The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not probed, not a bootmaker whom he had not studied through and through. This quaint abortion, who during his English lessons read the prospectuses which his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have delivered a brilliant lecture on the fashionable Paris world, customers and purveyors included, at an age when country urchins dare not look their housemaid in the face. Frequently, on his way home from school, he would bring back in his tilbury a bonnet, a box of soap, or a piece of jewellery which his stepmother had ordered the preceding day. He had always some strip of musk-scented lace hanging about in his pockets.
But his great treat was to go with Renée to the illustrious Worms, the tailor genius to whom the queens of the Second Empire bowed the knee. The great man’s show-room was wide and square, and furnished with huge divans. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Dresses undoubtedly have a perfume of their own; silk, satin, velvet and lace had mingled their faint aromas with those of hair and of amber-scented shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained that sweet-smelling warmth, that fragrance of flesh and of luxury, which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to wait for hours; a series of anxious women sat there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, helping themselves from the great table in the middle, which was covered with bottles and plates full of cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked without restraint, and when they ensconced themselves around the room, it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawingroom. Maxime, whom they endured and loved for his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted delights divine; he glided along the sofas like a supple adder; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, between two dresses, where he made himself quite small and kept very quiet, inhaling the warm fragrance of his neighbours with the demeanour of a choirboy partaking of the sacrament.
“That child pokes his nose in everywhere,” said the Baronne de Meinhold, tapping his cheeks.
He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by making him tipsy with the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He made astounding speeches to them, which made them laugh till they cried. However, it was the Marquise d’Espanet who found the right word to describe the position. One day when Maxime was discovered behind her back in a corner of the divan:
“That boy ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured, on seeing him so pink, blushing, penetrated with the satisfaction he had enjoyed from her proximity.
Then, when the great Worms at last received Renée, Maxime followed her into the consultation room. He had ventured to speak on two or three occasions while the master remained absorbed in the contemplation of his client, as the high-priests of the Beautiful hold that Leonardo da Vinci did in the presence of la Gioconda. The master had deigned to smile upon the correctness of his observations. He made Renée stand up before a glass which rose from the floor to the ceiling, and pondered with knit brows, while Renée, seized with emotion, held her breath, so as not to stir. And after a few minutes the master, as though seized and moved by inspiration, sketched in broad, jerky strokes the work of art which he had just conceived, ejaculating in short phrases:
“A Montespan dress in pale-gray faille… the skirt describing a rounded basque in front… large gray satin bows to catch it up on the hips… and a puffed apron of pearl-gray tulle, the puffs separated by strips of gray satin.”
He pondered once again, seemed to descend to the very depths of his genius, and, with the triumphant facial contortion of a pythoness on her tripod, concluded:
“We will have in the hair, on the top of this bonny head, Psyche’s dreamy butterfly, with wings of changeful blue.”
But at other times inspiration was stubborn. The illustrious Worms summoned it in vain, and concentrated his faculties to no purpose. He distorted his eyebrows, turned livid, took his poor head between his hands and shook it in his despair, and beaten, throwing himself into an armchair:
“No,” he would mutter, in a pitiful voice, “no, not to-day…. It is not possible…. You ladies expect too much. The source is exhausted.”
And he showed Renée out, repeating:
“Impossible, impossible, dear lady, you must come back another day…. I don’t grasp you this morning.”
The fine education that Maxime received had a first result. At seventeen the young scapegrace seduced his stepmother’s maid. The worst of the affair was that the lady’s-maid got a baby. They had to send her into the country with the brat, and to buy her a little annuity. Renée was horribly annoyed at this incident. Saccard did not interfere except to arrange the financial part of the question; but his young wife scolded her pupil roundly. That he, of whom she wanted to make a distinguished man, should compromise himself with a girl like that! What a ridiculous, disgraceful beginning, what a discreditable exploit! He might at least have led off with a lady!
“Quite true!” he replied quietly, “if your dear friend Suzanne had been willing, it was she who might have been sent to the country.”
“Oh! the scamp!” she murmured, disarmed, enlivened with the idea of seeing Suzanne retiring to the country with an annuity of twelve hundred francs.
Then a funnier thought occurred to her, and forgetting that she was playing the indignant mother, bursting into pearly laughter which she restrained with her fingers, she stammered, giving him a sidelong glance:
“I say, how you would have caught it from Adeline, and what a scene she would have made her….”
She did not finish. Maxime and she were screaming. Such was the fine catastrophe of Renée’s lecture on this incident.
Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself not at all about the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them absolute liberty, glad to see them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy merriment. A singular apartment, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were slamming to and fro all day long. The servants talked loud; its new and dazzling luxury was continually traversed by a flood of vast, floating skirts, by processions of tradespeople, by the uproar of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s chums and Saccard’s callers. From nine to eleven the last received the strangest set imaginable: senators and bailiffs’ clerks, duchesses and old-clothes-women, all the scum that the tempests of Paris hurled at his door every morning, silk gowns, dirty skirts, blouses, dress-coats, all of whom he received with the same hurried manner, the same impatient, nervous gestures; he clinched bits of business with two words, got rid of twenty difficulties at a time, and gave solutions at a run. One would have thought that this restless little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, and with the furniture, tumbling head over heels, knocking his head against the ceiling to make his ideas flash out, and always falling triumphantly on his feet. Then at eleven o’clock he went out; he was not seen again during the day; he breakfasted out, he often even dined out. From that time the house belonged to Renée and Maxime; they took possession of the father’s study; they unpacked the tradesmen’s parcels there, and articles of finery lay about among the business-papers. Sometimes serious people had to wait for an hour at the study-door while the schoolboy and the young married woman discussed a bow of ribbon, seated at either end of Saccard’s writing-table. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They rarely had a meal together; two of the three would be rushing about, forgetting themselves, staying out till midnight. An apartment of racket, of business, and of pleasure, through which modern life, with its noise of jingling gold, of rustling skirts, swept like a whirlwind.
Aristide Saccard was in his element at last. He had revealed himself a great speculator, a brewer of millions. After the masterstroke in the Rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the struggle which was beginning to fill Paris with shameful wreckages and lightning triumphs. He began by gambling on certainties, repeating his first successful stroke, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilizing his friends in order to obtain fat compensation. The moment came when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so curiously, as though they were acquaintances of his, in the days when he was