He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence in a cavalier manner: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple.”
She did not flinch.
“And you’re bored!” the young man resumed with comic passion. “You slay me! . . . But what do you want? What do you dream of ?”
She shrugged to indicate that she had no idea. Despite the tilt of her head, Maxime saw her at that moment as so serious, so somber, that he held his tongue. He gazed at the line of carriages, which, upon reaching the end of the lake, had spread out to fill the wide circle. Less bunched up now, the vehicles turned with magnificent grace. The volume of sound increased as the hooves of the horses struck the hard earth at a more rapid pace.
The calèche, making the wide turn to rejoin the queue, swung back and forth in a way that filled Maxime with a vaguely pleasurable sensation. With that he gave in to his desire to add insult to Renée’s injury. “You deserve to ride in a fiacre, you know. That would serve you right! . . . Just look at all these people heading back to Paris, people who are at your feet. They bow to you as though you were a queen, and your good friend M. de Mussy is all but blowing you kisses.”
Indeed, a man on horseback had been making signs in her direction. Maxime had spoken in a tone of hypocritical sarcasm. But Renée barely turned and shrugged her shoulders. This time the young man responded with a gesture of despair. “So, then, it’s as bad as that, is it? . . . But good God, you have everything, what more do you want?”
Renée raised her head. Her eyes were aglow with unslaked curiosity. “I want something different,” she muttered.
“But since you have everything,” Maxime laughed, “something different is nothing. . . . What do you mean, something different?”
“What do I mean?” she repeated.
But her voice trailed off. She had turned all the way round and was contemplating the strange tableau fading from view to her rear. Dusk came slowly, like a shower of fine ash. The lake, when viewed steadily in the pale light still lingering on the water, seemed to grow rounder, so that it resembled a huge slab of pewter. The trees lining both shores—evergreens whose straight, thin trunks seemed to surge up from the slumbering surface of the lake—at this hour took on the appearance of purplish colonnades whose regular architecture limned the studied curves of the water’s edge. Masses of foliage loomed in the distance, obscuring the horizon with broad dark patches. From behind those patches emanated a glow of embers, the light from a dying sun that set only a portion of the gray immensity aflame. Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature. The fading heights, slumbering sadly in mellow darkness, gave off such an autumnal melancholy that the Bois, gradually enveloped in a shroud of shadow and magnified by the potent magic dwelling in the wood, shed its worldly graces. As the vivid colors of the equipages were swallowed up by darkness, the sound of hooves could be heard more distinctly, like the whisper of distant leaves or the hiss of a faraway stream. Everything was receding and dying away. Amid this universal obliteration, the lateen sail of the big excursion boat stood out clearly and vigorously against the sunset’s amber. This sail, this inordinately enlarged triangle of yellow canvas, was all that could still be seen.
Renée, for all her jadedness, experienced a singular sensation of unavowable desire at the sight of this landscape, which she no longer recognized, this tastefully fashionable piece of nature turned by the dark chill of night into a sacred wood, into one of those mythical glades in which the ancient gods hid their outsized loves, their divine adulteries and incests. As the calèche drove on, it struck her that the twilight behind her had wrapped the land of her dreams in its shimmering veils and was making off with it, snatching away the bower of illicit but superhuman love in which she might at last have assuaged her ailing heart, her weary flesh.
When the lake and the little woods, vanished into darkness, were reduced to no more than a black streak on the face of heaven, the young woman turned abruptly and in a voice marked by tears of spite took up where she had left off. “What do I mean? I mean something different, for heaven’s sake. I want something different. How would I know what? If only I did. But can’t you see, I’ve had enough of balls, of late suppers, of parties and all the rest. Always the same thing. It’s deadly. . . . Men are so tiresome! So unspeakably tiresome.”
