The woods were still racing by, the water of the lake had turned iridescent as the slant of the sun’s rays increased, and the dancing glimmers of the line of carriages now stretched over an even greater distance than before. And in the grip of a kind of ecstasy and carried away by it, the young woman was only vaguely aware of the many appetites out that day for a drive in the sun. To these people had gone the spoils. If she felt no indignation toward them on that account, she nevertheless hated them for their happiness, for the triumph that revealed them to her as if powdered by gold dust fallen from on high. They were splendid and radiant. The women displayed themselves, white and plump. The men had the glint in the eye and bemused demeanor of satisfied lovers. And she found nothing in her empty heart but weariness, but aching want. Was she therefore better than the others for having given way under the burden of pleasure? Or was it the others who deserved praise for being made of sterner stuff? She had no idea. She wanted new desires with which to start life over. But just then she turned her head and saw alongside her, on the sidewalk that ran along the edge of the wood, a sight that tore through her with one final blow.
Saccard and Maxime were strolling slowly arm in arm. The father must have called on the son, and together they must have walked down the avenue de l’Impératrice to the lake, chatting as they went.
“You heard me,” Saccard was repeating. “You’re a fool. . . . When a fellow has the kind of money you have, he doesn’t stick it away in the bottom of a drawer. There’s a hundred percent profit to be made in the deal I’ve been telling you about. It’s a sure thing. You know very well I wouldn’t pull a fast one on you.”
But the young man seemed bored by his father’s insistence. He smiled prettily and looked at the carriages.
“See that little woman over there, the woman in violet?” he asked abruptly. “She’s a laundress that ass Mussy has set up.”
They looked at the woman in violet. Then Saccard pulled a cigar out of his pocket and turned to Maxime, who was smoking. “Give me a light.”
They stopped for a moment, face-to-face, and brought their heads together. When the cigar was lit, Saccard took his son’s arm, squeezed it tightly under his own, and continued with what he had been saying: “You know, you’re an imbecile if you don’t listen to me. So, do we have a deal? Will you bring me the 100,000 francs tomorrow?”
“You know I don’t go to your house anymore,” Maxime replied with a pout.
“Bah! Nonsense! It’s time to put an end to all that!”
As they walked on a few more steps in silence, and Renée, feeling faint, buried her head in the coupé’s upholstery so as not to be seen, a growing buzz raced along the line of carriages. On the sidewalks, pedestrians stopped and turned, mouths agape, eyes fixed on something coming toward them. The wheels made a scraping sound as carriages drew aside respectfully, and two outriders appeared, dressed in green and wearing round caps trimmed with golden tassels that formed a dancing curtain around their heads. Leaning slightly forward, they trotted past on big bay horses. Behind them, they left a void, and in that void the Emperor appeared.
He was riding in the back of a landau, alone on the rear seat. Dressed in black, with his frock coat buttoned up to his chin, he wore a very high top hat, slightly tilted to one side and made of shiny silk. Opposite him, on the front seat, dressed with the punctilious elegance that was then in favor at the Tuileries, two gentlemen sat gravely with their hands in their laps—two taciturn wedding guests exposed to a gawking crowd.
Renée found that the Emperor had aged. Under his thick waxed mustache, his jaw hung more listlessly than before. His eyelids drooped to the point where they half covered his lifeless eyes, whose hazel irises now seemed clouded. Only his nose remained unchanged, still looking like a dry fish bone sticking out of a rather nondescript face.
In the meantime, while the ladies in the carriages smiled discreetly, the people on foot pointed out the sovereign to one another. One fat man maintained that the Emperor was the gentleman with his back to the coachman on the left. A few hands were raised in salute. But Saccard, who had doffed his hat even before the outriders had passed, waited until the imperial carriage had reached a point just opposite him before shouting in his gruff Provençal voice, “Vive l’empereur!”
The Emperor, surprised, turned, no doubt recognized his enthusiastic subject, and returned the salute with a smile. Then everything vanished into the sunset, the carriages pulled back into line, and all Renée could see above the manes of the horses and between the backs of the footmen were the green caps of the outriders with their dancing tassels.
She sat a moment with her eyes wide open, full of what she had just seen, which reminded her of another time in her life. To her it seemed that the Emperor, by inserting himself into the line of carriages, had just added the last essential radiance to this triumphal procession and given it meaning. Now it was a glory to behold. All those wheels, all those decorated men, all those women lounging listlessly in their carriages vanished with the flash and rumble of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and painful that the young woman felt an imperious need to escape from this triumph, from Saccard’s shout, still ringing in her ears, and from the sight of the father and the son, arms linked, chatting as they ambled along. Looking for a way out, she brought her hands up to her chest, as if seared by a flame within. And it was with a sudden hope of relief, of a salutary cooling of a raging fever, that she leaned forward and told the coachman, “To the Hôtel Béraud.”
