But the child interrupted, rising up on her toes to whisper in Renée’s ear. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take him away. . . . It won’t matter, since we’ll be going off to Italy.”
And she smiled the inscrutable smile of a wicked sphinx. All Renée could do was stammer. Understanding eluded her; she thought the hunchback was making a joke at her expense. Then, after the Mareuils had left, having repeated “Until Sunday!” several times before doing so, she looked with terrified eyes first at her husband, then at Maxime, and seeing them there, looking cool and smug, she hid her face in her hands and fled, taking refuge at the far end of the conservatory.
The paths were deserted. The great masses of foliage slept, while two budding water lilies slowly unfolded on the stagnant surface of the pool. Renée felt like crying, but the humid heat and strong odor that she knew so well took her by the throat and strangled her despair. She looked at her feet on the edge of the pool, on the patch of yellow sand where she had laid out the bearskin the previous winter. And when she looked up, she could still see a figure of the cotillion unfolding in the distance through the double doors, which had been left open.
There was a deafening noise, a chaotic free-for-all in which all she could make out at first were flying skirts and black legs stamping and whirling. M. de Saffré’s voice cried out: “Change your ladies! Change your ladies!” And couples passed by in a cloud of fine yellow dust. Each gentleman danced three or four turns of the waltz and then flung his lady into the arms of his neighbor, who did the same. Baroness von Meinhold, wearing her Emerald costume, passed from the hands of the comte de Chibray to those of Mr. Simpson. He caught her as best he could by one shoulder, while the fingers of his gloves slipped beneath her bodice. A flushed Countess Wanska, her coral pendants jangling, leapt in a single bound from the chest of M. de Saffré to that of the duc de Rozan, whom she wrapped herself around and forced to pirouette for five measures so that she might attach herself next to the hip of Mr. Simpson, who had just hurled the Emerald at the cotillion’s leader. And Mme Teissière, Mme Daste, and Mme de Lauwerens, gleaming like great living jewels with the pale yellow of Topaz, the soft blue of Turquoise, and the fiery blue of Sapphire, briefly let themselves go and arched their backs under the outstretched wrists of their waltzing partners, then started up anew, moving backward or forward into yet another embrace, and in this fashion sampled one after another the arms of every man in the room. Meanwhile, Mme d’Espanet, standing in front of the orchestra, managed to grab Mme Haffner as she passed and waltzed off with her, unwilling to let her go. Gold and Silver danced together, like lovers.
Renée now understood this whirl of skirts, this stamping of feet. Situated as she was below the level of the dance floor, she saw the frenzy of legs, the chaos of patent-leather boots and white ankles. At times it seemed as though a gust of wind might carry off the women’s gowns. The bare shoulders, arms, and heads that flew past, that whirled by only to be caught, flung off, and caught again at the far end of the gallery where the orchestra played ever more furiously and the red hangings seemed to droop as the ball succumbed to its final fever, struck her as a tumultuous reflection of her own life, with its moments of nakedness and surrender. And she experienced such pain at the thought that Maxime, in order to take the hunchback in his arms, had cast her aside into the very spot where they had loved each other, that she dreamed of plucking a branch of the tanghin that grazed her cheek and chewing it down to the heartwood. But she was a coward, so she stood in front of the shrub shivering under the fur, which she pulled over her arms and clutched tightly in a gesture of terrified shame.
7
Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings that bring the low clouds and gloomy dampness of winter back to Paris, Aristide Saccard stepped down from his carriage on the place du Châteaud’Eau and with four other gentlemen entered the gaping hole opened up by demolitions making way for the future boulevard du Prince-Eugène. The men were from the investigative commission that the jury on indemnities sent out to construction sites to estimate the value of certain properties, whose owners had not been able to reach agreement with the city.
Saccard was going for a repeat of the stroke of fortune he had pulled off on the rue de la Pépinière. In order to expunge his wife’s name from the record entirely, his first move had been to arrange a mock sale of the land and the music hall. Larsonneau transferred the entire property to a fictitious creditor. The deed bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This amount was so exorbitant that when the expropriation agent, acting on behalf of the imaginary creditor, asked for an indemnity equal to the selling price, the city hall commission refused to award more than two million five hundred thousand francs despite the surreptitious efforts of M. Michelin and the pleas of M. Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud. Saccard had expected this setback. He rejected the offer and allowed the case to go to the jury, of which he happened to be a member, along with M. de Mareuil— a lucky break that he had no doubt had a hand in arranging. That was how he came to be conducting an inquiry into his own property along with four of his colleagues.
M. de Mareuil was at his side. Of the three other members of the committee, one was a doctor, who smoked a cigar and paid absolutely no attention to the rubble he was walking on, and two were businessmen, one of whom, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly been a knife sharpener who operated a grindstone on the street.
