“You’re hungry, you say?” the young man exclaimed. “Why, the solution’s quite simple. We’ll have supper together. . . . Would you like to?”
He said this in an even tone, but at first she refused, claiming that Céleste had prepared a snack for her at home. Meanwhile, Maxime, not wanting to go to the Café Anglais, had ordered the carriage to stop at the corner of rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche. He had even climbed down from the cab, and as his stepmother still couldn’t make up her mind, he added, “Afterwards, if you’re afraid I’m compromising you, just tell me. I’ll climb up beside the coachman and take you back to your husband.”
She smiled and climbed down from the cab with the look of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The sidewalk she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious shiver of fear through her skin, a sense that her wish had been fulfilled. As long as the cab had been moving, she had experienced a mad desire to jump out. She crossed the pavement furtively, with short steps, as though the fear of being seen heightened her pleasure. Her escapade was definitely turning into an adventure. Of course she had no regrets about having refused M. de Saffré’s uncouth invitation. But she would have returned home in a terrible mood if Maxime hadn’t had the idea of taking her to taste the forbidden fruit. The young man climbed the stairs eagerly, as if he felt at home. She followed him, somewhat out of breath. A faint aroma of the sea and of wild game hung in the air, and the carpet, held fast against the stairs by brass rods, smelled of dust, which only heightened her emotion.
As they reached the landing, they encountered a dignified-looking waiter who pressed himself against the wall to allow them to pass.
“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll serve us, won’t you? . . . Give us the white room.”
Charles bowed, climbed back up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was turned low, and to Renée the dimly lit room she was about to enter seemed as louche as it was charming.
A constant rumble of traffic could be heard through the wide-open window, and the play of light from the café below projected onto the ceiling shadows of pedestrians hurrying past. With a quick twist of the wrist, however, the waiter turned up the light from the gas jet. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, and a harsh light filled the room, illuminating the young woman’s face. She had already pulled back her hood. Her little curls had been mussed a bit in the cab, but the blue ribbon had not budged. She began to move about, embarrassed by the way that Charles was looking at her. He blinked and squinted to get a better look at her in a way that clearly said, “Now here’s one I’ve never seen before.”
“What shall I serve you, sir?” he asked in a loud voice.
Maxime turned toward Renée.
“How about M. de Saffré’s supper?” he said. “Oysters, a partridge—”
And, seeing the young man smile, Charles imitated him discreetly. “In that case,” he murmured, “would you like the Wednesday supper?”
“The Wednesday supper … ,” Maxime repeated.
Then, remembering, he said, “Yes, it’s all the same to me. Give us the Wednesday supper.”
When the waiter left, Renée took out her spectacles and carefully inspected the small room. It was a square room, done in white and gold, and furnished with the affectations of a boudoir. In addition to the table and chairs, there was a low serving table and a large divan, a veritable bed, set between the fireplace and the window. A Louis XVI clock and twin candelabra graced the white marble mantelpiece. But the centerpiece of the room was the mirror, a handsome elongated looking-glass on which the ladies who came to this place had scrawled with their diamonds, leaving it covered with names, dates, lines of doggerel, prodigious thoughts, and astounding confessions. Renée fancied she saw something obscene but lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, felt embarrassed again, and, working hard to maintain her composure, looked up at the ceiling and the gilded brass chandelier with its five gaslights. There was something very pleasurable about her discomfort, however. While tilting her head upward as if to study the cornice, looking grave and holding her spectacles in her hand, she took deep pleasure in the equivocal furniture she sensed around her: the clear, cynical mirror, whose purity, barely touched by all that obscene fly-spotting, had facilitated the adjustment of so many false chignons; the divan, whose width shocked her; the table and even the carpet, which gave off the same smell she had detected on the stairs, a vague, penetrating, and somehow religious smell of dust.
When at last she was forced to lower her eyes, she asked, “What is this Wednesday supper anyway?”
“Nothing,” he answered, “a bet that one of my friends lost.”
