THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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to discuss it, feeling a great coward at heart, and seized with invincible fright at the thought of the step she was taking. When she arrived, the courtyard of the Hotel Béraud froze her with its dreary, cloistral dampness, and she felt a longing to run away as she climbed the broad stone staircase, on which her little high-heeled boots rang out ominously. She had been foolish enough in her hurry to choose a costume of feuillemort silk, with long flounces of white lace, trimmed with bows of satin, and cut crosswise by a plaited sash. This dress, which was finished off with a little flat toque with a large white veil, struck so singular a note in the dark gloom of the staircase that she herself became conscious of the strange figure she cut there. She trembled as she traversed the austere array of huge rooms, in which the vague figures of the tapestry seemed surprised at the sight of this flow of skirts passing through the twilight of their solitude.
She found her father in a drawingroom looking out upon the courtyard, where he habitually sat. He was reading a large book placed on a desk fastened to the arms of his chair. Before one of the windows sat Aunt Elisabeth knitting with long wooden needles; and in the silence of the room the ticktack of those needles was the only sound heard.
Renée sat down, ill at ease, unable to move without disturbing the severity of the lofty ceiling with a noise of rustling silk. Her lace looked a crude white against the dark background of tapestry and old-fashioned furniture. M. Béraud du Châtel gazed at her with his hands resting on the edge of his reading-desk. Aunt Elisabeth spoke of the approaching wedding of Christine, who was about to marry the son of a very well-to-do attorney; she had gone shopping with an old family-servant; and the good aunt talked on all by herself, in her placid voice, knitting unceasingly, gossiping about her household affairs, and casting smiling glances at Renée over her spectacles.
But Renée became more and more uneasy. The silence of the whole house weighed upon her shoulders, and she would have given much for the lace of her dress to have been black. Her father’s look made her so uncomfortable that she considered Worms really ridiculous to have thought of such wide flounces.
“How smart you look, my girl!” said Aunt Elisabeth, suddenly. She had not even noticed her niece’s lace before.
She stopped her needles, and adjusted her spectacles, in order to see better. M. Béraud du Châtel gave a faint smile.
“It is rather white,” he said. “A woman must feel very uncomfortable in that on the pavements.”
“But, father, we don’t go out on foot!” cried Renée, who immediately regretted this ingenuous utterance.
The old man made as though to reply. Then he rose, drew up his tall stature, and walked slowly up and down, without giving his daughter another look. The latter remained quite pale with trepidation. Every time she exhorted herself to take courage, and sought a transition in order to lead up to her request for money, she felt a twitching at her heart.
“We never see you now, father,” she complained.
“Oh!” replied the aunt, without giving her brother time to open his lips, “your father never goes out, except very rarely to go to the Jardin des Plantes. And I have to grow angry with him before he will do that! He maintains that he loses himself in Paris, that the town is no longer fit for him…. Ah, you would do well to scold him!”
“My husband would be so pleased to see you at our Thursdays from time to time,” continued Renée.
M. Béraud du Châtel took a few steps in silence. Then in a quiet voice:
“Thank your husband for me,” he said. “He seems to be an energetic fellow, and I hope for your sake that he conducts his business honestly. But our ideas are not the same, and I do not feel comfortable in your fine house in the Parc Monceau.”
Aunt Elisabeth seemed vexed by this reply:
“How perverse you men are with your politics!” she said merrily. “Shall I tell you the truth? Your father is furious with both of you because you go to the Tuileries.”
But the old man shrugged his shoulders, as though to imply that his dissatisfaction had much more serious causes. He thoughtfully resumed his slow walk. Renée was silent for a moment, with the request for the fifty thousand francs on the tip of her tongue. Then she was seized with a greater fit of cowardice, kissed her father, and went away.
Aunt Elisabeth accompanied her to the staircase. As they crossed the suite of rooms, she continued to chatter in her thin, old voice:
“You are happy, dear child. I am so pleased to see you looking well and handsome; for if your marriage had turned out badly, you know, I should have thought myself to blame…. Your husband loves you, you have all you want, have you not?”
“Of course,” replied Renée, forcing herself to smile, though feeling sick at heart.
The aunt still detained her, her hand on the balustrade of the staircase.
“You see, I have only one fear, lest you should lose your head with all this happiness. Be prudent, and above all sell none of your property…. If one day you had a baby, you would have a little fortune all ready for it.”
When Renée was back in her brougham, she heaved a sigh of relief. Drops of cold sweat stood on her temples; she wiped them off, thinking of the icy dampness of the Hotel Béraud. Then, when the brougham rolled into the bright sunshine of the Quai Saint-Paul, she remembered the fifty thousand francs, and all her suffering was revived, more poignant than before. She who was considered so audacious, what a coward she had just been! And yet it was a question of Maxime, of his liberty, of their mutual joys! Amid the bitter reproaches which she heaped upon herself, an idea suddenly occurred to her that put the finishing touch to her despair: she ought to have spoken of the fifty thousand francs to her Aunt Elisabeth on the stairs. What had she been thinking of? The kind woman would perhaps have lent her the money, or at least have helped her. She was leaning forward to tell her coachman to drive back to the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, when she thought she again saw the image of her father slowly crossing the solemn darkness of the big drawingroom. She would never have the courage to return immediately to that room. What should she say to explain this second visit? And, at the bottom of her heart, she felt she had no longer even the courage to mention the matter to Aunt Elisabeth. She told her coachman to drive her to the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière.
Mme. Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw her opening the discreetly-curtained door of the shop. She was there by accident, she was just going out to run to the court where she was suing a customer. But she would let judgment go by default, she would try again another day; she was so happy that her sister-in-law had had the kindness to pay her a little visit at last. Renée smiled with an air of embarrassment. Mme. Sidonie positively refused to allow her to stay downstairs; she took her up to her room, by way of the little staircase, after removing the brass knob from the shop-door. She removed and replaced this knob, which was held by a single nail, twenty times a day.
“There, my beauty,” she said, making her sit down on a long-chair, “now we can have a nice chat…. Just fancy, you came in the nick of time. I was coming to see you this evening.”
Renée, who knew the room, experienced that indefinite feeling of uneasiness which a traveller feels on finding that a strip of timber has been felled in a favourite landscape.
“Ah,” she said at last, “you’ve moved the bed, have you not?”
“Yes,” the lace-dealer replied, quietly, “one of my customers prefers it facing the mantelpiece. It was she too who advised me to have red curtains.”
“That’s what I was thinking, the curtains used not to be red…. A very common colour, red.”
And she put up her eyeglass, and looked round this room that displayed the luxury of a big furnished hotel. On the mantelshelf she saw some long hairpins which had certainly not come from Mme. Sidonie’s meagre chignon. In the place where the bed used to stand, the wallpaper was all torn, discoloured, and soiled by the mattresses. The business-woman had indeed endeavoured to hide this eyesore behind the back of two armchairs: but these backs were rather low, and Renée’s