Complete Works of Emile Zola (235 page)

An adjoining closet, a spacious chamber hung with antique chintz, was simply furnished on every side with tall rosewood wardrobes, containing an army of dresses. Céleste, always methodical, arranged the dresses according to their dates, labelled them, introduced arithmetic amid her mistress’s blue and yellow caprices, and kept this closet as reposeful as a sacristy and as clean as a stable. There was no furniture in the room; not a rag lay about. The wardrobe-doors shone cold and clean like the varnished panels of a brougham.

But the wonder of the apartment, the room that was the talk of Paris, was the dressing-room. One said: “The beautiful Madame Saccard’s dressing-room,” as one says: “The Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles.” This room was situated in one of the towers, just above the little buttercup drawing-room. On entering, one was reminded of a large circular tent, an enchanted tent, pitched in a dream by some love-lorn Amazon. In the centre of the ceiling a crown of chased silver upheld the drapery of the tent, which ran, with a curve, to the walls, whence it fell straight down to the floor. This drapery, these rich hangings, consisted of pink silk covered with very thin muslin, plaited in wide folds at regular intervals. A band of lace separated the folds, and fillets of wrought silver ran down from the crown and glided down the hangings along either edge of each of the bands. The pink and gray of the bedroom grew brighter here, became a pink and white, like naked flesh. And under this bower of lace, under these curtains that hid all the ceiling save a pale blue cavity inside the narrow circlet of the crown, where Chaplin had painted a wanton Cupid looking down and preparing his dart, one would have thought one’s self at the bottom of a comfit-box, or in some precious jewel-case enlarged as though to display a woman’s nudity instead of the brilliancy of a diamond. The carpet, white as snow, stretched out without the least pattern or flower. The furniture consisted of a cupboard with plate-glass doors, whose two panels were inlaid with silver; a long-chair, two ottomans, some white satin stools; and a great toilet-table with a pink marble slab and legs hidden under flounces of muslin and lace. The glasses on the toilet-table, the bottles, the basin were of antique Bohemian crystal, streaked pink and white. And there was yet another table, inlaid with silver like the looking-glass cupboard, on which all the paraphernalia and toilet utensils were laid out, like the contents of a fantastic surgeon’s case, displaying a large number of little instruments of puzzling purpose, back-scratchers, nail-polishers, files of every shape and dimension, straight scissors and curved, every species of tweezer and pin. Each one of these articles of silver and ivory was marked with Renée’s monogram.

But the dressing-room had a delightful corner, which corner in particular made it famous. In front of the window the folds of the tent parted and disclosed, in a kind of long, shallow alcove, a bath, a tank of pink marble sunk into the floor, with sides fluted like those of a large shell and rising to a level with the carpet. Marble steps led down into the bath. Above the silver taps, shaped like swans’ necks, the back of the alcove was filled with a Venetian mirror, frameless, with curved edges, and a ground design on the crystal. Every morning Renée took a bath that lasted some minutes. This bath filled the dressing-room for the whole day with moisture, with a fragrance of fresh, wet flesh. Sometimes an unstoppered scent-bottle, a cake of soap left out of its dish, struck a more violent note in this somewhat insipid languor. Renée was fond of staying there till mid-day, almost naked. The round tent for its part was naked also. The pink bath, the pink slabs and basins, the muslin of the walls and ceiling, under which a pink blood seemed to course, acquired the curves of flesh, the curves of shoulders and breasts; and, according to the time of day, one would have thought of the snowy skin of a child or the hot skin of a woman. It was a vast nudity. When Renée left her bath, her fair-complexioned body added but a little more pink to all the pink flesh of the room.

