Complete Works of Emile Zola (239 page)

Renée did not even make a coquettish gesture.

“Why,” said she, “you said he was so smitten with Mme. Michelin.”

“Oh, that’s all over, over and done with… I can prove it to you if you like… haven’t you heard that the little Michelin has attracted the Baron Gouraud? It’s inconceivable. All who know the baron are astounded…. And now, you know, she is on the way to obtain the red riband for her husband!… Ah, she’s a clever woman that. She knows her way about, you can’t teach her anything!”

She said this with an air of admiration not unmingled with regret.

“But to return to M. de Saffré…. He seems to have met you at an actresses’ ball, muffled up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly asked you to supper…. Is it true?”

The younger woman was quite surprised.

“Perfectly true,” she murmured; “but who could have told him?”

“Wait, he says that he recognized you later on, after you had left the room, and that he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm…. Since that time he has been madly in love with you. It has sprouted up in his heart, don’t you see? a fancy…. He has been to see me, to beseech me to make you his apologies…”

“Well, tell him I forgive him,” interrupted Renée, carelessly.

Then, all her anguish returning, she went on:

“Ah, my kind Sidonie, I am terribly worried. I must positively have fifty thousand francs to-morrow morning. I came to talk to you about this. You know people who lend money, you told me.”

The woman of business, offended at the abrupt way in which her sister-in-law broke up her recital, made her wait some time for an answer.

“Yes, certainly, only I advise you first of all to look about among your friends…. Were I in your place I know very well what I should do…. I should just simply apply to M. de Saffré.”

Renée gave a constrained smile.

“But,” she retorted, “that would be hardly proper, considering you pretend that he is so much in love.”

The old woman looked at her with a stare; then her flaccid face melted gently into a smile of affectionate pity.

“You poor dear,” she murmured, “you’ve been crying; don’t deny it, I can see it by your eyes. You must be brave and take life as it comes…. Now then, let me arrange this little matter for you.”

Renée rose, twisting her fingers, making her gloves crack. And she remained standing, completely shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She opened her lips, to accept perhaps, when suddenly the bell rang lightly in the next room. Mme. Sidonie hastily went out, leaving the door ajar, which showed a double row of pianos. Renée next heard a man’s step and the stifled sound of a conversation carried on in an undertone. She mechanically went and examined more closely the yellow streak with which the mattresses had stained the wall. This stain disturbed her, made her feel uncomfortable. Forgetting everything, Maxime, the fifty thousand francs, M. de Saffré, she returned to the side of the bed, reflecting: that bed looked much better placed as it used to be; some women really had no taste; surely, if you went to bed like that, you would have the light in your eyes. And vaguely, in the depths of her memory she saw rising the image of the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul, her romance in two assignations, that chance amour which she had indulged over there, where the bed used to stand. The wearing away of the wall-paper was all that remained of it. Then the room filled her with uneasiness, and she lost patience with the hum of voices that still went on in the adjoining room.

When Mme. Sidonie returned, circumspectly, opening and closing the door, she made repeated signs with her fingers to induce Renée to speak very low. Then, in her ear:

“You have no idea, this is most fortunate: it is M. de Saffré who has called.”

“You haven’t told him, surely, that I was here?” asked Renée, uneasily.

The woman of business seemed surprised, and very innocently answered:

“I did indeed…. He is waiting for me to tell him to come in. Of course, I said nothing to him of the fifty thousand francs….”

Renée, very pale, had drawn herself up as though struck with a whip. An infinite pride rose to her heart. The rude creaking of boots which she now heard more distinctly in the room next door, exasperated her.

“I am going,” she said, curtly. “Come and open the door for me.”

Mme. Sidonie tried to smile.

“Don’t be childish…. I can’t be left with that lad on my hands, now that I’ve told him you are here…. You compromise me, really….”

But Renée had already descended the little staircase. She repeated before the closed shop-door:

“Open it, open it.”

The lace-dealer had a habit of putting the brass knob in her pocket after she had withdrawn it from the door. She wanted to continue arguing. At last, seized with anger herself, and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes, the sour barrenness of her nature, she cried:

“But what on earth do you want me to tell the man?”

“That I’m not for sale,” replied Renée, with one foot on the pavement.

And it seemed to her that she heard Madame Sidonie mutter, as she banged the door to: “Ah, get out, you jade! you shall pay me for this.”

“My God!” thought she, as she stepped into her brougham, “I prefer my husband to that.”

She drove straight back home. After dinner she asked Maxime not to come; she was unwell, she needed rest. And the next day, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia’s jeweller, she was embarrassed in the midst of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had had a good stroke of business. But from that day forward she was more wayward, she frequently changed the hour of the appointments she gave Maxime, and often even watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not trouble much about these changes of mood; he took pleasure in being an obedient thing in the hands of women. What more annoyed him was the moral turn which their lovers’-meetings took at times. She became quite dismal; and it even happened that she had great tears in her eyes. She left off her refrain of “le beau jeune homme” in
La Belle Hélène
, played the hymns she had learnt at school, asked her lover if he did not think that sin was punished sooner or later.

“There is no doubt she’s growing old,” thought he. “It will be the utmost if she’s amusing for another year or two.”

The truth was that she was suffering cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Madame Sidonie’s she had revolted, she had yielded to instinctive pride, to disgust for that coarse bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything within her foundered, and she felt herself to be so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man that pushed open the door of the room with the pianos. Up to then, the thought of her husband had sometimes passed before her, in her incest, like a voluptuous accentuation of horror, but now the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that changed her most delicate sensations into intolerable pain. She, who found pleasure in the refinement of her sin, and who dreamt gladly of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods enjoyed their own kindred, was now drifting towards vulgar debauchery, and making herself the common property of two men. In vain did she endeavour to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. Her curiosity penetrated to the depth of those accursed enjoyments; she went so far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son in the embraces of the father. And she emerged yet more scared, more bruised from this journey into the unknown regions of sin, from this ardent darkness in which she confused her twofold lovers, with terrors that were as the death-rattle of her joys.

