The man who manufactured surgical instruments didn’t even hear what Saccard had said. He was lost in the Régence.2
“What a strange time, for sure!” he murmured.
Then they found a cab on the rue de Charonne and drove off, spattered with filth up to the knees and as pleased with their outing as if they’d been to a picnic in the country. In the cab the conversation turned to politics; they agreed that the Emperor was doing great things. No one had ever seen anything like what they had just seen. This big straight boulevard would be superb once houses were built along it.
Saccard drew up the report, and the jury awarded an indemnity of three million francs. The speculator had his back to the wall; he couldn’t have held out another month. This money saved him from ruin and perhaps even from the criminal courts. He paid 500,000 francs of the million he owed his upholsterer and contractor on the Parc Monceau house. He attended to other trouble spots, plunged into new ventures, and deafened Paris with the sound of the very real gold coins that he loaded into his safe by the shovelful. The river of gold at last had a source. But it was not yet a solid, entrenched fortune flowing at an even and steady rate. Saved from bankruptcy, Saccard considered himself a beggar reduced to living on the crumbs from his three million francs; naïvely he told himself that he was still too poor, that he could not stop. And soon the ground had opened up yet again beneath his feet.
Larsonneau had behaved so admirably in the Charonne business that Saccard, after only a moment’s hesitation, had pushed honesty to the point of paying him his ten percent plus a bonus of 30,000 francs. With that the expropriation agent opened a bank. When his accomplice grumpily accused him of having outstripped him in wealth, the yellow-gloved dandy replied with a laugh: “You see, my beloved teacher, you’re very clever at making money rain down, but you’ve no idea how to pick it up.”
Mme Sidonie took advantage of her brother’s stroke of fortune to borrow 10,000 francs from him, with which she spent two months in London. She returned without a penny. No one ever found out what had become of the 10,000 francs.
“Oh, my, you know everything costs money,” she replied when questioned. “I scoured all the libraries. I had three secretaries to help with my research.”
And when people asked if she had at last found out anything certain about her three billion, she smiled mysteriously at first and then murmured, “You’re all skeptics. . . . I didn’t find anything, but it makes no difference. You’ll see, one of these days you’ll see.”
She had not wasted all her time in England, however. Her brother the minister had availed himself of the opportunity to charge her with a delicate commission. When she returned, she received a number of large orders from the ministry. This was a new incarnation for her. She signed contracts with the government and undertook to supply goods of every conceivable kind. She sold rations and weapons to the army for its troops, furniture to prefectures and government bureaus, and firewood to public offices and museums. The money she earned was not enough to persuade her to put aside the black dresses she invariably wore, and her waxy, doleful countenance remained as it had always been. Saccard now reflected that it must indeed have been his sister he had seen furtively exiting their brother Eugène’s house that day long ago. She had probably been in secret contact with him all along, running errands that nobody in the world was aware of.
While all these pecuniary interests and ardent, unquenchable thirsts swirled around her, Renée was in agony. Aunt Elisabeth had died. Her sister, now married, had left the family home, in the gloom of whose cavernous rooms her father now lived alone. In one season she ran through her aunt’s bequest. Lately she had taken to gambling. She had found a salon in which ladies sat at tables until three in the morning, losing hundreds of thousands of francs a night. Inevitably she tried to drink, but she could not: uncontrollable waves of nausea overwhelmed her. On finding herself alone again, helpless against the social tide that was sweeping her away, she had surrendered to it more than ever, not knowing any other way to kill the time. She sampled everything until nothing was left, yet none of it diminished the crushing weight of her boredom. She aged; blue circles formed around her eyes; her nose grew thinner, and her pouting lips erupted in sudden laughter for no reason. For this woman it was the end of the line.