The path these gentlemen set out to follow was in terrible condition. It had rained all night. The soggy ground had turned into a river of mud between crumbling buildings, following a line marked out on earth so soft that carts hauling rubble sank in up to their axles. On either side stood sections of wall shattered by pickaxes. Tall buildings had been gutted so that their blanched entrails showed: empty stair-wells and gaping rooms hung in the air like the smashed drawers of some huge, ugly bureau. No sight could be sadder than the wallpaper in the bedrooms five or six stories up, yellow or blue squares now in tatters marking the places under the roofs where poor, wretched garrets had been—tiny holes that had once housed someone’s entire existence. Ribbons of flue pipe, depressingly black in color and with sharp elbows, climbed bare walls side by side. A forgotten weathervane made a grating sound as it rotated close to the edge of one roof, while half-detached gutters hung down like rags. And the chasm continued on into the ruins like a breach opened by cannon fire. The path of the roadway, still hard to make out, was filled with debris and marked by mounds of earth and deep puddles; on it went beneath gray skies, enveloped in a sinister cloud of falling plaster dust and lined by black ribbons of flue pipe, which were like the badges worn by mourners.
The visiting gentlemen, with their carefully polished boots, frock coats, and top hats, injected a singular note into this muddy landscape of brown filth in which the only things that moved were sallow workmen, horses spattered with mud all the way up their flanks, and wagons whose sides were completely coated with dust. They walked single file, jumping from stone to stone while mostly avoiding pools of liquid filth, but occasionally sinking in up to their ankles, which made them swear out loud and shake their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the rue de Charonne, which would have made it unnecessary to traverse this area of excavation, but unfortunately the committee had a number of buildings to visit up and down the lengthy boulevard. Driven by curiosity, they had decided to set a course right through the heart of the construction. In any case, it interested them greatly. At times one of them would stop and balance himself on a chunk of plaster lying in a rut, look up, and call the attention of the others to a gaping floor, a piece of flue pipe hanging in the air, or a beam that had fallen onto a neighboring roof. This razed section of city at the end of the rue du Temple actually struck them as quite funny.
“Now there’s something really unusual,” said M. de Mareuil. “Look up there, Saccard, at that kitchen. There’s still an old frying pan hanging over the stove. . . . I can make it out quite clearly.”
But the ph
ysician, his cigar clamped between his teeth, had planted himself in front of a demolished house, of which nothing remained but the rooms on the ground floor, now filled with rubble from the floors above. Only one section of wall rose above the heap of debris. To knock this wall down at one go, a rope had been wound around it, and thirty workmen were now pulling on that line.
“They won’t get it that way,” the doctor mumbled. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”
The other four men had retraced their steps in order to watch the wall come down. All five stared intently with bated breath as they waited, thrilled at the prospect of witnessing the collapse. The workers let the rope go slack and then suddenly gave another tug, shouting, “Heave, ho!”
“They won’t get it,” the doctor repeated.
Then, after a few seconds of anxious waiting, one of the businessmen gleefully shouted, “It’s moving, it’s moving!”
When the wall finally gave way, collapsing with a terrifying rumble that raised a cloud of plaster dust, the five gentlemen of the committee smiled at one another. They were enchanted. A fine powder settled onto their coats, turning their arms and shoulders white.
Now, as the men went back to picking their way among the puddles, the conversation turned to workers. There weren’t many good ones. They were all lazy, wasteful, and pigheaded and dreamed of nothing but their employers’ ruin. M. de Mareuil, who for the past minute had been nervously watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof as they attacked a wall with pickaxes, nevertheless voiced the thought that fellows like those displayed splendid courage. The others stopped once more and looked up at the demolition workers balanced on the edge of the roof as they bent their backs and swung their axes with all their might. The workmen kicked stones from the wall with their feet and watched calmly as they crashed to the ground. If their picks had missed their marks, the sheer momentum of their swings would have sent them plunging off the roof.
“Bah, they’re used to it!” said the doctor, putting his cigar back in his mouth. “They’re brutes.”
Meanwhile the members of the committee had reached one of the buildings they were supposed to inspect. They polished off their work in fifteen minutes and resumed their walk. Little by little they lost their fear of the mud. They walked right through puddles, abandoning all hope of keeping their boots dry. As they passed rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the former knife grinder, grew anxious. He scrutinized the ruins around him, and the neighborhood no longer seemed familiar. He had lived there more than thirty years before, he said, just after arriving in Paris, and it would please him greatly to locate the spot. He continued to cast his eyes about until the sight of a house cut in two by the demolition workers’ axes brought him up short in the middle of the path. He studied the building’s door and windows. Then, pointing at a corner of the ruin, he cried out, “There it is! I recognize it!”
“What are you talking about?” asked the doctor.
“My room, for heaven’s sake! That’s it!”
It was a small bedroom on the sixth floor that must once have overlooked a courtyard. A breach in one wall exposed the room, already demolished on one side, and a large section of wallpaper bearing a yellow floral pattern had been torn away from the wall and could be seen flapping in the wind. On the left you could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And next to it was the hole for a stove, with a piece of pipe sticking out.
The erstwhile worker was gripped by emotion.
“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “Life was hard in those days, but it made no difference, I was young. . . . See that cupboard? That’s where I kept the 300 francs I saved sou by sou. And the hole for the stove—I can still remember the day I made it. The room had no fireplace, and it was bitter cold, all the more so because it wasn’t often that I was with somebody.”
