THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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might only have suspected that she had committed some secret fault which she kept to herself, but which she betrayed by a more strongly marked contempt for herself and by a more reckless depravity in her fashionable caprices. One night she confessed to Maxime that she was dying to go to a ball which Blanche Muller, a popular actress, was giving to the princesses of the footlights and the queens of the fast world. This avowal surprised and embarrassed even Maxime, who, after all, had no great scruples. He tried to catechize his stepmother: really, that was no place for her; besides, she would see nothing very amusing there; and then, if she were recognized, what a scandal there would be. To all these good arguments she answered with clasped hands, smiling and entreating:
“Come, my little Maxime, be nice, I want to go…. I’ll put on a very dark domino, and we’ll only just walk through the rooms.”
Maxime always ended by giving way, and would have taken his stepmother to every brothel in Paris for the asking. When he consented to escort her to Blanche Muller’s ball, she clapped her hands like a child that is given an unexpected holiday.
“Ah! you’re a dear,” she said. “It’s tomorrow, is it not? Come and fetch me very early. I want to see the women arrive. You must tell me their names, and we’ll have great fun.”
She reflected, and then added:
“No, don’t come here. Wait for me in a cab on the Boulevard Malesherbes. I shall go out through the garden.”
This mysteriousness was an added spice to her escapade, a simple refinement of pleasure, for she might have gone out at midnight by the front-door without her husband’s so much as putting his head out of window.
The next day, after telling Céleste to sit up for her, she crossed the dark shadows of the Parc Monceau with exquisite timorous shivers. Saccard had taken advantage of his good understanding with the Hotel de Ville to have a key given him of a little gate in the gardens, and Renée had asked for one for herself as well. She almost lost her way, and only found the cab thanks to the two yellow eyes of the lamps. At this period the Boulevard Malesherbes, barely finished, was still perfectly lonely at nighttime. Renée glided into the vehicle in great emotion, her heart beating rapturously, as though she were going to an assignation. Maxime smoked philosophically, half asleep in a corner of the cab. He wanted to throw away his cigar, but she prevented him, and in trying to hold back his arm in the darkness she put her hand full in his face, which amused them both greatly.
“I tell you I like the smell of tobacco,” she cried. “Go on smoking…. Besides, we are having a debauch tonight…. I’m a man, see?”
The boulevard was not yet lighted up. While the cab drove down to the Madeleine it was so dark inside that they could not see one another. Now and again, when the young man lifted his cigar to his lips, a red spot pierced the thick darkness. This red spot interested Renée. Maxime, who was half-covered by the folds of the black satin domino that filled the inside of the cab, continued smoking in silence, with an expression of weariness. The truth was that his stepmother’s caprice had prevented him from following a party of women who had made up their minds to begin and end Blanche Muller’s ball at the Café Anglais. He was in a huff, and she felt conscious of his sulkiness in the darkness.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
“No, I’m cold,” he replied.
“Dear me! I’m burning. I think it’s stifling in here…. Take the end of my skirts over your knees.”
“Oh! your skirts,” he muttered, ill-humouredly. “I’m up to my eyes in your skirts.”
But this remark made him laugh himself, and little by little he grew livelier. She told him how frightened she had felt in the Parc Monceau. After that she confessed to him another of her longings: she should like one night to go for a row on the little lake of the gardens in the skiff that she could see from her windows, moored at the edge of a pathway. He thought she was growing sentimental. The cab rolled on, the darkness remained impenetrable, they leant towards one another so as to hear one another amid the noise of the wheels, touching each other when they moved their hands, and at times, when they approached too closely, inhaling one another’s warm breath. And at regular intervals, Maxime’s cigar glowed afresh, throwing a red blur in the darkness, and casting a pale pink flash over Renée’s face. She was adorable, seen by this fleeting light; so much so that the young man was struck by it.
“Oh oh!” he said. “We seem to be very pretty this evening, stepmamma…. Let’s have a look.”
He brought his cigar nearer, and drew a few rapid puffs. Renée in her corner was lit up with a warm, palpitating light. She had slightly raised her hood. Her bare head, covered with a mass of little curls, adorned with a simple blue ribbon, looked like a real boy’s head over the great black satin blouse which came up to her neck. She thought it very amusing to be thus examined and admired by the light of a cigar. She threw herself back tittering, while he added with an air of comical gravity:
“The deuce! I shall have to look after you, if I am to bring you back safe and sound to my father.”
Meantime the cab turned round the Madeleine and joined the current of the boulevards. Here it became filled with a leaping light, with the reflections from the shops with their flaring windows. Blanche Muller lived close by in one of the new houses that have been built on the raised ground of the Rue Basse-du-Rempart. There were but few carriages as yet at the door. It was only ten o’clock. Maxime wanted to drive down the boulevards and wait an hour; but Renée, whose curiosity was becoming keener, told him decidedly that she would go up all alone if he did not accompany her. He followed her, and was glad to find more people upstairs than he expected. Renée had put on her mask. Leaning on Maxime’s arm, and whispering to him peremptory commands which he submissively obeyed, she ferreted about in all the rooms, lifted the corners of the door-hangings, examined the furniture, and would have gone so far as to search the drawers had she not feared being seen.
The apartment, though richly decorated, had Bohemian corners that at once suggested the chorus-girl. It was here especially that Renée’s pink nostrils quivered, and that she constrained her companion to walk slowly, so as to lose no particle of things or of their smell. She lingered particularly in a dressing-room left wide open by Blanche Muller, who, when she received her friends, gave up everything to them, even to her alcove, where the bed was pushed aside to make room for the card-tables. But the dressing-room did not please her: it seemed to her common, and even a little dirty, with its carpet covered with little round burns from cigarette-ends, and its blue silk hangings stained with pomade and splashed with soapsuds. Then, when she had fully inspected the rooms, and fixed the smallest details of the place in her memory, so as to describe them later to her friends, she passed on to the guests. The men she knew; for the most part they were the same financiers, the same politicians, the same young men-about-town who came to her Thursdays. She fancied herself in her own drawingroom at times, when she came face to face with a group of smiling dress-coats, who, the previous evening, had worn the same smile in her house when talking to the Marquise d’Espanet or the fair-haired Mme. Haffner. Nor was the illusion completely dispelled when she looked at the women. Laure d’Aurigny was in yellow like Suzanne Haffner, and Blanche Muller, like Adeline d’Espanet, wore a white dress which left her bare down to the middle of her back. At last Maxime besought her to take pity on him, and she consented to sit down with him on a sofa. They stayed there a moment, the young man yawning, Renée asking him the ladies’ names, undressing them with her look, adding up the number of yards of lace they wore round their skirts. Seeing her absorbed in this serious study, he ended by slipping away in obedience to a sign which Laure d’Aurigny made him with her hand. She chaffed him about the lady he was escorting. Then she made him swear to come and join them at the Café Anglais at one o’clock.
“Your father will be there,” she called to him, as he rejoined Renée.
The latter found herself surrounded by a group of women laughing very loud, while M. de Saffré had availed himself of the seat left vacant by Maxime to slip down beside her and pay her unmannerly compliments. Next, M. de Saffré and the women had all begun to shout, to smack their thighs, so much so that Renée, fairly deafened, and yawning in her turn,