When Maxime married Louise and the young couple left for Italy, Renée stopped worrying about her lover and seemed to forget all about him. And when he returned alone six months later, having buried “the hunchback” in the cemetery of a small town in Lombardy, she greeted him with hatred. She remembered Phèdre and no doubt recalled having heard Ristori invest that envenomed love with her sobs. Then, so that she would not have to run into the boy in her own home, and in order to set an abyss of shame between father and son forever, she forced her husband to acknowledge the incest, telling him that his son had been after her for some time and that on the day Saccard had surprised her with him, Maxime had been attempting to assault her. Saccard was terribly vexed by her insistence on opening his eyes. He was obliged to quarrel with his son and refuse to see him. The young widower, wealthy by dint of his wife’s dowry, established bachelor quarters in a small house on the avenue de l’Impératrice. He turned down the Conseil d’Etat and took to racing horses instead. The rupture Renée had caused between father and son was one of her last satisfactions. Her vengeance was to throw the degradation these two men had imposed on her back in their faces. Now, she told herself, she wouldn’t have to watch anymore as they walked arm in arm like two comrades, mocking her.
With the collapse of her affections, there came a time when she had no one left to love but her maid. Little by little she conceived a maternal affection for Céleste. It may have been that this girl, the only residue of her love for Maxime, reminded her of hours of pleasure now gone forever. Or maybe she was just touched by this servant’s loyalty, by the fidelity of this stouthearted woman whose tranquil solicitude seemed unshakable. In the depth of her remorse she thanked Céleste for having witnessed her shame without abandoning her in disgust. She imagined all sorts of self-denial, a whole life of renunciation, in her effort to comprehend the maid’s calm acceptance of incest, her icy hands, her respectful, unflappable attentiveness. And Céleste’s devotion pleased Renée all the more because she knew her to be honest and thrifty, a woman without a lover and untouched by vice.
In sad moments she sometimes said to her, “Listen, my child, when the time comes to close my eyes, I want it to be you.”
Céleste never gave any answer to this other than a peculiar smile. One morning, she quietly informed her mistress that she was leaving, returning home to her native village. Renée’s body shook all over, as if some great misfortune had arrived. She uttered a cry and pummeled Céleste with questions. Why was she abandoning her when they got along so well together? And she offered to double the girl’s wages.
But the chambermaid dismissed all these fine words with a calm but insistent wave.
Finally she broke her silence. “Madame, if you offered me all the gold in Peru, I wouldn’t stay one week longer. You don’t know me at all! . . . I’ve been with you for eight years, haven’t I? Well, on my first day I said to myself, ‘As soon as I’ve saved up 5,000 francs, I’ll go back home. I’ll buy the house in Lagache and live quite happily.’ That’s the promise I made myself, you see. And yesterday, when you paid me my wages, I had those 5,000 francs.”
Renée’s blood ran cold. She had a vision of Céleste passing behind her and Maxime while they were kissing, and she recognized the maid’s indifference, her complete detachment, as she dreamt of her 5,000 francs. She nevertheless tried to dissuade her, terrified as she was of the void in which she would soon find herself living, dreaming in spite of everything of keeping with her this stubborn mule whom she had thought devoted but who had turned out to be merely selfish. The maid smiled, shook her head, and muttered, “No, it’s not possible. Even if you were my mother, I would refuse. . . . I’m going to buy two cows. I may open a small hat shop. .
. . It’s a very nice town I come from. I’d be happy if you came to see me. It’s near Caen. I’ll leave you the address.”
Renée dropped her opposition. When she was alone, she cried hot tears. The next day, acting on a sick woman’s caprice, she insisted on driving Céleste to the Gare de l’Ouest in her coupé. She gave her one of her travel blankets as well as a sum of money and made a fuss over her as a mother might over a daughter about to embark on a long and difficult journey. In the coupé she gazed at her former maid with moist eyes. Céleste chatted about this and that and said how glad she was to be leaving. Then, feeling bold, she opened up and offered advice to her mistress.
“Personally, madame, I could never look at life the way you do. Plenty of times when I found you with M. Maxime, I used to say to myself, ‘How can any woman make such a fool of herself for a man!’ It always ends badly. . . . I’ve always been suspicious of them, but that’s me.”
She laughed and pressed herself back into a corner of the carriage.
“My money would have danced right out the door!” she went on. “And today I’d be crying my eyes out. So whenever I saw a man, I’d pick up a broomstick. . . . I never dared tell you any of that. Anyway, it was none of my business. You were free to do as you pleased, and for me it was an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.”
