THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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M. de Mussy entered. He seemed delighted to meet Maxime, and paying no attention to the masked woman he had with him:
“Ah, my friend,” he murmured with a lovesick air, “she will be the death of me. I know she is better, and she still forbids me her door. Do tell her you have seen me with tears in my eyes.”
“Be still, she shall have your message,” said the young man, with a curious laugh. And on the stairs:
“Well, stepmamma, hasn’t the poor fellow touched you?” She shrugged her shoulders without replying. Outside, on the pavement, she paused before getting into the cab, which had waited for them, and looked hesitatingly towards the Madeleine and towards the Boulevard des Italiens. It was barely half-past eleven, the boulevard was still very animated.
“So we are going home,” she murmured, regretfully.
“Unless you care to take a drive along the boulevards,” replied Maxime.
She agreed. Her feast of feminine curiosity was turning out badly, and she hated the idea of returning home with an illusion the less and an incipient headache. She had long imagined that an actresses’ ball was killingly funny. There seemed to be a return of Spring, as happens sometimes in the last days of October; the night had a May warmth, and the occasional cold breezes passing gave additional gaiety to the atmosphere. Renée, with her head at the window, remained silent, looking at the crowd, the cafés, the restaurants, whose interminable line scudded past. She had become quite serious, lost in the depths of those vague longings that fill the reveries of women. The wide pavement, swept by the streetwalkers’ skirts, and ringing with peculiar familiarity under the men’s boots, the gray asphalt, over which it seemed to her that the gallop of pleasure and facile love was passing, awoke her slumbering desires, and made her forget the idiotic ball which she had left, to allow her a glimpse of other and more highly-flavoured joys. At the windows of the private rooms at Brébant’s, she perceived the shadows of women on the whiteness of the curtains. And Maxime told her a very improper story, of a husband who had thus detected, on a curtain, the shadow of his wife and the shadow of a lover in the act. She hardly listened to him. But he grew livelier, and ended by taking her hands and teasing her by talking of that poor M. de Mussy.
They turned back, and as they once more passed in front of Brébant’s:
“Do you know,” she said, suddenly, “that M. de Saffré asked me to supper this evening?”
“Oh! you would have fared badly,” he replied, laughing. “Saffré has not the slightest culinary imagination. He has not got beyond a lobster salad.”
“No, no, he spoke of oysters and of cold partridge…. But he addressed me in the second person singular, and that bothered me ….”
She stopped short, looked again at the boulevard, and added after a pause, with an air of distress:
“The worst of it is that I am awfully hungry.”
“What, you are hungry!” exclaimed the young man. “That’s very simple, we will go and have supper together…. What do you say?’’
He spoke quietly, but she refused at first, declaring that Céleste had put out something for her to eat at home. Meantime Maxime, who did not want to go to the Café Anglais, had stopped the cab at the corner of the Rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche; he even alighted, and as his stepmother still hesitated:
“As for that,” he said, “if you are afraid of my compromising you, say so…. I will get up beside the driver and take you back to your husband.”
She smiled, and alighted from the cab with the air of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The pavement which she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious sensation of fear and of gratified caprice quivering over her skin. Ever since the cab had been rolling on, she had had a mad longing to jump out upon the pavement. She crossed it with short steps, stealthily, as though she felt a keener pleasure from the fear that she might be seen. Her escapade was decidedly turning into an adventure. She certainly did not regret having refused M. de Saffré’s offhand invitation. But she would have come home terribly cross if Maxime had not thought of letting her taste forbidden fruit. He ran upstairs quickly, as though at home. She followed him a little out of breath. Slight fumes of fish and game hung about, and the stair-carpet, secured to the steps with brass rods, had a smell of dust that increased her excitement.
As they reached the first landing, they met a dignified-looking waiter, who drew back to the wall to let them pass.
“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll wait on us, won’t you?… Give us the white room.”
Charles bowed, went up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was lowered, it seemed to Renée as if she was penetrating into the twilight of a dubious and charming resort.
A continuous rumbling came in through the wide-open window, and on the ceiling, in the reflection cast by the café below, the shadows of the people in the street passed swiftly by. But with a twist of his thumb the waiter turned on the gas. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, the room filled with a crude light that fell full upon Renée’s head. She had already thrown back her hood. The little curls had become slightly disarranged, but the blue ribbon had not stirred. She began to walk about, confused by the way in which Charles looked at her; he blinked his eyes and screwed up the lids in order to see her better in a way which plainly argued: “Here’s one I haven’t seen before.”
“What shall I serve, monsieur?” he asked aloud.
Maxime turned towards Renée.
“What do you say to M. de Saffré’s supper?” he asked. “Oysters, a partridge….”
And seeing the young man smile, Charles discreetly imitated him, murmuring:
“Wednesday’s supper, then, if that will suit?”
“Wednesday’s supper….” repeated Maxime.
Then, remembering:
“Yes, I don’t care, give us Wednesday’s supper.”
When the waiter had gone, Renée took her eyeglass, and went inquisitively round the room. It was a square room in white and gold, furnished with the coquetry of a boudoir. Besides the table and the chairs, there was a sort of low slab that served as a sideboard, and a broad divan, a veritable bed, which stood between the window and the fireplace. A Louis XVI clock and candlesticks adorned the white marble mantel. But the curiosity of the room was the mirror, a handsome long-shaped mirror, which had been scrawled over by the ladies’ diamonds with names, dates, doggrel verses, prodigious sentiments and astounding avowals. Renée thought she caught sight of something beastly, and lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, experiencing fresh embarrassment, and at last, to give herself countenance, began gazing at the ceiling and the copper-gilt chandelier with its five jets. But the uneasiness she felt was delicious. While she raised her forehead as if to examine the cornice, seriously, and with her eyeglass in her hand, she derived profound enjoyment from this equivocal furniture which she felt about her; from that limpid, cynical mirror whose pure surface, barely wrinkled by those filthy scrawls, had helped in the adjusting of so many false chignons; from that divan whose breadth shocked her; from the table and the very carpet, in which she found the same smell as on the stairs, a subtle, penetrating, and almost religious odour of dust.
Then, when she was driven at last to lower her eyes.
“What is this supper of Wednesday?” she asked of Maxime.
“Nothing,” he replied. “A bet one of my friends lost.”
In any other place he would have told her without hesitation that he had supped on Wednesday with a lady he had met on the boulevard. But since entering the private room, he had instinctively treated her as a woman whose good graces one seeks to obtain and whose jealousy must be spared. She did not insist; she went and leant on the rail of the window, where he joined her. Behind them Charles came and went, with a sound of crockery and plate.
It was