THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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of pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue, which one summons and receives.
The everlasting whirlwind that swept through the apartment in the Rue de Rivoli and made its doors slam to and fro blew stronger in the measure that Maxime grew up, that Saccard enlarged the sphere of his operations, and that Renée threw more fever into her search for an unknown joy. These three beings ended by leading an astonishing existence of liberty and folly. It was the ripe and prodigious fruit of an epoch. The street invaded the apartment with its rumbling of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its license of language. The father, the stepmother and the step-son acted, talked and made themselves at home as though each of them had found himself leading a bachelor life alone. Three boon companions, three students sharing the same furnished room, could not have made use of that room with less reserve for the installation of their vices, their loves, their noisy, adolescent gaiety. They accepted one another with a handshake, never seeming to suspect the reasons that united them under one roof, treating each other cavalierly, joyously, and thus assuming each the most entire independence. The family idea was replaced with them by a sort of partnership whose profits are divided in equal shares; each one drew his part of the pleasure to himself, and it was tacitly agreed that each should dispose of that part as best seemed to him. They went so far as to take their enjoyment in each other’s presence, displaying it, describing it, without awakening any feeling but a little envy and curiosity.
Maxime now instructed Renée. When he went to the Bois with her, he told her stories about the fast women which entertained her vastly. A new woman could not appear by the lake, but he would lay himself out to ascertain the name of her lover, the allowance he made her, the style in which she lived. He knew these ladies’ homes, and was acquainted with intimate details; he was a real living catalogue in which all the prostitutes in Paris were numbered, with a very complete description of each of them. This gazette of scandal was Renée’s delight. On race-days, at Longchamps, when she drove by in her calash, she listened eagerly, albeit retaining the haughtiness of a woman of the real world, to how Blanche Muller deceived her attaché with a hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his drawers in the alcove of a skinny red-haired celebrity who was nicknamed the Crayfish. Each day brought its tittle-tattle. When the story was rather too warm, Maxime lowered his voice, but told it to the end. Renée opened wide her eyes, like a child to whom a funny trick is being told, restrained her laughter, and then stifled it in her embroidered handkerchief, which she pressed daintily upon her lips.
Maxime also brought these ladies’ photographs. He had actresses’ photographs in all his pockets, and even in his cigar-case. From time to time he cleared them out and placed these ladies in the album that lay about on the furniture in the drawingroom, and that already contained the photographs of Renée’s friends. There were men’s photographs there too, MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, de Mussy, as well as actors, writers, deputies, who had come to swell the collection nobody knew how. A strangely mixed society, a symbol of the jumble of persons and ideas that crossed Renée’s and Maxime’s lives. Whenever it rained or they felt bored, this album was the great subject of conversation. It always ended by falling under one’s hand. Renée opened it with a yawn, for the hundredth time perhaps. Then her curiosity would reawaken, and the young man came and leant behind her. And then followed long discussions about the Crayfish’s hair, Madame de Meinhold’s double chin, Madame de Lauwerens’ eyes, and Blanche Muller’s bust; about the marquise’s nose, which was a little on one side, and little Sylvia’s mouth, which was renowned for the thickness of its lips. They compared the women with one another.
“If I were a man,” said Renée, “I would choose Adeline.”
“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” replied Maxime. “She is so quaint!… I must say I prefer Sylvia.”
The pages were turned over; sometimes the Duc de Rozan appeared, or Mr. Simpson, or the Comte de Chibray, and he added, jeering at her:
“Besides, your taste is perverted, everybody knows that…. Can anything more stupid be imagined than the faces of those men! Rozan and Chibray are both like Gustave, my hairdresser.”
Renée shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that she was beyond the reach of sarcasm. She again forgot herself in the contemplation of the pallid, smiling, or cross-grained faces contained in the album; she lingered longest over the portraits of the fast women, studying with curiosity the exact microscopic details of the photographs, the minute wrinkles, the tiny hairs. One day even she sent for a strong magnifying-glass, fancying she had perceived a hair on the Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the glass did reveal a thin golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose. This hair diverted them, for a long time. For a week long the ladies who called were made to assure themselves in person of the presence of this hair. Thenceforward the magnifying-glass served to pick the women’s faces to pieces. Renée made astonishing discoveries: she found unknown wrinkles, coarse skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder, until Maxime finally hid the glass, declaring that it was not right to disgust one’s self like that with the human countenance. The truth was that she scrutinized too rigorously the thick lips of Sylvia, for whom he cherished a particular fondness. They invented a new game. They asked this question: “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and they opened the album which was to supply for the answer. This brought about some very joyous couplings. The friends played this game for several evenings. Renée was in this way married successively to the Archbishop of Paris, to the Baron Gouraud, to M. de Chibray, which caused much laughter, and to her husband himself, which distressed her mightily. As to Maxime, either by chance, or through the mischievousness of Renée, who opened the album, he always fell to the marquise. But they never laughed so much as when fate coupled two men or two women together.
The familiarity between Renée and Maxime went so far that she told him the sorrows of her heart. He consoled and advised her. His father did not seem to exist. Then they came to confide in one another about their childhood. It was especially during their drives in the Bois that they felt a vague languor, a longing to tell one another things that are difficult to say, that are never told. The delight that children take in whispering about forbidden things, the fascination that exists for a young man and a young woman in lowering themselves to sin, if only in words, brought them back unceasingly to suggestive topics. They there partook deeply of a voluptuousness in which they felt no self-reproaching, and in which they revelled, lazily reclining in the two corners of the carriage like two old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. They ended by becoming braggarts of immorality. Renée confessed that the little girls at the boarding-school were very smutty. Maxime went further and had the courage to relate some of the infamy of the college at Plassans.
“Ah! I can’t tell you,” murmured Renée.
Then she bent towards his ear as if the sound of her voice alone would have made her blush, and she confided to him one of those convent stories that are spun out in lewd songs. He had too rich a collection of similar anecdotes to be left behindhand. He hummed some very bawdy couplets in her ear. And little by little they entered upon a peculiar state of beatitude, rocked by the carnal ideas they stirred up, tickled by little undefined desires. The carriage rolled gently on, and they returned home deliriously fatigued, more exhausted than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned like two young men who, wandering down country lanes without mistresses, content themselves with an interchange of reminiscences.
A still greater familiarity and license existed between father and son. Saccard had realized that a great financier must love women and commit extravagances for them. He was a rough lover, and preferred money; but it formed part of his programme to frequent alcoves, to scatter banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to affix some noted strumpet as a signboard to his speculations. When Maxime had left school they used to meet in the same women’s rooms and laugh over it. They were even rivals in a measure. Occasionally when the young man was dining at the “Maison d’Or” with some boisterous crew he heard Saccard’s voice in an adjacent private room.
“I say! papa’s next door!” he cried, with the grimace which he borrowed from the popular actors.
He went and knocked at the door of the private room, curious to see his father’s conquest.
“Ah!