Complete Works of Emile Zola (226 page)

Before long, turning over money by the shovelful, he had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and one of them, in fact, a vast enclosure of planks from which a magnificent house was to arise, had not got further than the flooring of the first story. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to his fingers’ ends, so many interests to watch over and puppets to work, that he slept barely three hours a night, and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous part was that his coffers seemed inexhaustible. He held shares in every company, built houses with a sort of mania, turned to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, and yet he was never seen to realize a genuine clear profit, to pocket a big sum of gold shining in the sun. This flood of gold with no known source, which seemed to flow from his office in rapidly-recurring waves, astonished the cockneys and made of him, at one moment, the prominent figure to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms that came from the Bourse.

With such a husband Renée was as little married as she could be. She remained entire weeks almost without seeing him. For the rest he was perfect: he opened his cash-box quite wide for her. At bottom she liked him as she would have liked an obliging banker. When she visited the Hotel Béraud, she praised him highly before her father, whose cold austerity was in no way changed by his son-in-law’s good-fortune. Her contempt had disappeared; this man seemed so convinced that life is a mere business, he was so obviously born to coin money with whatever fell into his hands: women, children, paving-stones, sacks of plaster, consciences, that she was no longer able to reproach him for their marriage-bargain. Since that bargain he looked upon her in a measure as upon one of those fine houses which did him credit and which would, he hoped, yield him a large profit. He liked to see her well-dressed, noisy, attracting the attention of all Paris. That consolidated his position, doubled the probable figure of his fortune. He seemed handsome, young, amorous and giddy because of his wife. She was his partner, his unconscious accomplice. A new pair of horses, a two-thousand-crown dress, a surrender to some lover facilitated and often ensured the success of his most remunerative transactions. Also he often pretended to be tired out and sent her to a minister, to some functionary or other, to solicit an authorization or receive a reply. He said to her: “And be good!” in a tone all his own, bantering and coaxing in one. And when she returned, successful, he rubbed his hands, repeating his famous, “I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too active to desire a Madame Michelin. Only he loved coarse pleasantries and improper hypotheses. For the rest, had Renée not “been good,” he would have experienced only the mortification of having really paid for the minister’s or functionary’s complaisance. To dupe people, to give them less than their money’s worth, was his delight. He often said: “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods: that is too foolish.”

This madcap of a Renée, who had shot one night into the Parisian firmament as the eccentric fairy of fashionable voluptuousness, was the most complex of women. Had she been brought up at home, she would doubtless by the aid of religion or some other nervous satisfaction have blunted the edge of the desire whose pricks at times maddened her. Her mind was of the middle-class: she was absolutely straightforward, loved logical views, feared Heaven and Hell, and was crammed with prejudice; she was the daughter of her father, of that placid, prudent race among which flourish the virtues of the fireside. And in this nature there sprouted and grew her prodigious fantasies, her ever reviving curiosity, her unspeakable longings. Among the ladies of the Visitation, free, her mind roaming amid the mystic voluptuousness of the chapel and the carnal attachments of her little friends, she had framed for herself a fantastic education, learning vice, throwing the frankness of her nature into it, and disordering her brain to the extent of singularly embarrassing her confessor by telling him that one day at mass she had experienced an irrational desire to get up and kiss him. Then she struck her breast, and turned pale at the thought of the Devil and his caldrons. The fault which later brought on her marriage with Saccard, the brutal rape which she underwent with a sort of frightened expectation, made her despise herself, and accounted in a great measure for the subsequent abandonment of her whole life. She thought that she need no longer struggle against evil, that it was in her, that logic authorized her to pursue the study of wickedness to the end. She had still more curiosity than appetite. Thrown into the world of the Second Empire, abandoned to her imagination, kept in money, encouraged in her loudest eccentricities, she gave herself, then regretted it, and finally succeeded in killing her expiring good principles, for ever lashed, for ever pushed onwards by her insatiable desire for knowledge and sensation.

For the rest she had as yet turned only the first page of the book of vice. She was fond of talking in a low tone, and laughing, about the extraordinary cases of the tender friendship of Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, of the ticklish trade of Madame de Lauwerens, and of the Comtesse Vanska’s tariffed kisses; but she still looked upon these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them, perhaps; and this indefinite longing that arose within her at evil hours still further increased her turbulent anxiety, her mad search after an unique, exquisite enjoyment of which she alone should partake. Her first lovers had not spoilt her; three times she had thought herself seized with a grand passion; love burst in her head like a cracker whose sparks failed to reach the heart. She went mad for a month, exhibiting herself with her heart’s lord all over Paris; and then one morning, amid all the racket of her amorousness, she became conscious of a crushing silence, an immense void. The first, the young Duc de Rozan, was a feast of sunshine that led to nothing; Renée, who had noticed him for his gentleness and his excellent manner, found him absolutely shallow, colourless and tedious when they were alone together. Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American Legation, who came next, all but beat her, and thanks to this remained with her for more than a year. Then she took up the Comte de Chibray, one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp, an absurdly vain, good-looking man who was beginning to hang terribly on her hands when the Duchesse de Sternich took it into her head to become enamoured of him and to take him away from her; whereupon she wept for him and gave her friends to understand that her heart was bruised, and that she should never be in love again. And thus she drifted towards M. de Mussy, the most insignificant creature in the world, a young man who was making his way in diplomacy by leading cotillons with especial grace; she never knew exactly how she had come to give herself to him, and she kept him a long time, a prey to idleness, disgusted with the unknown that is explored in an hour, and deferring the trouble of a change until she met with some extraordinary adventure. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Her boredom appeared to her all the more insupportable as her homely virtues took advantage of the hours when she was bored to complain and to disquiet her. She bolted her door, she had horrible headaches. And then, when she opened the door again, it was a flood of silk and lace that surged through it with a great noise, a luxurious, joyous being with no care nor blush upon her brow.

