The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
the mountings of copper-gilt were scarcely visible. Marvellous ornaments, the clock especially, with its ring of chubby Cupids, who climbed and leaned over the dial-plate like a troop of naked urchins mocking at the quick flight of time. This subdued luxury, these colours and ornaments which Renée’s taste had chosen soft and smiling, lent to the room a crepuscular light like that of an alcove with curtains drawn. The bed seemed to prolong itself till the room became one immense bed, with its carpets, its bearskin rugs, its padded seats, its stuffed hangings which continued the softness of the floor along the walls and up to the ceiling. And as in a bed, Renée left upon all these things the imprint, the warmth, the perfume of her body. When one drew aside the double hangings of the boudoir, it seemed as if one were raising a silken counterpane and entering some great couch, still warm and moist, where one found on the fine linen the adorable shape, the slumber and the dreams of a Parisian woman of thirty.
An adjoining closet, a spacious chamber hung with antique chintz, was simply furnished on every side with tall rosewood wardrobes, containing an army of dresses. Céleste, always methodical, arranged the dresses according to their dates, labelled them, introduced arithmetic amid her mistress’s blue and yellow caprices, and kept this closet as reposeful as a sacristy and as clean as a stable. There was no furniture in the room; not a rag lay about. The wardrobe-doors shone cold and clean like the varnished panels of a brougham.
But the wonder of the apartment, the room that was the talk of Paris, was the dressing-room. One said: “The beautiful Madame Saccard’s dressing-room,” as one says: “The Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles.” This room was situated in one of the towers, just above the little buttercup drawingroom. On entering, one was reminded of a large circular tent, an enchanted tent, pitched in a dream by some love-lorn Amazon. In the centre of the ceiling a crown of chased silver upheld the drapery of the tent, which ran, with a curve, to the walls, whence it fell straight down to the floor. This drapery, these rich hangings, consisted of pink silk covered with very thin muslin, plaited in wide folds at regular intervals. A band of lace separated the folds, and fillets of wrought silver ran down from the crown and glided down the hangings along either edge of each of the bands. The pink and gray of the bedroom grew brighter here, became a pink and white, like naked flesh. And under this bower of lace, under these curtains that hid all the ceiling save a pale blue cavity inside the narrow circlet of the crown, where Chaplin had painted a wanton Cupid looking down and preparing his dart, one would have thought one’s self at the bottom of a comfit-box, or in some precious jewel-case enlarged as though to display a woman’s nudity instead of the brilliancy of a diamond. The carpet, white as snow, stretched out without the least pattern or flower. The furniture consisted of a cupboard with plate-glass doors, whose two panels were inlaid with silver; a long-chair, two ottomans, some white satin stools; and a great toilet-table with a pink marble slab and legs hidden under flounces of muslin and lace. The glasses on the toilet-table, the bottles, the basin were of antique Bohemian crystal, streaked pink and white. And there was yet another table, inlaid with silver like the looking-glass cupboard, on which all the paraphernalia and toilet utensils were laid out, like the contents of a fantastic surgeon’s case, displaying a large number of little instruments of puzzling purpose, back-scratchers, nail-polishers, files of every shape and dimension, straight scissors and curved, every species of tweezer and pin. Each one of these articles of silver and ivory was marked with Renée’s monogram.
But the dressing-room had a delightful corner, which corner in particular made it famous. In front of the window the folds of the tent parted and disclosed, in a kind of long, shallow alcove, a bath, a tank of pink marble sunk into the floor, with sides fluted like those of a large shell and rising to a level with the carpet. Marble steps led down into the bath. Above the silver taps, shaped like swans’ necks, the back of the alcove was filled with a Venetian mirror, frameless, with curved edges, and a ground design on the crystal. Every morning Renée took a bath that lasted some minutes. This bath filled the dressing-room for the whole day with moisture, with a fragrance of fresh, wet flesh. Sometimes an unstoppered scent-bottle, a cake of soap left out of its dish, struck a more violent note in this somewhat insipid languor. Renée was fond of staying there till mid-day, almost naked. The round tent for its part was naked also. The pink bath, the pink slabs and basins, the muslin of the walls and ceiling, under which a pink blood seemed to course, acquired the curves of flesh, the curves of shoulders and breasts; and, according to the time of day, one would have thought of the snowy skin of a child or the hot skin of a woman. It was a vast nudity. When Renée left her bath, her fair-complexioned body added but a little more pink to all the pink flesh of the room.
It was Maxime who undressed Renée. He understood that sort of thing, and his quick hands divined pins and glided round her waist with innate science. He undid her hair, took off her diamonds, dressed her hair for the night. He added jests and caresses to the performance of his duties as lady’s-maid and hairdresser, and Renée laughed, with a broad stifled laugh, while the silk of her bodice cracked and her petticoats were loosened one by one. When she saw herself naked, she blew out the tapers of the candlestick, caught Maxime round the body, and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication. In her fever she was conscious of the previous day spent by the fireside, of that day of ardent stupor, of vague and smiling dreams. She still heard the harsh voice of Saccard and Madame Sidonie talking, calling out figures through their noses like lawyers. Those were the people who overwhelmed her, who drove her to crime. And even now, when she sought his lips in the depths of the vast, dark bed, she still saw Maxime’s image in the firelight of yesterday, looking at her with eyes that scorched her.
The young man did not leave her till six in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceau, and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawingroom by a servants’ staircase hidden in the wall, which connected all the rooms in the tower. From the drawingroom it was easy to pass into the conservatory and reach the gardens.
On going out at daylight in a thick fog, Maxime was a little bewildered by his adventure. He accepted it, however, with the epicene complacency that formed part of his being.
“So much the worse!” he thought. “It’s she who wishes it after all…. She is deucedly well made; and she was right, she is twice as jolly in bed as Sylvia.”
They had drifted towards incest since the day when Maxime, in his threadbare schoolboy tunic, had hung on Renée’s neck, creasing her French-guard’s coat. From that time forward there had been a long and constant perversion between them. The strange education the young woman gave the child; the familiarities that made boon companions of them; later on, the laughing audacity of their confidences; all this dangerous promiscuity had ended by linking them together by a singular bond, in which the delights of friendship came near to carnal indulgence. They had given themselves to one another for years; the animal act was but the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of passion. In the maddened world in which they lived, their sin had sprouted as on a dunghill oozing with equivocal juices; it had developed with strange refinements amid special conditions of debauch.
When the great calash carried them to the Bois and rolled them softly along the drives, their whispering of obscenities into each other’s ears, their searching to recall the spontaneous dirty practices of their childhood, was but a digression by the way and a tacit gratification of their passions. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as though they had just slightly touched one another; and even this first sin, this languor born of filthy conversations, though it wearied them with a voluptuous fatigue, tickled them yet more sweetly than plain, positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus the slow progress of two lovers, and was inevitably bound to lead them one day to the private room in the Café Riche and to Renée’s great pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have thought them two old lovers, whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had lost so many hours what time their whole beings had been in contact, that in spite of themselves they talked of that past which was full of their unconscious love.
“Do you remember, the day I came to Paris,” said Maxime, “what a funny dress you wore? and I drew an angle on your chest with my finger and advised you to cut down the bodice in a point…. I felt your skin under your shirt, and my finger went in a little…. It was very nice….”