The young man stayed until six the next morning. She gave him the key to the side gate of the Parc Monceau and made him swear to return every night. The dressing room was connected to the buttercup salon by a service stairway hidden in the wall, which gave access to all the rooms in the tower. From the salon it was easy to slip into the conservatory and from there to reach the park.
In making his way out at dawn through a thick fog, Maxime was rather bewildered by his good fortune. He accepted it, moreover, with a smugness typical of his sexless nature.
“Too bad!” he thought. “She was the one who wanted it, after all. . . . She has an awfully fine body, and she’s right: she’s twice as much fun in bed as Sylvia.”
They had been drifting toward incest since the day when Maxime in his threadbare schoolboy’s tunic had flung himself at Renée’s neck and creased her French Guards jacket. Every minute that had passed between them since that moment had been a minute of perversion. The peculiar way in which the young woman had raised the child; the familiarities that had made comrades of them; and, later, the ribald audacity of their shared confidences—all that dangerous promiscuity had in the end formed a singular bond between them, turning the joys of friendship into almost carnal pleasures. They had been surrendering to each other for years. The brutal act was only the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of love. In the frenetic world in which they lived, their sin had grown as if fertilized by the impure secretions of a dung heap. It had developed with peculiar refinements, in conditions particularly conducive to debauchery.
When the big calèche carried them off to the Bois and gently along its carriageways as they whispered smutty stories in each other’s ears and searched their memories of childhood for dirty jokes, it was merely a diversion of their desires, an unavowed gratification of their wants. They felt vaguely guilty, as if they had grazed each other’s flesh. Indeed, that original sin, that languor born of filthy conversations that had left them weary with voluptuous fatigue, had stimulated them more gently than frank and unmistakable kisses would have done. Their camaraderie was thus the slow progress of two lovers fated to end one day in the private room at the Café Riche and finally in Renée’s large pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not feel the shock of sin. They were like old lovers, whose kisses were steeped in nostalgia. Their two beings had been in intimate contact for so long that despite themselves they spoke of a past that had been suffused with a tenderness of which they had been unaware.
“Do you remember the day I arrived in Paris?” Maxime asked. “You were wearing an odd outfit, and with my finger, I traced an angle on your breast and advised you to alter your neckline to a V.... I felt your skin under your blouse, and my finger went in a little. . . . It was very nice.”
Renée laughed and kissed him. “You were already an awfully naughty boy,” she murmured. “You had us in stitches at Worms’s, remember? We called you ‘our little man.’ I always thought Suzanne would have let you have your way with her if the marquise hadn’t kept shooting her such furious looks.”
“Yes, indeed, we laughed quite a lot,” the young man whispered. “The photo album, you know? And all the rest—our errands in Paris, our snacks at the pastry shop on the boulevard—you know, those little strawberry cakes you adore? . . . I’ll always remember that afternoon when you told me about Adeline’s little adventure in the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed them with a man’s name, Arthur d’Espanet, and asked him to come carry her off.”
The lovers laughed at this story yet again, and then Maxime went on in his flirtatious voice. “When you came in your carriage to pick me up at school, we must have made quite an unusual pair. . . . I was so small I vanished under your skirts.”
“Yes, yes,” she stammered, shivering and drawing the young man toward her. “That was so nice, as you say. . . . We loved each other without knowing it, didn’t we? I knew before you did. The other day, on the way home from the Bois, my leg brushed against yours, and I jumped. . . . But you didn’t notice anything, did you? You weren’t thinking about me?”
“Oh, yes I was!” he replied, a bit embarrassed. “Only I didn’t know, you understand. . . . I didn’t dare.”
He was lying. The idea of possessing Renée had never occurred to him in any clear way. He had allowed his dissolute habits to rub off on her but had never really desired her. He was too lackadaisical for such effort. He had accepted Renée because she pressed herself on him, and he had slipped into her bed without wanting to or realizing in advance what he was doing. Having once rolled in her sheets, he stayed because it was warm and because it was typical of him to abandon himself whenever he fell into a hole. At first his ego was gratified. She was the first married woman he had had. He gave no thought to the fact that her husband was his father.
Renée, however, sinned with all the ardor of a heart that seeks love beneath its station. She, too, had slid down a slippery slope, yet she had not remained passive the whole way down. Desire had awakened in her too late to combat it, after the fall had become ineluctable. All at once she saw that fall as a necessary consequence of her boredom, a rare and extreme pleasure that alone could rouse her weary senses, her ravaged heart. It was during that autumn drive, as slumber descended on the Bois at dusk, that vague thoughts of incest had first come to her, like a tickling that sent a strange new shiver through her flesh. That same night those thoughts had taken on a more definite shape, had risen up ardently before her in the flames of the conservatory as she stood, half-intoxicated by the dinner and lashed by jealousy, spying on Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that would fill her empty life and plunge her at last into the hell of which she had been frightened ever since she was a little girl. By the next day she craved it no more, overcome by a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it wasn’t as good as she had expected, and that it really would be too sordid to go through with it in reality. The crisis had had to come as a caprice of fate, of its own accord, independent of the will of the two individuals involved—two comrades who were destined one fine night to make a mistake, to end up making love rather than shaking hands. After that mindless fall, however, her dreams of unknown pleasures had revived, and she had taken Maxime into her arms again because she was curious about him and about the cruel pleasures of a love she regarded as a crime. Her will accepted the incest, demanded it, and intended to savor it to the end, to the point of remorse—if remorse ever came. She was active and conscious of what she was doing. She loved with all the fervor of a celebrated socialite, with all the anxious prejudices of a lady of the bourgeoisie, and with all the conflicts, joys, and antipathies of a woman drowning in self-contempt.