Maxime began to laugh. Signs of passion were showing through the socialite’s aristocratic surface. She had stopped batting her eyelids. The furrow in her brow deepened. Her lower lip, which had protruded in a sulky child’s pout, pushed further forward in pursuit of pleasures she coveted but could not name. Although she noticed her companion’s laugh, she was trembling too much to stop. Half-reclining, yielding to the rocking of the carriage, she continued her thought with a series of short, sharp sentences: “Yes, no doubt about it, you’re all tiresome. . . . I don’t include you, Maxime. You’re too young. . . . But if I were to tell you how Aristide suffocated me at the beginning. And as for the rest of them—the men who have loved me. . . . You know, we’re good friends, I’m not inhibited with you. So listen to this: there are days when I’m so tired of living the life of the rich woman, worshiped and adored, that I’d rather be someone like Laure d’Aurigny, one of those women who live as men do.”
Because this only made Maxime laugh harder, she insisted. “Yes, someone like Laure d’Aurigny. It must be less insipid to live that way, less always the same thing.”
For a few instants she fell silent, as if to imagine the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, in a discouraged tone, she resumed. “But you know, women like that must have their troubles too. Life is certainly no barrel of laughs. It’s deadly. . . . As I was saying, what I need is something different. I have no idea what that might be, you understand. But something different, something that’s never happened to anyone else, something out of the ordinary, a pleasure of some rare, unfamiliar kind.”
Her speech had slowed. As she uttered those last words, she seemed to be searching for something, yielding to some profound reverie. The calèche was just then climbing the avenue leading to the exit of the Bois. The shadows grew deeper. The woods sped past on either side, like two gray walls. Dashing down the sidewalks went the yellow-painted cast-iron chairs on which, in the evening when the weather was fine, the bourgeoisie sat and showed off its Sunday best. Empty, these benches had the dark, melancholy look of lawn furniture surprised by winter, and the dull, rhythmic sound of the returning carriages wafted over the deserted path like a sad lament.
Maxime was of course fully aware that it was quite bad form to think that life was a barrel of laughs. Though still young enough to succumb to bursts of enthusiasm, he had a selfish streak too deep, an indifference too scornful, and had already experienced too much genuine lassitude not to pronounce himself disgusted, blasé, and at the end of his tether. Ordinarily he would have taken a certain pride in such a confession.
He stretched out like Renée and affected a doleful tone. “Of course you’re right,” he said. “It is tedious. I’m not enjoying myself much more than you are. I’ve often dreamed of something different. . . . Nothing is as stupid as traveling. As for making money, I’d rather run through it, though that isn’t always as amusing as one first imagines. Loving, being loved—one soon gets sick of it, no? . . . Yes indeed. One gets sick of it.”
As the young woman did not answer, he continued, hoping to shock her with blatant sacrilege. “I’d like to be loved by a nun, you know. Now that might be amusing. . . . Have you ever dreamed of loving a man you couldn’t think about without committing a crime?”
She remained somber, however, and Maxime, seeing that she stayed silent, concluded that she wasn’t listening. With the back of her neck resting on the padded sill of the carriage, she seemed to be
asleep with her eyes wide open. She lay inert, in the grip of her dreams, while now and then her lips twitched nervously. The shadow of twilight softly invaded her. All that that shadow contained of vague sadness, of discreet pleasure, of unavowed hope, penetrated her, bathing her in a sort of languid and morbid atmosphere. While staring at the round back of the footman perched on his bench, she was no doubt thinking about her pleasures of the past, of the parties she now found so dreary and no longer cared for. She looked back on her former life: the immediate gratification of her appetites, the loathsome luxury, and the oppressive monotony of the same caresses and the same betrayals repeated time and time again. Then there dawned in her something like a ray of hope, along with shudders of desire: the idea of that “something else” that her feverish mind had failed to discover. At this point her reverie went awry. Despite her efforts, the word she was looking for eluded her in the gathering darkness, was swallowed up by the steady rumble of the carriages. The soft swaying of the calèche was yet another obstacle that prevented her from formulating what it was she wanted. A tremendous temptation welled up from all that emptiness, from the shrubbery slumbering in the darkness on either side of the path, from the sound of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the carriage, which filled her with a delicious drowsiness. A thousand tiny breaths blew across her flesh: unfinished dreams, unnamed pleasures, vague wants—all the exquisite and monstrous things that a drive home from the Bois at the hour when the sky turns pale can put into a woman’s weary heart. She kept her two hands buried in the bearskin and felt very warm in her white cloth jacket with its mauve velvet lining. As she stretched her leg, relaxing in snug comfort, her ankle brushed the warmth of Maxime’s leg. He took no particular notice of this touch. A jolt wrenched her from her half-sleep. Lifting her head, she turned her gray eyes on the young man sprawled in all his elegance and stared at him oddly.
