THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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expiring good principles, for ever lashed, for ever pushed onwards by her insatiable desire for knowledge and sensation.
For the rest she had as yet turned only the first page of the book of vice. She was fond of talking in a low tone, and laughing, about the extraordinary cases of the tender friendship of Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, of the ticklish trade of Madame de Lauwerens, and of the Comtesse Vanska’s tariffed kisses; but she still looked upon these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them, perhaps; and this indefinite longing that arose within her at evil hours still further increased her turbulent anxiety, her mad search after an unique, exquisite enjoyment of which she alone should partake. Her first lovers had not spoilt her; three times she had thought herself seized with a grand passion; love burst in her head like a cracker whose sparks failed to reach the heart. She went mad for a month, exhibiting herself with her heart’s lord all over Paris; and then one morning, amid all the racket of her amorousness, she became conscious of a crushing silence, an immense void. The first, the young Duc de Rozan, was a feast of sunshine that led to nothing; Renée, who had noticed him for his gentleness and his excellent manner, found him absolutely shallow, colourless and tedious when they were alone together. Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American Legation, who came next, all but beat her, and thanks to this remained with her for more than a year. Then she took up the Comte de Chibray, one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp, an absurdly vain, good-looking man who was beginning to hang terribly on her hands when the Duchesse de Sternich took it into her head to become enamoured of him and to take him away from her; whereupon she wept for him and gave her friends to understand that her heart was bruised, and that she should never be in love again. And thus she drifted towards M. de Mussy, the most insignificant creature in the world, a young man who was making his way in diplomacy by leading cotillons with especial grace; she never knew exactly how she had come to give herself to him, and she kept him a long time, a prey to idleness, disgusted with the unknown that is explored in an hour, and deferring the trouble of a change until she met with some extraordinary adventure. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Her boredom appeared to her all the more insupportable as her homely virtues took advantage of the hours when she was bored to complain and to disquiet her. She bolted her door, she had horrible headaches. And then, when she opened the door again, it was a flood of silk and lace that surged through it with a great noise, a luxurious, joyous being with no care nor blush upon her brow.
Yet she had had a romance amid the fashionable commonplace of her life. One day, when she had gone out on foot to see her father, who disliked the noise of carriages at his door, she perceived, as she was walking back in the twilight along the Quai Saint-Paul, that she was being followed by a young man. It was warm; and the daylight was waning with amorous gentleness. She, who was never followed except on horseback in the lanes of the Bois, thought the adventure piquant, she felt flattered by it as by a new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very coarseness appealed to her. Instead of returning home, she turned down the Rue du Temple, and walked her admirer along the boulevards. The man, however, grew bolder and became so persistent that Renée, a little dismayed, lost her head, followed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, and took refuge in the shop of her husband’s sister. The man came in after her. Mme. Sidonie smiled, seemed to understand, and left them alone. And when Renée made as if to follow her, the stranger held her back, addressed her with respectful fervour, and won her forgiveness. He was a clerk, he was called Georges, and she never asked him his surname. She came twice to see him; she came in through the shop, and he by the Rue Papillon. This chance love affair, picked up and accepted in the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame, but with a singular smile of regret. Mme. Sidonie profited by the adventure in that she at last became the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a part to which she had been aspiring since the day of the wedding.
That poor Madame Sidonie had experienced a disappointment. While intriguing for the match she had expected to marry Renée a little herself, to make her one of her customers and derive a heap of profits from her. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horseflesh. And so her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to settle down, she perceived Mme. de Lauwerens enthroned in the centre of the drawingroom, and realized that she was already too late. Mme. de Lauwerens, a fine woman of six-and-twenty, made a business of launching new arrivals. She came of a very old family, and was married to a man in the higher financial world, who had the bad taste to refuse to pay her tailor’s and milliner’s bills. The lady, a very intelligent person, made money and kept herself. She loathed men, she said, but she supplied all her friends with them; there was always a full array of customers in the apartment which she occupied in the Rue de Provence over her husband’s offices. You always found a snack there. You met your friends there in an unpremeditated and charming fashion. There was no harm in a young girl’s going to see her dear Mme. de Lauwerens, and if chance brought men there who were, at all events, respectful, and moved in the best set — so much the worse. The hostess was adorable in her long lace tea-gowns. Many a visitor would have chosen her in preference to her collection of blondes and brunettes. But rumour asserted that she was absolutely good. The whole secret of the affair lay there. She kept up her high position in society, had all the men for her friends, retained her pride as a virtuous woman, and derived a secret enjoyment from bringing others down and profiting by their fall. When Mme. Sidonie had enlightened herself as to the mechanism of the new invention, she was thunderstruck. It was the classical school, the woman in the old black dress carrying love-letters at the bottom of her basket, brought face to face with the modern, the lady of quality, who sells her friends in her boudoir while sipping a cup of tea. The modern school triumphed. Mme. Lauwerens looked coldly upon the shabby attire of Mme. Sidonie, in whom she scented a rival. And it was she who provided Renée with her first bore, the young Duc de Rozan, whom the fair financier had found much difficulty in disposing of. The classical school did not win the day till later on, when Mme. Sidonie lent her entresol to her sister-in-law so that she might gratify her caprice for the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained her confidante.
But one of Mme. Sidonie’s faithful friends was Maxime. From his fifteenth year, he had been in the habit of prowling around at his aunt’s, sniffing at the gloves that he found lying forgotten on the furniture. She who hated clear situations and never owned up to her little complacencies, ended by lending him the keys of her apartments on certain days, saying that she was going to stay in the country till the next day. Maxime talked of some friends whom he wanted to entertain, and whom he dared not ask to his father’s house. It was in the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl who had to be sent to the country. Mme. Sidonie borrowed her nephew’s money, and went into ecstasies before him, murmuring in her soft voice that he was “smooth and pink as a cherub.”
Maxime meantime had grown. He was now a nice-looking, slender young man, who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that “girl look” that so enchanted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with her soft expression and blonde paleness. But he was not even the equal of that indolent, shallow woman. The race of the Rougons became refined in him, grew delicate and vicious. Born of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and, so to say, scattered mixture of his father’s furious appetites and his mother’s self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental shortcomings were fulfilled and aggravated. This family lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in suspense; he represented, not a greedy eagerness for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a mean nature devouring readymade fortunes, a strange hermaphrodite making its entrance at the right moment in a society that was growing rotten. When Maxime rode in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman, lightly dancing in the saddle, in which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of that age, with his swelling haunches, his long, slender hands, his sickly, lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his comic-opera slang. He was twenty years old, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most unheard-of filth. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth. It waved over his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, dressed him in his clothes. But his special characteristic was his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, coquette’s mirrors, behind