It was at about the time they moved to Parc Monceau that an apparition entered Renée’s life, leaving an indelible impression. The minister had previously resisted the pleas of his sister-in-law, who was enviously longing to be invited to the court balls. Believing that his brother’s fortune was at last assured, he finally gave in. Renée did not sleep for a month thinking about it. When the great night arrived, she sat trembling in the carriage that took her to the Tuileries.
She wore an outfit of prodigious grace and originality, a real find that had come to her in a bout of insomnia and had been put together by three of Worms’s employees, who came to her home to do their work under her supervision. It was a simple gown of white gauze, but trimmed with a multitude of little flounces scalloped out and edged with black velvet. The black velvet tunic featured a square neckline cut very low and framed by narrow lace, barely the width of a finger. Not one flower or piece of ribbon. On her wrists she wore bracelets without engraving, and on her head a thin diadem of gold, a plain circlet that fitted her like a halo.
When she reached the reception rooms and her husband deserted her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a moment of embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she could see that she looked lovely, quickly reassured her, and she was just getting used to the hot air, the murmur of voices, the crush of black evening dress and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who wheezed as if suffering from a problem of digestion. The shoulders aligned themselves in two rows, while the black tailcoats instinctively and discreetly fell back a step. Renée found herself shoved to the end of the line of shoulders, near the second door, toward which the Emperor was moving with a laborious, faltering step. She thus saw him come toward her from one door to the other.
He was wearing a tailcoat with the red sash of the Grand Cordon. 11 Renée, once more in the grip of emotion, had difficulty seeing clearly, and to her this bloody stain seemed to splatter the prince’s entire chest. She found him small, with legs that were too short and jiggling flesh around his waist. But she was charmed and thought him handsome, with his pale face, and heavy, leaden lids that drooped over lifeless eyes. Underneath his mustache his mouth opened languidly, while the boniness of his nose was the only feature that stood out from his puffy face.
Appearing to support each other, the Emperor and the elderly general continued to move forward in a lethargic manner, taking short steps and smiling vaguely. They looked to the right and to the left, and as they did their gazes slipped into the bodices of the bowing ladies. The general leaned over and said something to the sovereign, giving his arm a comradely squeeze. And the Emperor, listless and impenetrable, even more vapid than usual, drew nearer and nearer in his dawdling way.
They had reached the middle of the reception room when Renée felt their eyes upon her. The general stared at her in astonishment, while the Emperor, raising his lids slightly, revealed a predatory gleam in the otherwise hesitant gray of his bleary gaze. Renée, taken aback, looked down and bowed until she could see nothing but the rose pattern in the carpet. But she followed their shadows and realized that they had paused for several seconds in front of her. And she thought she heard the Emperor, that lascivious dreamer, murmur as he gazed at her tightly wrapped in her skirt of muslin striped with velvet, “Now there, general, is a flower worth picking, a mysterious pink carnation with white and black streaks.”
To which the general replied in a more brutal tone, “Sire, that carnation there would look damned good in our buttonholes!”
Renée raised her head. The apparition had disappeared, and a throng was clogging the doorway. Since that evening, she had been back to the Tuileries many times and had even had the honor of being complimented out loud by His Majesty and becoming something of a friend of his. But she always remembered the sovereign’s slow, ponderous march through the reception room, between the two rows of shoulders. And as her husband’s fortune grew, whenever she experienced some new joy, she recalled the image of the Emperor towering over the bowed bosoms, coming toward her, and comparing her to a carnation, which the old general advised him to put in his buttonhole. This was the high point of her life.
4
The clear, burning desire that had risen in Renée’s heart as she breathed in the unsettling fragrances of the conservatory while Maxime and Louise laughed on a love seat in the little buttercup salon seemed to vanish like a nightmare, leaving behind only a vague shudder. The bitter taste of tanghin had lingered on the young woman’s lips throughout the night. The infernal leaf caused a burning sensation that made her feel as though a mouth of flame had pressed itself to hers, breathing into her a devouring love. Then that mouth fled from her, and great waves of darkness rolled over her, drowning her dream.
