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entire absence of awnings or shutters, for at no season of the year did the sun shine on those pale, melancholy stones. This facade with its venerable air, its burgher severity, slumbered solemnly amid the self-absorption of the district, in the silence of the street that no carriage ever disturbed.
In the interior of the mansion was a square courtyard, surrounded by a colonnade, a reduced copy of the Place Royale, paved with enormous flags, and completing the cloistral appearance of this lifeless house. Opposite the porch a fountain, a lion’s head half worn away, its gaping jaws alone distinguishable, discharged a heavy, monotonous stream of water through an iron tube into a basin green with moss, its edges polished by wear. This water was cold as ice. Weeds sprouted between the flagstones. In the summer a meagre ray of sunlight entered the courtyard, and this infrequent visit had whitened a corner of the south façade, while the three other walls, morose and black, were streaked with moisture. There, in the depth of that courtyard, cold and silent as a well, lighted with a white, wintry light, one would have thought one’s self a thousand leagues away from that new Paris in which every passionate enjoyment flamed amid the racket of gold.
The rooms of the house had the sad calm, the cold solemnity of the courtyard. Approached by a broad iron-railed staircase, on which the footsteps and coughs of visitors resounded as in the aisle of a church, they stretched in long strings of wide, lofty rooms, in which the old-fashioned, heavy furniture of dark wood was lost; and the pale light was peopled only by the figures on the tapestries, whose great, pallid bodies could be vaguely discerned. There was all the luxury of the old-fashioned Parisian middle-class, a luxury that is Spartan and all-enduring. Chairs whose oak seats are barely covered with a little tow, beds with stiff sheets, linen-chests the roughness of whose boards would strangely endanger the frail existence of modern garments. M. Béraud du Châtel had selected his rooms in the darkest part of the mansion, between the street and the courtyard, on the first floor. He there found himself in a wonderful surrounding of peacefulness, silence, and gloom. When he opened the doors, traversing the solemnity of the rooms with his slow, serious step, he might have been taken for one of those members of the old parliaments, whose portraits were hung on the walls, returning home wrapt in thought after discussing and refusing to sign an edict of the king.
Yet in this lifeless house, in this cloister, there was one warm nest full of life, a corner of sunshine and gaiety, a nook of adorable childhood, of fresh air, of bright light. One had to climb a host of little stairways, pass along ten or twelve corridors, go down and up again, make a positive journey, and then at last one reached a huge room, a sort of belvedere built on the roof, at the back of the house, over above the Quai de Bethune. It looked due South. The window opened so wide that the heavens, with all their sunbeams, all their ether, all their blue, seemed to enter there. It was perched aloft like a dovecot, and contained long flower-boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single article of furniture. There was only just some matting spread over the floor. This was “the children’s room.” All over the house it was known and spoken of by that name. The house was so cold, the courtyard so damp, that Aunt Elisabeth had dreaded lest Christine and Renée should suffer harm from the chill breath that hung about the walls; many a time had she scolded the children for running about the arcades and amusing themselves by dipping their little arms into the icy water of the fountain. Thereupon she conceived the idea of making use of this forgotten attic for them, the only corner into which the sun had, for nearly two centuries, entered and rejoiced, in the midst of the cobwebs. She gave them some matting, birds, and flowers. The bairns were wild with delight. Renée lived there during the holidays, bathing in the yellow rays of that good sun, who seemed pleased with the decorations lavished upon his retreat and with the two fair-haired heads sent to keep him company. The room became a paradise, ever resounding with the song of the birds and the children’s babbling. It had been yielded to them for their exclusive use. They spoke of “our room;” it was their home; they went so far as to lock themselves in so as to put it beyond doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the room. What a happy nook! On the matting lay a massacre of playthings, expiring in the bright sunshine.
But the great delight of the children’s room was the vastness of the horizon. From the other windows of the house there was nothing to look at but black walls, a few feet away. But from this window one could see all that part of the Seine, all that piece of Paris which extends from the Cité to the Pont de Bercy, boundlessly flat, resembling some quaint Dutch city. Down below, on the Quai de Béthune, were tumbledown wooden sheds, accumulations of beams and crumbling roofs, amid which the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats run about, with a vague fear of seeing them clamber up the high walls. But beyond all this the real rapture began. The boom, with its tiers of timbers, its buttresses resembling those of a Gothic cathedral, and the slender Pont de Constantine, hanging like a strip of lace beneath the wayfarers’ footsteps: crossed each other at right angles, and seemed to dam up and keep within bounds the huge mass of the river. The trees of the Halle aux Vins opposite and the shrubberies of the Jardin des Plantes, further away, spread out their greenness to the distant horizon: while on the other bank of the river the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended their low and irregular edifices, their row of houses which, from above, resembled the tiny wood and cardboard houses which the little girls kept in boxes. In the background on the right the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière rose blue above the trees. Then, in the centre, sloping down to the Seine, the wide-paved banks formed two long gray tracks, streaked here and there by a row of casks, a cart and its team, an empty wood or coal-barge lying high and dry. But the soul of all this, the soul that filled the whole landscape, was the Seine, the living river; it came from afar, from the vaguely-shimmering edge of the horizon, it emerged from the distance, as from a dream, to flow straight down to the children with its tranquil majesty, its puissant swell, which spread and widened itself into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, looked like necessary boundaries placed there to contain it, to prevent it from surging up to the room. The little ones loved this giant, they filled their eyes with its colossal flux, with that eternal murmuring flood which rolled towards them as though to reach them, and which branched out to left and right, and disappeared into the unknown with the docility of a conquered Titan. On fine days, on mornings when the sky hung blue overhead, they would be enraptured with the pretty dresses of the Seine; it wore dresses of a changeable hue that altered from blue to green with a thousand tints of infinite tenderness; dresses of silk shot with white flames and trimmed with frills of satin; and the barges drawn up on either bank bordered it with a black velvet ribbon. In the distance, especially, the material became beautiful and precious as the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s robe; and, beyond the belt of dark-green satin with which the shadow of the bridges girdled the Seine, were breastplates of gold and lappets of a plaited sun-coloured stuff. The immense sky formed a vault over the water, over the low rows of houses, over the green of the two parks.
Sometimes Renée, wearied of this unbounded horizon, a big girl already, and full of a fleshly curiosity brought back from her boarding-school, would throw a glance into the swimming school attached to Petit’s floating baths, which were moored to the end of the island. She sought to catch a glimpse, through the flapping linen cloths hung up on lines to serve as a roof, of the men in bathing-drawers showing their naked bellies.
CHAPTER III
Maxime remained at school at Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was a few months over thirteen, and had just passed the fifth class. It was then that his father decided to let him come to Paris. He reflected that a son of that age would give him a certain position, would fix him definitively in the part he played of a wealthy widower, twice married, and serious in his views. When he informed Renée, towards whom he prided himself upon his extreme gallantry, of his intention, she answered, negligently:
“That’s right, have the boy up…. He will amuse us a little. One is bored to death in the mornings.”
The boy arrived a week later. He was already a tall, spare stripling, with a girl’s face, a delicate, forward look, and very light flaxen hair. But great God! how oddly he was got up! He was cropped to the ears,