Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

He was thus able to pretend to his wife that he was strapped for cash all the more convincingly as his business dealings became increasingly entangled. He was not a man to confess for love of truth.

“But monsieur,” Renée asked with an air of doubt, “if you are in difficulty, why did you buy me that aigrette and necklace, which I believe cost you 65,000 francs? . . . I have no use for those jewels, and I shall be obliged to ask your permission to dispose of them in order to raise money to pay Worms a first installment on what I owe.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” he exclaimed anxiously. “If you’re not seen wearing those jewels tomorrow night at the ministry ball, there will be talk about my position.”

He was in a good mood that morning. He ended with a smile and a wink, whispering, “My dear, we speculators are like pretty women. We have our sly ways. . . . Please, I beg you, for my sake, keep your aigrette and your necklace.”

He could not tell her the story, which was quite a good one but rather risqué. One night after supper, Saccard and Laure d’Aurigny had formed an alliance. Laure was up to her eyes in debt and had only one thought in mind: to find a nice young man willing to run off to London with her. Saccard, for his part, felt the ground giving way beneath him. With his back to the wall, his imagination cast about for an expedient that would display him to the public sprawled upon a bed of gold and banknotes. Lingering over dessert, both half-drunk, the whore and the speculator came to an understanding. He hatched the plan of selling Laure’s diamonds in a sale that would grip the imagination of all of Paris. He would then make a great splash by buying some of the jewels himself, for his wife. With the proceeds from this sale, around 400,000 francs, he managed to satisfy Laure’s creditors, to whom she owed almost twice that amount. It was quite likely that he pocketed part of his 65,000 francs himself. When people saw him putting the Aurigny woman’s affairs in order, they took him to be her lover and concluded that he must have paid off all her debts and made a fool of himself for her. Suddenly he was the man of the hour, and his credit was miraculously restored. At the Bourse everyone teased him about his passion with smiles and allusions that pleased him no end. Meanwhile, Laure d’Aurigny, notorious as a result of all this fuss even though he had never spent a single night with her, pretended to deceive him with eight or ten imbeciles spurred on by the idea of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. Within a month she had two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had been forced to sell. Saccard had taken to going to her place to smoke a cigar every afternoon after leaving the Bourse. He often glimpsed coattails fleeing out the door in terror as he arrived. When they were alone, they couldn’t look at each other without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead, as if her perverse mischief excited him. He never gave her a cent, and once she even lent him money to pay off a gambling debt.

Renée felt compelled to press her point and brought up the idea of at least pawning the jewels, but her husband insisted that this was impossible because all Paris expected to see her wearing them the next night. The young woman, quite worried about Worms’s bill, then tried another tack.

“But my business in Charonne is going well, isn’t it?” she blurted out. “You were telling me the other day that the profits would be superb. . . . Maybe Larsonneau would advance me the 136,000 francs?”

Saccard had momentarily left the tongs lying between his legs. Now he grabbed them energetically, leaned forward, and practically disappeared into the fireplace, from which the young woman heard a muffled voice murmur, “Yes, yes, Larsonneau might perhaps—”

She thus arrived of her own accord at the point toward which he had been gently leading her since the beginning of the conversation. His masterstroke in Charonne had already been in preparation for two years. His wife had always been unwilling to sell Aunt Elisabeth’s land. She had sworn to her aunt that she would keep the property intact as a bequest for her child, should she become a mother. Faced with such stubbornness, the speculator’s imagination had gone to work and concocted a poem of epic proportions. It was a work of exquisite perfidy, a colossal fraud of which the city, the state, his wife, and even Larsonneau were to be the victims. He no longer spoke of selling the land, though he moaned every day about how foolish it was to leave it unproductive, to settle for a return of two percent. Renée, always hard up for cash, eventually agreed to some sort of speculative venture. He based his plan on the certainty of an imminent expropriation to make way for the boulevard du Prince-Eugène, whose route had not yet been finally decided. At this point he had brought in as a partner his old accomplice Larsonneau, who struck a bargain with his wife on the following terms. She was to contribute the land, representing a value of 500,000 francs. Larsonneau, for his part, promised to invest an equal amount to build on that land a music hall connected to a large park featuring amusements such as swings, skittles, bowling, and the like. Naturally the profits were to be shared, and by the same token any losses were to be borne fifty-fifty. If either partner wished to withdraw from the agreement, he could demand his share based on an estimate of the current value. Renée looked surprised at the figure of 500,000 francs, which seemed high since the land was worth 300,000 at most. But Saccard gave her to understand that this was a clever way of tying Larsonneau’s hands later on, since what he planned to build on the property would never be worth that much.

