The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
over the housetops.
When Renée turned round, the light of the little chandelier made her blink her eyes. She was a little pale now, and felt slight quivers at the corners of her mouth. Charles was putting out the dessert: he went out, came in again, opening and shutting the door slowly, with the self-contained air of a man of the world.
“But I’m no longer hungry!” cried Renée. “Take away all those plates, and bring the coffee.”
The waiter, accustomed to the whims of the ladies he waited on, cleared away the dessert and poured out the coffee. He filled the room with his importance.
“Do get rid of him,” said Renée, who was feeling sick, to Maxime.
Maxime dismissed him; but scarcely had he disappeared before he returned once again to draw the great window-curtains closely together with an air of discretion. When he had at last retired, the young man, seized in his turn with impatience, rose, and going to the door:
“Wait,” he said, “I know a way to keep him out.”
And he pushed the bolt.
“That’s it,” she rejoined, “we are by ourselves at last.”
Their confidential, intimate chatting recommenced. Maxime had lighted a cigar. Renée sipped her coffee and even indulged in a glass of chartreuse. The room grew warmer and became filled with blue smoke. She ended by leaning her elbows on the table and resting her chin between her half-closed fists. Under this slight pressure her mouth became smaller, her cheeks were slightly raised, and her eyes, diminished in size, shone more brightly. Thus rumpled, her little face looked adorable under the rain of golden curls that now fell down upon her eyebrows. Maxime examined her through the smoke of his cigar. He thought her quaint. At times he was no longer quite sure of her sex: the great wrinkle that crossed her forehead, the pouting projection of her lips, the undecided air derived from her shortsightedness, made a big young man of her; the more so as her long black satin blouse came so high that one could barely espy, under her chin, a line of plump white neck. She let herself be looked at with a smile, no longer moving her head, her eyes lost in vacancy, her lips silent.
Then she woke up suddenly; she went and looked at the mirror towards which her dreamy eyes had been turning the last few moments. She raised herself on tip-toe, and leant her hands on the edge of the mantel, to read the signatures, the coarse remarks which before supper had frightened her off. She spelt out the syllables with some difficulty, laughing, reading on like a schoolboy turning over the pages of a Piron in his desk.
“‘Ernest and Clara,’“ she said, “and there is a heart underneath that looks like a funnel…. Ah! this is better: ‘I like men because I like truffles.’ Signed, ‘Laure.’ Tell me, Maxime, was it the d’Aurigny woman who wrote that?… Then here is the coat-of-arms of one of these ladies, I imagine: a hen smoking a big pipe…. And more names, the whole calendar of saints, male and female: Victor, Amélie, Alexandre, Edouard, Marguerite, Paquita, Louise, Renée…. So there’s one called after me….”
Maxime could see her face glowing in the glass. She raised herself still higher, and her domino, drawn more tightly behind, outlined the curve of her figure, the undulation of her hips. The young man followed the line of satin, which fitted her like a shirt. He rose in his turn, and threw away his cigar. He was ill at ease and restless. Something he was accustomed to was wanting in him.
“Ah! here is your name, Maxime,” cried Renée …. “Listen…. ‘I love….’“
But he had sat down on the corner of the divan, almost at Renée’s feet. He succeeded in taking hold of her hands with a quick movement; he turned her away from the looking-glass, and said, in a singular voice:
“Please, don’t read that.”
She struggled, laughing nervously.
“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”
But he insisted in a more suppressed tone:
“No, no, not tonight.”
He still held her, and she tried to free herself with little jerks of the wrists. There was an unknown light in their eyes, a touch of shame in their long constrained smile. She fell on her knees at the edge of the divan. They continued struggling, although she no longer made any movement to return to the mirror, and was already surrendering herself. And as Maxime threw his arms round her body, she said with her embarrassed, expiring laugh:
“Don’t, let me alone…. You are hurting me.”
It was the only murmur that rose to her lips. In the profound silence of the room, where the gas seemed to flare up higher, she felt the ground tremble and heard the clatter of the Batignolles omnibus turning the corner of the boulevard. And it was all over. When they recovered their position, side by side on the divan, he stammered out amid their mutual embarrassment:
“Bah! it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
She said nothing. She examined the pattern of the carpet with a dumfounded air.
“Had you ever dreamt of it?…” continued Maxime, stammering still more. “I hadn’t for a moment…. I ought to have mistrusted that private room.”
But in a deep voice, as if all the middle-class respectability of the Bérauds du Châtel had been awakened by this supreme sin:
“This is infamous, what we have just done,” she muttered, sobered, her face aged and very serious.
She was stifling. She went to the window, drew back the curtains, and leant out. The orchestra was hushed; her sin had been committed amid the last quiver of the basses and the distant chant of the violins, the vague, soft music of the boulevard asleep and dreaming of love. The roadway and pavement below stretched out and merged into gray solitude. All the growling cab-wheels seemed to have departed, carrying with them the lights and the crowd. Beneath the window, the Café Riche was closed; no shred of light gleamed through the shutters. Across the road, shimmering lights alone lit up the front of the Café Anglais, and one half-open window in particular, whence issued a faint laughter. And all along this riband of darkness, from the turn at the Rue Drouot to the other extremity, as far as her eyes could reach, she saw nothing but the symmetrical blurs of the kiosks staining the night red and green, without illuminating it, and resembling night-lights spaced along a giant dormitory. She raised her head. The trees outlined their tall branches against a clear sky, while the irregular line of the houses died away, assuming the clustering appearance of a rocky coast on the shore of a faint blue sea. But this belt of sky saddened her still more, and only in the darkness of the boulevard could she find consolation. What lingered on the surface of the deserted road of the noise and vice of the evening made excuses for her. She thought she could feel the heat of the footsteps of all those men and women ascend from the pavement that was growing cold. The shamefulness that had lingered there, momentary lusts, whispered offerings, prepaid weddings of a night, was evaporating, was floating in a heavy mist dissipated by the breath of morning. Leaning out into the darkness, she inhaled this quivering silence, that alcove fragrance, as an encouragement that reached her from below, as an assurance of shame shared and accepted by an approving city. And when her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she saw the woman in the blue dress trimmed with lace standing in the same place, alone in the gray solitude, waiting and offering herself to the empty night.
On turning round, Renée perceived Charles, who was looking around for what he could see. He ended by discovering Renée’s blue ribbon, lying rumpled and forgotten on a corner of the sofa. And with his civil air he hastened to take it to her. Then she realized all her shame. Standing before the glass, with awkward hands she endeavoured to refasten the ribbon. But her chignon had slipped down, her little curls had flattened on her temples, and she was unable to tie the bow. Charles came to her assistance, saying, as though he were offering an everyday thing, a finger-bowl or a toothpick:
“Would madame like the comb?…”
“Oh no, don’t trouble,” interrupted Maxime, giving the waiter an impatient look. “Go and call a cab.”
Renée decided simply