THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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Mme. Sidonie, folding her hands, with the mien of a gastronome who is about to describe what she has had for dinner. “Just think, M. de Saffré has fallen in love with the beautiful Madame Saccard…. Yes, with your pretty self.”
Renée did not even make a coquettish gesture.
“Why,” said she, “you said he was so smitten with Mme. Michelin.”
“Oh, that’s all over, over and done with… I can prove it to you if you like… haven’t you heard that the little Michelin has attracted the Baron Gouraud? It’s inconceivable. All who know the baron are astounded…. And now, you know, she is on the way to obtain the red riband for her husband!… Ah, she’s a clever woman that. She knows her way about, you can’t teach her anything!”
She said this with an air of admiration not unmingled with regret.
“But to return to M. de Saffré…. He seems to have met you at an actresses’ ball, muffled up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly asked you to supper…. Is it true?”
The younger woman was quite surprised.
“Perfectly true,” she murmured; “but who could have told him?”
“Wait, he says that he recognized you later on, after you had left the room, and that he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm…. Since that time he has been madly in love with you. It has sprouted up in his heart, don’t you see? a fancy…. He has been to see me, to beseech me to make you his apologies…”
“Well, tell him I forgive him,” interrupted Renée, carelessly.
Then, all her anguish returning, she went on:
“Ah, my kind Sidonie, I am terribly worried. I must positively have fifty thousand francs tomorrow morning. I came to talk to you about this. You know people who lend money, you told me.”
The woman of business, offended at the abrupt way in which her sister-in-law broke up her recital, made her wait some time for an answer.
“Yes, certainly, only I advise you first of all to look about among your friends…. Were I in your place I know very well what I should do…. I should just simply apply to M. de Saffré.”
Renée gave a constrained smile.
“But,” she retorted, “that would be hardly proper, considering you pretend that he is so much in love.”
The old woman looked at her with a stare; then her flaccid face melted gently into a smile of affectionate pity.
“You poor dear,” she murmured, “you’ve been crying; don’t deny it, I can see it by your eyes. You must be brave and take life as it comes…. Now then, let me arrange this little matter for you.”
Renée rose, twisting her fingers, making her gloves crack. And she remained standing, completely shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She opened her lips, to accept perhaps, when suddenly the bell rang lightly in the next room. Mme. Sidonie hastily went out, leaving the door ajar, which showed a double row of pianos. Renée next heard a man’s step and the stifled sound of a conversation carried on in an undertone. She mechanically went and examined more closely the yellow streak with which the mattresses had stained the wall. This stain disturbed her, made her feel uncomfortable. Forgetting everything, Maxime, the fifty thousand francs, M. de Saffré, she returned to the side of the bed, reflecting: that bed looked much better placed as it used to be; some women really had no taste; surely, if you went to bed like that, you would have the light in your eyes. And vaguely, in the depths of her memory she saw rising the image of the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul, her romance in two assignations, that chance amour which she had indulged over there, where the bed used to stand. The wearing away of the wallpaper was all that remained of it. Then the room filled her with uneasiness, and she lost patience with the hum of voices that still went on in the adjoining room.
When Mme. Sidonie returned, circumspectly, opening and closing the door, she made repeated signs with her fingers to induce Renée to speak very low. Then, in her ear:
“You have no idea, this is most fortunate: it is M. de Saffré who has called.”
“You haven’t told him, surely, that I was here?” asked Renée, uneasily.
The woman of business seemed surprised, and very innocently answered:
“I did indeed…. He is waiting for me to tell him to come in. Of course, I said nothing to him of the fifty thousand francs….”
Renée, very pale, had drawn herself up as though struck with a whip. An infinite pride rose to her heart. The rude creaking of boots which she now heard more distinctly in the room next door, exasperated her.
“I am going,” she said, curtly. “Come and open the door for me.”
Mme. Sidonie tried to smile.
“Don’t be childish…. I can’t be left with that lad on my hands, now that I’ve told him you are here…. You compromise me, really….”
But Renée had already descended the little staircase. She repeated before the closed shop-door:
“Open it, open it.”
The lace-dealer had a habit of putting the brass knob in her pocket after she had withdrawn it from the door. She wanted to continue arguing. At last, seized with anger herself, and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes, the sour barrenness of her nature, she cried:
“But what on earth do you want me to tell the man?”
“That I’m not for sale,” replied Renée, with one foot on the pavement.
And it seemed to her that she heard Madame Sidonie mutter, as she banged the door to: “Ah, get out, you jade! you shall pay me for this.”
“My God!” thought she, as she stepped into her brougham, “I prefer my husband to that.”
She drove straight back home. After dinner she asked Maxime not to come; she was unwell, she needed rest. And the next day, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia’s jeweller, she was embarrassed in the midst of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had had a good stroke of business. But from that day forward she was more wayward, she frequently changed the hour of the appointments she gave Maxime, and often even watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not trouble much about these changes of mood; he took pleasure in being an obedient thing in the hands of women. What more annoyed him was the moral turn which their lovers’-meetings took at times. She became quite dismal; and it even happened that she had great tears in her eyes. She left off her refrain of “le beau jeune homme” in La Belle Hélène, played the hymns she had learnt at school, asked her lover if he did not think that sin was punished sooner or later.
“There is no doubt she’s growing old,” thought he. “It will be the utmost if she’s amusing for another year or two.”
The truth was that she was suffering cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Madame Sidonie’s she had revolted, she had yielded to instinctive pride, to disgust for that coarse bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything within her foundered, and she felt herself to be so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man that pushed open the door of the room with the pianos. Up to then, the thought of her husband had sometimes passed before her, in her incest, like a voluptuous accentuation of horror, but now the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that changed her most delicate sensations into intolerable pain. She, who found pleasure in the refinement of her sin, and who dreamt gladly of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods enjoyed their own kindred, was now drifting towards vulgar debauchery, and making herself the common property of two men. In vain did she endeavour to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. Her curiosity penetrated to the depth of those accursed enjoyments; she went so far as to mingle the two affections, and