At the station, Renée insisted on paying for her ticket and bought her a seat in first class. Since they had arrived early, she wouldn’t let the servant go but held her by the hand and kept repeating, “Look after yourself, my good Céleste, take good care of yourself.”
Céleste allowed herself to be caressed. She remained happy though her mistress’s eyes filled with tears, and her face looked cool and radiant. Renée spoke again about the past. Then, suddenly, Céleste burst out, “I almost forgot. I haven’t told you the story of Baptiste, Monsieur’s manservant. . . . Nobody wanted to tell you.”
The young woman admitted that she knew nothing.
“Well, you remember his stuck-up airs and snotty looks? You’ve mentioned them to me. . . . Well, that was all a charade. . . . He didn’t like women. He never went down to the kitchen when we were there. And I can tell you this now, he even said that the drawing room was disgusting because of the low-cut gowns. I’m sure he didn’t care for women!”
And she leaned over to whisper in Renée’s ear. She made her mistress blush, yet her own placid sense of propriety remained unperturbed.
“When the new stable boy told Monsieur everything, Monsieur chose to dismiss Baptiste rather than press charges against him. It seems that disgusting things of that sort had been going on in the stables for years. . . . And to think that the big fellow pretended he liked horses! It was the grooms he was after.”
The bell interrupted her. She hastily gathered up the eight or ten packages she had not been willing to part with. She allowed herself to be kissed. Then she walked off without looking back.
Renée remained in the station until the locomotive blew its whistle. When the train pulled out, she felt desperate and didn’t know what to do. Her days seemed to stretch out before her as empty as the vast waiting room in which she was now left standing all alone. She climbed back in her coupé and told the coachman to drive home. On the way, however, she changed her mind. She was afraid of her room and of the boredom that awaited her there. She didn’t even have the heart to change clothes for her usual drive around the lake. She needed sun, and to be with people.
She ordered the coachman to go to the Bois.
It was four o’clock. The Bois was just awakening from the oppressive afternoon heat. Clouds of dust rose all along the avenue de l’Impératrice, and in the distance one could see expanses of greenery bordered by the slopes of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes and crowned by the gray mass of Mont-Valérien. 3 The sun, high on the horizon, flowed as if molten and filled the gaps in the foliage with a golden dust, setting the high branches ablaze and turning the ocean of leaves into an ocean of light. But beyond the fortifications, the carriageway that led to the lake had just been watered. The carriages rolled over the brown dirt as over a woolen carpet, enveloped in a cool fragrance of moist earth. On either side small trees drove their numerous young trunks into the low scrub and vanished into a sea of obscure greenery punctuated here and there by clearings aglow with yellow light. The nearer one got to the lake, the more numerous the chairs along the sidewalks became, and families sat on them and watched the endless parade of wheels with silent, tranquil faces. At the circle just before the lake a dazzling spectacle awaited. The sun’s oblique rays turned the round basin into a huge mirror of polished silver reflecting the star’s splendid face. Through squinting eyes it was hard to make out, on the left, near the bank, the dark outline of the excursion boat. The umbrellas of the carriages bowed in a gentle, uniform motion toward the source of the splendor and did not straighten up again until the carriages reached the carriageway that ran along the edge of the water, which from the height of the embankment took on a dark metallic hue with stripes of burnished gold. On the right, clumps of conifers lined up in regular colonnades, the soft violet tint of their straight, slender needles tinged red by the flames from the sky. On the left, expanses of lawn lay bathed in light like fields of emeralds all the way to the distant lace of the Porte de la Muette. Nearer the falls, the gloomy forest resumed on one side, while across the lake islands loomed against the blue sky with sunlit shores and shadowy slopes of vigorous fir, at the base of which the Chalet looked like a child’s toy lost in a corner of some virgin forest. The entire Bois shook with laughter in the sun.