It was Maxime who undressed Renée. He understood that sort of thing, and his quick hands divined pins and glided round her waist with innate science. He undid her hair, took off her diamonds, dressed her hair for the night. He added jests and caresses to the performance of his duties as lady’s-maid and hairdresser, and Renée laughed, with a broad stifled laugh, while the silk of her bodice cracked and her petticoats were loosened one by one. When she saw herself naked, she blew out the tapers of the candlestick, caught Maxime round the body, and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication. In her fever she was conscious of the previous day spent by the fireside, of that day of ardent stupor, of vague and smiling dreams. She still heard the harsh voice of Saccard and Madame Sidonie talking, calling out figures through their noses like lawyers. Those were the people who overwhelmed her, who drove her to crime. And even now, when she sought his lips in the depths of the vast, dark bed, she still saw Maxime’s image in the firelight of yesterday, looking at her with eyes that scorched her.

The young man did not leave her till six in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceau, and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawing-room by a servants’ staircase hidden in the wall, which connected all the rooms in the tower. From the drawing-room it was easy to pass into the conservatory and reach the gardens.

On going out at daylight in a thick fog, Maxime was a little bewildered by his adventure. He accepted it, however, with the epicene complacency that formed part of his being.

“So much the worse!” he thought. “It’s she who wishes it after all…. She is deucedly well made; and she was right, she is twice as jolly in bed as Sylvia.”

They had drifted towards incest since the day when Maxime, in his threadbare schoolboy tunic, had hung on Renée’s neck, creasing her French-guard’s coat. From that time forward there had been a long and constant perversion between them. The strange education the young woman gave the child; the familiarities that made boon companions of them; later on, the laughing audacity of their confidences; all this dangerous promiscuity had ended by linking them together by a singular bond, in which the delights of friendship came near to carnal indulgence. They had given themselves to one another for years; the animal act was but the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of passion. In the maddened world in which they lived, their sin had sprouted as on a dunghill oozing with equivocal juices; it had developed with strange refinements amid special conditions of debauch.

When the great calash carried them to the Bois and rolled them softly along the drives, their whispering of obscenities into each other’s ears, their searching to recall the spontaneous dirty practices of their childhood, was but a digression by the way and a tacit gratification of their passions. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as though they had just slightly touched one another; and even this first sin, this languor born of filthy conversations, though it wearied them with a voluptuous fatigue, tickled them yet more sweetly than plain, positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus the slow progress of two lovers, and was inevitably bound to lead them one day to the private room in the Café Riche and to Renée’s great pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have thought them two old lovers, whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had lost so many hours what time their whole beings had been in contact, that in spite of themselves they talked of that past which was full of their unconscious love.

“Do you remember, the day I came to Paris,” said Maxime, “what a funny dress you wore? and I drew an angle on your chest with my finger and advised you to cut down the bodice in a point…. I felt your skin under your shirt, and my finger went in a little…. It was very nice….”

Renée laughed, kissed him and murmured:

“You were nice and vicious already…. How you amused us at Worms’s, do you remember? We used to call you ‘our little toy man.’ I always believed that the fat Suzanne would have let you do anything you liked, if the marquise had not watched her with such furious eyes.”

“Ah, yes, we had some good laughs….” murmured Maxime. “The photograph album, what? and all the rest, our drives through Paris, our feeds at the pastry-cook’s on the boulevard; you know, those little strawberry-tarts you were so fond of?… I shall never forget the afternoon when you told me the story of Adeline at the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed herself ‘Arthur d’Espanet’ like a man, and proposed to elope with her….”

The lovers grew merry again over this anecdote; and then Maxime continued in his coaxing voice:

“When you came to fetch me from school in your carriage, how funny we must have looked, you and I…. I used to disappear under your skirts, I was so little.”

“Yes, yes,” she stammered, quivering, and drawing Maxime towards her, “it was very delightful, as you say…. We loved one another without knowing it, did we not? I knew it before you did. The other day, driving back from the Bois, I just touched your leg, and I gave a start…. But you didn’t notice anything. Eh? you were not thinking of me?”

“Oh yes,” he replied, somewhat embarrassed. “Only I did not know, you see…. I did not dare.”

He lied. The idea of possessing Renée had never clearly come to him. He had covered her with all his viciousness, without really desiring her. He was too feeble for such an effort. He accepted Renée because she forced herself upon him, and he had drifted into her bed without willing or foreseeing it. When he had once rolled there, he remained because it was warm, and because he habitually lingered at the bottom of every pit he fell into. At the commencement he even felt the satisfaction of egotism. She was the first married woman he had had. He did not reflect that the husband was his father.

But Renée brought into her sin all the ardour of a heart that has lost caste. She too had glided down the slope. Only she had not rolled to the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Lust had been kindled within her when it was too late to combat it, and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly opened up before her as a necessary consequence of her weariness, as a rare and supreme enjoyment which alone was able to rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumn drive in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her like a titillation that sent an unknown thrill over her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, lashed by jealousy, this idea became more defined, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she stood before Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved for sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that was to fill her empty existence and bring her at last to that hell of which she was still afraid, as in the days when she was a little girl. Then, the next day, through a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude, her craving had left her. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it was not so pleasant as she had fancied, and that it would really be too disgusting. The crisis was bound to be a fatal one, to come of itself, without the help of these two beings, these comrades who were destined to deceive themselves one fine evening, to unite in a sexual embrace when they imagined they were shaking hands. But after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime back to her arms, curious about him, curious as to the cruel delights of a passion which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, demanded it, resolved to taste it to the end, even to remorse, should that ever come. She was active and cognizant. She loved with the transports of a woman of fashion, with the restless prejudices of a woman of the middle class, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman drowning herself in self-disdain.

Maxime returned every night. He came through the garden at about one o’clock. Oftenest Renée would wait for him in the conservatory, which he must cross to reach the small drawing-room. For the rest they were absolutely shameless, barely hiding themselves, forgetting the most classic precautions of adultery. This corner of the house, it is true, belonged to them. Baptiste, the husband’s valet, alone had the right to enter it, and Baptiste, like a serious man, disappeared so soon as his duties were over. Maxime even pretended with a laugh that he withdrew to write his Memoirs. One night, however, just after Maxime had arrived, Renée pointed out Baptiste to him crossing the drawing-room solemnly with a candlestick in his hand. The tall valet, with his diplomatic figure, lit by the yellow light of the taper, wore that night a still more correct and severe expression than usual. Leaning forward, the lovers saw him blow out his candle and go towards the stables, where the horses and grooms lay sleeping.

“He is going his rounds,” said Maxime.

Renée stood shivering. Baptiste always made her uncomfortable. She said one day that he was the only respectable man in the house, with his coldness and his clear glances that never alighted on the women’s shoulders.

After that they evinced a certain prudence in their meetings. They closed the doors of the small drawing-room and were thus able to dispose of this room, of the conservatory, and of Renée’s own rooms in all tranquillity. It was quite a world in itself. They there tasted, during the earlier months, the most refined, the most daintily sought-out delights. They shifted their love-scenes from the great gray-and-pink bed of the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing-room and to the symphony in yellow-minor of the small drawing-room. Each room with its particular odour, its hangings, its special life, gave them a different form of passion and made of Renée a different inamorata: she was dainty and pretty in her padded patrician couch, where, in the tepid, aristocratic bedchamber, love underwent the modification of good taste; under the flesh-coloured tent, amid the perfume and the humid languor of the bath-room, she became a capricious, carnal courtesan, yielding herself as she left the bath: it was there that Maxime preferred her; then, downstairs, in the bright sunrise of the small drawing-room, in the midst of the yellow halo that gilded her hair, she became a goddess with her fair Diana-like head, her bare arms which assumed chaste postures, her unblemished body which reclined on the couches in attitudes revealing noble outlines of antique grace. But there was one place of which Maxime was almost frightened, where Renée dragged him only on bad days, on days when she needed a more acrid intoxication. Then they loved in the hot-house. It was there that they tasted incest.