Complete Works of Emile Zola (230 page)

“Let’s go away, they’re too stupid!”

As they were leaving, M. de Mussy entered. He seemed delighted to meet Maxime, and paying no attention to the masked woman he had with him:

“Ah, my friend,” he murmured with a love-sick air, “she will be the death of me. I know she is better, and she still forbids me her door. Do tell her you have seen me with tears in my eyes.”

“Be still, she shall have your message,” said the young man, with a curious laugh. And on the stairs:

“Well, stepmamma, hasn’t the poor fellow touched you?” She shrugged her shoulders without replying. Outside, on the pavement, she paused before getting into the cab, which had waited for them, and looked hesitatingly towards the Madeleine and towards the Boulevard des Italiens. It was barely half-past eleven, the boulevard was still very animated.

“So we are going home,” she murmured, regretfully.

“Unless you care to take a drive along the boulevards,” replied Maxime.

She agreed. Her feast of feminine curiosity was turning out badly, and she hated the idea of returning home with an illusion the less and an incipient headache. She had long imagined that an actresses’ ball was killingly funny. There seemed to be a return of Spring, as happens sometimes in the last days of October; the night had a May warmth, and the occasional cold breezes passing gave additional gaiety to the atmosphere. Renée, with her head at the window, remained silent, looking at the crowd, the cafés, the restaurants, whose interminable line scudded past. She had become quite serious, lost in the depths of those vague longings that fill the reveries of women. The wide pavement, swept by the street-walkers’ skirts, and ringing with peculiar familiarity under the men’s boots, the gray asphalt, over which it seemed to her that the gallop of pleasure and facile love was passing, awoke her slumbering desires, and made her forget the idiotic ball which she had left, to allow her a glimpse of other and more highly-flavoured joys. At the windows of the private rooms at Brébant’s, she perceived the shadows of women on the whiteness of the curtains. And Maxime told her a very improper story, of a husband who had thus detected, on a curtain, the shadow of his wife and the shadow of a lover in the act. She hardly listened to him. But he grew livelier, and ended by taking her hands and teasing her by talking of that poor M. de Mussy.

They turned back, and as they once more passed in front of Brébant’s:

“Do you know,” she said, suddenly, “that M. de Saffré asked me to supper this evening?”

“Oh! you would have fared badly,” he replied, laughing. “Saffré has not the slightest culinary imagination. He has not got beyond a lobster salad.”

“No, no, he spoke of oysters and of cold partridge…. But he addressed me in the second person singular, and that bothered me ….”

She stopped short, looked again at the boulevard, and added after a pause, with an air of distress:

“The worst of it is that I am awfully hungry.”

“What, you are hungry!” exclaimed the young man. “That’s very simple, we will go and have supper together…. What do you say?’’

He spoke quietly, but she refused at first, declaring that Céleste had put out something for her to eat at home. Meantime Maxime, who did not want to go to the Café Anglais, had stopped the cab at the corner of the Rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche; he even alighted, and as his stepmother still hesitated:

“As for that,” he said, “if you are afraid of my compromising you, say so…. I will get up beside the driver and take you back to your husband.”

She smiled, and alighted from the cab with the air of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The pavement which she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious sensation of fear and of gratified caprice quivering over her skin. Ever since the cab had been rolling on, she had had a mad longing to jump out upon the pavement. She crossed it with short steps, stealthily, as though she felt a keener pleasure from the fear that she might be seen. Her escapade was decidedly turning into an adventure. She certainly did not regret having refused M. de Saffré’s off-hand invitation. But she would have come home terribly cross if Maxime had not thought of letting her taste forbidden fruit. He ran upstairs quickly, as though at home. She followed him a little out of breath. Slight fumes of fish and game hung about, and the stair-carpet, secured to the steps with brass rods, had a smell of dust that increased her excitement.

As they reached the first landing, they met a dignified-looking waiter, who drew back to the wall to let them pass.

“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll wait on us, won’t you?… Give us the white room.”

