She clapped her hands, beaming.
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “That’s it! . . . A big cross was just what I had on the tip of my tongue.”
She opened up her blouse, vanished for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. Then she stationed herself once more in front of the mirror, murmuring, “Oh, now it’s perfect, quite perfect! . . . So, my little boy with the shaved head is not stupid at all! Did you dress the women in your province? . . . Clearly we shall be good friends. But you must mind what I say. First of all, you must let your hair grow, and you must never wear that dreadful tunic again. And you will faithfully heed all my lessons in good manners. I want you to be a smart young man.”
“Of course,” the boy said naïvely, “since papa is rich now, and you’re his wife.”
She smiled, and with her usual audacity said, “Then let’s begin by addressing each other familiarly. I’ve been switching between tu and vous. It’s silly. . . . Do you promise to love me?”
“I shall love you with all my heart,” he answered with the effusive-ness of a lad addressing his sweetheart.
Such was the first conversation between Maxime and Renée. The boy did not return to school for a month. In their first days together, his stepmother played with him as she would have played with a doll. She knocked the rough edges of his provincial upbringing off him, and it must be said that he lent himself to her efforts with the utmost alacrity. When he appeared dressed from head to toe in spanking new clothes supplied by his father’s tailor, she gave a cry of joyful surprise. He was as “pretty as a picture,” as she put it. It took a desperately long time for his hair to grow out, however. Renée always said that the hair made the face. She took devoted care of her own. For quite some time the color of her hair drove her to despair—that soft yellow color reminiscent of the finest butter. But when blonde hair became fashionable, she was delighted, and in order to make people believe that she wasn’t just unconsciously following fashion, she swore that she dyed her hair every month.
For a boy of thirteen, Maxime was already terribly knowing. His was one of those frail and precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he had desires. On two occasions he nearly got himself expelled from school. Had Renée been attuned to provincial graces, she might have noticed that, as odd as his appearance was, the “little shaved skull,” as she called him, smiled, turned his head, and held out his arm in the dainty, effeminate manner of those schoolboys who beguile their classmates with their charms. He took great care with his hands, which were slender and long. Although his hair was cut short by order of the headmaster, a former colonel in the Engineers, he possessed a small mirror, which he used to take from his pocket during class and place between the pages of his book so that he could stare at himself for hours on end, examining his eyes and gums, making faces, and teaching himself to flirt. His classmates clutched at his school uniform as if it were a skirt, and he pulled his belt so tight that he had the thin waist and swaying hips of a grown woman. The truth was that he took beatings from his classmates as often as he received their caresses. The school in Plassans, like most provincial boarding schools a den of young bandits, thus proved a hotbed of corruption that developed Maxime’s neutered temperament in unusual ways, fostering the evil that had come down to him from some mysterious hereditary source. Fortunately, age was about to straighten him out. But the mark of his youthful surrenders, of the effeminization of his entire being during this period in which he had thought of himself as a girl, would remain with him and cripple his virility for good.
Renée called him “mademoiselle,” unaware that six months earlier her description would have been right on the mark. He struck her as very obedient and very loving, indeed so loving that she often felt embarrassed by his caresses. He had a way of kissing that made her skin feel warm. What delighted her, though, was his mischievous manner. He was as funny as could be, and bold, already grinning when he spoke of women and holding his own with Renée’s friends: dear Adeline, who had just married M. d’Espanet, and plump Suzanne, who had only recently married the big industrialist Haffner. At fourteen he formed a passionate attachment to the latter. He made a confidant of his stepmother, who was most amused.
“In your place I would have preferred Adeline,” she said. “She’s prettier.”
“Maybe,” the naughty boy replied, “but Suzanne is so much meatier. I love beautiful women. If you were nice, you’d speak to her for me.”
