The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
person singular, and that bothered me ….”
She stopped short, looked again at the boulevard, and added after a pause, with an air of distress:
“The worst of it is that I am awfully hungry.”
“What, you are hungry!” exclaimed the young man. “That’s very simple, we will go and have supper together…. What do you say?’’
He spoke quietly, but she refused at first, declaring that Céleste had put out something for her to eat at home. Meantime Maxime, who did not want to go to the Café Anglais, had stopped the cab at the corner of the Rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche; he even alighted, and as his stepmother still hesitated:
“As for that,” he said, “if you are afraid of my compromising you, say so…. I will get up beside the driver and take you back to your husband.”
She smiled, and alighted from the cab with the air of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The pavement which she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious sensation of fear and of gratified caprice quivering over her skin. Ever since the cab had been rolling on, she had had a mad longing to jump out upon the pavement. She crossed it with short steps, stealthily, as though she felt a keener pleasure from the fear that she might be seen. Her escapade was decidedly turning into an adventure. She certainly did not regret having refused M. de Saffré’s offhand invitation. But she would have come home terribly cross if Maxime had not thought of letting her taste forbidden fruit. He ran upstairs quickly, as though at home. She followed him a little out of breath. Slight fumes of fish and game hung about, and the stair-carpet, secured to the steps with brass rods, had a smell of dust that increased her excitement.
As they reached the first landing, they met a dignified-looking waiter, who drew back to the wall to let them pass.
“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll wait on us, won’t you?… Give us the white room.”
Charles bowed, went up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was lowered, it seemed to Renée as if she was penetrating into the twilight of a dubious and charming resort.
A continuous rumbling came in through the wide-open window, and on the ceiling, in the reflection cast by the café below, the shadows of the people in the street passed swiftly by. But with a twist of his thumb the waiter turned on the gas. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, the room filled with a crude light that fell full upon Renée’s head. She had already thrown back her hood. The little curls had become slightly disarranged, but the blue ribbon had not stirred. She began to walk about, confused by the way in which Charles looked at her; he blinked his eyes and screwed up the lids in order to see her better in a way which plainly argued: “Here’s one I haven’t seen before.”
“What shall I serve, monsieur?” he asked aloud.
Maxime turned towards Renée.
“What do you say to M. de Saffré’s supper?” he asked. “Oysters, a partridge….”
And seeing the young man smile, Charles discreetly imitated him, murmuring:
“Wednesday’s supper, then, if that will suit?”
“Wednesday’s supper….” repeated Maxime.
Then, remembering:
“Yes, I don’t care, give us Wednesday’s supper.”
When the waiter had gone, Renée took her eyeglass, and went inquisitively round the room. It was a square room in white and gold, furnished with the coquetry of a boudoir. Besides the table and the chairs, there was a sort of low slab that served as a sideboard, and a broad divan, a veritable bed, which stood between the window and the fireplace. A Louis XVI clock and candlesticks adorned the white marble mantel. But the curiosity of the room was the mirror, a handsome long-shaped mirror, which had been scrawled over by the ladies’ diamonds with names, dates, doggrel verses, prodigious sentiments and astounding avowals. Renée thought she caught sight of something beastly, and lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, experiencing fresh embarrassment, and at last, to give herself countenance, began gazing at the ceiling and the copper-gilt chandelier with its five jets. But the uneasiness she felt was delicious. While she raised her forehead as if to examine the cornice, seriously, and with her eyeglass in her hand, she derived profound enjoyment from this equivocal furniture which she felt about her; from that limpid, cynical mirror whose pure surface, barely wrinkled by those filthy scrawls, had helped in the adjusting of so many false chignons; from that divan whose breadth shocked her; from the table and the very carpet, in which she found the same smell as on the stairs, a subtle, penetrating, and almost religious odour of dust.
Then, when she was driven at last to lower her eyes.
“What is this supper of Wednesday?” she asked of Maxime.
“Nothing,” he replied. “A bet one of my friends lost.”
In any other place he would have told her without hesitation that he had supped on Wednesday with a lady he had met on the boulevard. But since entering the private room, he had instinctively treated her as a woman whose good graces one seeks to obtain and whose jealousy must be spared. She did not insist; she went and leant on the rail of the window, where he joined her. Behind them Charles came and went, with a sound of crockery and plate.
It was not yet midnight. On the boulevard below, Paris was growling, prolonging its ardent day, before deciding to go to bed. The rows of trees separated with a confused line the whiteness of the pavement from the uncertain darkness of the roadway, on which passed the rumble and the fleeting lamps of the carriages. On either edge of this dark belt, the newsvendors’ kiosks shed their light from spot to spot, like great Venetian lanterns, tall and fantastically variegated, set on the ground at regular intervals for some colossal illumination. But at this time their subdued brilliancy was lost in the flare of the neighbouring shop-fronts. Not a shutter was up, the pavement stretched out without a line of shadow, under a shower of rays that lighted it with a golden dust, with the warm and resplendent glare of daylight. Maxime showed Renée the Café Anglais, whose windows shone out in front of them. The lofty branches of the trees interfered with them a little, however, when they tried to see the houses and pavement opposite. They leant over, and looked below them. There was a continual coming and going; men walked past in groups, prostitutes in couples dragged their skirts, which they raised from time to time with a languid movement, casting weary, smiling glances around them. Right under the window, the tables of the Café Riche were spread out in the blaze of the gaslamps, whose brilliancy extended half across the roadway; and it was especially in the centre of this burning focus that they saw the pallid faces and pale smiles of the passersby. Around the little tables were men and women mingled together, drinking. The girls were in showy dresses, their hair dressed low down in their necks; they lounged about on chairs and made loud remarks, which the clatter prevented one from hearing. Renée noticed one in particular, sitting alone at a table, dressed in a bright-blue costume, garnished with white guipure; thrown back in her chair, she finished, sip by sip, a glass of beer, her hands on her stomach, a heavy and resigned expectant look on her face. The women on foot disappeared slowly among the crowd, and Renée, who was interested in them, followed them, gazing from one end of the boulevard to the other, into the noisy, confused depths of the avenue, full of the black swarm of pedestrians, where the lights became mere sparks. And the endless procession, a crowd strangely mixed and always alike, passed by with tiring regularity in the midst of the bright colours and patches of darkness, in the fairylike confusion of the thousand leaping flames that swept like waves from the shops, lending colour to the transparencies of the windows and the kiosks, running along the pavements in fillets, letters and designs of fire, piercing the darkness with stars, gliding unceasingly along the roadway. The deafening noise that rose on high had a clamour, a prolonged monotonous rumbling, like an organ-note accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. Renée at one moment thought an accident had taken place. A stream of people moved on the left, a little beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. But, taking her eyeglass, she recognized the omnibus-office. There was a crowd of people on the pavement, standing waiting, and rushing forward as soon as an omnibus arrived.