The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
ringing. Her eyes lighted upon the advertisements on a kiosk, glaringly coloured like Épinal prints; on a pane of glass, in a green-and-yellow frame, there was the head of a grinning devil with hair on end, a hatter’s advertisement, which she failed to understand. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed, with its red lamps and yellow sides, turning the corner of the Rue le Peletier, shaking the house with its din, and she saw the men on the knifeboard raise tired faces and look at them, Maxime and her, with the curious glance of famished people peering through a keyhole.
“Ah!” she said. “The Parc Monceau is fast asleep by this time.”
It was the only remark she made. They stayed there for nearly twenty minutes in silence, surrendering themselves to the intoxication of the noise and light. Then, the table being laid, they went and sat down, and as she seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime dismissed him.
“Leave us…. I will ring for dessert.”
Renée’s cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled; one would think she had just been running. She brought from the window a little of the din and animation of the boulevard. She would not let her companion close the window.
“Why, it’s the orchestra!” she said, when he complained of the noise. “Don’t you think it a funny sort of music? It will make a fine accompaniment to our oysters and partridge.”
The escapade gave youth to her thirty years. She had quick movements and a touch of fever, and this private room, this supping alone with a young man amid the uproar of the street excited her, gave her the look of a fast woman. She attacked the oysters resolutely. Maxime was not hungry; he watched her bolt her food with a smile.
“The devil!” he murmured. “You would have made a good supper-girl.”
She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.
“Do I look hungry? What can you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that exhausted me…. Ah, my poor friend, I pity you for living in a world like that!”
“You know very well,” he said, “that I have promised to give up Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny on the day your friends consent to come to supper with me.”
She made a haughty gesture.
“I should rather think so! We are rather more amusing than those women, you must confess…. If one of us were to bore her lover as your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore all of you, why the poor little woman would not keep her lover a week!… You never will listen to me. Just try it, one of these days.”
Maxime, to avoid summoning the waiter, rose, removed the oysters, and brought the partridge which was on the slab. The table had the luxurious look of the first-class restaurants. A breath of adorable debauchery passed over the damask cloth, and Renée experienced little thrills of contentment as she let her slender hands stroll from her fork to her knife, from her plate to her glass. She, who usually drank water barely tinged with claret, now drank white wine neat. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, and waiting on her with comical obsequiousness, resumed:
“What can M. de Saffré have said to make you so furious? Did he tell you you were ugly?”
“Oh, he!” she replied. “He’s a nasty man. I could never have believed that a gentleman who is so distinguished, so polite when at my house, could have used such language. But I forgive him. It was the women that irritated me. One would have thought they were apple-women. There was one who complained of a boil on her hip, and a little more and I believe she would have pulled up her petticoat to show all of us her sore.”
Maxime was splitting with laughter.
“No, really,” she continued, working herself up, “I can’t understand you men; those women are dirty and dull…. And to think that when I saw you going off with your Sylvia I imagined wonderful scenes, ancient banquets that you see in pictures, with creatures crowned with roses, goblets of gold, extraordinary voluptuousness… Ah! no doubt. You showed me a dirty dressing-room, and women swearing like troopers. That’s not worth being immoral for.”
He wanted to protest, but she silenced him, and holding between her fingertips a partridge-bone which she was daintily nibbling, she added, in a lower voice:
“Immorality ought to be an exquisite thing, my dear… When I, a straight woman, feel bored and commit the sin of dreaming of impossibilities, I am sure I think of much jollier things than all your Blanche Mullers.”
And with a serious air, she concluded with this profound and frankly cynical remark:
“It is a question of education, don’t you see?”
She laid the little bone gently on her plate. The rumbling of the carriages continued, with no clearer sound rising above it. She had been obliged to raise her voice for him to hear her, and the flush on her cheeks grew redder. There were still on the slab some truffles, a sweet, and some asparagus, which was out of season. He brought the lot over, so as not to have to disturb himself again; and as the table was rather narrow, he placed on the floor between them a silver pail, full of ice, containing a bottle of champagne. Renée’s appetite had ended by communicating itself to him. They tasted all the dishes, they emptied the bottle of champagne with brusque liveliness, launching out into ticklish theories, leaning their elbows on the table like two friends who relieve their hearts after drinking. The noise on the boulevard was diminishing; but to her ears, on the contrary, it seemed to increase, and at moments all these wheels would seem to be whirling round in her head.
When he spoke of ringing for dessert, she rose, shook the crumbs from her long satin blouse, and said:
“That’s it… You can light your cigar, you know.”
She was a little giddy. She went to the window, attracted by a peculiar noise which she could not explain to herself. The shops were being closed.
“Look,” she said, turning towards Maxime, “the orchestra is emptying.”
She leant out again. In the middle of the road, the coloured eyes of the cabs and omnibuses, fewer and faster, were still crossing one another. But on either side, along the pavements, great pits of darkness had opened out in front of the closed shops. The cafés alone were still flaming, streaking the asphalt with sheets of light. From the Rue Drouot to the Rue du Helder she thus perceived a long line of white squares and black squares, in which the last wayfarers sprang up and disappeared in a curious fashion. The streetwalkers in particular, with their long-trained dresses, glaringly illuminated and immersed in darkness by turns, seemed like apparitions, like ghostly puppets crossing the limelight of some extravaganza. She amused herself for a moment with this sight. There was no longer any widespread light; the gasjets were being turned out; the variegated kiosks marked the darkness more definitely. From time to time a flood of people, issuing from some theatre, passed by. But soon there was vacancy, and there came under the window groups of men in twos or threes whom a woman accosted. They stood debating. Some of their remarks rose audibly in the subsiding din; and then the woman generally went off on the arm of one of the men. Other girls wandered from café to café, strolled round the tables, pocketed the forgotten lumps of sugar, laughed with the waiters, and gazed fixedly with a silent, questioning, proffering look at the belated customers. And just after Renée had followed with her eyes the all but empty knifeboard of a Batignolles omnibus, she recognized, at the corner of the pavement, the woman in the blue dress with the white lace, erect, glancing about her, still in search of a man.
When Maxime came to fetch Renée from the window where she stood lost, he smiled as he looked towards one of the half-opened windows of the Café Anglais; the idea of his father, supping there on his side, struck him as humorous; but that evening he was under the influence of a peculiar form of modesty which interfered with his customary love of fun. Renée left the window-rail with regret. An intoxication and languor rose up from the vaguer depths of the boulevard. In the enfeebled rumbling of the carriages, in the obliteration of the bright lights, there was a coaxing summons to voluptuousness and sleep. The whispers that sped by, the groups assembled in shadowy corners, turned the pavement into the passage of some great inn at the