The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
were nice and vicious already…. How you amused us at Worms’s, do you remember? We used to call you ‘our little toy man.’ I always believed that the fat Suzanne would have let you do anything you liked, if the marquise had not watched her with such furious eyes.”
“Ah, yes, we had some good laughs….” murmured Maxime. “The photograph album, what? and all the rest, our drives through Paris, our feeds at the pastrycook’s on the boulevard; you know, those little strawberry-tarts you were so fond of?… I shall never forget the afternoon when you told me the story of Adeline at the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed herself ‘Arthur d’Espanet’ like a man, and proposed to elope with her….”
The lovers grew merry again over this anecdote; and then Maxime continued in his coaxing voice:
“When you came to fetch me from school in your carriage, how funny we must have looked, you and I…. I used to disappear under your skirts, I was so little.”
“Yes, yes,” she stammered, quivering, and drawing Maxime towards her, “it was very delightful, as you say…. We loved one another without knowing it, did we not? I knew it before you did. The other day, driving back from the Bois, I just touched your leg, and I gave a start…. But you didn’t notice anything. Eh? you were not thinking of me?”
“Oh yes,” he replied, somewhat embarrassed. “Only I did not know, you see…. I did not dare.”
He lied. The idea of possessing Renée had never clearly come to him. He had covered her with all his viciousness, without really desiring her. He was too feeble for such an effort. He accepted Renée because she forced herself upon him, and he had drifted into her bed without willing or foreseeing it. When he had once rolled there, he remained because it was warm, and because he habitually lingered at the bottom of every pit he fell into. At the commencement he even felt the satisfaction of egotism. She was the first married woman he had had. He did not reflect that the husband was his father.
But Renée brought into her sin all the ardour of a heart that has lost caste. She too had glided down the slope. Only she had not rolled to the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Lust had been kindled within her when it was too late to combat it, and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly opened up before her as a necessary consequence of her weariness, as a rare and supreme enjoyment which alone was able to rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumn drive in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her like a titillation that sent an unknown thrill over her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, lashed by jealousy, this idea became more defined, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she stood before Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved for sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that was to fill her empty existence and bring her at last to that hell of which she was still afraid, as in the days when she was a little girl. Then, the next day, through a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude, her craving had left her. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it was not so pleasant as she had fancied, and that it would really be too disgusting. The crisis was bound to be a fatal one, to come of itself, without the help of these two beings, these comrades who were destined to deceive themselves one fine evening, to unite in a sexual embrace when they imagined they were shaking hands. But after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime back to her arms, curious about him, curious as to the cruel delights of a passion which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, demanded it, resolved to taste it to the end, even to remorse, should that ever come. She was active and cognizant. She loved with the transports of a woman of fashion, with the restless prejudices of a woman of the middle class, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman drowning herself in self-disdain.
Maxime returned every night. He came through the garden at about one o’clock. Oftenest Renée would wait for him in the conservatory, which he must cross to reach the small drawingroom. For the rest they were absolutely shameless, barely hiding themselves, forgetting the most classic precautions of adultery. This corner of the house, it is true, belonged to them. Baptiste, the husband’s valet, alone had the right to enter it, and Baptiste, like a serious man, disappeared so soon as his duties were over. Maxime even pretended with a laugh that he withdrew to write his Memoirs. One night, however, just after Maxime had arrived, Renée pointed out Baptiste to him crossing the drawingroom solemnly with a candlestick in his hand. The tall valet, with his diplomatic figure, lit by the yellow light of the taper, wore that night a still more correct and severe expression than usual. Leaning forward, the lovers saw him blow out his candle and go towards the stables, where the horses and grooms lay sleeping.
“He is going his rounds,” said Maxime.
Renée stood shivering. Baptiste always made her uncomfortable. She said one day that he was the only respectable man in the house, with his coldness and his clear glances that never alighted on the women’s shoulders.
After that they evinced a certain prudence in their meetings. They closed the doors of the small drawingroom and were thus able to dispose of this room, of the conservatory, and of Renée’s own rooms in all tranquillity. It was quite a world in itself. They there tasted, during the earlier months, the most refined, the most daintily sought-out delights. They shifted their love-scenes from the great gray-and-pink bed of the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing-room and to the symphony in yellow-minor of the small drawingroom. Each room with its particular odour, its hangings, its special life, gave them a different form of passion and made of Renée a different inamorata: she was dainty and pretty in her padded patrician couch, where, in the tepid, aristocratic bedchamber, love underwent the modification of good taste; under the flesh-coloured tent, amid the perfume and the humid languor of the bathroom, she became a capricious, carnal courtesan, yielding herself as she left the bath: it was there that Maxime preferred her; then, downstairs, in the bright sunrise of the small drawingroom, in the midst of the yellow halo that gilded her hair, she became a goddess with her fair Diana-like head, her bare arms which assumed chaste postures, her unblemished body which reclined on the couches in attitudes revealing noble outlines of antique grace. But there was one place of which Maxime was almost frightened, where Renée dragged him only on bad days, on days when she needed a more acrid intoxication. Then they loved in the hothouse. It was there that they tasted incest.
One night, in an hour of anguish, Renée sent her lover for one of the black bearskin rugs. Then they lay down on this inky fur, at the edge of a tank, in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly in the limpid moonlight. Maxime arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers. The conservatory was heated to such a point that he swooned away on the bearskin. Coming from the dry, biting cold into so intense a heat, he felt a smarting as though he had been whipped with a birch-rod. When he came to himself, he saw Renée on her knees, leaning over him, with fixed eyes and an animal attitude that alarmed him. Her hair down, her shoulders bare, she leant upon her wrists, with her spine stretched out, like a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. The young man, lying on his back, perceived above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous beast that gazed upon him the marble sphinx, whose thighs gleamed in the moonlight. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the monster with the woman’s head, and, in her loosened petticoats, looked like the white sister of this black divinity.
Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating, a sultry heat that did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground like a poisonous effluvium, and its steam ascended like a storm-laden cloud. A warm dampness covered the lovers with dew, with burning sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple, nervous hams. From outside, through the little panes of the hothouse, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, clumps of trees with fine black outlines, lawns white as frozen lakes, a whole dead landscape, the exquisiteness and the light, even tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese prints. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely in the midst of the great, silent cold.
They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate, active will. Maxime submitted. Smooth-limbed, slim and graceful as a Roman stripling,