The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
Mussy, as well as actors, writers, deputies, who had come to swell the collection nobody knew how. A strangely mixed society, a symbol of the jumble of persons and ideas that crossed Renée’s and Maxime’s lives. Whenever it rained or they felt bored, this album was the great subject of conversation. It always ended by falling under one’s hand. Renée opened it with a yawn, for the hundredth time perhaps. Then her curiosity would reawaken, and the young man came and leant behind her. And then followed long discussions about the Crayfish’s hair, Madame de Meinhold’s double chin, Madame de Lauwerens’ eyes, and Blanche Muller’s bust; about the marquise’s nose, which was a little on one side, and little Sylvia’s mouth, which was renowned for the thickness of its lips. They compared the women with one another.
“If I were a man,” said Renée, “I would choose Adeline.”
“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” replied Maxime. “She is so quaint!… I must say I prefer Sylvia.”
The pages were turned over; sometimes the Duc de Rozan appeared, or Mr. Simpson, or the Comte de Chibray, and he added, jeering at her:
“Besides, your taste is perverted, everybody knows that…. Can anything more stupid be imagined than the faces of those men! Rozan and Chibray are both like Gustave, my hairdresser.”
Renée shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that she was beyond the reach of sarcasm. She again forgot herself in the contemplation of the pallid, smiling, or cross-grained faces contained in the album; she lingered longest over the portraits of the fast women, studying with curiosity the exact microscopic details of the photographs, the minute wrinkles, the tiny hairs. One day even she sent for a strong magnifying-glass, fancying she had perceived a hair on the Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the glass did reveal a thin golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose. This hair diverted them, for a long time. For a week long the ladies who called were made to assure themselves in person of the presence of this hair. Thenceforward the magnifying-glass served to pick the women’s faces to pieces. Renée made astonishing discoveries: she found unknown wrinkles, coarse skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder, until Maxime finally hid the glass, declaring that it was not right to disgust one’s self like that with the human countenance. The truth was that she scrutinized too rigorously the thick lips of Sylvia, for whom he cherished a particular fondness. They invented a new game. They asked this question: “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and they opened the album which was to supply for the answer. This brought about some very joyous couplings. The friends played this game for several evenings. Renée was in this way married successively to the Archbishop of Paris, to the Baron Gouraud, to M. de Chibray, which caused much laughter, and to her husband himself, which distressed her mightily. As to Maxime, either by chance, or through the mischievousness of Renée, who opened the album, he always fell to the marquise. But they never laughed so much as when fate coupled two men or two women together.
The familiarity between Renée and Maxime went so far that she told him the sorrows of her heart. He consoled and advised her. His father did not seem to exist. Then they came to confide in one another about their childhood. It was especially during their drives in the Bois that they felt a vague languor, a longing to tell one another things that are difficult to say, that are never told. The delight that children take in whispering about forbidden things, the fascination that exists for a young man and a young woman in lowering themselves to sin, if only in words, brought them back unceasingly to suggestive topics. They there partook deeply of a voluptuousness in which they felt no self-reproaching, and in which they revelled, lazily reclining in the two corners of the carriage like two old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. They ended by becoming braggarts of immorality. Renée confessed that the little girls at the boarding-school were very smutty. Maxime went further and had the courage to relate some of the infamy of the college at Plassans.
“Ah! I can’t tell you,” murmured Renée.
Then she bent towards his ear as if the sound of her voice alone would have made her blush, and she confided to him one of those convent stories that are spun out in lewd songs. He had too rich a collection of similar anecdotes to be left behindhand. He hummed some very bawdy couplets in her ear. And little by little they entered upon a peculiar state of beatitude, rocked by the carnal ideas they stirred up, tickled by little undefined desires. The carriage rolled gently on, and they returned home deliriously fatigued, more exhausted than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned like two young men who, wandering down country lanes without mistresses, content themselves with an interchange of reminiscences.
A still greater familiarity and license existed between father and son. Saccard had realized that a great financier must love women and commit extravagances for them. He was a rough lover, and preferred money; but it formed part of his programme to frequent alcoves, to scatter banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to affix some noted strumpet as a signboard to his speculations. When Maxime had left school they used to meet in the same women’s rooms and laugh over it. They were even rivals in a measure. Occasionally when the young man was dining at the “Maison d’Or” with some boisterous crew he heard Saccard’s voice in an adjacent private room.
“I say! papa’s next door!” he cried, with the grimace which he borrowed from the popular actors.
He went and knocked at the door of the private room, curious to see his father’s conquest.
“Ah! it’s you,” said the latter, jovially. “Come in. You make so much noise that a man can’t hear himself eat. Who are you with?”
“Why, there’s Laure d’Aurigny, and Sylvia, and the Crayfish, and two more besides, I believe. They are wonderful: they dig their fingers into the dishes, and chuck handfuls of salad at our heads. My coat is covered with oil.”
The father laughed, thinking this very amusing.
“Ah! young folk, young folk,” he murmured. “That’s not like us, is it, pet? We’ve had a nice quiet dinner, and now we’re going to by-by.”
And he took the woman by his side by the chin, and cooed with his Provençal snuffle, producing a queer sort of love music.
“Oh! the old cully!”… cried the woman. “How are you, Maxime? Musn’t I be fond of you, eh! to consent to sup with your scapegrace of a father…. I never see you now. Come the day after tomorrow, in the morning, early…. No, really, I have something to tell you.”
Saccard finished an ice or a fruit, taking small mouthfuls, blissfully. He kissed the woman on the shoulder, saying jestingly:
“You know, my loves, if I’m in the way I’ll go out…. You can ring when I may come in again.”
Then he carried the lady off, or sometimes went with her and joined in the noise of the next room. Maxime and he shared the same shoulders; their hands met around the same waists. They called to one another on the sofas, and repeated to one another aloud the confidences the women had whispered in their ears. And they carried their intimacy to the pitch of plotting together to carry off from the company the blonde or the brunette whom one of them had selected.
They were well known at Mabille. They went there arm in arm, after a good dinner, strolling round the garden, nodding to the women, tossing them a remark as they went by. They laughed out loud, without unlocking their arms, and came to one another’s aid if necessary whenever the conversation became too lively. The father, who was very strong on this point, negotiated his son’s love-affairs advantageously. At times they sat down and drank with a party of girls. Then they changed their table, or resumed their stroll. And till midnight they were seen, their arms always linked in their intimacy, following the petticoats along the yellow pathways, under the glaring flame of the gasjets.
When they returned home they brought with them from outside, in their coats, a something of the women they had been with. Their jaunty attitudes, the tags of certain suggestive phrases and certain vulgar gestures filled the flat in the Rue de Rivoli with the fragrance of an equivocal alcove. The easy, wanton way in which the father shook hands with his son was enough to proclaim whence they came. It was in this atmosphere that Renée inhaled her sensual caprices and longings.