Complete Works of Emile Zola (252 page)

Renée felt a chill at her heart. She saw Céleste moving behind her and Maxime while they embraced each other, and she saw her with her indifference, her perfect unconcern, thinking of her five thousand francs. She made one more endeavour, for all that, to retain her, frightened at the void that threatened her existence, hoping, in despite of everything, to keep by her this obstinate mule whom she had looked upon as devoted and whom she discovered to be merely egotistical. The girl smiled, still shaking her head, muttering:

“No, no, I can’t do it. I would refuse my own mother…. I shall buy two cows. I may start a little haberdasher’s shop. It’s very nice in our part. Oh, as to that, I don’t mind if you like to come and see me. It is near Caen. I will leave you the address.”

Then Renée ceased insisting. She wept scalding tears when she was alone. The next day, with the capriciousness of a sick person, she decided to accompany Céleste to the Gare de l’Ouest in her own brougham. She gave her one of her travelling-rugs, made her a present of money, fussed around her like a mother whose daughter is about to undertake a long and arduous journey. In the brougham she looked at her with humid eyes. Céleste chatted, said how pleased she was to go away. Then, emboldened, she spoke out and gave her mistress some advice.

“I should never have taken up life as you did, madame. I often said to myself, when I found you with M. Maxime: ‘How is it possible to be so foolish for men!’ It always ends badly…. Well, for my part, I always mistrusted them!”

She laughed, she threw herself back in the corner of the brougham.

“How my money would have danced!” she continued. “And at this moment I might have been crying my eyes out. And that is why, whenever I saw a man, I took up a broomstick…. I never dared tell you all this. Besides, it wasn’t my business. You were free to do as you pleased, and I had only to earn my money honestly.”

At the railway-station Renée said she would pay her fare, and took a first-class ticket for her. As they had arrived before their time, she detained her, pressed her hands, reiterated:

“And mind you take great care of yourself, look after yourself well, my dear Céleste.”

The latter let herself be petted. She stood looking happy, with a fresh, smiling face under her mistress’s eyes, which were swimming in tears. Renée again spoke of the past. And suddenly the other exclaimed:

“I was forgetting: I never told you the story of Baptiste, monsieur’s valet…. I suppose they did not care to tell you….”

Renée owned that as a matter of fact she did not know.

“Well, then, you remember his grand, dignified airs, his scornful look, you yourself spoke to me about them…. All that was play-acting…. He didn’t like women, he never came down to the servants’ hall when we were there: and he even, I can tell you now, pretended that it was disgusting in the drawing-room, because of the low-necked dresses. I well believe it, that he didn’t like women!”

And she leant toward Renée’s ear; she made her blush, the while she herself retained her virtuous composure.

“When the new stable-lad,” she continued, “told everything to monsieur, monsieur preferred to dismiss Baptiste rather than have him prosecuted. It seems that filthy sort of thing had been going on in the stables for years…. And to think that great rascal pretended to be fond of horses! It was the grooms he was after.”

The bell interrupted her. She hurriedly caught up the nine or ten packages from which she had refused to be parted. She allowed herself to be kissed. Then she went off, without looking back.

Renée remained in the station till the engine whistled. And when the train had gone, she did not know what to do in her despair; her days seemed to stretch before her as empty as this great hall where she had been left alone. She stepped back into her brougham, she told the coachman to drive her home. But on the way she changed her mind; she was afraid of her room, of the tediousness awaiting her there; she had not even the spirit to go in and change her dress for her customary drive round the lake. She felt a need of sunlight, a need of crowd.

She ordered the coachman to drive to the Bois.