Maxime returned night after night. He entered by way of the garden around one o’clock. Usually Renée was waiting for him in the conservatory, which he had to cross to reach the small salon. They were in any case supremely impudent, barely troubling to hide themselves and neglecting the commonest precautions of adulterers. Of course this corner of the mansion was theirs. Only Baptiste, the husband’s valet, was allowed to enter, and Baptiste, a serious sort of man, vanished the moment his duties were discharged. Maxime joked that he probably went off to write his memoirs. One night, however, shortly after Maxime arrived, Renée pointed out the valet solemnly making his way across the salon, candlestick in hand. With his ministerial bearing, and his face illuminated by the yellow light of burning wax, the tall servant looked even more proper and austere than usual. Leaning forward, the lovers watched him blow out his candle and head for the stables, where the horses and grooms lay sleeping.
“He’s making his rounds,” Maxime said.
Renée stood shivering. Baptiste generally made her anxious. She sometimes said that with his chilly demeanor and frank stare, which never came to rest on a woman’s shoulders, he was the only decent man in the house.
Thereafter they b
ecame more cautious in their meetings. They shut the doors to the small salon, which allowed them to enjoy that room, the conservatory, and Renée’s apartment in complete tranquillity. It was a whole world unto itself. There for the first few months they savored the most refined and exquisitely exotic pleasures. They moved the scene of their lovemaking from the big pink-and-gray bed in the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing room and the symphony in yellow minor of the small salon. Each room, with its own peculiar fragrance, its own hangings, its own special life, yielded a different sort of tenderness and made Renée a different kind of lover. In the plush bed of the grande dame in the warm aristocratic bedroom, where lovemaking took on the discreet accents required by good taste, she was delicate and pretty. Under the flesh-colored tent, amid the fragrances and humid languor of the bath, she displayed herself as a capricious and carnal whore, surrendering her body as it emerged from the bath, which was where Maxime preferred to take her. And finally, downstairs, in the morning sunlight of the small salon, bathed in an auroral yellow that gilded her hair, she became a goddess, with the head of a blonde Diana, her naked arms in chaste poses and her unblemished body positioned on the love seats in postures that revealed noble lines and an antique grace. Maxime was almost afraid of this place, however, and Renée enticed him there only on foul days, when her intoxication required a more pungent note. Then they made love in the conservatory. That was where they savored incest.
One night, in an hour of anguish, the young woman asked her lover to fetch one of the black bearskins. They lay down on that inky fur alongside a pool adjacent to the big circular walkway. Outside, in the limpid moonlight, the air was terribly cold. Maxime arrived shivering, his ears and fingers frozen. The conservatory was so overheated that he fainted on the bearskin. Coming in from the sharp, stinging cold, he entered an oven so oppressive that he felt a burning sensation, as if he were being beaten with birch rods. When he came to, he saw Renée kneeling over him with a fixed stare and in a brutal posture that frightened him. With her hair tumbling down and her shoulders bare, she supported herself on her fists, arching her back as if she were a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. Lying on his back, the young man, peering over the shoulders of the lovely, amorous beast that held him in her gaze, caught sight of the marble sphinx, its legs gleaming in the moonlight. Renée had assumed the posture and the smile of that monster with a woman’s head, and with her petticoats undone she looked like that black god’s white sister.
Maxime continued to lie on his back. The heat was suffocating. It was a somber heat, which did not fall from heaven as a rain of fire but hung about the earth like an unhealthy exhalation, giving off a mist that rose like a storm-laden cloud. The humid heat covered the lovers with a kind of dew, a hot sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and silent in this bath of flames, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists like an animal on supple and sinewy hocks. From outside, through the small panes of the conservatory windows, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, of clumps of trees with fine black outlines and lawns as white as frozen lakes, a whole lifeless landscape whose delicate touches and smooth, pale colors were reminiscent of Japanese engravings. And this scorching bit of earth, this blazing bed on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely amid the deep silent chill.
They had a night of wild love. Renée was the man, the passionate and active will. Maxime submitted. With the plucked limbs and slender grace of a Roman ephebe, this pretty, fair-haired, neutered boy, stricken in his virility since youth, became a strapping girl in this young woman’s inquisitive arms. He seemed to have been born and raised for perverse sensual pleasure. Renée relished her dominance, bending this creature of still-dubious sexuality to her passion. From this her desire derived constant astonishment, her senses unending surprise, a bizarre sensation of uneasiness and acute pleasure. He bewildered her. Her doubts revived each time she returned to his fine skin, his plump neck, his sighs and swoons. She experienced an hour of completeness. Maxime, by revealing a new thrill to her, completed her extravagant outfits, her prodigious luxury, her unbridled existence. He invested her flesh with the note of excess that sounded in everything else in her life. He was a lover suited to the fashions and follies of the age. This pretty youth, whose jackets showed off his slender shape; this boy who ought to have been a girl and who strolled the boulevards with his hair parted in the middle, with chuckling laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those decadent deviants that can at times consume the flesh and derange the intelligence in nations gone rotten.
