Complete Works of Emile Zola (227 page)

The everlasting whirlwind that swept through the apartment in the Rue de Rivoli and made its doors slam to and fro blew stronger in the measure that Maxime grew up, that Saccard enlarged the sphere of his operations, and that Renée threw more fever into her search for an unknown joy. These three beings ended by leading an astonishing existence of liberty and folly. It was the ripe and prodigious fruit of an epoch. The street invaded the apartment with its rumbling of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its license of language. The father, the step-mother and the step-son acted, talked and made themselves at home as though each of them had found himself leading a bachelor life alone. Three boon companions, three students sharing the same furnished room, could not have made use of that room with less reserve for the installation of their vices, their loves, their noisy, adolescent gaiety. They accepted one another with a hand-shake, never seeming to suspect the reasons that united them under one roof, treating each other cavalierly, joyously, and thus assuming each the most entire independence. The family idea was replaced with them by a sort of partnership whose profits are divided in equal shares; each one drew his part of the pleasure to himself, and it was tacitly agreed that each should dispose of that part as best seemed to him. They went so far as to take their enjoyment in each other’s presence, displaying it, describing it, without awakening any feeling but a little envy and curiosity.

Maxime now instructed Renée. When he went to the Bois with her, he told her stories about the fast women which entertained her vastly. A new woman could not appear by the lake, but he would lay himself out to ascertain the name of her lover, the allowance he made her, the style in which she lived. He knew these ladies’ homes, and was acquainted with intimate details; he was a real living catalogue in which all the prostitutes in Paris were numbered, with a very complete description of each of them. This gazette of scandal was Renée’s delight. On race-days, at Longchamps, when she drove by in her calash, she listened eagerly, albeit retaining the haughtiness of a woman of the real world, to how Blanche Muller deceived her attaché with a hair-dresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his drawers in the alcove of a skinny red-haired celebrity who was nicknamed the Crayfish. Each day brought its tittle-tattle. When the story was rather too warm, Maxime lowered his voice, but told it to the end. Renée opened wide her eyes, like a child to whom a funny trick is being told, restrained her laughter, and then stifled it in her embroidered handkerchief, which she pressed daintily upon her lips.

Maxime also brought these ladies’ photographs. He had actresses’ photographs in all his pockets, and even in his cigar-case. From time to time he cleared them out and placed these ladies in the album that lay about on the furniture in the drawing-room, and that already contained the photographs of Renée’s friends. There were men’s photographs there too, MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, de Mussy, as well as actors, writers, deputies, who had come to swell the collection nobody knew how. A strangely mixed society, a symbol of the jumble of persons and ideas that crossed Renée’s and Maxime’s lives. Whenever it rained or they felt bored, this album was the great subject of conversation. It always ended by falling under one’s hand. Renée opened it with a yawn, for the hundredth time perhaps. Then her curiosity would reawaken, and the young man came and leant behind her. And then followed long discussions about the Crayfish’s hair, Madame de Meinhold’s double chin, Madame de Lauwerens’ eyes, and Blanche Muller’s bust; about the marquise’s nose, which was a little on one side, and little Sylvia’s mouth, which was renowned for the thickness of its lips. They compared the women with one another.

“If I were a man,” said Renée, “I would choose Adeline.”

“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” replied Maxime. “She is so quaint!… I must say I prefer Sylvia.”

The pages were turned over; sometimes the Duc de Rozan appeared, or Mr. Simpson, or the Comte de Chibray, and he added, jeering at her:

“Besides, your taste is perverted, everybody knows that…. Can anything more stupid be imagined than the faces of those men! Rozan and Chibray are both like Gustave, my hairdresser.”

Renée shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that she was beyond the reach of sarcasm. She again forgot herself in the contemplation of the pallid, smiling, or cross-grained faces contained in the album; she lingered longest over the portraits of the fast women, studying with curiosity the exact microscopic details of the photographs, the minute wrinkles, the tiny hairs. One day even she sent for a strong magnifying-glass, fancying she had perceived a hair on the Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the glass did reveal a thin golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose. This hair diverted them, for a long time. For a week long the ladies who called were made to assure themselves in person of the presence of this hair. Thenceforward the magnifying-glass served to pick the women’s faces to pieces. Renée made astonishing discoveries: she found unknown wrinkles, coarse skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder, until Maxime finally hid the glass, declaring that it was not right to disgust one’s self like that with the human countenance. The truth was that she scrutinized too rigorously the thick lips of Sylvia, for whom he cherished a particular fondness. They invented a new game. They asked this question: “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and they opened the album which was to supply for the answer. This brought about some very joyous couplings. The friends played this game for several evenings. Renée was in this way married successively to the Archbishop of Paris, to the Baron Gouraud, to M. de Chibray, which caused much laughter, and to her husband himself, which distressed her mightily. As to Maxime, either by chance, or through the mischievousness of Renée, who opened the album, he always fell to the marquise. But they never laughed so much as when fate coupled two men or two women together.

The familiarity between Renée and Maxime went so far that she told him the sorrows of her heart. He consoled and advised her. His father did not seem to exist. Then they came to confide in one another about their childhood. It was especially during their drives in the Bois that they felt a vague languor, a longing to tell one another things that are difficult to say, that are never told. The delight that children take in whispering about forbidden things, the fascination that exists for a young man and a young woman in lowering themselves to sin, if only in words, brought them back unceasingly to suggestive topics. They there partook deeply of a voluptuousness in which they felt no self-reproaching, and in which they revelled, lazily reclining in the two corners of the carriage like two old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. They ended by becoming braggarts of immorality. Renée confessed that the little girls at the boarding-school were very smutty. Maxime went further and had the courage to relate some of the infamy of the college at Plassans.

“Ah! I can’t tell you,” murmured Renée.

Then she bent towards his ear as if the sound of her voice alone would have made her blush, and she confided to him one of those convent stories that are spun out in lewd songs. He had too rich a collection of similar anecdotes to be left behindhand. He hummed some very bawdy couplets in her ear. And little by little they entered upon a peculiar state of beatitude, rocked by the carnal ideas they stirred up, tickled by little undefined desires. The carriage rolled gently on, and they returned home deliriously fatigued, more exhausted than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned like two young men who, wandering down country lanes without mistresses, content themselves with an interchange of reminiscences.

A still greater familiarity and license existed between father and son. Saccard had realized that a great financier must love women and commit extravagances for them. He was a rough lover, and preferred money; but it formed part of his programme to frequent alcoves, to scatter bank-notes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to affix some noted strumpet as a sign-board to his speculations. When Maxime had left school they used to meet in the same women’s rooms and laugh over it. They were even rivals in a measure. Occasionally when the young man was dining at the “Maison d’Or” with some boisterous crew he heard Saccard’s voice in an adjacent private room.

“I say! papa’s next door!” he cried, with the grimace which he borrowed from the popular actors.

He went and knocked at the door of the private room, curious to see his father’s conquest.

“Ah! it’s you,” said the latter, jovially. “Come in. You make so much noise that a man can’t hear himself eat. Who are you with?”

“Why, there’s Laure d’Aurigny, and Sylvia, and the Crayfish, and two more besides, I believe. They are wonderful: they dig their fingers into the dishes, and chuck handfuls of salad at our heads. My coat is covered with oil.”

The father laughed, thinking this very amusing.

“Ah! young folk, young folk,” he murmured. “That’s not like us, is it, pet? We’ve had a nice quiet dinner, and now we’re going to by-by.”

And he took the woman by his side by the chin, and cooed with his Provençal snuffle, producing a queer sort of love music.

“Oh! the old cully!”… cried the woman. “How are you, Maxime? Musn’t I be fond of you, eh! to consent to sup with your scapegrace of a father…. I never see you now. Come the day after to-morrow, in the morning, early…. No, really, I have something to tell you.”

Saccard finished an ice or a fruit, taking small mouthfuls, blissfully. He kissed the woman on the shoulder, saying jestingly:

“You know, my loves, if I’m in the way I’ll go out…. You can ring when I may come in again.”

Then he carried the lady off, or sometimes went with her and joined in the noise of the next room. Maxime and he shared the same shoulders; their hands met around the same waists. They called to one another on the sofas, and repeated to one another aloud the confidences the women had whispered in their ears. And they carried their intimacy to the pitch of plotting together to carry off from the company the blonde or the brunette whom one of them had selected.

They were well known at Mabille. They went there arm in arm, after a good dinner, strolling round the garden, nodding to the women, tossing them a remark as they went by. They laughed out loud, without unlocking their arms, and came to one another’s aid if necessary whenever the conversation became too lively. The father, who was very strong on this point, negotiated his son’s love-affairs advantageously. At times they sat down and drank with a party of girls. Then they changed their table, or resumed their stroll. And till midnight they were seen, their arms always linked in their intimacy, following the petticoats along the yellow pathways, under the glaring flame of the gas-jets.

When they returned home they brought with them from outside, in their coats, a something of the women they had been with. Their jaunty attitudes, the tags of certain suggestive phrases and certain vulgar gestures filled the flat in the Rue de Rivoli with the fragrance of an equivocal alcove. The easy, wanton way in which the father shook hands with his son was enough to proclaim whence they came. It was in this atmosphere that Renée inhaled her sensual caprices and longings. She chaffed them nervously.

“Where on earth do you come from?” she asked them. “You smell of musk and tobacco…. I know I shall have a headache.”

And the strange aroma did in fact perturb her profoundly. It was the persistent perfume of that singular household.

Meantime Maxime was smitten with a violent passion for little Sylvia. He bored his step-mother with this girl for several months. Renée soon knew her from one end to the other, from the sole of her feet to the crown of her head. She had a blue mark on her hip; nothing was sweeter than her knees; her shoulders had this peculiarity that the left alone was dimpled. Maxime took a malicious pleasure in filling their drives with his mistress’s perfections. One evening, on returning from the Bois, Renée’s carriage and Sylvia’s, caught in a block, had to draw up side by side in the Champs-Élysées. The two women eyed one another with keen curiosity, while Maxime, enchanted with this critical situation, tittered under his breath. When the calash began to roll on again, his step-mother preserved a gloomy silence; he thought she was sulking, and expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those strange lectures, with which she still occasionally filled up her moments of lassitude.

“Do you know that person’s jewellers?” she asked him suddenly, at the moment they reached the Place de la Concorde.

“Yes, alas!” he replied with a smile; “I owe him ten thousand francs…. Why do you ask me?”

“For nothing.”

Then, after a fresh pause:

“She had a very pretty bracelet, the one on the left wrist…. I should have liked to see it closer.”

They reached home. She said no more on the matter. Only, the next day, just as Maxime and his father were going out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in an undertone, with an air of embarrassment, and a pretty smile which pleaded for pardon. He seemed surprised and went off, laughing his wicked laugh. In the evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet, which his step-mother had begged him to show her.

“There’s what you want,” he said. “One would turn thief for your sake, step-mother.”

“She didn’t see you take it?” asked Renée, who was greedily examining the bracelet.

“I don’t think so…. She wore it yesterday, she certainly would not want to wear it to-day.”

Meantime Renée approached the window. She put on the bracelet. She raised her wrist a little and turned it round, enraptured, repeating:

“Oh! very pretty, very pretty…. I like everything immensely, except the emeralds.”

At that moment Saccard entered, and as she was still holding up her wrist in the white light of the window:

“Hullo!” he cried in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”

“Do you know this piece of jewellery?” she said, more embarrassed than he, not knowing what to do with her arm.