Renée laughed. Her doll—this tall boy with his girlish ways— seemed priceless now that he was in love. There came a point when Mme Haffner had to defend herself seriously. In any case, these three women encouraged the precocious child with their stifled laughs, their insinuations, and their flirtatious behavior. A very aristocratic touch of debauchery was part of it. All three led tumultuous lives and, having been burned by passion, they found the naughty child’s charming depravity diverting—a novel, unthreatening spice that reawakened their taste. They allowed him to touch their gowns and graze their shoulders with his fingers when he followed them into the vestibule to throw their evening wraps over them. They passed him from one to the other, laughing madly when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, where the skin is so soft. Then they turned maternal and instructed him at length in the art of being a fine gentleman and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little man of ingenious construction, who kissed, made love, and exhibited all the most charming vices of high society yet remained a toy, a little cardboard man of whom one did not have to be too afraid, just enough to tremble most pleasantly beneath his childish caresses.
When classes resumed, Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. This was the school to which all the best families sent their children, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The boy, listless and frivolous though he was at that point, had a very lively intelligence, but the classics were the last thing to which he applied himself. He was nevertheless a decent student, who never joined the dunces in their low bohemian ways but remained among the proper, well-dressed young gentlemen who never drew adverse comment. All that remained of his younger years was a veritable fetish about good grooming. Paris opened his eyes and made a handsome young man of him; following the latest fashions, he wore his clothes tight. He was the Beau Brummel1 of his class. He came to school turned out as if for a drawing room, elegantly shod, properly gloved, wearing fabulous ties and indescribable hats. There were twenty or so similar boys in his class, and they constituted an aristocracy, passing out Havana cigars after school from cases with gold clasps and having their books carried by liveried servants. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury2 and a small black horse that made him the envy of his classmates. He drove this rig himself, while a footman sat in the rear with arms crossed and Maxime’s books on his lap in a briefcase of textured brown leather worthy of a government minister. You had to see him to appreciate how effortlessly, cleverly, and skillfully he managed the ten-minute drive from the rue de Rivoli to the rue du Havre, stopping his horse in front of the lycée and tossing the reins to the footman with the reminder, “Jacques, until four-thirty, all right?” The neighborhood shopkeepers took delight in the grace of this fair-haired boy whose comings and goings they witnessed daily. After school, he would sometimes drive a friend home and drop him at his door. The two youths would smoke, look at women, and spatter pedestrians with mud as if returning from the races. It was an astonishing little world, a breeding ground for the snobs and imbeciles who could be seen every day on the rue du Havre, nattily dressed in their dandyish jackets, playing at being blasé men of means, while the school’s bohemians, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and pushing and pounding the pavement with their heavy boots while carrying their books slung over their backs at the end of a strap.
Renée, who took her role as mother and teacher seriously, was delighted with her pupil. Indeed, she left no stone unturned when it came to perfecting his education. She had been goin
g through a period of bitterness and tears. A lover had left her in a scandalous way, obvious to all Paris, in order to be with Duchess von Sternich. She dreamt that Maxime would be her consolation; she made herself look older, contrived in all sorts of ways to be maternal, and became the most unusual mentor imaginable. On many days Maxime’s tilbury remained at the house, and Renée came to fetch the boy from school in her big calèche. They hid the brown briefcase under the seat and went to the Bois, then brand new. There she gave him a course in high elegance. She recited the most prominent names of imperial Paris— the names of fat, happy people still ecstatic about the stroke of the magic wand that had transformed them overnight from starving oafs into great lords breathing hard and fainting from the strain of lifting their cash boxes. But the child questioned her mainly about the women, and, being very free with him, she offered him precise details. Mme de Guende was stupid but admirably built; Countess Wanska, extremely wealthy, had been a street singer before marrying a Pole who was said to beat her; the marquise d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner were of course inseparable, and even though they were her intimate friends, Renée pressed her lips together as if to indicate she would say no more after remarking that some quite unpleasant rumors had been circulating about them; beautiful Mme de Lauwerens was terribly compromising as well, but she had such pretty eyes, and, to make a long story short, everybody knew that, while she herself was beyond reproach, she was a little bit too mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who often called on her, Mme Daste, Mme Teissière, and Baroness von Meinhold. Maxime asked for portraits of these ladies, which he placed in an album that remained on the drawing room table. With the salacious cunning that was the dominant trait of his character, he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking her for details about the prostitutes, whom he pretended to mistake for authentic socialites. With a moral and serious air Renée would then tell him that these were frightful creatures whom he must carefully avoid. Then she forgot herself and spoke about them as if they were people she had known intimately. One of the child’s great delights was to get her started about Duchess von Sternich. Whenever the duchess’s carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never failed to mention her name in a sly, cruel way and with a downward flick of his eyes which proved that he knew all about Renée’s most recent adventure. In a cutting tone Renée then tore her rival to pieces. How old she was getting! The poor woman! She painted her face, had lovers hidden in all her closets, and had given herself to a chamberlain to gain access to the imperial bed. And she ran on in this vein while Maxime tried to provoke her by saying that he found Mme von Sternich ravishing. Lessons such as these developed the student’s intelligence to a remarkable degree, especially since his young teacher repeated them everywhere, in the Bois, at the theater, and in various drawing rooms. The pupil became very proficient.