It was four o’clock. The Bois was awakening from the drowsiness of the warm afternoon. Clouds of dust flew along the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and one could see in the distance the expanse of verdure contained by the slopes of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes, crowned by the gray mass of Mont-Valérien. The sun, high on the horizon, swept down, filling the hollows of the foliage with a golden dust, lighting up the tall branches, changing that sea of leaves into a sea of light. But past the fortifications, in the drive of the Bois leading to the lake, the roads had been watered, the carriages rolled over the brown earth as over the pile of a carpet, amid a freshness, a rising fragrance of moist earth. On either side the trees of the copses reared their crowd of young trunks amid the low bushes, losing themselves in the greenish twilight, which streaks of light pierced here and there with yellow clearings; and as the lake drew nearer, the chairs on the side-paths became more numerous, families sat with quiet, silent faces, watching the endless procession of wheels. Then, on reaching the open space before the lake, there was an effulgence; the slanting sun transformed the round sheet of water into a great mirror of polished silver, reflecting the blazing disk of the luminary. Eyes blinked, one could only distinguish on the left, near the bank, the dark patch of the pleasure-boat. The sunshades in the carriages inclined with a gentle, uniform movement towards this splendour, and were not raised until they reached the avenue skirting the water which, from above the bank, now assumed a metallic darkness streaked with burnished gold. On the right, the clumps of fir-trees stretched forth their colonnades of straight, slender stems, whose soft violet tint was reddened by the flames of the sky; on the left, the lawns, bathed in light, spread out like fields of emeralds to the distant lacework of the Porte de la Muette. And on approaching the cascade, while the dimness of the copses was renewed on one side, the islands at the further end of the lake rose up against the blue sky, with their sunlit banks, the bold shadows of their pine-trees, and the Chalet at their feet looked like a child’s plaything lost in the corner of a virgin forest. The whole park laughed and quivered in the sun.

Renée felt ashamed of her brougham, of her dress of puce-coloured silk, on this splendid day. She ensconced herself a little, and through the open windows looked out at this flood of light covering the water and the verdure. At the bends of the drives she caught sight of the line of wheels revolving like golden stars in a long track of blinding lights. The varnished panels, the gleam of the bits of brass and steel, the bright hues of the dresses passed on in the even trot of the horses, set against the background of the Bois a long moving bar, a ray fallen from the sky, stretching out and following the bends of the roadway. And in this ray Renée, blinking her eyes, at intervals saw a woman’s fair chignon, a footman’s dark back, the white mane of a horse detach itself. The rounded sunshades of watered silk shimmered like moons of metal.

Then, in the presence of this broad daylight, of these sheets of sunshine, she thought of the fine dust of twilight which she had seen falling one evening upon the yellow leaves. Maxime was with her. It was at the period when her lust for that child was awakening within her. And she saw again the lawns soaked by the evening air, the darkened copses, the deserted pathways. The line of carriages drove on with a mournful sound past the empty chairs, while to-day the rumble of the wheels, the trot of the horses, sounded with the joyousness of a fanfare of trumpets. Then all her drives in the Bois came back to her. She had lived there, Maxime had grown up there, by her side, on the cushion of her carriage. It was their garden. Rain had surprised them there, sunshine brought them back, night had not always driven them away. They drove there in every kind of weather, they tasted there the disappointments and the delights of their life. Amid the void of her existence, amid the melancholy caused by Céleste’s departure, these memories imparted to her a bitter joy. Her heart said, “Never again! never again!” And she remained frozen when she evoked the image of that winter landscape, that congealed and dimmed lake upon which they had skated; the sky was soot-coloured, the snow had stitched white bands of lace upon the trees, the wind blew fine sand into their faces.

Meantime, on the left hand, on the track reserved for riders, she had recognized the Duc de Rozan, M. de Mussy, and M. de Saffré. Larsonneau had killed the duc’s mother by presenting to her, as they fell due, the hundred and fifty thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by the son, and the duc was running through his second half million with Blanche Muller after leaving the first five hundred thousand francs in the hands of Laure d’Aurigny. M. de Mussy, who had left the Embassy in London for the Embassy at Florence, had become gallant once more; he led the cotillon with renewed grace. As to M. de Saffré, he remained the fastest and most amiable sceptic in the world. Renée saw him urging his horse towards the carriage-door of the Comtesse Vanska, with whom he was said to have been infatuated ever since the day when he had seen her as Coral at the Saccard’s.