Charles bowed, went up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was lowered, it seemed to Renée as if she was penetrating into the twilight of a dubious and charming resort.

A continuous rumbling came in through the wide-open window, and on the ceiling, in the reflection cast by the café below, the shadows of the people in the street passed swiftly by. But with a twist of his thumb the waiter turned on the gas. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, the room filled with a crude light that fell full upon Renée’s head. She had already thrown back her hood. The little curls had become slightly disarranged, but the blue ribbon had not stirred. She began to walk about, confused by the way in which Charles looked at her; he blinked his eyes and screwed up the lids in order to see her better in a way which plainly argued: “Here’s one I haven’t seen before.”

“What shall I serve, monsieur?” he asked aloud.

Maxime turned towards Renée.

“What do you say to M. de Saffré’s supper?” he asked. “Oysters, a partridge….”

And seeing the young man smile, Charles discreetly imitated him, murmuring:

“Wednesday’s supper, then, if that will suit?”

“Wednesday’s supper….” repeated Maxime.

Then, remembering:

“Yes, I don’t care, give us Wednesday’s supper.”

When the waiter had gone, Renée took her eye-glass, and went inquisitively round the room. It was a square room in white and gold, furnished with the coquetry of a boudoir. Besides the table and the chairs, there was a sort of low slab that served as a sideboard, and a broad divan, a veritable bed, which stood between the window and the fireplace. A Louis XVI clock and candlesticks adorned the white marble mantel. But the curiosity of the room was the mirror, a handsome long-shaped mirror, which had been scrawled over by the ladies’ diamonds with names, dates, doggrel verses, prodigious sentiments and astounding avowals. Renée thought she caught sight of something beastly, and lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, experiencing fresh embarrassment, and at last, to give herself countenance, began gazing at the ceiling and the copper-gilt chandelier with its five jets. But the uneasiness she felt was delicious. While she raised her forehead as if to examine the cornice, seriously, and with her eye-glass in her hand, she derived profound enjoyment from this equivocal furniture which she felt about her; from that limpid, cynical mirror whose pure surface, barely wrinkled by those filthy scrawls, had helped in the adjusting of so many false chignons; from that divan whose breadth shocked her; from the table and the very carpet, in which she found the same smell as on the stairs, a subtle, penetrating, and almost religious odour of dust.

Then, when she was driven at last to lower her eyes.

“What is this supper of Wednesday?” she asked of Maxime.

“Nothing,” he replied. “A bet one of my friends lost.”

In any other place he would have told her without hesitation that he had supped on Wednesday with a lady he had met on the boulevard. But since entering the private room, he had instinctively treated her as a woman whose good graces one seeks to obtain and whose jealousy must be spared. She did not insist; she went and leant on the rail of the window, where he joined her. Behind them Charles came and went, with a sound of crockery and plate.