She kept this tragedy for herself alone, and redoubled its anguish by the fever of her imagination. She would have died rather than confess the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear lest the young man might revolt and leave her; above all she had so absolute a belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the eternity of her damnation, that she would rather have crossed the Parc Monceau naked than have confessed her shame in a whisper. On the other hand, she still remained the scatter-brain who astonished Paris with her eccentricities. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices, which were discussed in the newspapers with her name disguised under initials. It was at this period that she seriously wanted to fight a duel, with pistols, with the Duchesse de Sternich, who had purposely, she said, upset a glass of punch over her gown; her brother-in-law, the minister, had to speak angrily to her before she would relinquish her idea. On another occasion she bet Madame de Lauwerens that she could run round the track at Longchamps in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her. Maxime himself began to be frightened of this head in which madness was shooting up, and in which he thought he could hear, at night, on the pillow, all the hubbub of a city on heat for enjoyment.

One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. They had not even looked at the bill. They wanted to see a great Italian actress, Ristori, who was at that time being run after by all Paris, and who was so much in fashion that they were forced to take an interest in her. The play was
Phèdre
. He remembered his classical repertory sufficiently well, and she knew enough Italian, to follow the performance. And this tragedy even gave them a special emotion, played in this foreign language whose sonorousness seemed to them at times to be a simple orchestral accompaniment to the pantomime of the actors. The Hippolyte was a tall, pale fellow, a very poor actor, who wept through his part.

“What an ass!” muttered Maxime.

But Ristori, with her broad shoulders shaken by sobs, with her tragic features and large arms, moved Renée profoundly. Phèdre was of Pasiphaé’s blood, and she asked herself of whose blood she could be, she, the incestuous one of modern time. And she saw nothing of the piece save this tall woman dragging across the stage the crime of antiquity. In the first act, when Phèdre confides her criminal affection to Œnone; in the second when, all burning, she declares herself to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when the return of Thésée overwhelms her, and she curses herself, in a crisis of sombre fury, she filled the house with such a cry of savage passion, with so great a yearning for superhuman voluptuousness, that Renée felt every shudder of her desire and of her remorse pass through her own flesh.

“Wait,” whispered Maxime in her ear, “you will hear Théramène tell his story. What an old fat-head!”

And he muttered in a hollow voice:

“Scarce had we issued forth from Trœzen’s gates,

“He on his chariot…”

But while the old man spoke, Renée had neither eyes nor ears. The light from the roof blinded her, a stifling heat came to her from all those pale faces stretched out towards the stage. The monologue continued, interminable. She was back in the hot-house, under the ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She suffered hideously, she was losing consciousness, when the last death-rattle of Phèdre, repenting and dying in the convulsions of poison, made her re-open her eyes. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself some day? How mean and shameful was her tragedy by the side of the idyl of antiquity! And while Maxime fastened her opera-cloak under her chin, she still heard Ristori’s rough voice growling behind her, and Œnone’s complacent murmur replying.

In the brougham Maxime did all the talking. He thought tragedy “disgusting” as a rule, and preferred the plays at the Bouffes. Nevertheless Phèdre was pretty “thick.” He felt interested because…. And he squeezed Renée’s hand to complete his thought. Then a funny notion came into his head, and he yielded to the impulse to make a joke.

“I was wise,” he murmured, “not to go too near the sea at Trouville.”

Renée, lost in the depths of her melancholy dream, was silent. He had to repeat his sentence.

“Why?” she asked, astonished, unable to understand.

“Why, the monster…”

And he tittered. The jest froze Renée. Everything was becoming unhinged in her head. Ristori was no longer anything but a great buffoon who pulled up her peplon and stuck out her tongue at the audience like Blanche Muller in the third act of
La Belle Hélène
, Théramène danced a can-can, and Hippolyte ate bread and jam, and stuffed his fingers up his nose.

When a more piercing remorse than usual made Renée shudder, she felt an insolent reaction. What was her crime after all, and why should she blush? Did she not tread on greater infamies every day? Did she not rub shoulders at the ministries, at the Tuileries, everywhere, with wretches like herself, who wore millions on their bodies and were adored on both knees? And she thought of the shameful intimacy of Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, at which one smiled now and again at the Empress’s Mondays. And she recalled the traffic driven by Madame de Lauwerens, whose praises were sung by husbands for her propriety, her orderly conduct, her promptness in paying her bills. She called up the names of Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, the Baronne de Meinhold, those creatures who let their lovers pay for their luxuries, and who were quoted in fashionable society as shares are quoted on the Bourse. Madame de Guende was so stupid and so beautifully made, that she had three superior officers for her lovers at the same time, and was unable to tell one from the other, because of their uniform; wherefore that demon of a Louise said that she first made them strip to their shirts so as to know which of the three she was talking to. The Comtesse Vanska for her part could remember court-yards in which she had sung, pavements on which she had been seen, dressed in calico, prowling along like a she-wolf. Each of these women had her shame, her open, triumphant sore. And lastly, overtopping them all, uprose the Duchesse de Sternich, old, ugly, worn-out, with the halo of a night passed in the Imperial bed; she typified official vice, from which she derived as it were a majesty of debauch and a sovereignty over this band of illustrious strumpets.