The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
and pretty, stricken in his virility since childhood, this epicene being became a great girl in Renée’s inquisitive arms. He seemed born and bred for a perversion of sensual pleasure. Renée enjoyed her domination, and she bent under her passion this creature with the still indeterminate sex. For her it was a continual astonishment of lasciviousness, a surprise of the senses, a bizarre sensation of discomfort and of keen enjoyment. She was no longer certain: she felt doubts each time she returned to his delicate skin, his soft plump neck, his attitudes of abandonment, his fainting-fits. She then experienced an hour of repletion. By revealing to her a new ecstasy, Maxime crowned her mad toilettes, her prodigious luxury, her life of excess. He set in her flesh the top note that was already singing in her ears. He was the lover who matched the follies and fashions of the period. This pretty little fellow, whose frail figure was revealed by his clothes, this abortive girl, who strolled along the boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those debauching influences of the decadence which at certain periods among rotten nations exhaust a body and unhinge a brain.
And it was in the hothouse especially that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by many others. The hothouse loved and burned with them. In the heavy atmosphere, in the pale light of the moon, they saw the strange world of plants around them moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched across the pathway. At their feet the tank steamed full of a swarm, of a thick tangle, of plants, while the pink petals of the water-lilies opened out on the surface like virgin bodices, and the tornelias let fall their bushy tendrils like the hair of languishing water-nymphs. Around them the palm-trees and the tall Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, where they bent over and mingled their leaves with the staggering attitudes of exhausted lovers. Lower down the ferns, the pterides, the alsophilas, were like green ladies, with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, who stood mute and motionless at the edge of the pathway awaiting love. By their side the twisted red-streaked leaves of the begonias and the white spear-headed leaves of the caladiums furnished a vague series of bruises and pallors, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, though at times they discerned curves as of hips and knees, prone on the ground beneath the brutality of ensanguined kisses. And the plaintain-trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fecundity of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbias, of whose prickly, deformed, tapering stems, covered with loathly excrescences, they could catch glimpses in the shadow, seemed to sweat out sap, the overflowing flux of this fiery gestation. But, by degrees, as their glances penetrated into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness became filled with a more furious debauch of leaves and stalks; they were not able to distinguish on the stages between the marantas, soft as velvet, the gloxinias, purple-belled, the dracœnas resembling blades of old lacquer; it was one round dance of living plants pursuing one another with unsatiated fervour. At the four corners, there where the curtains of creepers closed in the arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder still, and the supple shoots of the vanilla-plants, of the Indian berries, the quisqualias and bauhinias were as the interminable arms of unseen lovers distractedly lengthening their embraces so as to collect all scattered delights. Those endless arms drooped with weariness, entwined in a spasm of love, sought each other, closed up together like a crowd bent on rut. It was the unbounded copulation of the hothouse, of this nook of virgin forest ablaze with tropical flora and foliage.
Maxime and Renée, their senses perverted, felt carried away in these mighty nuptials of the earth. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap that rose in the trunks of the trees penetrated them also, filling them with a mad longing for immediate increase, for gigantic procreation. They joined in the copulation of the hothouse. It was then, in the pale light, that they were stupefied by visions, by nightmares in which they watched at length the intrigues of the ferns and palm-trees; the foliage assumed a confused equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into sensual images; murmurs and whisperings reached them from the shrubberies, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was audible in their own embraces, and that was wafted back by the echo. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as though the very ground had burst forth into voluptuous sobs in a fit of satisfied desire.
If they had closed their eyes, if the stifling heat and the pale light had not imparted to them a vitiation of every sense, the aromas would have been sufficient to throw them into an extraordinary state of nervous irritation. The tank saturated them with a deep, pungent odour, through which passed the thousand perfumes of the flowers and plants. At times the vanilla-plant sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the stanhopeas, whose tigered throats have the strong and putrid breath of the convalescent sick. The orchids, in their baskets suspended by wire chains, emitted their exhalations like living censers. But the dominant scent, the scent in which all these vague breaths were intermingled, was a human scent, a scent of love which Maxime recognized when he kissed Renée in the neck, when he plunged his head into her flowing hair. And they lay intoxicated with this scent of an amorous woman which trailed through the hothouse, as through an alcove in which the earth was reproducing its kind.
As a rule the lovers lay down under the Madagascar tanghin-tree, under that poisoned shrub into one of whose leaves Renée had once bitten. Around them the white statues laughed as they gazed at the mighty copulation of foliage. The moon, as it turned, displaced the groups and gave life to the drama with its changing light. They were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the easy life of the Bois and official receptions, in a corner of an Indian forest, of some monstrous temple of which the black marble sphinx became the deity. They felt themselves rolling towards crime, towards accursed love, towards the caresses of wild beasts. All the germination that surrounded them, the swarming of the tank, the naked immodesty of the foliage, threw them into the innermost, dantesque inferno of passion. It was then, in the depths of this glass cage, all boiling in the summer heat, lost in the keen December cold, that they relished the flavour of incest, as though it were the criminal fruit of an overheated soil, feeling the while a secret dread of their terrifying couch.
And in the center of the black bearskin, Renée’s body seemed whiter, as she crouched like a great cat, her spine stretched out, her wrists tense like supple, nervous hams. She was all swollen with voluptuousness, and the clear outline of her shoulders and loins stood out with feline distinctness against the splash of ink with which the rug blackened the yellow sand of the pathway. She gloated over Maxime, this prey extended beneath her, abandoning itself, which she possessed entirely. And from time to time she leant forward abruptly and kissed him with her chafed mouth. Her mouth opened then with the hungry, bleeding brilliancy of the Chinese hibiscus, whose expanse covered the wall of the house. She became a sheer burning daughter of the hothouse. Her kisses bloomed and faded like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last scarcely a few hours and are unceasingly renewed, like the bruised, insatiable lips of a colossal Messalina.
CHAPTER V
Saccard was haunted by the thought of the kiss he had pressed upon his wife’s neck. He had long ceased to avail himself of his marital rights; the rupture had come naturally, neither one nor the other caring about a connection which inconvenienced them. Saccard would never think of returning to Renée’s chamber, if some good piece of business were not the ultimate aim of his conjugal devotion.
The lucky speculation at Charonne progressed favourably, although he was still anxious as to its termination. Larsonneau, with his dazzling shirtfront, had a way of smiling which he did not like. He was no more than an intermediary, a man of straw, whose assistance he paid for by allowing him a commission of ten per cent, on the ultimate profits. But although the expropriation-agent had not paid a sou into the enterprise, and Saccard had not only found the money for the music-hall but taken every precaution, a deed of retrocession, undated letters, antedated receipts, the latter none the less felt an inward fear, a presentiment of some treachery. He suspected his accomplice of an intention to blackmail him by means of the false inventory which he had preciously preserved and which alone he had to thank for his share in the business.
So