Yet she had had a romance amid the fashionable commonplace of her life. One day, when she had gone out on foot to see her father, who disliked the noise of carriages at his door, she perceived, as she was walking back in the twilight along the Quai Saint-Paul, that she was being followed by a young man. It was warm; and the daylight was waning with amorous gentleness. She, who was never followed except on horseback in the lanes of the Bois, thought the adventure piquant, she felt flattered by it as by a new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very coarseness appealed to her. Instead of returning home, she turned down the Rue du Temple, and walked her admirer along the boulevards. The man, however, grew bolder and became so persistent that Renée, a little dismayed, lost her head, followed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, and took refuge in the shop of her husband’s sister. The man came in after her. Mme. Sidonie smiled, seemed to understand, and left them alone. And when Renée made as if to follow her, the stranger held her back, addressed her with respectful fervour, and won her forgiveness. He was a clerk, he was called Georges, and she never asked him his surname. She came twice to see him; she came in through the shop, and he by the Rue Papillon. This chance love affair, picked up and accepted in the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame, but with a singular smile of regret. Mme. Sidonie profited by the adventure in that she at last became the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a part to which she had been aspiring since the day of the wedding.

That poor Madame Sidonie had experienced a disappointment. While intriguing for the match she had expected to marry Renée a little herself, to make her one of her customers and derive a heap of profits from her. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horseflesh. And so her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to settle down, she perceived Mme. de Lauwerens enthroned in the centre of the drawing-room, and realized that she was already too late. Mme. de Lauwerens, a fine woman of six-and-twenty, made a business of launching new arrivals. She came of a very old family, and was married to a man in the higher financial world, who had the bad taste to refuse to pay her tailor’s and milliner’s bills. The lady, a very intelligent person, made money and kept herself. She loathed men, she said, but she supplied all her friends with them; there was always a full array of customers in the apartment which she occupied in the Rue de Provence over her husband’s offices. You always found a snack there. You met your friends there in an unpremeditated and charming fashion. There was no harm in a young girl’s going to see her dear Mme. de Lauwerens, and if chance brought men there who were, at all events, respectful, and moved in the best set — so much the worse. The hostess was adorable in her long lace tea-gowns. Many a visitor would have chosen her in preference to her collection of blondes and brunettes. But rumour asserted that she was absolutely good. The whole secret of the affair lay there. She kept up her high position in society, had all the men for her friends, retained her pride as a virtuous woman, and derived a secret enjoyment from bringing others down and profiting by their fall. When Mme. Sidonie had enlightened herself as to the mechanism of the new invention, she was thunderstruck. It was the classical school, the woman in the old black dress carrying love-letters at the bottom of her basket, brought face to face with the modern, the lady of quality, who sells her friends in her boudoir while sipping a cup of tea. The modern school triumphed. Mme. Lauwerens looked coldly upon the shabby attire of Mme. Sidonie, in whom she scented a rival. And it was she who provided Renée with her first bore, the young Duc de Rozan, whom the fair financier had found much difficulty in disposing of. The classical school did not win the day till later on, when Mme. Sidonie lent her entresol to her sister-in-law so that she might gratify her caprice for the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained her confidante.

But one of Mme. Sidonie’s faithful friends was Maxime. From his fifteenth year, he had been in the habit of prowling around at his aunt’s, sniffing at the gloves that he found lying forgotten on the furniture. She who hated clear situations and never owned up to her little complacencies, ended by lending him the keys of her apartments on certain days, saying that she was going to stay in the country till the next day. Maxime talked of some friends whom he wanted to entertain, and whom he dared not ask to his father’s house. It was in the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl who had to be sent to the country. Mme. Sidonie borrowed her nephew’s money, and went into ecstasies before him, murmuring in her soft voice that he was “smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Maxime meantime had grown. He was now a nice-looking, slender young man, who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that “girl look” that so enchanted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with her soft expression and blonde paleness. But he was not even the equal of that indolent, shallow woman. The race of the Rougons became refined in him, grew delicate and vicious. Born of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and, so to say, scattered mixture of his father’s furious appetites and his mother’s self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental shortcomings were fulfilled and aggravated. This family lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in suspense; he represented, not a greedy eagerness for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a mean nature devouring ready-made fortunes, a strange hermaphrodite making its entrance at the right moment in a society that was growing rotten. When Maxime rode in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman, lightly dancing in the saddle, in which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of that age, with his swelling haunches, his long, slender hands, his sickly, lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his comic-opera slang. He was twenty years old, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most unheard-of filth. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth. It waved over his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, dressed him in his clothes. But his special characteristic was his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, coquette’s mirrors, behind which one perceived all the emptiness of the brain. Those harlot’s eyes were never lowered: they roamed in quest of pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue, which one summons and receives.