It was not yet midnight. On the boulevard below, Paris was growling, prolonging its ardent day, before deciding to go to bed. The rows of trees separated with a confused line the whiteness of the pavement from the uncertain darkness of the roadway, on which passed the rumble and the fleeting lamps of the carriages. On either edge of this dark belt, the newsvendors’ kiosks shed their light from spot to spot, like great Venetian lanterns, tall and fantastically variegated, set on the ground at regular intervals for some colossal illumination. But at this time their subdued brilliancy was lost in the flare of the neighbouring shop-fronts. Not a shutter was up, the pavement stretched out without a line of shadow, under a shower of rays that lighted it with a golden dust, with the warm and resplendent glare of daylight. Maxime showed Renée the Café Anglais, whose windows shone out in front of them. The lofty branches of the trees interfered with them a little, however, when they tried to see the houses and pavement opposite. They leant over, and looked below them. There was a continual coming and going; men walked past in groups, prostitutes in couples dragged their skirts, which they raised from time to time with a languid movement, casting weary, smiling glances around them. Right under the window, the tables of the Café Riche were spread out in the blaze of the gas-lamps, whose brilliancy extended half across the roadway; and it was especially in the centre of this burning focus that they saw the pallid faces and pale smiles of the passers-by. Around the little tables were men and women mingled together, drinking. The girls were in showy dresses, their hair dressed low down in their necks; they lounged about on chairs and made loud remarks, which the clatter prevented one from hearing. Renée noticed one in particular, sitting alone at a table, dressed in a bright-blue costume, garnished with white guipure; thrown back in her chair, she finished, sip by sip, a glass of beer, her hands on her stomach, a heavy and resigned expectant look on her face. The women on foot disappeared slowly among the crowd, and Renée, who was interested in them, followed them, gazing from one end of the boulevard to the other, into the noisy, confused depths of the avenue, full of the black swarm of pedestrians, where the lights became mere sparks. And the endless procession, a crowd strangely mixed and always alike, passed by with tiring regularity in the midst of the bright colours and patches of darkness, in the fairy-like confusion of the thousand leaping flames that swept like waves from the shops, lending colour to the transparencies of the windows and the kiosks, running along the pavements in fillets, letters and designs of fire, piercing the darkness with stars, gliding unceasingly along the roadway. The deafening noise that rose on high had a clamour, a prolonged monotonous rumbling, like an organ-note accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. Renée at one moment thought an accident had taken place. A stream of people moved on the left, a little beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. But, taking her eye-glass, she recognized the omnibus-office. There was a crowd of people on the pavement, standing waiting, and rushing forward as soon as an omnibus arrived. She heard the rough voice of the ticket-examiner calling out the numbers, and then the tinkle of the registering bell reached her with a crystal ringing. Her eyes lighted upon the advertisements on a kiosk, glaringly coloured like Épinal prints; on a pane of glass, in a green-and-yellow frame, there was the head of a grinning devil with hair on end, a hatter’s advertisement, which she failed to understand. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed, with its red lamps and yellow sides, turning the corner of the Rue le Peletier, shaking the house with its din, and she saw the men on the knife-board raise tired faces and look at them, Maxime and her, with the curious glance of famished people peering through a keyhole.

“Ah!” she said. “The Parc Monceau is fast asleep by this time.”

It was the only remark she made. They stayed there for nearly twenty minutes in silence, surrendering themselves to the intoxication of the noise and light. Then, the table being laid, they went and sat down, and as she seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime dismissed him.

“Leave us…. I will ring for dessert.”

Renée’s cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled; one would think she had just been running. She brought from the window a little of the din and animation of the boulevard. She would not let her companion close the window.

“Why, it’s the orchestra!” she said, when he complained of the noise. “Don’t you think it a funny sort of music? It will make a fine accompaniment to our oysters and partridge.”

The escapade gave youth to her thirty years. She had quick movements and a touch of fever, and this private room, this supping alone with a young man amid the uproar of the street excited her, gave her the look of a fast woman. She attacked the oysters resolutely. Maxime was not hungry; he watched her bolt her food with a smile.

“The devil!” he murmured. “You would have made a good supper-girl.”

She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.

“Do I look hungry? What can you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that exhausted me…. Ah, my poor friend, I pity you for living in a world like that!”

“You know very well,” he said, “that I have promised to give up Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny on the day your friends consent to come to supper with me.”

She made a haughty gesture.

“I should rather think so! We are rather more amusing than those women, you must confess…. If one of us were to bore her lover as your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore all of you, why the poor little woman would not keep her lover a week!… You never will listen to me. Just try it, one of these days.”

Maxime, to avoid summoning the waiter, rose, removed the oysters, and brought the partridge which was on the slab. The table had the luxurious look of the first-class restaurants. A breath of adorable debauchery passed over the damask cloth, and Renée experienced little thrills of contentment as she let her slender hands stroll from her fork to her knife, from her plate to her glass. She, who usually drank water barely tinged with claret, now drank white wine neat. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, and waiting on her with comical obsequiousness, resumed: