The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
tobacco…. I know I shall have a headache.”
And the strange aroma did in fact perturb her profoundly. It was the persistent perfume of that singular household.
Meantime Maxime was smitten with a violent passion for little Sylvia. He bored his stepmother with this girl for several months. Renée soon knew her from one end to the other, from the sole of her feet to the crown of her head. She had a blue mark on her hip; nothing was sweeter than her knees; her shoulders had this peculiarity that the left alone was dimpled. Maxime took a malicious pleasure in filling their drives with his mistress’s perfections. One evening, on returning from the Bois, Renée’s carriage and Sylvia’s, caught in a block, had to draw up side by side in the Champs-Élysées. The two women eyed one another with keen curiosity, while Maxime, enchanted with this critical situation, tittered under his breath. When the calash began to roll on again, his stepmother preserved a gloomy silence; he thought she was sulking, and expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those strange lectures, with which she still occasionally filled up her moments of lassitude.
“Do you know that person’s jewellers?” she asked him suddenly, at the moment they reached the Place de la Concorde.
“Yes, alas!” he replied with a smile; “I owe him ten thousand francs…. Why do you ask me?”
“For nothing.”
Then, after a fresh pause:
“She had a very pretty bracelet, the one on the left wrist…. I should have liked to see it closer.”
They reached home. She said no more on the matter. Only, the next day, just as Maxime and his father were going out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in an undertone, with an air of embarrassment, and a pretty smile which pleaded for pardon. He seemed surprised and went off, laughing his wicked laugh. In the evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet, which his stepmother had begged him to show her.
“There’s what you want,” he said. “One would turn thief for your sake, stepmother.”
“She didn’t see you take it?” asked Renée, who was greedily examining the bracelet.
“I don’t think so…. She wore it yesterday, she certainly would not want to wear it to-day.”
Meantime Renée approached the window. She put on the bracelet. She raised her wrist a little and turned it round, enraptured, repeating:
“Oh! very pretty, very pretty…. I like everything immensely, except the emeralds.”
At that moment Saccard entered, and as she was still holding up her wrist in the white light of the window:
“Hullo!” he cried in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”
“Do you know this piece of jewellery?” she said, more embarrassed than he, not knowing what to do with her arm.
He had recovered himself, and threatened his son with his finger, murmuring:
“That rascal has always some forbidden fruit in his pockets…. One of these days he will bring us the lady’s arm with the bracelet on.”
“Ah! but it’s not I,” replied Maxime with mischievous cowardice. “It’s Renée who wanted to see it.”
“Ah!” was all the husband said.
And he examined the gaud in his turn, repeating like his wife:
“It is very pretty, very pretty.”
Then he went quietly away, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away like that. But he declared that his father didn’t care a pin! Then she returned him the bracelet, adding:
“You must go to the jeweller and order one exactly like it for me; only you must have sapphires put in instead of emeralds.”
Saccard was unable to keep a thing or a person near him for long without wanting to sell it or derive some sort of profit from it. His son was not twenty when he thought of turning him to account. A good-looking boy, nephew to a minister and son of a big financier, ought to be a good investment. He was a trifle young still, but one could always look out for a wife and a dowry for him, and then decide to postpone the wedding for a long time, or to hurry it on, according to the exigencies of domestic economy. Saccard was fortunate. He discovered on a board of directors of which he was a member a fine, tall man, M. de Mareuil, who in two days belonged to him. M. de Mareuil was a retired sugar-refiner of Havre, and his real name was Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young girl of noble birth, also very rich, who was looking out for a fool of imposing appearance. Bonnet obtained permission to assume his wife’s name, which was a first satisfaction for his bride; but his marriage had made him madly ambitious, and his dream was to repay Hélène for the noble name she had given him by achieving a high political position. From that time forward he had put money into new papers, bought large estates in the heart of the Nièvre, and by all the well-known means prepared for himself a candidature for the Corps Législatif. So far he had failed without losing an iota of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could come across. He was of splendid stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman; and as he had a marvellous way of listening, he gave the impression of a prodigious inner labour of comprehension and deduction. In reality he was thinking of nothing. But he succeeded in perplexing people, who no longer knew whether they had to do with a man of distinction or a fool. M. de Mareuil attached himself to Saccard as to a raft. He knew that an official candidature was about to fall vacant in the Nièvre, and he ardently hoped that the minister would nominate him: it was his last card. And so he handed himself over, bound hand and foot, to the minister’s brother. Saccard, who scented a good piece of business, put into his head a match between his daughter Louise and Maxime. The other became most effusive, thought he was the first to have had the idea of this marriage, and considered himself very fortunate to enter into a minister’s family and to give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects.
Louise, her father said, would have a million francs to her dowry. Deformed, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young; consumption was stealthily undermining her, giving her a nervous gaiety and a tender grace. Sick little girls quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was naïvely sensual, she seemed to have been born when she was fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, that healthy, stupid colossus, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother during her lifetime had also been a tall, strong woman; but stories were told about her which explained the child’s stuntedness, her manners like a millionaire gipsy’s, her vicious and charming ugliness. It was said that Hélène de Mareuil had died amid the most shameful debauchery. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband’s perceiving the lucid madness of his wife, whom he ought to have had locked up in a lunatic asylum. Borne in these diseased flanks, Louise had issued from them with impoverished blood, deformed limbs, her brain threatened, and her memory already filled with a dirty life. She occasionally fancied she had a confused recollection of a former existence; she saw unfolded before her, in a vague gloaming, bizarre scenes, men and women kissing, a whole fleshly drama in which her childish curiosity found amusement. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice continued through her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she reached for forbidden things with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, resemble a man returning home after a long absence, and having only to stretch out his arm to make himself comfortable and enjoy the pleasures of his homestead. This odd little girl, who by her evil instincts flattered Maxime, but had, moreover, in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, an ingenuous effrontery, a piquant mixture of childishness and audacity, was bound in the end to attract him, and to seem to him even more diverting than Sylvia, the daughter of a worthy stationer, who had the heart of a money-lender, and was terribly homely by nature.
The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that “the youngsters” should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived in close intimacy. M. de Mareuil worked his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination