The Kill

  Then the husband moved forward into the room. A need for brutality mottled his face, and he clenched his fists to strike the guilty pair. Rage in this little dervish of a man exploded with the force of a pistol shot. As he continued to move toward them, he snickered: “You told her about your marriage, didn’t you?”

  Maxime retreated until his back was to the wall.

  “Listen,” he stammered, “She was the one—”

  He was about to accuse her in the most cowardly way, to blame the crime on her, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself in the abject and quivering manner of a child caught misbehaving. But he lacked the strength to go through with it; the words stuck in his throat. Renée remained as rigid as a statue in mute defiance. Then Saccard rapidly surveyed the room, no doubt in search of a weapon. On the corner of the dressing table, among the combs and nail brushes, he spotted the purchase-and-sale agreement, on official stamped paper whose yellow color tinged the marble with its reflection. He looked at the document, then at the guilty pair. And leaning forward a little, he saw that the document was signed. His eyes moved from the open inkwell to the still-damp pen, lying by the base of the candelabra. He stood in front of that signed document and pondered his position.

  The silence seemed to deepen, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz grew softer as the folds of the draperies wrapped themselves soothingly around it. Saccard gave an imperceptible flick of his shoulders. With a serious look he once again scrutinized his wife and son, as if to wring from their faces an explanation that was nowhere to be found. Then he slowly folded the document and put it in the pocket of his coat. All the color had gone out of his cheeks.

  “You did well to sign, my dear,” he said quietly to his wife. “You’ve gained 100,000 francs. I shall give you the money tonight.”

  He was almost smiling; only his hands were still trembling. He took a few steps, then added, “It’s stifling in here. Whatever possessed you to come and hatch one of your pranks in this steam bath!”

  Then he turned to Maxime, who, surprised by the calmness of his father’s voice, had raised his head again. “Come down with me,” he continued. “I saw you go up and came after you so that you could say good-bye to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”

  The two men went down together, chatting as they went. Renée was left standing alone in the middle of the dressing room, staring at the gaping void at the top of the small staircase into which she had just seen father and son vanish. She could not take her eyes off that void. To her astonishment, they had left quietly and amicably. They had not beaten each other to a pulp. She pricked up her ears and strained to hear whether some horrible struggle had broken out in the stairwell, sending bodies rolling down the stairs. In the tepid shadows nothing could be heard but the sound of dancing—a long lullaby. In the distance she thought she could make out the marquise’s laughter and the clear voice of M. de Saffré. So the drama was over? Her crime—the kisses in the big gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the conservatory, all the damnable love that had burned in her for months—had culminated in this insipid, ignoble end. Her husband now knew everything and had not even beaten her. And the silence that enveloped her—a silence in which the endless waltz dragged on—terrified her more than the sound of a murder. She was afraid of this peace, afraid of this soft, discreet dressing room redolent of the odor of love.

  She caught sight of herself in the tall mirror of the armoire. She moved closer to it, surprised by her own image, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, wholly preoccupied by the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness was taking hold. Her yellow hair, pinned up around her temples and on the back of her neck, looked to her like a kind of nakedness, an obscenity. The furrow in her brow had deepened to the point where it created a dark streak above her eyes, like the thin blue mark of a whiplash. Who had done this to her? Her husband hadn’t raised a hand. She was stunned by the pallor of her lips, and her myopic eyes looked lifeless. How old she seemed! When she tilted her head forward and saw herself in tights and a light, gauzy blouse, she contemplated her appearance with lowered eyelids and sudden flushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing in such disarray, like a prostitute who bares her breasts and torso? She no longer knew. She looked at her thighs, made shapely by the tights; at her hips, whose supple lines she followed under the gauze; at her largely bare bosom; and she was ashamed of herself, and contempt for her own flesh filled her with dull rage against those who had left her that way, with nothing to hide her flesh but plain gold ringlets around her ankles and wrists.

  Then, her drowning mind obsessed with but a single thought, she tried to understand what she was doing there stark naked in front of that mirror, and suddenly she leapt back in time to her childhood and saw herself at the age of seven in the somber shadows of the Hôtel Béraud. She remembered a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed her and Christine in gray wool dresses with red checks. It was Christmas. How happy they were with those two identical dresses! Their aunt spoiled them and went so far as to give each of them a bracelet and necklace of coral. Their sleeves were long, their bodices reached all the way up to their chins, and the jewelry stood out against the fabric, which seemed to them quite pretty. Renée still remembered that her father had been there and that he’d smiled with his melancholy smile. That day, she and her sister had moved about their room like grown-ups, not playing so as to avoid soiling their clothes. But when she went back to school with the Sisters of the Visitation, her classmates had teased her about her “clown’s dress,” with sleeves that went all the way down to her fingertips and a collar that reached up above her ears. She had cried in class. At recess, to stop the others’ making fun of her, she had pushed up those sleeves and turned down that collar. And the coral necklace and bracelet had looked prettier to her against the skin of her neck and arm. Was that the day she had begun to strip herself naked?

  Her life unfolded before her. She experienced the slow onset of panic as swirling eddies of gold and flesh rose within her, first to her knees, then to her belly, and on to her lips, and now she could feel the current passing over her head, striking sharp, rapid blows against her skull. It was like rotten sap; it had drained the energy from her limbs, deformed her heart with the cancer of shameful loves, and planted sick and bestial whims in her brain. That sap had been absorbed through the soles of her feet from the carpet of her calèche and other carpets too and from all the miles of silk and velvet she had walked on since her marriage. Other people must have left poisonous seeds in their footsteps, and now those seeds were sprouting in her blood and circulating through her veins. She remembered her childhood very well. When she was little, she had merely been inquisitive. Even later, after the rape that had plunged her into evil, she had not coveted shame to that degree. Of course she would have been better off if she’d stayed home and knitted with Aunt Elisabeth. And she could hear the regular ticking of her aunt’s knitting needles as she stared into the mirror in search of the peaceful future that had eluded her. But all she saw was her pink thighs, her pink hips, this strange woman of pink silk she beheld before her, whose skin of fine, closely woven fabric seemed made for the amours of puppets and dolls. This was what she had come to: she was a big doll, from whose torn chest stuffing leaked in a thin stream. Then, confronted with the enormities of her life, her father’s blood—that bourgeois blood that tormented her in times of crisis—cried out in her and rebelled. She who had always trembled at the thought of hell—she should have lived her life within the dark austerity of the Hôtel Béraud. Who, then, had stripped her naked?

  In the dim blue surface of the mirror she thought she saw the figures of Saccard and Maxime. Saccard, swarthy and sneering, had a color that resembled iron, a laugh that was torture to listen to, and skinny legs. What a will the man had! For ten years she had watched him at work in the forge, enveloped in sparks of red-hot metal, his flesh singed, breathing hard, tapping steadily, lifting hammers twenty times too heavy for him, heedless of
the risk that he might be crushed. She understood him now. He seemed magnified by his superhuman effort, his scheming on a vast scale, his obsession with acquiring an immense fortune immediately. She remembered his jumping over obstacles, rolling in the mud, and not even taking the time to wipe himself off in order to arrive ahead of schedule, not even stopping to enjoy himself along the way, chewing on gold pieces as he ran. Then Maxime’s pretty blond head appeared behind his father’s stout shoulders. He wore the bright smile of a streetwalker and the blank stare of a whore who never lowered her eyes, and he parted his hair in the middle, revealing the whiteness of his cranium. He made fun of Saccard and deemed it “bourgeois” to go to so much trouble to earn the money that he consumed with such admirable indolence. He was kept. His long, soft hands told of his vices. His hairless body struck the weary pose of a satiated woman. Vice flowed as easily as lukewarm water through this soft, spineless creature, utterly devoid of curiosity about evil. He was passive. And Renée, as she watched these two apparitions emerge from the dim shadows of the mirror, took a step backward and saw that Saccard had tossed her out as a prize, an investment, and that Maxime had happened along to pick up the gold coin the speculator had let drop. She had always been an asset in her husband’s portfolio. He had encouraged her to wear gowns for a night and take lovers for a season. He had rotated her in the flames of his forge, used her as one might use a precious metal to gild the iron in his hands. Little by little, the father had thus made her mad enough and miserable enough to accept the son’s kisses. If Maxime was the impoverished blood of Saccard, she felt that she was the fruit these two worms had ruined, the vileness at which both had eaten away and in which both now lay coiled.

  She knew now. These were the men who had stripped her naked. Saccard had unhooked her bodice, and Maxime had removed her skirt. Then, just now, both of them had ripped off her slip. Now she remained without a shred of clothing, with her gold ringlets, like a slave. When they had looked at her earlier, they hadn’t said, “You’re naked.” The son had quivered like a coward, trembling at the idea of seeing his crime through to the end, and had refused to follow her in her passion. The father, instead of killing her, had robbed her. He was a man who punished people by picking their pockets. A signature had appeared like a ray of sunlight in the midst of his wrath, and as vengeance he had carried that signature off with him. Then she had watched their shoulders disappear into the darkness. No blood on the carpet, not a single cry, not a whimper. These men were cowards. They had stripped her naked.

  On one solitary occasion, she told herself, she had read the future: on that day when with burgeoning desires she had braved the murmuring shadows of the Parc Monceau and been terrified by the thought that her husband would someday defile her and plunge her into madness. Oh, but her poor head ached! How acutely she now felt the fallacy of the imagination that had led her to believe she was living in a blessed realm of divine ecstasy and impunity! She had lived in the land of shame, and she was punished by the surrender of her entire body and the annihilation of her being, now in its final agony. She wept that she had not listened to the resonant voices of the trees.

  Her nakedness vexed her. She turned her head and looked around. The dressing room retained its heavy odor of musk, its overheated silence disturbed only by snatches of the never-ending waltz, like dying ripples on a sheet of water. Like attenuated laughter from some far-off sensual encounter, the music passed over her, and its mockery was more than she could bear. She stopped her ears so as to hear no more. Then her eyes took in the luxurious appointments of the dressing room. Her gaze followed the pink draperies all the way up to the silver crown, through which peered a cherub with plump cheeks readying his arrow. Her eyes lingered on the furniture, on the marble top of the dressing table crowded with jars and implements she no longer recognized. She went to the bathtub, still filled with stagnant water. With her foot she kicked away the fabrics left lying on the white satin armchairs: Echo’s costume, petticoats, towels she had tossed aside. And all these things spoke with the voices of shame: the nymph’s costume told of her having accepted the role of Echo for the novel thrill of offering herself to Maxime in public; the bathtub exhaled the fragrance of her body; the water in which she had soaked filled the room with a sick woman’s fever; the dressing table, with its soaps and oils, and the round curves of the furniture, so reminiscent of a bed, spoke brutally to her of her flesh, her loves, and all the filth she wanted to forget. She went back to the center of the room, her face crimson, because she had no idea how to escape from this bedroom scent, this luxury that revealed itself as brazenly as a prostitute, parading this abundance of pink. The room was as naked as she was. The pink tub, the pink skin of the tent, the pink marble of the two tables seemed to come alive, to stretch and curl and wrap themselves around her with such a living sensual embrace that she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and gave in to the crushing weight of the lace that adorned the ceilings and walls.

  In the darkness, however, she again noticed the flesh-colored stain of the dressing room and imagined the gray softness of the bedroom, the tender gold of the small salon, the garish green of the conservatory—so many complicit riches. These were the places where her feet had soaked up the rotten sap. She would not have slept with Maxime on a pallet in some garret. That would have been too vile. Silk had made her crime stylish. And she dreamt of tearing down all this lace, of spitting on this silk, of kicking her big bed to pieces, and of trailing her luxury through some gutter from which it would emerge as worn and soiled as she was.

  When she opened her eyes, she went over to the mirror and looked at herself again, examined herself closely. She was done for. She saw herself dead. Her whole face told her that her nervous breakdown was nearly complete. Maxime—the ultimate perversion of her senses— had finished his work, exhausted her flesh, unhinged her mind. She had no more joys to savor, no further hope of awakening. At this thought a savage rage was rekindled in her. And in one final paroxysm of desire, she dreamt of seizing her prey one more time, of dying in Maxime’s arms and taking him with her. Louise could not marry him. Louise knew full well that he did not belong to her, since she had seen them kissing each other on the lips. Then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders so as not to cross the dance floor naked. She went downstairs.

  In the small salon she found herself face-to-face with Mme Sidonie, who had again stationed herself on the conservatory steps to relish the drama. But she no longer knew what to think when Saccard reappeared with Maxime and to her whispered questions brusquely replied that she was dreaming, that there was “nothing at all.” Then the truth dawned on her. Her yellow face turned white: this really was too much. Quietly, she went over and glued her ear to the door of the staircase, hoping that she would hear Renée sobbing upstairs. When the young woman opened the door, it nearly struck her sister-in-law in the face.

  “You’re spying on me!” Renée said angrily.

  But Mme Sidonie replied with splendid disdain: “As if I’d bother with your filth!”

  Then, hiking up her magician’s robes, she withdrew with a majestic glare: “It’s not my fault, darling, if you’ve had some mishaps. . . . But understand that I hold no grudge. And that you would have found a second mother in me and may find one still. I’ll be happy to see you at my place whenever it suits you.”

  Renée wasn’t listening. She walked into the large drawing room and made her way through a very complex figure of the cotillion without so much as noticing the surprise occasioned by her fur cloak. In the middle of the room, groups of ladies and gentlemen were milling around and waving streamers, and M. de Saffré’s high-pitched voice was saying, “Let’s go, ladies, it’s time for the ‘Mexican War.’ The ladies must pretend to be cactus plants by sitting on the floor and spreading their skirts out around them. . . . Now, the gentlemen will dance around the cacti. . . . Then, when I clap my hands, each gentleman must waltz with his cactus.”

  He clapped his hands. The brass rang out, and couples o
nce again waltzed around the salon. The figure was not much of a success. Two of the ladies remained sitting on the carpet, tangled up in their petticoats. Mme Daste said that what amused her in the “Mexican War” was making a “cheese” out of her dress as the girls used to do at boarding school.

  When Renée reached the vestibule, she found Louise and her father with Saccard and Maxime. Baron Gouraud had left. Mme Sidonie was on her way out with Mignon and Charrier, and M. Hupel de la Noue escorted Mme Michelin, while her husband followed at a discreet distance. The prefect had spent most of the evening courting the pretty brunette. He had just persuaded her to spend a month of the summer season in the capital of his district, “where there are some truly unusual ancient artifacts to be seen.”

  Louise, who was surreptitiously nibbling on the nougat she had hidden in her pocket, succumbed to a fit of coughing just as she was about to leave.

  “Button up tight,” her father said.

  And Maxime hastened to tighten the string on the hood of her evening wrap. She lifted her chin and allowed herself to be swaddled. But when Mme Saccard appeared, M. de Mareuil returned to say his good-byes. Everyone stood chatting for a while. To explain her pallor and shivering, she said that she had felt cold and had gone upstairs to fetch the fur now draped over her shoulders. Meanwhile, she was waiting for an opportunity to whisper something to Louise, who was staring at her with curious tranquillity. Since the men were still shaking hands, Renée leaned over to her and whispered: “You won’t marry him, will you? It’s out of the question. You know full well—”