In any other place, he would have told her straightaway that he had had supper that Wednesday night with a lady he’d met on the boulevard, but since entering the private room with her, he had instinctively begun to treat her as a woman he was obliged to please and whose jealousy must not be aroused. In any case she did not insist. She went and leaned on the window railing, where he joined her. Behind them Charles bustled in and out of the room with a clatter of dishes and silver.
It was not yet midnight. Down below, on the boulevard, Paris went rumbling on, prolonging the blaze of daylight before making up its mind to turn in for the night. Wavering lines of trees separated the whiteness of the sidewalks from the murky blackness of the roadway with its thunder of speeding carriages and flash of headlights. At intervals on either side of this dark strip newsdealers’ kiosks blazed forth like huge Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely gaudy, as if they had been set down in these precise places for some colossal illumination. At this time of night, however, their muffled glow was lost in the glare of nearby storefronts. Not a single shutter was down, and the sidewalks ran on without a patch of shadow, under a shower of light that sprinkled them with golden dust, as warm and bright as the midday sun. Maxime pointed out to Renée the bright windows of the Café Anglais opposite them. The high branches of the trees interfered somewhat with their view of the buildings and sidewalk across the way. They leaned out to get a better view of what lay below. A steady stream of traffic flowed past. Groups of people walked by; prostitutes, strolling in pairs, dragged their skirts along the sidewalk, lifting them from time to time in a languid motion while casting weary, smiling glances from side to side. Directly below the window, the tables of the Café Riche basked in the glare of its lamps, whose light reached to the middle of the roadway. It was in the center of the restaurant’s glow that they could best see the pale faces and hear the wan laughter of the passersby. Around the small round tables, women mingled with the men and drank. They wore revealing dresses, and their hair cascaded down upon their necks. They shimmied in their chairs and spoke in loud voices that Renée could not make out above the noise. She took particular notice of one, sitting alone at a table in a loud blue outfit trimmed with white lace. With little sips this woman finished off a glass of beer, then leaned back a bit and placed her hands over her belly with an air of gloomy resignation. The streetwalkers slowly vanished into the crowd, and Renée, who found them fascinating, followed them with her eyes, scanning from one end of the boulevard to the other all the way to the tumultuous bustle of the avenue, filled with people strolling in darkness occasionally relieved by flashes of light. The parade was endless, moreover, renewing itself with tiresome regularity; it was a strangely mixed crowd, yet always the same, surrounded by bright colors and punctuated by dark voids in the fantastic chaos of a thousand dancing flames pouring from the shops, coloring the storefronts and kiosks, painting the façades with fiery ribbons, letters, and designs, studding the shadows with stars, and washing constantly over the roadway. The noise was deafening, a howl, a monotonous, steady hum that rose from the streets like the whine of an organ accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. At one point Renée thought there had been an accident. The crowd surged to the left just beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. When she took up her
spectacles, however, she recognized the omnibus office. The crowd waiting on the sidewalk pressed forward whenever a bus arrived. She heard the gruff voice of the conductor calling out numbers, and then the crystalline tinkle of the bell. Her eyes lingered over the posters plastered to one of the kiosks, as gaudily colored as an Epinal print.2 One green-and-yellow frame featured a poster under glass depicting a grinning devil’s head with bristling hair, an ad for a hat-maker, which she failed to comprehend. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed with its red lights and yellow sides, turning the corner from the rue le Peletier and shaking the building with its rumble, and she saw the men on the upper deck look up with their tired faces, staring at her and Maxime with the curious gaze of famished men peering through a keyhole.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “At this hour, the Parc Monceau is fast asleep.”
That was the only remark she made. They stood there in silence for close to twenty minutes, surrendering to the intoxication of the noise and light. When the table was finally set, they went and sat down, and since Renée seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime sent him away.
“Leave us. I’ll ring for dessert.”
Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled. She looked as though she had just been running. Some of the din and bustle of the boulevard came away from the window with her, and she refused to allow her companion to pull the casement shut.
When he complained about the noise, she said, “Of course! It’s the orchestra! Don’t you find the music odd? It will go very nicely with our oysters and partridge.”
The escapade made her look younger than her thirty years. Her movements were quick, she felt a touch of fever, and this tête-à-tête with a young man in a private room filled with sounds of the street spurred her on and coarsened her appearance. She went at the oysters with gusto. Maxime, who wasn’t hungry, smiled as he watched her devour them.
“Damn!” he muttered. “You’d have made a fine companion for suppers like this.”
She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.
“Do I seem hungry? What do you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that left me feeling empty. . . . I feel sorry for you, my dear friend, to live in such society as that!”
“You know perfectly well,” he replied, “that I’ve promised to drop Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny the day your friends are willing to join me for supper.”
She reacted with a gesture of disdain.
“Well, I should think so! We’re far more amusing than ladies of that sort: admit it! . . . If one of us were to bore her lover the way your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore you—why the poor little woman wouldn’t keep her lover for a week! . . . But you never listen to me. Try it for yourself one of these days.”
Maxime, to avoid calling the waiter, got up, removed the oyster shells, and served the partridge that had been on the serving table. The table had the luxurious look of a first-class restaurant. A delightful breath of lasciviousnesss swept the damask tablecloth, and Renée felt little shivers of contentment as she slid her slender hands from her fork to her knife and from her plate to her glass. She drank white wine without water—she who ordinarily drank water barely tinged with red. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, served her with comical solicitude, resuming the conversation as he did so.
“What could M. de Saffré possibly have said to you to make you so angry? Did he find you ugly?”
“Oh, him!” she replied. “He’s a vile man. I never would have believed that a gentleman who is so distinguished and polite in my home could say such things. But I forgive him. It was the women who irritated me. They looked like the women you see selling apples. There was one who complained of a boil on her hip, and I think it wouldn’t have taken much for her to lift up her skirts and show us all her sore.”
Maxime burst out laughing.
“No, really,” she continued, warming to her task, “I don’t understand you. They’re filthy and stupid. . . . And to think that whenever I saw you going off to be with your Sylvia, I imagined wondrous things, ancient revels of the sort you see in paintings with creatures wearing crowns of roses and golden goblets and the most extraordinary voluptuousness. . . . Yes, indeed. But what you showed me was a filthy dressing room and women who swore like sailors. Sin like that isn’t worth the bother.”
He made as if to protest, but she silenced him, and, holding between her fingertips the bone of a partridge on which she nibbled daintily, she lowered her voice and added, “Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy. . . . Respectable woman that I am, when I’m bored and sin by dreaming impossible dreams, you can be sure that the things I come up with are a lot nicer than your Blanche Mullers.”
And with a grave air she concluded on a profound note of naïve cynicism: “It’s a matter of upbringing, don’t you see?”
She gently laid the small bone on her plate. The rumble of carriages continued, but no particular sound stood out from the dull roar. She was obliged to raise her voice so that he could hear her, and her cheeks grew redder. On the serving table there remained truffles, a sweet side-dish, and asparagus, unusual for that time of year. He brought everything to the table so as not to have to get up again, and since the surface was rather narrow, he set down on the floor between himself and Renée a silver bucket filled with ice and a bottle of champagne. In the end her appetite proved contagious. They sampled all the dishes and in high spirits emptied the bottle of champagne, proposing scandalous theories while leaning on their elbows like two friends letting themselves go after a bout of drinking. The noise from the boulevard died down, but to her it sounded louder, and at times all those wheels seemed to be turning round in her head.
When he asked about ringing for dessert, she got up, shook the crumbs from her long satin blouse, and said, “Go ahead. . . . You may light a cigar, if you like.”
She felt slightly dizzy. She went over to the window, drawn there by a peculiar sound she couldn’t account for. The shops were closing.
“Look,” she said, turning toward Maxime, “the orchestra is putting away its instruments.”