At that moment the calèche left the Bois. The avenue de l’Impératrice stretched straight ahead into the dusk, lined on both sides by green-painted wooden fences converging to a point on the horizon. On the side path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance pierced a bright hole in the gray shadow. Scattered along the path on the other side of the avenue, tardy strollers formed groups of black dots slowly moving in the direction of Paris. At the very top of the scene, at the end of the chaotic, crawling train of carriages, the Arc de Triomphe, set at an angle, grew whiter against a vast expanse of soot-colored sky.
As the calèche proceeded on its way at a brisker pace than before, Maxime, charmed by the English allure of the landscape, took in the hôtels on both sides of the avenue, town houses of fanciful design whose lawns stretched all the way down to the bridle paths. Renée, still lost in her daydream, was delighted to see the gaslights on the place de l’Etoile illuminated on the horizon one by one, and as those dancing lights stained the dying daylight with small yellow flames, she thought she heard secret calls and was convinced that the flamboyant Paris of winter nights was being kindled for her benefit, lighting the way to that unknown ecstasy for which her jaded senses longed.
The calèche turned down the avenue de la Reine-Hortense and stopped at the end of the rue Monceau, a few steps from the boulevard Malesherbes, before a large mansion with a courtyard in front and a park to the rear. Two gates encrusted with gilt ornaments opened onto the courtyard, each gate flanked by a pair of lamps in the shape of urns similarly bristling with gold appurtenances and equipped with large gaslights. Between the two gates the concierge occupied an elegant gatehouse vaguely reminiscent of a small Greek temple.
Just as the carriage was about to enter the court, Maxime jumped nimbly to the ground.
Renée, grabbing hold of his hand, said, “You know, we sit down to dinner at seven-thirty. You have more than an hour to dress. Don’t keep us waiting.”
With a smile she added, “The Mareuils will be there. . . . Your father wants you to pay particular attention to Louise.”
Maxime shrugged. “That’s some job,” he mumbled grumpily. “I want to get married, but courting her is just too silly. . . . It would be awfully nice of you, Renée, if you saved me from Louise tonight.”
He put on a funny face, borrowing his expression and accent from the actor Lassouche,8 as he did when he was about to come out with one of his customary pleasantries: “Will you, step-mama dear?”
Renée shook hands with him as with a friend. Quickly, in a mocking tone, she tried a nervous sally: “You know, if I hadn’t married your father, I think you might make love to me.”
The young man must have found this idea quite funny, because he was still laughing as he rounded the corner of the boulevard Malesherbes.
The calèche entered the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps of the mansion.
The wide, low steps were sheltered by a huge glass canopy, which was edged with a lambrequin trimmed with gold fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose above a servants’ hall, whose small, square windows of frosted glass could be seen almost level with the ground. At the top of the stairs the entrance to the vestibule was set forward and flanked by thin columns recessed into the wall, forming a protruding portion of the façade that had a round bay window on each floor and stretched all the way up to the roof, where it ended in a delta. On either side of this projection each floor had five windows, regularly spaced along the façade and set in simple stone frames. The mansard roof was cut square, with large sections almost vertical.
