Despite this banal socialite’s existence, Renée had had one romance in her life. She had gone out one day at dusk to visit her father, walking to his house because he did not like the sound of carriages at his door, and on her way back via the Quai Saint-Paul she noticed that she was being followed by a young man. It was hot; the day was dying with amorous softness. Used to being followed only by men on horseback on the bridle paths of the Bois, she found the adventure stimulating and was flattered by this new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very crudeness she found appealing. Rather than return directly home, she took the rue du Temple, leading her admirer along the boulevards. Emboldened, the man became so importunate, however, that Renée, rather taken aback, lost her head, turned down the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, and took refuge in her husband’s sister’s shop. The man followed her in. Mme Sidonie smiled, signaled her comprehension of the situation, and left the couple alone. When Renée made as if to follow her out of the room, the stranger called her back, spoke to her in a respectfully admiring way, and won her pardon. He was a clerk by the name of Georges, whose last name she never asked. She came to meet him twice, entering through the shop, while he used the entrance on rue Papillon. This chance love affair, which began with an encounter on the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame but also a singular smile of regret. Mme Sidonie’s profit from the adventure was to have become the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a role she had aspired to play from the day of the wedding.
Poor Mme Sidonie had suffered a setback. In brokering the marriage, she had hoped in a sense to marry Renée herself, to turn her into a client and reap from her a variety of rewards. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horses. So her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to get settled, she found Mme de Lauwerens already ensconced in their salon and realized that she had waited too long. Mme de Lauwerens, a beautiful woman of twenty-six, made it her business to launch newcomers to high society. She belonged to a very old family and was married to a man from the world of high finance, who had made the mistake of refusing to pay the bills submitted by his wife’s milliner and tailor. Highly intelligent, the lady minted whatever cash she needed and became her own keeper. Men horrified her, she said, yet she supplied all her lady friends with them. The apartment she occupied on the rue de Provence, above her husband’s offices, was always crowded with clients. It was an ideal setting for intimate little meals. Men and women could meet there in charming impromptu encounters. Where was the harm if a young woman went to visit her dear friend Mme de Lauwerens, and so what if some very respectable men from the best society chanced to arrive at her apartment at the same time? The mistress of the house looked lovely in her long lacy peignoirs. Many a visitor would have chosen her over any of the women in her collection of blondes and brunettes, but word had it that she was beyond reproach. That was the secret of her success. She maintained her position in society, enjoyed friendships with all the men, preserved her proud reputation as a respectable lady, and secretly enjoyed ruining the reputations of other women and profiting from their downfall. When Mme Sidonie had worked out the mechanism of this new system, she was mortified. It was the old school—a woman in a black dress carrying love notes in the bottom of her basket—versus the modern school—a great lady who sips tea while selling her friends in her own boudoir. The modern school won out. Mme de Lauwerens cast a cold eye on the threadbare clothing of Mme Sidonie, in whom she suspected a rival. And it was Mme de Lauwerens who saddled Renée with her first problem, the young duc de Rozan, for whom the financier’s beautiful wife had had a very hard time finding a match. The old school did not score a victory until later, when Mme Sidonie lent her sister-in-law her apartment so that she might indulge her whim with the strange man from the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained Renée’s confidante.
Among Mme Sidonie’s faithful allies, moreover, was Maxime. By the age of fifteen he was prowling around his aunt’s house, sniffing at gloves he found lying forgotten on the furniture. Although she detested any situation that was unambiguous and never admitted doing favors, eventually she agreed to lend him the keys to her apartment on certain days, saying that she would be off to the country overnight. Maxime had mentioned to her that there were friends he wished to entertain but did not dare bring to his father’s house. It was in his aunt’s apartment above the shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière that he had spent several nights with the poor girl who had had to be sent away to the country. Mme Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew and swooned at the sight of him, whispering sweetly in his ear that he was “as smooth and pink as a cherub.”
Meanwhile, Maxime had grown. He was now a slender, good-looking young man who still had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a child. His curly locks completed the “girlish look” that the ladies found so enchanting. He took after poor Angèle, with her gentle gaze and blond pallor. Yet he was even more worthless than that lazy, empty-headed woman. The Rougon blood ran thin in his veins and became tenuous and susceptible to vice. Born to a woman too young to be a mother, he was a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s capitulations and weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out. When Maxime went riding in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman and swaying slightly in the saddle to the rhythm of his horse’s canter, he was the god of the age, with his well-developed hips, his long, slender hands, his sickly, leering appearance, his punctilious elegance, and his music-hall slang. At twenty he considered himself beyond all possibility of surprise or disgust. He had certainly dreamt some unusually filthy dreams. Vice for him was not an abyss, as it is for some old men, but a natural and outward flowering. It lived in his wavy blond hair, smiled on his lips, cloaked him in its robes. What was most typical of him, however, were his eyes, two blue apertures, radiant and smiling, mirrors of vanity that could not hide the emptiness of the brain behind. Those harlot eyes were never lowered. They never tired in their search for pleasure, which they summoned forth and drank in.