The courtyard, as always, had the chill of a cloister. Renée made her way around the arcade, reveling in the drops of moisture that fell on her shoulders. She walked over to the trough, covered with green moss, its edges worn smooth. She examined the half-vanished lion’s head, from whose gaping jaws a stream of water spurted through an iron tube. How many times had she and Christine as little girls taken that head in their arms, leaning forward to reach the stream of water, whose icy pressure they liked to feel against their little hands? Then she climbed the big silent staircase and spotted her father at the far end of the series of vast rooms. He pulled himself up to his full height and slowly moved deeper into the gloom of the old house and of that proud solitude in which he had completely cloistered himself since the death of his sister, while Renée thought of the men in the Bois and of that other elderly man, Baron Gouraud, who had had his carcass set upon pillows and driven around in the sun. She climbed still higher, explored the corridors and the service stairway, and made the trip up to the children’s bedroom. When she reached the very top of the house, she found the key hanging on the usual nail—a big, rusty key encased in a spider’s web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad the children’s room looked! She felt a pang in her heart on finding it so empty, so gray, and so silent. She closed the door of the aviary, which had been left open, thinking that somehow this must be the door through which the joys of her childhood had flown away. In front of the planters, which were still filled with soil hardened and cracked like dried mud, she stopped and snapped the stem of a rhododendron with her fingers. This skeleton of a plant, withered and white with dust, was all that remained of their once-vibrant tubs of greenery. And the matting—the very matting—faded and gnawed by rats, beckoned with the melancholy of a winding sheet that had lain for years awaiting its intended corpse. Over in a corner, in the midst of this scene of silent desperation, this mournful abandonment that made silence itself seem to sob, she found one of her old dolls. All the stuffing had leaked out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with enameled lips above the wasted body, seemingly exhausted by the doll’s follies.
To Renée the stale air of her childhood was stifling. She opened the window and looked out at the vast landscape. Out there nothing was soiled. She rediscovered the eternal joys, the eternal youth, of open air. Behind her, the sun must have been going down. She saw only the rays of the setting orb as with infinite tenderness they gilded this section of the city that she knew so well. I
t was like daylight’s swan song, a joyful refrain that slowly laid everything to rest. Tawny flames lit up the floating pier below, while the iron cables of the Pont de Constantine stood out like black lace against the whiteness of the bridge’s pillars. Then, on the right, the shady groves of the Halle aux Vins and the Jardin des Plantes looked like large pools of stagnant green water whose surface almost blended with the hazy sky. On the left, the Quai Henri IV and Quai de la Rapée were lined with the same rows of houses the girls had looked out on twenty years earlier, with the same brown patches where warehouses stood and the same red smokestacks where there were factories. And above the trees the slate roof of the Salpêtrière, turned blue by the sun’s adieu, suddenly looked to her like an old friend. But what calmed her, what cooled her breast, were the long gray banks and above all the Seine, the giant, which she used to watch as it flowed all the way from the horizon straight to where she stood, in those happy days when it frightened her to think that the river might swell and climb all the way up to her window. She remembered the affection she and her sister felt for the river, their love for its colossal flow, for the thrill of roaring water spreading itself out in sheets at their feet, opening out around and behind them in two arms they could no longer see but whose vast and pure caress they felt. They were smart dressers already, and on fair days they used to say that the Seine had put on her beautiful gown of green silk streaked with white. And the currents where the water curled in eddies trimmed that gown with satin ruffles, while in the distance, beyond the belt of bridges, splashes of light greeted the eye like flaps of fabric the color of the sun.
And Renée, lifting up her eyes, stared at the vast expanse of pale blue sky slowly dissolving into the oblivion of dusk. She thought of the complicitous city, of blazing nights on the boulevards, of ardent afternoons in the Bois, of pale harsh days in big new town houses. Then, when she looked down again and gazed once more on the tranquil horizon of her childhood, on this neighborhood of bourgeois and workers in which she had once dreamt of a life of peace, a final bitterness came to her lips. Her hands clasped, she sobbed into the falling night.
The following winter, when Renée died of acute meningitis, it was her father who paid off her debts. The bill from Worms came to 257,000 francs.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
coupé: a closed carriage seating two passengers, with an outside seat for the driver.
Bois de Boulogne: an English-style park on the western edge of Paris, newly created from a royal military preserve under Napoleon III.
fiacre: a small hackney coach.
the rivière and the aigrette: A rivière is a necklace of diamonds or other precious stones; an aigrette is a spray of gems often worn in the hair.
Second Empire: the era of French history (1852–1870) that began when the Second Republic was replaced by the imperial rule of Napoleon III.
Porte de la Muette: a gate in the west of Paris offering access to the Bois de Boulogne.
Tuileries: royal residence adjacent to the Louvre that was the site of the imperial court in Paris.
Lassouche: J.-P. Lassouche, a popular actor during the Second Empire.
Louvre: The additions to the Louvre museum, completed in 1857, set the style for massive public buildings with high mansard roofs and a profusion of classical detail.
Ile Saint-Louis: a tranquil, respectable neighborhood of Paris, which occupies an island in the Seine.
Légion d’honneur: order of merit conferred as a high honor by the French government and indicated by a red ribbon.
Léoville and Château-Lafitte: celebrated Bordeaux wines.
Conseil d’Etat: the Council of State, which is the highest court in France for state issues and cases concerning public administration.
aiguillettes de canard sauvage: filets of wild duck breast.
