THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
her head.
When he spoke of ringing for dessert, she rose, shook the crumbs from her long satin blouse, and said:
“That’s it… You can light your cigar, you know.”
She was a little giddy. She went to the window, attracted by a peculiar noise which she could not explain to herself. The shops were being closed.
“Look,” she said, turning towards Maxime, “the orchestra is emptying.”
She leant out again. In the middle of the road, the coloured eyes of the cabs and omnibuses, fewer and faster, were still crossing one another. But on either side, along the pavements, great pits of darkness had opened out in front of the closed shops. The cafés alone were still flaming, streaking the asphalt with sheets of light. From the Rue Drouot to the Rue du Helder she thus perceived a long line of white squares and black squares, in which the last wayfarers sprang up and disappeared in a curious fashion. The streetwalkers in particular, with their long-trained dresses, glaringly illuminated and immersed in darkness by turns, seemed like apparitions, like ghostly puppets crossing the limelight of some extravaganza. She amused herself for a moment with this sight. There was no longer any widespread light; the gasjets were being turned out; the variegated kiosks marked the darkness more definitely. From time to time a flood of people, issuing from some theatre, passed by. But soon there was vacancy, and there came under the window groups of men in twos or threes whom a woman accosted. They stood debating. Some of their remarks rose audibly in the subsiding din; and then the woman generally went off on the arm of one of the men. Other girls wandered from café to café, strolled round the tables, pocketed the forgotten lumps of sugar, laughed with the waiters, and gazed fixedly with a silent, questioning, proffering look at the belated customers. And just after Renée had followed with her eyes the all but empty knifeboard of a Batignolles omnibus, she recognized, at the corner of the pavement, the woman in the blue dress with the white lace, erect, glancing about her, still in search of a man.
When Maxime came to fetch Renée from the window where she stood lost, he smiled as he looked towards one of the half-opened windows of the Café Anglais; the idea of his father, supping there on his side, struck him as humorous; but that evening he was under the influence of a peculiar form of modesty which interfered with his customary love of fun. Renée left the window-rail with regret. An intoxication and languor rose up from the vaguer depths of the boulevard. In the enfeebled rumbling of the carriages, in the obliteration of the bright lights, there was a coaxing summons to voluptuousness and sleep. The whispers that sped by, the groups assembled in shadowy corners, turned the pavement into the passage of some great inn at the hour when the travellers repair to their casual beds. The gleam and the noise continued to grow fainter and fainter, the town fell asleep, a breath of love passed over the housetops.
When Renée turned round, the light of the little chandelier made her blink her eyes. She was a little pale now, and felt slight quivers at the corners of her mouth. Charles was putting out the dessert: he went out, came in again, opening and shutting the door slowly, with the self-contained air of a man of the world.
“But I’m no longer hungry!” cried Renée. “Take away all those plates, and bring the coffee.”
The waiter, accustomed to the whims of the ladies he waited on, cleared away the dessert and poured out the coffee. He filled the room with his importance.
“Do get rid of him,” said Renée, who was feeling sick, to Maxime.
Maxime dismissed him; but scarcely had he disappeared before he returned once again to draw the great window-curtains closely together with an air of discretion. When he had at last retired, the young man, seized in his turn with impatience, rose, and going to the door:
“Wait,” he said, “I know a way to keep him out.”
And he pushed the bolt.
“That’s it,” she rejoined, “we are by ourselves at last.”
Their confidential, intimate chatting recommenced. Maxime had lighted a cigar. Renée sipped her coffee and even indulged in a glass of chartreuse. The room grew warmer and became filled with blue smoke. She ended by leaning her elbows on the table and resting her chin between her half-closed fists. Under this slight pressure her mouth became smaller, her cheeks were slightly raised, and her eyes, diminished in size, shone more brightly. Thus rumpled, her little face looked adorable under the rain of golden curls that now fell down upon her eyebrows. Maxime examined her through the smoke of his cigar. He thought her quaint. At times he was no longer quite sure of her sex: the great wrinkle that crossed her forehead, the pouting projection of her lips, the undecided air derived from her shortsightedness, made a big young man of her; the more so as her long black satin blouse came so high that one could barely espy, under her chin, a line of plump white neck. She let herself be looked at with a smile, no longer moving her head, her eyes lost in vacancy, her lips silent.
Then she woke up suddenly; she went and looked at the mirror towards which her dreamy eyes had been turning the last few moments. She raised herself on tip-toe, and leant her hands on the edge of the mantel, to read the signatures, the coarse remarks which before supper had frightened her off. She spelt out the syllables with some difficulty, laughing, reading on like a schoolboy turning over the pages of a Piron in his desk.
“‘Ernest and Clara,’“ she said, “and there is a heart underneath that looks like a funnel…. Ah! this is better: ‘I like men because I like truffles.’ Signed, ‘Laure.’ Tell me, Maxime, was it the d’Aurigny woman who wrote that?… Then here is the coat-of-arms of one of these ladies, I imagine: a hen smoking a big pipe…. And more names, the whole calendar of saints, male and female: Victor, Amélie, Alexandre, Edouard, Marguerite, Paquita, Louise, Renée…. So there’s one called after me….”
Maxime could see her face glowing in the glass. She raised herself still higher, and her domino, drawn more tightly behind, outlined the curve of her figure, the undulation of her hips. The young man followed the line of satin, which fitted her like a shirt. He rose in his turn, and threw away his cigar. He was ill at ease and restless. Something he was accustomed to was wanting in him.
“Ah! here is your name, Maxime,” cried Renée …. “Listen…. ‘I love….’“
But he had sat down on the corner of the divan, almost at Renée’s feet. He succeeded in taking hold of her hands with a quick movement; he turned her away from the looking-glass, and said, in a singular voice:
“Please, don’t read that.”
She struggled, laughing nervously.
“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”
But he insisted in a more suppressed tone:
“No, no, not tonight.”
He still held her, and she tried to free herself with little jerks of the wrists. There was an unknown light in their eyes, a touch of shame in their long constrained smile. She fell on her knees at the edge of the divan. They continued struggling, although she no longer made any movement to return to the mirror, and was already surrendering herself. And as Maxime threw his arms round her body, she said with her embarrassed, expiring laugh:
“Don’t, let me alone…. You are hurting me.”
It was the only murmur that rose to her lips. In the profound silence of the room, where the gas seemed to flare up higher, she felt the ground tremble and heard the clatter of the Batignolles omnibus turning the corner of the boulevard. And it was all over. When they recovered their position, side by side on the divan, he stammered out amid their mutual embarrassment:
“Bah! it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
She said nothing. She examined the pattern of the carpet with a dumfounded air.
“Had you ever dreamt of it?…” continued Maxime, stammering still more. “I hadn’t for a moment…. I ought to have mistrusted that private room.”
But in a deep voice, as if all the middle-class respectability of the Bérauds du Châtel had been awakened by this supreme sin:
“This