The wind that constantly rattled the doors of the apartment on the rue de Rivoli grew stronger as Maxime grew older, Saccard expanded the scope of his operations, and Renée searched ever more feverishly for unfamiliar pleasures. The lives these three people led were in the end astonishingly wild and free. Such was the fruit that the epoch ultimately produced in abundance. The street invaded the apartment with its rumble of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its unbridled speech. The father, the stepmother, and the stepson acted and spoke and made themselves at home as if each were alone, living the bachelor life. Three friends, three classmates sharing the same furnished room, could not have been less inhibited about their vices, their loves, and their boisterous adolescent pleasures. They greeted one another with handshakes, gave no hint of any doubts about why they were living under the same roof, and treated one another in a cavalier, carefree manner, thereby asserting their absolute independence. They banished the idea of family in favor of a kind of partnership, with each claiming an equal share of the profits. To each partner went a quota of pleasure to be consumed, it was tacitly understood, as he or she saw fit. Ultimately they gratified themselves in one another’s presence, making a parade of their pleasures, recounting them to one another without provoking anything but a bit of envy or curiosity, nothing more.
Maxime now became Renée’s teacher. When he went to the Bois with her, he amused her greatly with his stories about the whores. Whenever a new one turned up at lakeside, he set out at once to find out who her lover was, how much he paid her per month, and how she liv
ed. He knew the interiors of these ladies’ apartments as well as intimate details of their lives and was nothing less than a walking catalog listing all the prostitutes of Paris, with complete descriptions of each and every one. This scandal sheet delighted Renée. On race days at Longchamp, she would listen avidly to all his stories as they drove past the racetrack in her calèche, yet she always maintained the hauteur of the true socialite. She liked to hear, for instance, how Blanche Muller was deceiving her embassy attaché with her hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his undershorts in the alcove of a skinny, redheaded celebrity who went by the name “Crayfish.” Each day yielded its quota of gossip. When the story was too coarse for a lady’s ears, Maxime lowered his voice but told all. Renée opened her eyes wide like a child listening to a good joke and restrained her laughter until she was obliged to stifle it with an embroidered handkerchief pressed delicately to her lips.
Maxime also brought her photographs of these ladies. His pockets and even his cigar case were always filled with portraits of actresses. Sometimes he emptied them out and put the ladies’ pictures in the album left lying about the drawing room, which already contained portraits of Renée’s friends. It also contained pictures of men such as MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, and de Mussy, along with actors, writers, and deputies who had somehow or other found their way into Maxime’s collection. It was a singularly mixed society, a faithful reflection of the motley assortment of ideas and people that came Renée and Maxime’s way. Whenever it rained, or they felt bored, this album served as a great conversation piece. Somehow it always seemed close at hand. Stifling a yawn, Renée would open it for perhaps the hundredth time. Then her curiosity would reawaken, Maxime would come and lean behind her, and they would fall into lengthy discussions about Crayfish’s hair, Frau von Meinhold’s double chin, Mme de Lauwerens’s eyes, Blanche Muller’s bosom, the marquise’s slightly crooked nose, or little Sylvia’s mouth with its notoriously thick lips. They compared one woman with another.
“If I were a man,” Renée would say, “I’d choose Adeline.”
“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” Maxime would answer. “She’s so funny! . . . I prefer Sylvia.”
As the pages turned, an image of the duc de Rozan might pop up, or Mr. Simpson, or the comte de Chibray, and Maxime would add in a mocking tone, “In any case, your taste is perverted, as everyone knows. . . . Can you imagine anything stupider than the faces of these gentlemen? Rozan and Chibray look like Gustave, my barber.”
