The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
distorted form, would assume a pose of abandonment, and a light would flash from the depths of her eyes, still full of callowness; but not the least blush in the world was brought to her cheeks by Maxime’s romping. And they both laughed on, thinking themselves alone, without perceiving Renée, who stood half-hidden in the middle of the conservatory, watching them from a distance.
A moment before, as she was crossing a walk, the sight of Maxime and Louise had suddenly caused Renée to stand still behind a shrub. Around her the hothouse, resembling the nave of a church, with an arched glass roof supported by straight, slender iron columns, displayed its fat vegetation, its masses of lusty verdure, its spreading rockets of foliage.
In the middle, in an oval tank level with the flooring, lived, with the mysterious sea-green life of water-plants, all the aquatic flora of the tropics. Cyclanthus-plants, displaying their streaks of variegated green, raised a monumental girdle around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end, two tall tornelias reared their quaint brushwood above the water, their dry, bare stems contorted like agonizing serpents, and let fall aerial roots, that seemed like a fisherman’s nets hung up in the open air. Near the edge, a Javanese pandanus spread its cluster of green leaves streaked with white, thin as swords, prickly and fretted as Malay creeses. And on the surface, in the warmth of the tepid sheet of slumbering water, great water-lilies opened out their pink petals, and euryales trailed their round leaves, their leprous leaves, floating like the backs of monstrous blistered toads.
By way of turf, a broad edging of selaginella encircled the tank. This dwarf fern formed a thick mossy carpet of a light green shade. And beyond the great circular path, four enormous clusters of plants shot vigorously right up to the roof: palms, drooping gently in their elegance, spreading their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, hung down their leaves like oars wearied by their perpetual voyage through the blue; tall Indian bamboos rose straight, hard, slender, dropping from on high their light shower of leaves; a ravenala, the traveller’s tree, reared its bouquet of huge Chinese hand-screens; and in a corner a plantain-tree, loaded with fruit, stretched out on all sides its long horizontal leaves, on which two lovers might easily recline clasped in each other’s embrace. In the corners were Abyssinian euphorbias, deformed prickly cactuses, covered with loathly excrescences, oozing with poison. And beneath the trees the ground was carpeted with creeping ferns, adianta and pterides, their fronds outlined daintily like fine lace. Alsophilas of a taller species tapered upwards with their rows of symmetrical foliage, hexagonal, so regular as to have the appearance of large pieces of porcelain destined to hold the fruit of some titanic desert. The shrubberies were surrounded with a border of begonias and caladiums; begonias, with twisted leaves, gorgeously streaked with red and green; caladiums whose spear-headed leaves, white, with veins of green, looked like large butterfly-wings; bizarre plants, whose foliage lives strangely with the sombre or wan splendour of noisome flowers.
Behind the shrubberies, a second and narrower pathway ran round the greenhouse. There, on stages, half concealing the hot-water pipes, bloomed marantas, soft as velvet to the touch, gloxinias, purple-belled, dracœnas, resembling blades of old lacquer.
But one of the charms of this winter-garden was the four alcoves of verdure at the corners, roomy arbours closed in by thick curtains of creepers. Scraps of virgin forest had here erected their leafy walls, their impenetrable confusion of stems, of supple shoots that clung to the branches, shot through space in reckless flight, and fell from the arched roof like tassels of ornate drapery. A stalk of vanilla, whose ripe pods emitted a pungent perfume, trailed about a moss-grown portico; Indian berries draped the thin pillars with their round leaves; bauhinias with their red clusters, quisqualias with flowers pendant like bead necklaces glided, twined and intertwined like slim adders, endlessly playing and creeping amid the darkness of the growths.
And beneath arches, placed here and there between the beds of shrubs, hung baskets suspended from wire chains, and filled with orchids, fantastic plants of the air, which pushed in every direction their crooked tendrils, bent and twisted like the limbs of cripples. There were cypripediums, whose flowers resemble a wonderful slipper with a heel adorned with a dragon-fly’s wings; ærides, so delicately scented; stanhopeas, with pale tiger flowers, which exhale from afar a strong and acrid breath, as from the putrid throats of the convalescent sick.
But what most struck the eye from every point of the walks was a great Chinese hibiscus, whose immense expanse of foliage and flowers covered the whole wall of the house on to which the conservatory was built. The huge purple flowers of this giant mallow, unceasingly renewed, live but a few hours. They resembled as who should say the eager, sensual mouths of women, the red lips, soft and moist, of some colossal Messalina, bruised by kisses, and ever reviving with their hungry, bleeding smiles.
Renée, standing by the tank, shivered in the midst of this verdant magnificence. Behind her, a great sphinx in black marble, squatting upon a block of granite, turned its head towards the fountain with a cat’s cruel and wary smile; and, with its polished thighs, it looked like the dark idol of this tropical clime. From globes of ground glass came a light that covered the leaves with milky stains. Statues, heads of women with necks thrown back, swelling with laughter, stood out white against the background of the shrubberies, with patches of shadow which distorted the mad gaiety upon their faces. Strange rays of light played about the dull, still water of the tank, throwing up vague shapes, glaucous masses with monstrous outlines. A flood of white light streamed over the ravenala’s glossy leaves, over the lacquered fans of the latanias; while from the lacework of the ferns fell drops of light in a fine shower. Up above shone the reflections from the glass roof, between the sombre tops of the tall palm-trees. And all around was massed in darkness; the arbours, with their hangings of creepers, were drowned in tenebrous gloom, like the lairs of slumbering serpents.
Renée stood musing beneath the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime in the distance. She no longer felt the fleeting fancies, the gray, twilight temptations of the chilly avenues of the Bois. Her thoughts were no longer lulled to sleep by the trot of her horses along the mundane turf, the glades in which middle-class families take their Sunday repasts. This time she was permeated with a keen and definite desire.
Unbridled love and voluptuous appetite haunted this stifling nave in which seethed the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapt in the puissant bridals of the earth which gave birth to those dark growths, those colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hot-bed, of this forest expansion, of this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia full of intoxication. At her feet steamed the tank, the mass of tepid water thickened by the saps from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours; a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with concupiscence. Overhead she could smell the palm-trees whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat of the air, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours, above all, that overpowered her. An indescribable perfume, potent, provocative, composed of a thousand perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and swooningly faint were blended with zephyrs coarse, pestilential, laden with poison. But, amid this rare music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids’ stridency, was that penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, that smell of love escaping in the morning hour from the close chamber of a bridegroom and bride.
Renée sank back slowly, leaning against the granite pedestal. In her dress of green satin, her head and breast flushed and bedewed with the bright scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled a great flower, green and pink, one of the water-lilies from the tank, swooning with heat. In this moment of enlightenment, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of dinner returned to her head, arrogant, triumphant, redoubled in force by the flames of the hothouse. She thought no longer of the freshness of the night, that had calmed her, of the murmuring shadows of the gardens, whose voices had whispered in her ear the bliss of serenity. In her were aroused the senses of a woman who desires, the caprices of a woman who is satiated. And above her head, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mystic laugh, as if it had read the longing, formulated at last, that galvanized that dead heart, the fugitive longing, the “something different”