling nave in which seethed the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapt in the puissant bridals of the earth which gave birth to those dark growths, those colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hot-bed, of this forest expansion, of this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia full of intoxication. At her feet steamed the tank, the mass of tepid water thickened by the saps from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours; a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with concupiscence. Overhead she could smell the palm-trees whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat of the air, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours, above all, that overpowered her. An indescribable perfume, potent, provocative, composed of a thousand perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and swooningly faint were blended with zephyrs coarse, pestilential, laden with poison. But, amid this rare music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids’ stridency, was that penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, that smell of love escaping in the morning hour from the close chamber of a bridegroom and bride.

Renée sank back slowly, leaning against the granite pedestal. In her dress of green satin, her head and breast flushed and bedewed with the bright scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled a great flower, green and pink, one of the water-lilies from the tank, swooning with heat. In this moment of enlightenment, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of dinner returned to her head, arrogant, triumphant, redoubled in force by the flames of the hot-house. She thought no longer of the freshness of the night, that had calmed her, of the murmuring shadows of the gardens, whose voices had whispered in her ear the bliss of serenity. In her were aroused the senses of a woman who desires, the caprices of a woman who is satiated. And above her head, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mystic laugh, as if it had read the longing, formulated at last, that galvanized that dead heart, the fugitive longing, the “something different” vainly sought for by Renée in the rocking of her calash, in the fine ashes of the falling night, and now suddenly revealed to her beneath the dazzling light of this blazing garden by the sight of Maxime and Louise, laughing and playing, their hands interlocked.

Now a sound of voices issued from an adjacent arbour into which Aristide Saccard had led the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier.

“No, Monsieur Saccard,” said the latter’s fat voice, “we really cannot take that back at more than two hundred francs the metre.”

And Saccard’s shrill tones retorted:

“But in my share you valued each metre of frontage at two hundred and fifty francs.”

“Well, listen, we will make it two hundred and twenty-five francs.”

And the voices went on, coarse, sounding strangely under the clumps of drooping palm-trees. But they passed like an empty noise through Renée’s dream, as there rose before her, with the fatal summons experienced by one looking over a precipice, an unknown joyance, hot with crime, more violent than all those which she had already drained, the last that remained in her cup. She felt weary no longer.

The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascar tanghin-tree with broad box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. And at a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the yellow refraction, in the sunset of the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth parched and stung, took between her lips a sprig of the tanghin-tree which came to the level of her teeth, and closed them on one of its bitter leaves.

CHAPTER II

Aristide Rougon swept down upon Paris on the morrow of the 2 December, like a carrion bird that scents the field of battle from afar. He came from Plassans, a sous-préfecture in the south, where his father had at length, in the troubled waters of events, netted a long-coveted appointment as receiver of taxes. He himself, still young, had compromised himself like a fool, without fame or profit, and could consider himself fortunate to have emerged safe and sound from the scrimmage. He came with a rush, furious at having taken a false step, cursing the country, talking of Paris with the ravenous hunger of a wolf, swearing “that he would never be such an ass again;” and the bitter smile which accompanied these words assumed a terrible significance on his thin lips.

He arrived in the early days of 1852. He brought with him his wife Angèle, a fair-haired, insipid person, whom he installed in a cramped lodging in the Rue Saint-Jacques, like an inconvenient piece of furniture that he was eager to get out of the way. The young wife had refused to be separated from her daughter, little Clotilde, a child of four, whom the father would gladly have left behind in the care of his family. But he had only yielded to Angèle’s desire on the stipulation that the college at Plassans should remain the home of their son Maxime, a scapegrace of eleven, whom his grandmother had promised to look after. Aristide wanted to have his hands free: a wife and a child already seemed to him a crushing burden for a man decided to surmount every obstacle, not caring whether he got rolled in the mud or broke his back in the attempt.

On the very night of his arrival, while Angèle was unpacking the trunks, he felt a keen desire to explore Paris, to tread with his clodhopping shoes the burning stones from which he hoped to extract millions of money. He simply took possession of the city. He walked for the sake of walking, going along the pavements as though he were in a conquered country. He saw before him clearly the battle he had come to fight, and he felt no repugnance in comparing himself to a skilful picklock who was about, by ruse or violence to seize his share of the common wealth which so far had been malignantly denied him. Had he felt the need of an excuse, he would have invoked his desires, which had for ten years been stifled, his wretched provincial existence, and above all his mistakes, for which he held society at large responsible. But at this moment, amid this emotion of the gambler who at last places his eager hands on the green cloth, he felt nothing but joy, a joy all his own, in which were mingled the gratification of covetousness and the expectations of unpunished roguery. The Paris air intoxicated him; he thought he could hear in the rumbling of the carriages the voices from
Macbeth
calling to him: “Thou shalt be rich!” For close upon two hours he thus walked from street to street, tasting the delights of a man who gives play to his vices. He had not been back in Paris since the happy year which he had spent there as a student. The night fell: his dream grew in the bright light thrown on the pavement by the shops and cafes; he lost himself.

When he raised his eyes, he found he was in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the middle. One of his brothers, Eugène Rougon, lived in an adjacent street, the Rue Penthièvre. When coming to Paris, Aristide had reckoned particularly upon Eugène, who, after having been one of the most active participators in the Coup d’État, was now an occult force, a lawyer of small account about to develop into a politician of great importance. But with the superstition of a gambler, Aristide decided not to knock at his brother’s door that evening. He returned slowly to the Rue Saint-Jacques, thinking of Eugène with a dull feeling of jealousy, contemplating his shabby clothes still covered with the dust of the journey, and seeking consolation in the resumption of his dream of wealth. But even this dream had turned to bitterness. After starting out for the sake of expansion, and being exhilarated by the bustling activity of the Paris shops, he returned home irritated by the happiness that seemed to him to fill the streets, intensified his ferocity, picturing to himself relentless struggles in which he would take delight in beating and cheating the crowd that had jostled him on the pavement. Never had he known an appetite so vast, an eagerness so pressing for enjoyment.