Renée shrugged as if to say that sarcasm like Maxime’s left her cold. She remained absorbed in the spectacle of faces, whether pallid, cheerful, or cross. She lingered longest over the portraits of the prostitutes, carefully scrutinizing the photographs for precise, microscopic details, for tiny wrinkles and hairs. One day she even called for a servant to bring her a magnifying glass after she thought she spotted a hair on Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the lens did reveal a thin golden filament, which had fallen from an eyebrow onto the middle of the nose. This hair amused the two of them for quite some time. For the next week, all the ladies who came to visit were obliged to verify its presence in the photograph for themselves. From then on the magnifying glass was put to regular use in scrutinizing the women’s faces. Renée made some astonishing discoveries. She found unsuspected wrinkles, rough skin, and pockmarks imperfectly concealed by rice powder. In the end Maxime hid the magnifying glass, on the grounds that it was not right to use such an instrument to make the human face look disgusting. The truth was that Renée had subjected Sylvia’s thick lips to excessively close scrutiny, Sylvia being a person for whom Maxime felt a special affection. He and Renée invented a new game. They asked the question, “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and then turned to the album for answers. This yielded some quite delightful couples. Renée spent any number of evenings playing this game with her friends and found herself married off in succession to the archbishop of Paris, Baron Gouraud, M. de Chibray, which made her laugh, and even her own husband, which depressed her. As for Maxime, whether by chance or as a result of Renée’s mischievous intervention, he always ended up with the marquise. But the laughs were never louder than when fate coupled two men or two women.
So close was the camaraderie between Renée and Maxime that she even told him about her heartaches. He consoled her and offered his advice. His father seemed not to exist. Eventually they even exchanged confidences about their younger years. During their drives in the Bois especially they felt a vague languor, a need to tell each other things that are difficult to say and usually left unspoken. The relish that children feel when speaking in low voices about forbidden subjects, the attraction that draws a young man and a young woman together into sin, albeit in word only, kept bringing them back to salacious subjects. This gave them deep pleasure, for which they did not reproach each other—a pleasure that each savored while reclining listlessly in a corner of their carriage, like old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. Eventually they boasted to each other of their debaucheries, like braggarts. Renée confessed that the little girls in her school were very naughty. Maxime outdid her and dared to recount some of the shameful things that went on at his school in Plassans.
“Ah!” Renée whispered. “I can’t tell . . .”
Then she leaned close to his ear, as if the only thing that would have made her blush was the sound of her own voice, and confided to him one of those convent stories that are often heard in lewd songs. He himself had too rich a collection of anecdotes of this sort to hold anything back. He warbled any number of very coarse verses in her ear. Little by little they entered their own peculiar state of beatitude, gently stimulated by the many carnal thoughts they stirred up and titillated by unavowed desires. The carriage drove quietly on, and they returned home pleasantly fatigued, more tired than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned, like two boys who, while strolling together in the country without their mistresses, make do with mutual recollections.
A still greater familiarity and lack of restraint existed between father and son. Saccard had grasped the fact that a great financier is bound to make love to women and on occasion lose his head over them. He was brusque in love and preferred money. It was a part of his plan, however, to frequent women’s bedrooms, to strew banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to use a celebrated prostitute as a gold-plated advertisement for one of his speculations. When Maxime left school, he and his father would occasionally run into each other at the home of the same lady, and they would laugh about it. To some extent they were even rivals. Sometimes, when the young man dined at the Maison d’Or with a noisy group of friends, he could hear Saccard’s voice in a private room nearby.
“Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Daddy next door!” he would shout, with an expression on his face borrowed from one of the popular actors of the day.
“Oh, it’s you!” his father would rejoin in a jocular tone of voice. “Come in, why don’t you? You’re making so much noise I can’t hear myself eat. So who are you with tonight?”
“Laure d’Aurigny, Sylvia, Crayfish, and two others I think. They’re astonishing: they poke at the plates with their fingers and throw handfuls of salad at our heads. My clothes are covered with oil.”
His father laughed at this story, which he thought quite funny.
“Ah, young people, young people,” he murmured. “Not like us, are they, my kitten? We’ve had a very quiet meal and will soon hit the hay.”
And with that he grabbed the chin of the woman next to him and cooed at her in his nasal Provençal, which produced a strange amorous music.
“Oh, you old fool!” the woman shouted. “Hello, Maxime. If I’m willing to have supper with your nasty father, I must be in love with you, don’t you think? . . . Where have you been keeping yourself? Come see me the day after tomorrow, early in the morning. . . . No, I mean it, I have something to tell you.”
With a blissful look on his face, Sacc
ard polished off a dish of ice cream or fruit, taking small mouthfuls. He kissed the woman’s shoulders and said teasingly, “You know, my loves, if I’m in your way, I’ll be off. . . . You can ring when it’s safe to return.”
Then he would take the lady off, or sometimes he would take her to join the boisterous crowd next door. He and Maxime shared the same shoulders; their hands encircled the same waists. They called out to each other from the divans and repeated out loud confidences that women had whispered in their ears. Indeed, they carried intimacy to the point of conspiring, when one or the other had chosen a blonde or brunette from the company, to lure her away from the group and make off with her.