All the ladies were there besides: the Duchesse de Sternich in her everlasting chariot, Madame de Lauwerens in a landau, with the Baronne de Meinhold and little Madame Daste in front of her; Madame Teissière and Madame de Guende in a victoria. Among these ladies, Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny displayed themselves on the cushions of a magnificent calash. Even Madame Michelin passed by, ensconced in a brougham; the pretty brunette had been on a visit to M. Hupel de la Noue’s departmental town, and on her return she had appeared in the Bois in this brougham, to which she hoped soon to add an open carriage. Renée also perceived the Marquise d’Espanet and Madame Haffner, the inseparables, hidden beneath their sunshades, stretched side by side, laughing amorously into each other’s eyes.

Then the gentlemen drove by. M. de Chibray in a drag; Mr. Simpson in a dog-cart; the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, keener than ever after work despite their dream of approaching retirement, in a brougham which they left at the corner of the drives in order to go a bit of the way on foot; M. de Mareuil, still in mourning for his daughter, looking out for bows in acknowledgment of his first interruption uttered the day before at the Corps Législatif, airing his political importance in the carriage of M. Toutin-Laroche, who had once more saved the Crédit Viticole after bringing it to the verge of ruin, and who was being made still thinner and still more imposing by his work on the Senate.

And to close the procession, as a last display of majesty, came the Baron Gouraud, lolling in the sun on the two pillows with which his carriage was furnished. Renée was surprised and disgusted to recognize Baptiste seated by the coachman’s side, with his pale face and his solemn air. The tall lackey had taken service with the baron.

The copses sped past, the water of the lake grew iridescent under the more slanting rays, the line of carriages stretched out its dancing lights. And Renée, herself caught up and carried away amid this enjoyment, was vaguely conscious of all these appetites rolling along through the sunlight. She felt no indignation with these devourers of the hounds’ fee. But she hated them by reason of their joy, of this triumph which showed them full in the golden dusk that fell from the sky. They were gorgeous and smiling; the women displayed themselves white and plump; the men had the quick glances, the enamoured deportment of successful lovers. And she, down in her empty heart, found nought but lassitude, but repressed envy. Was she better, then, than others, that she should thus give way under the weight of pleasure? or was it the others who were to be praised for having stronger loins than hers? She did not know, she longed for new desires with which to begin life afresh, when, turning her head, she perceived beside her, on the side-path edging the coppice, a sight that rent her with a supreme blow.

Saccard and Maxime were walking along with short steps, arm-in-arm. The father must have been to see the son, and together they had come down from the Avenue de l’Impératrice to the lake, chatting as they went.

“Listen to me,” said Saccard, “you’re a simpleton…. A man like you, with money, doesn’t let it lie idle at the bottom of his drawers. There is a hundred per cent, to be made in the business I am telling you of. It’s a safe investment. You know very well I wouldn’t let you be done.”

But the young man seemed wearied by this persistence. He smiled in his pretty way, he looked at the carriages.

“Do you see that little woman over there, the woman in violet?” he said suddenly. “That’s a washer-girl whom that ass of a Mussy has brought out.”

They looked at the woman in violet. Then Saccard took a cigar from his pocket, and turning to Maxime, who was smoking:

“Give me a light.”

Then they stopped for a moment, facing each other, bringing their faces close together. When the cigar was alight:

“Look here,” continued the father, once more taking his son’s arm, pressing it tightly under his own, “you’re a fool if you don’t take my advice. Well! is it agreed? Will you bring me the hundred thousand francs to-morrow?”

“You know I no longer go to your house,” replied Maxime, compressing his lifts.

“Bah! rubbish! it’s time at last there was end to all that!”

And as they took a few steps in silence, at the moment when Renée, feeling about to faint away, pressed back her head against the padding of the brougham so as not to be seen, a growing rumour ran along the line of carriages. The pedestrians on the side-paths halted, turned round, open-mouthed, following with their eyes something that approached. There was a quicker sound of wheels, carriages drew aside respectfully, and two outriders appeared, clad in green, with round caps on which danced golden tassels with their cords outspread all round; leaning slightly forward, they trotted on upon the backs of their large bay horses. Behind them they left an empty space. Then, in this empty space, the Emperor appeared.