“Hold on there,” the doctor interrupted in a jocular tone. “Nobody wants to know your secrets. You had your fun like everybody else.”
“That’s true,” the dignitary naïvely admitted. “I can still remember a laundress from the house across the street. . . . See up there, the bed was on the right, near the window. . . . What they’ve done to my poor bedroom!”
He was really quite sad about it.
“Now listen here,” said Saccard. “There’s nothing wrong with knocking down old dumps like these. They’re going to build fine new freestone houses in their place. . . . Would you still live in a hovel like that? Whereas on the new boulevard you’ll be able to find quite suitable housing.”
“That’s true,” repeated the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled by the thought.
The investigative commission stopped at two more buildings. The doctor remained outside, smoking and staring at the sky. When the men came to the rue des Amandiers, the houses thinned out, and now they made their way through fenced lots and land undeveloped but for a few tumbledown cottages. Saccard seemed delighted by this stroll through the ruins. He was reminded of the dinner he had had long ago with his first wife on the Buttes Montmartre and vividly recalled having gestured with the edge of his hand to indicate where Paris would be sliced open from the place du Château-d’Eau to the Barrière du Trône. It enchanted him to know that this prediction from the distant past had come true. He followed the line of that slice with the secret pleasure of an author, as if he himself had struck the first blows of the pickaxe with his iron fingers. And as he jumped the puddles, he relished the thought that three million francs awaited him beneath these ruins, at the end of this greasy river of muck.
Meanwhile, the members of the committee began to fancy that they had reached the countryside. The path of the roadway ran through gardens, whose walls had been knocked down to make way for it. Huge lilac bushes were in bud. The foliage was a very delicate light green in color. Each of these gardens opened out like a castle keep walled off by shrubbery, inside which lay a narrow pool, a miniature waterfall, and a section of wall featuring trompe-l’oeil representations of foreshortened bowers set against distant blue landscapes. The houses, spread out and discreetly hidden, resembled Italian pavilions or Greek temples. Moss ate away at the bottoms of the plaster columns, while weeds loosened the mortar of the pediments.
“These are petites maisons,” said the physician with a wink.
But when he saw that the other gentlemen didn’t understand what he meant by this, he explained that in the time of Louis XIV nobles had kept retreats for assignations in the country. It was the fashion. “They called them petites maisons. This neighborhood was full of them. . . . You can bet that there were some wild goings-on in those places!”
The investigative committee had become quite attentive. Eyes glistening, the two businessmen smiled and examined these gardens and pavilions with great interest, even though they had not so much as glanced at them before hearing their colleague’s explanations. One grotto held their attention for quite some time. But when the doctor noticed one house that had already fallen victim to the pickaxes and mentioned that he recognized it as having been the petite maison of the comte de Savigny—and well-known for that gentleman’s orgies—the entire committee left the boulevard to visit the ruin. They climbed up over the rubble and entered through the first-floor windows. Since the workers were on their lunch break, they were able to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content. They stayed for more than half an hour, examining the rosettes in the ceilings, the paintings above the doors, and the overelaborate plaster moldings that had turned yellow with age. The doctor reconstructed the house.
“This room, you see, must have been the formal dining room. Over there, in that recess in the wall, there was surely a huge sofa. And wait a minute, I’m even certain there must have been a mirror above that sofa. There are the retainers for the glass. . . . Those bastards really knew how to enjoy life!”
They would never have left those old stones, which piqued their curiosity, if Saccard, impatient to get going, had not laughingly reminded them that “i
t’s no use looking for the ladies, they’re not here anymore. . . . It’s time to get back to business.”
Before leaving, however, the doctor climbed up on a mantel and with a deft blow from an axe detached the small painted head of a cupid, which he slipped into the pocket of his coat.
At last they came to the end of their route. The property that had previously belonged to Mme Aubertot was quite extensive. The music hall and garden occupied barely half of it. A few nondescript houses were scattered around the remaining land. The fact that the new boulevard cut diagonally across this large parallelogram had allayed one of Saccard’s fears. For a long time he had worried that only the music hall would be affected by the planned route. He had accordingly instructed Larsonneau to talk things up, since the value of the adjacent land should have increased at least fivefold. He was already threatening the city by saying that he might invoke a recent ordinance authorizing landowners to surrender only that portion of a property absolutely essential for public works.
It was the expropriation agent who received the gentlemen of the committee. He showed them around the garden and the music hall and gave them a huge file to examine. But the two businessmen had gone back downstairs with the doctor, whom they continued to question about the petite maison of the comte de Savigny, which had fired their imaginations. With jaws hanging, both men listened to the doctor’s stories, as all three stood alongside a “barrel ride” in the amusement park. And the doctor regaled them with tales of Mme de Pompadour and recounted the loves of Louis XV 1 while M. de Mareuil and Saccard carried on with the investigation by themselves.
“This job is done,” said the latter upon returning to the garden. “If you’ll allow me, gentlemen, I’ll accept responsibility for writing up the report.”