Hôtel de Ville to Luxembourg: The Hôtel de Ville was the city hall of Paris, which dated from the Renaissance; the Luxembourg Gardens were once the park of the seventeenth-century Luxembourg Palace.
Alicante and Tokay: sweet after-dinner wines.
tabouret: a circular seat or stool without arms or back.
Messalina: third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, known for her licentiousness and her instigation of fatal court intrigues.
CHAPTER 2
Second of December: date of the coup d’etat that transformed Louis Napoleon Bonaparte into Emperor Napoleon III in 1851.
voices from Macbeth: in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the three witches who prophesy that Macbeth will be king, thus setting in motion his murderous theft of the throne.
Faubourg Saint-Honoré: a wealthy and aristocratic quarter of Paris.
Corps Législatif: the national legislature of France.
Prince-President: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, returned from exile in 1848 to garner support for the Bonapartist cause and was elected president of the Second Republic; this event was the prelude to the proclamation of the Second Empire.
guipure and Valenciennes: Guipure is a heavy decorative lace with a large pattern; Valenciennes is a fine lace spun from a bobbin.
Bourse: the French stock exchange.
Crimea: The Crimean War began in 1853, when Turkey declared war on Russia over disputed lands on the Russo-Turkish border; Britain and France were later drawn into the war as allies of Turkey.
tisane: infusion of dried herbs drunk as a beverage or for its medicinal effects.
the Marais: residential area west of the Bastille that was the site of many grand seventeenth-century houses.
Etienne Marcel: As “provost of merchants” in Paris, Etienne Marcel (c. 1315–1358) was one of the leaders of the bourgeoisie in the Estates General of 1355 and 1356.
sca fold: in the Reign of Terror (1793–94), when many were guillotined as enemies of the Revolution.
the Nivernais: region of central France southwest of Burgundy.
the Code: the civil laws known as the Napoleonic Code, which were enacted in 1814 and which governed marriage and property rights.
the Sologne: region of north-central France between the Loire and Cher rivers.
Buttes Montmartre: hill on the northern edge of Paris, known for its cafés and cabarets.
the Madeleine: the Church of St. Madeleine, built in 1806 in the style of a Roman temple.
A Thousand and One Nights: the far-fetched and exotic Arabic tales collected in 1450, also called The Arabian Nights.
Les Halles: the central marketplace of Paris.
Prefect of the Seine: the senior administrator of the département de la Seine, which includes the city of Paris.
Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe: successive kings of France from 1814 to 1848.
place Royale: A monument of early modern urbanism, the place Royale, constructed during the reign of Henri IV, is today the place des Vosges.
Ile de la Cité: island in the Seine linked to the rest of the city by bridges.
Halle aux Vins: the wine market of Paris.
Jardin des Plantes: vast botanical garden in Paris.
La Salpêtrière: a Paris hospital.
CHAPTER 3
Beau Brummel: English dandy (1778–1840) who was a leader of fashion in the early nineteenth century.
tilbury: a light two-wheeled carriage.
Sibyl on her tripod: prophetess of Greek mythology, who made cryptic pronouncements as the voice of an oracle.
Psyche’s dreamy butterfly: In Greek mythology, Psyche (or the Soul), the lover of Cupid, was sometimes represented as a butterfly.
Saint-Ouen: a northern suburb of Paris, bounded on the northwest by the Seine, where a quarry was located.
Chaillot: an area of high ground on the Right Bank of the Seine.
Trocadéro: the neighborhood of the Trocadéro Palace.
Champenois: characteristic of the Champagne region of France.
Mabille: a park in Paris where prostitutes met clients after dark.
Champs-Elysées: a broad avenue
in Paris that stretches from the Arc de Triomphe to the place de la Concorde.
Grand Cordon: decoration associated with the Legion of Honor.
CHAPTER 4
black satin domino: Earlier Renée had said she was going to wear a blue domino; a domino is a long hooded cloak, usually worn with a half-mask as a masquerade costume.
Epinal print: illustrated broadsheets printed in Epinal, France, during the nineteenth century; they told religious stories, patriotic histories, and fairy tales using a cartoonlike narrative form.
Piron’s obscene poetry: Alexis Piron (1689–1783) was a French playwright and writer of obscene verse whose “Ode to Priapus” was considered “a masterpiece of licentious verse.”
Sèvres: fine porcelain, often elaborately decorated, made at the royal factory at Sèvres, France.
Chaplin: Charles Chaplin (1825–1891), a fashionable painter of the period.
CHAPTER 5
Vincennes: former royal hunting preserve east of Paris, which was converted into a fortress in 1840.
Musée Campana: museum housing the collection of the marquis de Campana.
Bal de l’Opéra: the opera house ball.
La Belle Hélène: heroine of the 1864 operetta of the same name by French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), who used the story of Helen of Troy to comment satirically on Parisian society.
Tannhäuser: grand opera by German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), written in 1845 and revised in 1860 for performance in Paris, where it was badly received.
Théâtre-Italien: theater in Paris offering Italian-language performances of a range of classic plays.
Ristori: Italian actress Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906) won international renown for her performances in tragic roles.