The façade on the park side was quite a bit more sumptuous. A royal staircase led up to a narrow terrace dominating the entire length of the ground floor. The banister of this terrace, in the style of the gates of the Parc Monceau, was even more gold-encrusted than the canopy and lamps on the courtyard side. Behind it stood the hôtel, with a pavilion at each corner, consisting of a sort of tower half set into the body of the structure, which created space for round rooms inside. In the middle, another turret set still more deeply into the structure made a slight bulge. The windows, high and thin for the pavilions, more widely spaced and almost square on the flat parts of the façade, featured stone balustrades on the ground floor and gilded wrought-iron railings on the upper floors. It was a parade of wealth, a profusion, an embarrassment of riches. The mansion disappeared beneath its sculptures. Around the windows and along the ledges ran coils of branches and flowers. There were balconies that resembled planters held aloft by huge naked women, their hips twisted and nipples thrust forward. Attached to the walls here and there were fantastic escutcheons, grapes, roses, efflorescences in stone and marble of every imaginable variety. The higher the eye looked, the more the mansion bristled with flowers. Circling the roof was a balustrade on which were set at intervals urns ablaze with sprays of gems. And there, amid the oeils-de-boeuf of the mansards, which looked out on an incredible tangle of fruit and foliage, lay the culminating elements of this astonishing décor, the pediments of the pavilions, in the center of which stood additional huge female nudes—naked women playing with apples or striking poses in thickets of bulrushes. The roof, laden with these ornaments and capped by additional fretwork in lead, along with two lightning rods and four enormous, symmetrical chimneys sculpted like everything else, seemed to mark the climax of this display of architectural fireworks.
On the right stood a vast conservatory, attached to the side of the mansion and communicating with the ground floor by way of a glass door in one of the salons. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low fence hidden behind a hedge, was rather steeply sloped. Too small for the house, so narrow that a lawn and a few clumps of trees sufficed to fill it, it was simply a mound, a pedestal of greenery, on which the mansion stood proudly ensconced and decked out for a ball. Seen from the park, looming above its neat lawn and the polished leaves of its gleaming shrubbery, that huge edifice, still brand-new and quite pale, had the wan face and rich, idiotic self-importance of a par-venue, with its heavy slate chapeau, its gilt railings, and its façade dripping with sculptures. It was a scale
model of the new Louvre,9 one of the most characteristic examples of the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed. On summer nights, when the sun’s slanting rays lit up the gold of the railings against the white façade, people strolling in the park stopped to stare at the red silk curtains hanging in the first-floor windows. Through windows so large and so clear that they seemed to have been placed there, like the windows of a great modern department store, to display the sumptuous interior to the outside world, these petit-bourgeois families caught glimpses of the furniture, of the fabrics, and of the dazzlingly rich ceilings, the sight of which riveted them to the spot with admiration and envy.
Just now, however, darkness was gathering under the trees, and the façade lay sleeping. In the courtyard, a footman had respectfully helped Renée down from the carriage. On the right were the stables, with walls of striped red brick and broad doors of brown oak that opened onto a large area lit by skylights. On the left, as if to balance the composition, a very ornate niche was embedded in the wall of the house next door, in which a stream of water flowed perpetually from a shell that two Cupids held in outstretched arms. The young woman stood for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, lightly tapping at her skirt, which refused to hang properly. The courtyard, into which the clatter of horses and carriage had erupted only a moment earlier, now sank back into solitude, its aristocratic silence broken only by the eternal refrain of running water. In all the dark mass of the mansion, whose chandeliers would soon be lit for the first great banquet of the fall season, only the lower windows were ablaze, coloring the neat, regular checkerboard of small paving stones with the intense glow of a roaring conflagration.
As Renée pushed open the door of the vestibule, she found herself face-to-face with her husband’s manservant on his way to the servants’ hall with a silver kettle. The man was magnificent, all dressed in black, tall, solid, with the white face and neatly trimmed side-whiskers of an English diplomat and the grave, dignified air of a judge.