On this splendid day Renée felt ashamed of her coupé and of her puce outfit, made of silk. She settled back a bit in the carriage and looked out through the open windows at the ripples of light on the water and greenery. At bends in the carriageway she caught glimpses of the line of wheels, revolving like golden stars in an endless stream of blinding flashes. The polished side panels, the glittering appurtenances of copper and steel, and the vividly colored outfits moved along at the regular pace of the trotting horses, so that it seemed that a large bar, a fallen ray of sunlight, was moving against the background of the Bois, stretching to wed the curves of the carriageway. By squinting from time to time, the young woman could make out within that ray the blonde bun of a woman’s hair, the dark back of a footman’s coat, or the white mane of a horse. The rounded contours of the watered-silk parasols shimmered like metal moons.
As Renée contemplated this bright day, these expanses of sunlight, she remembered the fine ash of dusk that had settled over the yellowing leaves one evening as she watched. Maxime was with her then. This was back when her desire for the boy had first been aroused. And she could still see the lawns drenched by the evening air, the darkening woods, and the deserted paths. The line of carriages had then made a mournful sound as it moved past the row of empty chairs, whereas today the rolling wheels and trotting horses sounded as joyful as a brass band. All her outings to the Bois now came back to her. She had lived in these woods, and Maxime had grown up here, sitting next to her on these cushions. The Bois had been their garden. The rain had surprised them here, the sun had brought them back, the night had not always driven them out. They had come here in all kinds of weather, and here they had experienced life’s tedium as well as its joys. In the emptiness of her existence and the melancholy caused by Céleste’s departure, these memories aroused a bitter joy in Renée. Her heart said: Never again! Never again! And as she conjured up that wintry landscape, that dull, frozen lake on which they had skated, she sat transfixed. The sky was the color of soot, the snow stitched veils of white lace onto the trees, and the north wind hurled a fine powder at their eyes and lips.
In the meantime she had recognized the duc de Rozan, M. de Mussy, and M. de Saffré on the path reserved for riders on the left. Larsonneau had killed the duke’s mother by presenting her with 150,000 francs’ worth of overdue notes signed by her son, and the duke was now squandering his second half-million with Blanche M
uller after leaving the first 500,000 francs in the hands of Laure d’Aurigny. M. de Mussy, who had left the embassy in England for the embassy in Italy, had resumed his flirtatious ways. He led the cotillion with new-found grace. M. de Saffré for his part was still a skeptic as well as the most amiable bon vivant imaginable. Renée watched him urge his horse toward the door of Countess Wanska’s carriage. People said that he had fallen madly in love with her the day he saw her dressed up as Coral at the Saccards’.
All the ladies were in the Bois as well: Duchess von Sternich in her inevitable eight-spring; Mme de Lauwerens in a landau, with Baroness von Meinhold and little Mme Daste seated opposite her in front; and Mme Teissière and Mme de Guende in a victoria. In amongst these ladies, Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny sat on the cushions of a magnificent calèche, showing themselves off. Even Mme Michelin drove by, sitting well back in a coupé. The pretty brunette had paid a visit to M. Hupel de la Noue’s district capital and upon her return had been seen in the Bois in this same coupé, to which she hoped soon to add an open carriage. Renée also spotted the marquise d’Espanet and Mme Haffner, the Inseparables, hiding under parasols and laughing affectionately, gazing into each other’s eyes as they stretched out side by side.
Then the gentlemen passed by: M. de Chibray in a drag; Mr. Simpson in a dog cart; Mignon and Charrier, keener than ever about their work despite their dream of impending retirement, in a coupé that they left by the side of one of the paths while they stretched their legs a bit; M. de Mareuil, still in mourning for his daughter, seeking plaudits for his first intervention in the legislature the night before, showing off his political importance in the carriage of M. Toutin-Laroche, who had just saved the Crédit Viticole once again after having brought it to the brink of ruin and whose waistline had contracted even while his influence had expanded as never before following his nomination to the Senate.
And bringing up the rear as the ultimate majesty in this procession, Baron Gouraud, taking the sun in his open carriage, weighed heavily on the two extra pillows that had been placed on the seat. Renée felt surprise and disgust at the sight of Baptiste sitting next to the coachman, his face white and solemn. The tall butler had entered the baron’s service.