THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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blushed a little, despite his audacity, came nearer still, and with his fingertip tracing an acute angle on Renée’s breast:
“If I were you,” he continued, “I would hollow out that lace so, and wear a necklace with a great big cross.”
She clapped her hands, radiant with delight.
“That’s it, that’s it,” she exclaimed…. “I had the great big cross on the tip of my tongue.”
She folded back the chemisette, left the room for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. And resuming her place in front of the mirror she murmured triumphantly:
“Oh, perfect, quite perfect…. But he’s no fool, that little shaveling! Used you to dress the girls in the country, then? You and I are sure to get on well together. But you will have to do as I tell you. In the first place, you must let your hair grow and never wear that horrid tunic again. Then you must faithfully follow my lessons in good manners. I want you to become a smart young man.”
“But, of course,” said the child naïvely; “since papa is rich now and you are his wife.”
She smiled, and with her customary vivacity:
“Then let us begin by dropping the plural. I have been saying thou and you anyhow. It’s too silly…. Will you love me very much?”
“I will love you with all my heart,” he replied, with the effusiveness of a boy towards his sweetheart.
Such was the first interview between Maxime and Renée. The child did not go to school till a month later. During the first few days his stepmother played with him as with a doll; she brushed off his country manners, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, newly arrayed from head to foot by his father’s tailor, she uttered a cry of joyous surprise: he looked as pretty as a daisy, she said. Only his hair took an unconscionable time in growing. Renée used always to say that all one’s face lay in one’s hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long time she had been maddened by the colour of it, that peculiar pale yellow colour which reminded one of good butter. But when yellow hair came into fashion she was delighted, and to make believe that she did not follow the fashion because she could not help herself, she swore she dyed it every month.
Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. He was one of those frail, precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he knew the meaning of desire. He had twice narrowly escaped being expelled from school. Had Renée’s eyes been accustomed to provincial graces, she would have perceived that, strangely got-up though he was, the little shaveling, as she called him, had a way of smiling, of turning his neck, of putting out his arms prettily, with the feminine air of the love-boys at school. He took great pains over his hands, which were long and slender; and though his hair was cropped short by order of the headmaster, an ex-colonel of engineers, he owned a little looking-glass which he drew from his pocket during school-time and placed between the leaves of his book, looking at himself in it for hours, examining his eyes, his gums, pulling pretty faces, studying the art of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a petticoat, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had the slim waist and undulating hips of a grown woman. True it was, he received as many kicks as kisses. And so the school at Plassans, a den of little miscreants like most provincial schools, was a hotbed of pollution in which were singularly developed that epicene temperament, that childhood fraught with evil from some mysterious hereditary cause. Fortunately, age was about to improve him. But the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effemination of his whole being what time he had played the girl, was destined to remain in him, and to strike a lasting blow at his virility.
Renée called him “Mademoiselle,” not knowing that six months earlier she would have hit the truth. He seemed to her very docile, very affectionate, and indeed his caresses often made her feel ill-at-ease. He had a way of kissing that heated the skin. But what delighted her was his roguishness; he was as entertaining as could be, and bold, already talking of women with a smile, holding his own against Renée’s friends, against dear Adeline who had just married M. d’Espanet, and the fat Suzanne, wedded quite recently to Haffner, the big manufacturer. When he was fourteen he fell in love with the latter. He confided his passion to his stepmother, who was intensely amused.
“For myself I should have preferred Adeline,” she said, “she is prettier.”
“Perhaps so,” replied the scapegrace, “but Suzanne is much stouter…. I like fine women…. If you were very goodnatured, you would put in a word for me.”
Renée laughed. Her doll, this tall lad with the girl’s ways, seemed to her inimitable now that he had fallen in love. The time came when Mme. Haffner had seriously to defend herself. For the rest the ladies encouraged Maxime by their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes they assumed in presence of the precocious child. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in this. All three, in the midst of their life of tumult, scorched by passion, lingered over the boy’s delicious depravity as over a novel and harmless spice that stimulated their palates. They allowed him to touch their dresses, to pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the anteroom to help them on with their wraps; they passed him from hand to hand, laughing like madwomen when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, on the place where the skin is so soft; and then they became motherly, and learnedly instructed him in the art of being a smart man and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little toy man of ingenious workmanship, that kissed, and made love, and had the sweetest vices in the world, but remained a plaything, a little cardboard man that one need not be too much afraid of, only just sufficiently to feel a very pleasant thrill at the touch of his childish hand.
After the holidays Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the fashionable public school, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The child, soft and light-headed though he was, had by that time a very quick intelligence; but he applied himself to far other things than his classical studies. He was nevertheless a well-behaved pupil, who never descended to the Bohemian level of dunces, and who forgathered with the proper and well-dressed young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his boyhood was a veritable cult of dress. Paris opened his eyes, turned him into a smart young man, with tight-fitting clothes of the latest fashion. He was the Brummel of his form. He appeared there as he would in a drawingroom, daintily booted, correctly gloved, with prodigious neckties and unutterable hats. There were about twenty like him in all, who formed a sort of aristocracy, offering one another, as they left the school, Havannah cigars out of gold-clasped cigar-cases, and having servants in livery to carry their parcels of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse, which were the admiration of his schoolfellows. He drove himself, while a footman sat with folded arms on the back seat, holding on his knees the schoolboy’s knapsack, a real ministerial portfolio in brown grained leather. And you should have seen how lightly, how cleverly, and with what excellent form Maxime drove in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew up his horse before the school-door, threw the reins to the footman, and said:
“Jacques, at half-past four, see?”
The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the fine grace of this fair-haired spark whom they saw regularly twice a day arriving and leaving in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women, splashed the passersby, as though they were returning from the races. An astonishing little world, a foolish, foppish brood which you can see any day in the Rue du Havre, smartly dressed in their dandy jackets, aping the ways of rich and wornout men, while the Bohemian contingent of the school, the real schoolboys, come shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their thick shoes, with their books hung over their backs by a strap.
Renée, who took herself seriously as a mother and as a governess, was delighted with her pupil. She left nothing undone, in fact, to complete his education. She was at that time passing through a period of mortification and tears; a lover had jilted her openly, before the eyes of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchesse de Sternich. She dreamt of Maxime as her consolation,