In the morning she slept a little. When she woke up, she felt sick. She ordered the curtains drawn, spoke to her doctor of nausea and a headache, and for two days absolutely refused to go out. Since she was pretending to be under siege, moreover, she closed her door to all visitors. Maxime came and knocked, but to no avail. In order to be free to use his apartment as he pleased, he had stopped sleeping at home. Indeed, he led the most nomadic life imaginable, taking up residence in new houses his father had built, choosing whatever floor he liked, and moving monthly from one place to another, often on a whim but sometimes to make room for paying tenants. He would move in with a mistress before the paint had dried. Accustomed to his stepmother’s caprices, he feigned great compassion and went up to her room four times a day to put on a long face and ask how she was, just to tease her. On the third day he found her in the small salon, in the pink, smiling, looking calm and rested.
“So, did you have a good time with Céleste?” he asked, alluding to the long tête-à-tête that she’d just had with her chambermaid.
“Yes,” she replied, “the girl is precious. Her hands are always ice cold. She put them on my brow and calmed my poor head a bit.”
“So she’s medicine!” the young man exclaimed. “If ever I suffer the misfortune of falling in love, you’ll lend her to me, won’t you? So that she can lay both of her hands on my heart?”
They exchanged pleasantries and went for their usual drive in the Bois. Two weeks passed. Renée threw herself more madly than ever into the round of visits and balls that was her life. She had apparently changed her mind once again and no longer complained of weariness and disgust. Yet she seemed to have suffered some secret fall, and though she did not speak of it, she revealed what she was going through by exhibiting a more pronounced contempt for herself and a more reckless depravity in her lady-about-town whims. One night she confessed to Maxime that she was dying to go to a ball that Blanche Muller, a fashionable actress, was giving for the princesses of the foot-lights and the queens of the demimonde. This confession surprised and embarrassed the young man, though he had no great scruples about such things. He tried to catechize his stepmother: she really didn’t belong there, and in any case she wouldn’t see anything very amusing. Besides which, if she were recognized, it would cause a scandal. In reply to all these excellent arguments she clasped her hands and smilingly pleaded, “Please, Maxime, darling, be nice. I want to go. . . . I’ll wear a dark blue domino, and we’ll just walk through the rooms.”
When Maxime, who always gave in eventually and would gladly have taken his stepmother to every disreputable place in Paris had she asked, agreed to accompany her to Blanche Muller’s ball, she clapped her hands like a child who has been granted an unexpected break from school.
“You’re a dear!” she exclaimed. “It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Come for me early. I want to see those women make their entrances. You’ll tell me who they are, and we’ll have a grand old time.”
She thought for a moment, then added, “No, don’t come for me. Wait for me in a cab on the boulevard Malesherbes. I’ll go out through the garden.”
This mysterious proposal was just a way of adding spice to the escapade, a simple refinement of he
r pleasure, since she could have walked out the front door at midnight and her husband wouldn’t even have poked his head out the window.
The next night, after telling Céleste to wait up for her, Renée, quivering with exquisite fear, made her way through the dark shadows of the Parc Monceau. Saccard had taken advantage of his connections at city hall to obtain a key to one of the park’s side gates, and Renée had asked to have one of them for herself. She nearly lost her way and only found the cab thanks to its two yellow eyes—the headlights. In those days the just-completed boulevard Malesherbes was still quite deserted at night. The young woman slipped into the carriage in a highly emotional state, her heart beating wildly as though she had just returned from a rendezvous with a lover. Maxime, half asleep in a corner of the cab, smoked philosophically. He tried to toss his cigar away, but she stopped him, and as she reached out to grab his arm in the darkness, her hand came right up against his face, to the great amusement of both.
“I tell you I like the smell of tobacco!” she exclaimed. “Keep your cigar. . . . Besides, we’re going to have a fling tonight. . . . I’m a man, see.”