She leaned out again. Out in the middle of the street, cabs and omnibuses, rarer now and moving more rapidly than before, stared at each other with various-colored eyes as they passed. But along the sidewalks great pits of darkness had opened up in front of the closed shops. Only the cafés remained ablaze, striping the asphalt with streaks of light. From the rue Drouot to the rue du Helder Renée was thus able to observe a long series of white squares alternating with dark, from which the last stragglers emerged only to vanish again in the strangest way. The prostitutes above all, their long dresses alternately illuminated by a harsh light and then drowned in shadow, took on a ghostly air, like faded marionettes caught in the electric beam of some fantastic extravaganza. For a short while Renée found this game amusing. The puddles of light evaporated. The gaslights flickered out. The variegated kiosks stained the darkness more brightly than before. At intervals a crowd of people from some theater hurried past. Gaps began to open up in the flow, however, and groups of two or three men passed beneath the window and were approached by a woman. They stood and haggled. Some of what they said could be heard above the dying din. Usually the woman then went off on the arm of one of the men. Other streetwalkers moved from café to café, making the rounds of the tables, snatching forgotten cubes of sugar, laughing with the waiters, and staring steadily at the lingering customers with questioning looks and unspoken propositions. And Renée, who had been studying the nearly empty upper deck of a Batignolles omnibus, happened to recognize the woman in the blue dress and white lace, now standing at the street corner and turning her head from side to side, still on the prowl.
When Maxime came over to join her at the rail, where she stood lost in thought, he smiled at the sight of a half-open window in the Café Anglais. The idea that his father was having supper across the way struck him as comical, but this evening peculiar inhib
itions subdued his usual banter. Renée was reluctant to leave the railing. An intoxication, a languor, rose from the more obscure depths of the boulevard. As the rumble of traffic faded and the bright lights dimmed, she felt a tender summons to sensuousness and sleep. The fleeting whispers she heard, the groups of men and women she saw loitering in dark corners, turned the sidewalk into a vast inn at the hour when travelers take to their beds for the night. The light and noise grew fainter and fainter, the city went to sleep, and soft breezes caressed the rooftops.
When the young woman turned around, light from the small chandelier made her blink. She was a little pale now, and a slight quivering was noticeable at the corners of her mouth. Charles laid out the dessert. He went out and came back in, leaving the door swinging slowly on its hinges as he went about his business in the phlegmatic manner of a proper gentleman.
“But I’m not hungry anymore,” Renée exclaimed. “Take all those dishes away and serve us coffee.”
The waiter, accustomed to the whims of the women he served, took away the dessert and poured the coffee. He filled the room with his importance.
“Please tell him to go,” Renée, feeling sick, said to Maxime.
The young man dismissed him, but no sooner had he vanished than he returned once more to hermetically seal the heavy window drapes in his discreet manner. When he finally withdrew, Maxime, also in the grip of impatience, got up and went to the door.
“Wait,” he said, “I’ll see to it that he leaves us alone.”
And he pushed the bolt shut.
“That’s that,” she replied. “Now at least we can make ourselves at home.”
They went back to sharing confidences and gossiping like old comrades. Maxime lit a cigar. Renée sipped her coffee and even allowed herself a glass of chartreuse. The room heated up and filled with bluish smoke. After a while she placed her elbows on the table and propped her chin on two half-clenched fists. Under this slight pressure her mouth grew smaller, her cheeks were lifted up a bit, and her eyes, narrowed somewhat, glowed more brightly. Distorted in this way, her small face looked lovely under the shower of golden curls that now dangled down to her eyebrows. Maxime stared at her through the smoke from his cigar. She was definitely an original. At times he was no longer quite sure of her sex. The large wrinkle across her forehead, the pouting protrusion of her lips, and the vagueness in her eyes because of her nearsightedness made her look like a nearly grown young man, particularly since her long black satin blouse went so high that a line of fleshy white neck was barely visible beneath her chin. She submitted to his stare with a smile, holding her head steady, staring vacantly, and keeping her lips sealed.