What Maxime adored was living amid the women’s skirts, finery, and rice powder. He remained a girl in some ways, with his slender hands, beardless face, and fleshy white neck. Renée consulted him closely about her wardrobe. He knew all the good Paris designers and judged each of them with a word, speaking of the “flavor” of this one’s hats or the “logic” of that one’s gowns. At the age of seventeen, there was not a milliner he had not scrutinized in depth, not a bootmaker whose heart he had not studied and penetrated. This oddly stunted youth, who spent his time in English class reading the brochures his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have defended a brilliant thesis on Parisian high society, its purveyors and their clients, at an age when a provincial boy still wouldn’t dare look his maid in the face. On returning from the lycée he often brought with him a hat, a box of soap, or an item of jewelry ordered the day before by his stepmother. In one of his pockets he always carried a piece of perfumed lace.
What Maxime liked best, however, was to accompany Renée on her visits to the illustrious Worms, the genius tailor before whom the queens of the Second Empire fell to their knees. The great man’s showroom was a vast square filled with ample couches. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Clothing of course has a fragrance all its own. Silk, satin, velvet, and lace married their faint aromas to those of perfumed hair and shoulders, and the air in the salon retained a fragrant warmth, an incense of flesh and luxury, that transformed the room into a chapel consecrated to some secret deity. Renée and Maxime were frequently obliged to wait for hours. Twenty or so other importunate ladies waited their turn along with them, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira and helping themselves from a large central table laden with bottles and plates of petits fours. These ladies were at home here and spoke freely, and when they huddled about the room in small groups it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawing room. Maxime, whom they tolerated and loved for his girlish looks, was the only man allowed in this clique. Here he savored divine delights. He slithered along the sofas like an agile serpent. He might hide beneath a skirt, behind a bodice, or between two gowns, making himself small and remaining very quiet while he breathed in the perfumed warmth of the ladies in his vicinity with the expression of a choirboy swallowing the host.
“That boy sticks his nose everywhere,” said Baroness von Meinhold as she patted his cheeks.
He was such a slight youth that none of the ladies thought of him as being older than fourteen. They amused themselves by getting him tipsy on the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He said astounding things to them, which made them laugh until they cried. But it was the marquise d’Espanet who hit upon the best description of Maxime’s situation. One day he was spotted hiding behind her back at a place where two couches came together. “There’s a boy who ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured at the sight of him pink and flushed and thoroughly pleased at having been so close to her.
When at last the great Worms received Renée, Maxime accompanied her into his studio. He ventured two or three times to speak up while the master was absorbed in contemplation of his client, much as Leonardo da Vinci is said by the high priests of art to have been absorbed in the presence of Mona Lisa. The master deigned to smile at the accuracy of Maxime’s observations. He had Renée stand in front of a mirror that stretched from floor to ceiling and knitted his brows in meditation while the young woman, in the grip of emotion, held her breath and tried to remain motionless. After a few minutes, the master, as if seized and shaken by inspiration, painted in bold, rapid strokes the masterpiece he had just conceived, spitting out his description in sharp, brief sentences: “Montespan dress in pale gray faille. . . . The train describing a rounded basque in front. . . . Big bows of gray satin catching it up at the hips. . . . And to top it all off, a puffed pinafore of pearl gray tulle, with the puffs separated by strips of gray satin.”
He meditated a while longer, seemed to reach down into the depths of his genius, and at last with the triumphant expression of a Sibyl on her tripod3 concluded, “We shall adorn the hair on this happy head with Psyche’s dreamy butterfly4 and its iridescent wings of azure.”
On other occasions, however, inspiration dragged its feet. In vain did the illustrious Worms summon it forth, concentrating all his faculties to no avail. He knitted his brow, turned pale, took his poor head between his hands and shook it in despair until, defeated at last, he threw himself down in his chair. “No,” he murmured in a pained voice, “no, not today. . . . It’s impossible. . . . You ladies expect too much. The well is dry.”
And he showed Renée the door, repeating, “It’s impossible, impossible, dear lady. You must come back another day. . . . You elude me this morning.”
The fine education that Maxime was receiving yielded its first result. At seventeen the boy seduced his stepmother’s chambermaid. To make matters worse, the girl became pregnant and had to be sent away to the country with her infant and a small stipend. Renée was terribly put out by the whole episode and remained that way for some time. Saccard became involved just long enough to settle the pecuniary aspect of the matter, but the young woman scolded h
er pupil roundly. To think he’d gone and compromised himself with a girl of that sort when she wanted to make a distinguished gentleman of him! What a ridiculous and shameful debut! What a disgraceful escapade! He might at least have started out with one of the ladies!
“Absolutely!” he answered quietly. “If your good friend Suzanne had been willing, she’s the one who would be leaving for the country.”
“Oh, you filthy scoundrel!” she muttered, disarmed and amused by the idea of Suzanne hiding out in the country on a stipend of 1,200 francs.
Then an even more amusing thought occurred to her, and, forgetting her role as indignant mother, she began to titter, placed her fingers over her mouth to hold back the laughter, cast a sidelong glance at Maxime, and stammered, “You know, Adeline is the one who would have given you a hard time and made a scene—”
She did not finish her sentence. Maxime was laughing with her. Renée’s effort to turn this escapade into a lesson in morality ended then and there.
Meanwhile, Aristide Saccard spent little time worrying about the “two children,” as he called his son and his second wife. He granted them absolute freedom, glad to see that they were good friends who filled the apartment with boisterous gaiety. The second-floor flat on the rue de Rivoli was a place of unusual activity. Doors were swinging all day long. The servants spoke in loud voices. Billowing skirts swept constantly through the dazzling luxury of the brand-new rooms, along with processions of purveyors and gaggles of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s classmates, and Saccard’s visitors. From nine until eleven in the morning Saccard received the strangest assemblage of characters imaginable: senators and court clerks, duchesses and rag dealers— whatever flotsam the Parisian tempest dumped on his doorstep each morning, whether clad in silk gowns, filthy skirts, workmen’s smocks, or dark frock coats—and he received each one with the same clipped tones and impatient, nervous gestures. He dispatched business deals with a couple of words, dealt with twenty difficulties at once, and proposed solutions on the fly. It sometimes sounded as though this energetic little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, or with the furniture, turning somersaults and knocking his head against the ceiling to jar ideas loose before landing on his feet, ever victorious. Then, at eleven o’clock, he went out and was not seen again for the rest of the day. He took his lunch out and often his dinner as well. Then the house belonged to Renée and Maxime. They took over the old man’s study and unpacked the boxes from the stores, and articles of clothing were left lying on top of business files. There were times when grave men were obliged to wait for an hour outside the door of the study while the schoolboy and the young wife, seated at either end of Saccard’s desk, argued about a bow of ribbon. Renée ordered the horses hitched up ten times a day. The family seldom took meals together. Two of the three were always on the run somewhere, too absorbed in whatever they were doing to return before midnight. It was an apartment noisy with business and pleasure, where modern life rushed in like a gust of wind, accompanied by the clink of gold and the rustle of gowns.