The boulevard was not yet illuminated. As the cab proceeded toward the Madeleine, it was so dark in the carriage that they could not see. Each time the young man lifted the cigar to his lips, a spot of red pierced the thick darkness. That red spot drew Renée’s attention. Maxime, half covered by the flowing black satin domino1 that filled the cab’s interior, continued to smoke in bored silence. The truth was that his stepmother’s whim was preventing him from joining a group of women who planned to meet at the Café Anglais before Blanche Muller’s ball and return there afterward. He was grumpy, and Renée sensed his sulk through the gloom.
“Are you under the weather?” she asked.
“No, I’m cold,” he answered.
“Well, I’m on fire. It’s stifling in here. . . . Drape my skirt over your knees.”
“Oh, your skirts!” he muttered with annoyance. “I’m up to my eyes in your skirts.”
But this sally made him laugh, and little by little he grew more animated. She told him about the fear she had felt just now in crossing the Parc Monceau. Then she confessed another of her desires: some night she hoped to go rowing on the little lake in the park in the boat she could see from her window, which had been left lying next to one of the paths. He thought she was getting rather sentimental. The cab rolled on, the gloom remained thick, and the two passengers leaned toward each other in order to hear better over the sound of the wheels, so that occasionally, when they got too close, their hands touched and they could feel each other’s warm breath. At regular intervals, Maxime’s cigar would flare up again, tinting the shadows red and casting a pale pink light on Renée’s face. She looked lovely in that fleeting glimmer, so lovely that the young man was struck by it.
“Oh, my, we’re looking very pretty tonight, step-mama! . . . Let’s see a little.”
He brought his cigar close to her and quickly drew a few puffs. Renée, in her corner, was bathed in a warm and strangely pulsating light. She had raised her hood a little. Her bare head, covered by cascades of little curls and adorned with a simple blue ribbon, looked like the head of a true gamin, and below she wore a big black satin blouse buttoned up to her neck. She found it quite amusing to be examined and admired by the light of a cigar. She threw her head back and laughed quietly, while Maxime added with an air of comic gravity, “Damned if I won’t have to keep an eye on you if I want to bring you back to my father safe and sound.”
Meanwhile, the cab rounded the Madeleine and proceeded down one of the boulevards. Dancing light from blazing store windows now filled its interior. Blanche Muller lived nearby in one of the new houses built after the rue Basse-du-Rempart was filled in and brought up to grade. There were still only a few carriages at the door. It was just past ten. Maxime wanted to tour the boulevards for an hour before going in, but Renée, her curiosity aroused, told him flatly that she would go up herself if he didn’t go with her. He followed her and was pleased to find a bigger crowd than he had expected. The young woman had covered her face with a mask. She went about on Maxime’s arm, whispering peremptory orders that he docilely obeyed, and thereby managed to poke her nose into all the rooms, lift the edges of door-curtains, and examine the furniture, and she would have rummaged in the drawers as well had she not been afraid of being seen. The apartment, though quite sumptuous, had corners suggestive of a bohemian existence, reminders that the occupant had once acted in music halls. It was chiefly in these corners that Renée’s pink nostrils quivered, and she forced her companion to walk slowly so as to miss nothing and savor the smell. She was particularly fascinated by the dressing room, which the hostess had left wide open, for when Blanche Muller entertained, she allowed her guests access to everything, even her alcove, where the bed had been pushed aside to make room for gaming tables. The dressing room did not satisfy Renée, however. To her eye it seemed common and even a little dirty, with its carpet in which the butts of cigarettes had burned little round holes and its blue silk wall hangings stained with pomade and splattered with soap. Once she completed her careful inspection of the premises, every last detail of which she stored away in memory to describe later to her intimate friends, she turned her attention to the people. The men she already knew. They were mostly the same financiers, politicians, and young men about town who attended her “Thursdays.” At times, as she stood facing groups of smiling men in black suits, she could imagine that she was in her own drawing room, where only the night before the same men had stood with the same smiles talking to the marquise d’Espanet or blonde Mme Haffner. And when she looked at the women, the illusion was not completely dispelled. Laure d’Aurigny wore yellow, just as Suzanne Haffner had done, and Blanche Muller had on a white dress cut to the middle of her back like Adeline d’Espanet’s. After a while Maxime begged for mercy, and Renée was quite willing to sit with him on a love seat. They sat there for a while, the young man yawning, the young woman asking for the names of the ladies who passed before them, undressing them with her eyes, counting the yards of lace they had wrapped around their skirts. When he realized that she was deeply absorbed in these studies, he seized the opportunity to escape in obedience to a wave from Laure d’Aurigny, who teased him about the woman he had on his arm. Then she made him promise to join her party at around one o’clock at the Café Anglais.
