The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
the adventure piquant, she felt flattered by it as by a new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very coarseness appealed to her. Instead of returning home, she turned down the Rue du Temple, and walked her admirer along the boulevards. The man, however, grew bolder and became so persistent that Renée, a little dismayed, lost her head, followed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, and took refuge in the shop of her husband’s sister. The man came in after her. Mme. Sidonie smiled, seemed to understand, and left them alone. And when Renée made as if to follow her, the stranger held her back, addressed her with respectful fervour, and won her forgiveness. He was a clerk, he was called Georges, and she never asked him his surname. She came twice to see him; she came in through the shop, and he by the Rue Papillon. This chance love affair, picked up and accepted in the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame, but with a singular smile of regret. Mme. Sidonie profited by the adventure in that she at last became the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a part to which she had been aspiring since the day of the wedding.
That poor Madame Sidonie had experienced a disappointment. While intriguing for the match she had expected to marry Renée a little herself, to make her one of her customers and derive a heap of profits from her. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horseflesh. And so her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to settle down, she perceived Mme. de Lauwerens enthroned in the centre of the drawingroom, and realized that she was already too late. Mme. de Lauwerens, a fine woman of six-and-twenty, made a business of launching new arrivals. She came of a very old family, and was married to a man in the higher financial world, who had the bad taste to refuse to pay her tailor’s and milliner’s bills. The lady, a very intelligent person, made money and kept herself. She loathed men, she said, but she supplied all her friends with them; there was always a full array of customers in the apartment which she occupied in the Rue de Provence over her husband’s offices. You always found a snack there. You met your friends there in an unpremeditated and charming fashion. There was no harm in a young girl’s going to see her dear Mme. de Lauwerens, and if chance brought men there who were, at all events, respectful, and moved in the best set — so much the worse. The hostess was adorable in her long lace tea-gowns. Many a visitor would have chosen her in preference to her collection of blondes and brunettes. But rumour asserted that she was absolutely good. The whole secret of the affair lay there. She kept up her high position in society, had all the men for her friends, retained her pride as a virtuous woman, and derived a secret enjoyment from bringing others down and profiting by their fall. When Mme. Sidonie had enlightened herself as to the mechanism of the new invention, she was thunderstruck. It was the classical school, the woman in the old black dress carrying love-letters at the bottom of her basket, brought face to face with the modern, the lady of quality, who sells her friends in her boudoir while sipping a cup of tea. The modern school triumphed. Mme. Lauwerens looked coldly upon the shabby attire of Mme. Sidonie, in whom she scented a rival. And it was she who provided Renée with her first bore, the young Duc de Rozan, whom the fair financier had found much difficulty in disposing of. The classical school did not win the day till later on, when Mme. Sidonie lent her entresol to her sister-in-law so that she might gratify her caprice for the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained her confidante.
But one of Mme. Sidonie’s faithful friends was Maxime. From his fifteenth year, he had been in the habit of prowling around at his aunt’s, sniffing at the gloves that he found lying forgotten on the furniture. She who hated clear situations and never owned up to her little complacencies, ended by lending him the keys of her apartments on certain days, saying that she was going to stay in the country till the next day. Maxime talked of some friends whom he wanted to entertain, and whom he dared not ask to his father’s house. It was in the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl who had to be sent to the country. Mme. Sidonie borrowed her nephew’s money, and went into ecstasies before him, murmuring in her soft voice that he was “smooth and pink as a cherub.”
Maxime meantime had grown. He was now a nice-looking, slender young man, who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that “girl look” that so enchanted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with her soft expression and blonde paleness. But he was not even the equal of that indolent, shallow woman. The race of the Rougons became refined in him, grew delicate and vicious. Born of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and, so to say, scattered mixture of his father’s furious appetites and his mother’s self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental shortcomings were fulfilled and aggravated. This family lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in suspense; he represented, not a greedy eagerness for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a mean nature devouring readymade fortunes, a strange hermaphrodite making its entrance at the right moment in a society that was growing rotten. When Maxime rode in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman, lightly dancing in the saddle, in which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of that age, with his swelling haunches, his long, slender hands, his sickly, lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his comic-opera slang. He was twenty years old, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most unheard-of filth. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth. It waved over his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, dressed him in his clothes. But his special characteristic was his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, coquette’s mirrors, behind which one perceived all the emptiness of the brain. Those harlot’s eyes were never lowered: they roamed in quest of pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue, which one summons and receives.
The everlasting whirlwind that swept through the apartment in the Rue de Rivoli and made its doors slam to and fro blew stronger in the measure that Maxime grew up, that Saccard enlarged the sphere of his operations, and that Renée threw more fever into her search for an unknown joy. These three beings ended by leading an astonishing existence of liberty and folly. It was the ripe and prodigious fruit of an epoch. The street invaded the apartment with its rumbling of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its license of language. The father, the stepmother and the step-son acted, talked and made themselves at home as though each of them had found himself leading a bachelor life alone. Three boon companions, three students sharing the same furnished room, could not have made use of that room with less reserve for the installation of their vices, their loves, their noisy, adolescent gaiety. They accepted one another with a handshake, never seeming to suspect the reasons that united them under one roof, treating each other cavalierly, joyously, and thus assuming each the most entire independence. The family idea was replaced with them by a sort of partnership whose profits are divided in equal shares; each one drew his part of the pleasure to himself, and it was tacitly agreed that each should dispose of that part as best seemed to him. They went so far as to take their enjoyment in each other’s presence, displaying it, describing it, without awakening any feeling but a little envy and curiosity.
Maxime now instructed Renée. When he went to the Bois with her, he told her stories about the fast women which entertained her vastly. A new woman could not appear by the lake, but he would lay himself out to ascertain the name of her lover, the allowance he made her, the style in which she lived. He knew these ladies’ homes, and was acquainted with intimate details; he was a real living catalogue in which all the prostitutes in Paris were numbered, with a very complete description of each of them. This gazette of scandal was Renée’s delight. On race-days, at Longchamps, when she drove by in her calash, she listened eagerly, albeit retaining the haughtiness of a woman of the real world, to how Blanche Muller deceived her attaché with a hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his drawers in the alcove of a skinny red-haired celebrity who was nicknamed the Crayfish. Each day brought its tittle-tattle. When the story was rather too warm, Maxime lowered his voice, but told it to the end. Renée opened wide her eyes, like a child to whom a funny trick is being told, restrained her laughter, and then stifled it in her embroidered handkerchief, which she pressed daintily upon her lips.
Maxime also brought these ladies’ photographs. He had actresses’ photographs in all his pockets, and even in his cigar-case. From time to time he cleared them out and placed these ladies in the album that lay about on the furniture in