It was chiefly in the conservatory, moreover, that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by several others. The hothouse joined them in their lovemaking, burned with the heat of their passion. Through the oppressive air, by the white light of the moon, they took in the strangeness of the world around them, as the plants seemed vaguely to move about and embrace one another. The black bearskin filled the entire width of the path. At their feet mist rose from the root-choked pool as the pink stars of the water lilies opened on its surface as upon a virgin’s breast and the bushy tornelia drooped like the hair of swooning water nymphs. Around them, meanwhile, the palms and the giant bamboo of India rose toward the arched roof, where they bowed their heads and mingled their leaves like weary lovers unsteady on their feet. Lower down, the ferns, pterids, and alsophila were like sprightly ladies, their broad skirts trimmed with regular flounces, who stood silent and motionless along the path awaiting love. Beside them, the twisted, red-stained leaves of begonia and the spiky white leaves of caladium created a vague medley of hues ranging from the pallor of death to the color of a bruise, puzzling the lovers, who at times thought they could make out round shapes like hips and knees pressed hard against the earth by the brutality of sanguinary caresses. And the banana trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fertility of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbia, whose tapering stems—prickly, misshapen, and covered with horrid excrescences they glimpsed through the darkness—oozed sap, as if their procreative exuberance could not be contained. The deeper they peered into the recesses of the conservatory, the more the obscurity became charged with an ever more frenetic riot of stems and foliage. On the racks they could no longer distinguish the maranta, as soft as velvet, from the gloxinia, with its purple bells, or the dracaena, which resembled strips of polished old lacquer. The living plants danced in a circle, pursuing one another with unrequited tenderness. In the four corners, where curtains of vines created bowers, their carnal fantasies grew even wilder, and the supple shoots of vanilla, of Indian berries, of quisqualis and bauhinia turned into the interminable arms of lovers who remained out of sight while madly extending their embrace, drawing countless dispersed pleasures unto themselves. Those endless arms drooped wearily, knotted themselves in a spasm of love, sought one another out, and entwined each other like a pack of wild creatures in rut. The whole conservatory was in rut, the whole patch of virgin forest ablaze with the foliage and blossoms of the tropics.
Their senses warped, Maxime and Renée felt themselves caught up in the earth’s powerful nuptials. Through the bearskin the ground burned their backs, and hot droplets fell upon them from the tall palms. The sap rising in the trees’ flanks penetrated them as well, filling them with wild desire for immediate increase, for reproduction on a gigantic scale. They partook of the conservatory’s rut. There, in the pale glimmer, visions dazed them, long nightmares in which they witnessed the amours of the palms and the ferns. The foliage took on strange, weird shapes, which their desires transformed into sensual images. Murmurs and whispers came from the bushes, swooning voices, ecstatic sighs, muffled cries of pain, distant laughter— whatever was loquacious in their own kisses came echoing back at them. Sometimes they felt as if they’d been buffeted by an earthquake, as if the ground itself, in a climax of gratification, had erupted in sensuous sobs.
Had they closed their eyes, had the suffocating heat and pa
le light not been enough to plunge them into depravity of all the senses, the odors would have sufficed to rouse their nerves to an extraordinary degree of irritability. The pool enveloped them in a deep, pungent aroma compounded of the smells of a thousand blossoms and leaves. At times the vanilla cooed like wood pigeons. Then the stanhopea chimed in with harsh notes from their striped throats, whose exhalations were marked by a strong and bitter smell of convalescence. The orchids, in baskets suspended from small chains, were like living censers breathing out their distinctive scents. But the dominant odor, the odor responsible for all the muffled sighs, was a human odor, an odor of love, which Maxime recognized when he kissed the back of Renée’s neck and buried his head in her undone tresses. They were still intoxicated by that odor of amorous womanhood, which hung about the air of the conservatory as though this were the alcove where the earth gave birth.
Usually the lovers lay down beneath the tanghin from Madagascar, the poisonous shrub whose leaf Renée had bitten into. All around them, white statues laughed at the sight of such quantities of greenery engaged in the act of love. The moon, as it revolved, moved groups of plants about and animated the drama with its changing light. And they were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the facile life of the Bois and official receptions, somewhere in the jungles of India or in some monstrous temple, where the black marble sphinx was god. They were aware of tumbling helplessly into crime, forbidden love, and bestial caresses. All the lushness that surrounded them, all the hidden tangle of the pool, all the naked shamelessness of the greenery plunged them into a Dantean inferno of passion. Then it was, in the depths of this glass cage seething with summer heat astray in that clear December chill, that they tasted incest, the criminal fruit of that overheated patch of earth, that terrifying bed that filled their hearts with unspoken fear.