“Your father will be with us,” she shouted after him just as he rejoined Renée.
His stepmother found herself surrounded by a group of women who were laughing quite loudly, while M. de Saffré had availed himself of the place left free by Maxime to slide in alongside her and lavish her with crude compliments. Then he and the women all began to shout and slap their thighs, to the point where Renée, deafened by the noise and by now yawning herself, got up and said to her companion, “Let’s go! They’re too idiotic.”
As they were leaving, M. de Mussy came in. He seemed delighted to run into Maxime, and, paying no attention to the masked woman with him, murmured with a lovesick air, “Ah, my friend, she’s killing me. I know she’s feeling better, but her door remains closed to me. Tell her that you’ve seen me with tears in my eyes.”
“Don’t worry, your message will be delivered,” the young man replied with a strange laugh.
On the stairs he asked, “So, step-mama, did the poor boy touch your heartstrings?”
She shrugged but gave no answer. Downstairs, on the sidewalk, she paused a moment before climbing into the cab, which had waited for them, looking hesitantly first toward the Madeleine and then toward the boulevard des Italiens. It was barely eleven-thirty, and the boulevard was still quite animated.
“So, we’re going home,” she murmured wistfully.
“Unless you’d like to drive along the boulevards for a while,” Maxime replied.
She agreed. The evening, intended to be a feast to feed a woman’s curiosity, was not going as planned, and she hated the idea of returning home shorn of
one more illusion and with a migraine coming on. It had long been a fantasy of hers that an actress’s ball had to be the most amusing thing in the world. As sometimes happens in the final days of October, spring seemed to have returned. The night was as warm as an evening in May, and the occasional chill breeze only added to the gaiety in the air. Renée, lying with her head against the carriage door, remained silent, staring at the crowd, the cafés, and the restaurants, which stretched out before her in an endless line. She had become quite serious, absorbed in a typical woman’s daydream filled with vague longings. The dresses of the prostitutes swept over the wide sidewalk, and the men’s boots struck the pavement with distinct familiarity; easy pleasures and facile loves seemed to gallop along the gray asphalt. And that sidewalk, that asphalt, awakened dormant desires in her, made her forget the idiotic ball she had just left and allowed her to glimpse other, more savory enjoyments. In the windows of the private rooms at Brébant’s she saw women silhouetted against the whiteness of the curtains. Maxime told her a very naughty story about a deceived husband who had caught the silhouette of his wife on a curtain in the act of making love to the silhouette of a man. She was barely listening. He cheered up, however, and after a while took her hands and teased her by talking about poor M. de Mussy.
On the way back they again passed by Brébant’s. “Did you know,” she asked suddenly, “that M. de Saffré invited me to supper tonight?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have eaten very well,” he replied, laughing. “Saffré hasn’t the slightest culinary imagination. He hasn’t gotten beyond lobster salad.”
“No, no, he was talking about oysters and cold partridge. . . . But he used tu with me, and that bothered me.”
She fell silent, stared once more at the boulevard, and then, after an interval, added with a distraught look, “The worst of it is that I’m terribly hungry.”