Larsonneau had become an elegant man about town, who wore fine gloves, dazzling linen, and astonishing ties. To run his errands he had a tilbury as finely tuned as a piece of clockwork, with a high seat on which he sat and drove himself around town. His offices on the rue de Rivoli comprised a suite of sumptuous rooms in which not a single file folder or scrap of paper was to be seen. His clerks wrote on tables of stained pear-wood, inlaid with marquetry and trimmed with chased brass. He had assumed the title of “expropriation agent,” a new profession that the public works of the city of Paris had called into being. His city hall connections yielded him advance information about the routing of new thoroughfares. When he learned the route of a proposed boulevard from one of the surveyors, he offered his services to the threatened landowners. Before the eminent domain decree was issued, he persuaded them to take certain steps to increase their indemnities. When a landowner accepted his proposal, he assumed all the costs himself, had a plan of the property drawn up, shepherded the case through the courts, and paid a lawyer in exchange for a percentage of the difference between the city’s initial offer and the indemnity finally awarded by the jury. In addition to this almost respectable activity, however, he was involved in several other lines of work. In particular, he lent money at usurious rates of interest. He was not a usurer of the old school—shabbily dressed, dirty, with blank eyes as expressionless as a five-franc piece and pale lips drawn as tightly as the strings of a purse. He smiled and darted charming glances here and there, had his suits made by Dusautoy, and lunched at Brébant’s with his victim, whom he called “my good fellow” and plied with Havana cigars over dessert. In fact, despite his penchant for wearing jackets cut narrowly at the waist, Larsonneau was a frightful fellow who, without perceptible change in his friendly demeanor, would hound a man for payment of a promissory note until he’d driven the hapless debtor to suicide.

Saccard would gladly have sought out a different partner, but he was still worried about the fake inventory that Larsonneau guarded like a precious possession. He preferred to involve him in the deal in the hope that circumstances might arise that would allow him to reclaim the compromising document. Larsonneau built the music hall out of wood and plaster topped by small tin turrets painted yellow and red. In the populous Charonne neighborhood, the park and amusements proved successful. After two years, the speculation seemed to have prospered, although the profits were really quite small. Thus far Saccard had spoken to his wife of the future of this fine idea only in the most glowing of terms.

Renée, seeing that her husband was making no move to come out of the fireplace and finding it harder and harder to make out his voice, finally said, “I’ll go see Larsonneau today. He’s my only resource.”

At that point he gave up struggling with the log.

“It’s been taken care of, my dear,” he replied with a smile. “Don’t I anticipate all your desires? . . . I saw Larsonneau last night.”

“And he promised to give you the 136,000 francs?” she asked anxiously.

Between the two burning logs he made a small pile of embers, delicately picking up the tiniest pieces of charcoal with the ends of the tongs and contemplating with an air of satisfaction the heap he was constructing with infinite skill.

“Now, hold on a moment!” he murmured. “A hundred and thirty-six thousand francs is quite a large sum. . . . Larsonneau is a fine fellow, but his means are still modest. He’s quite prepared to help you out. . . .

He paused, blinking his eyes and rebuilding a corner of the pile that had just crumbled. This game was beginning to confuse Renée’s thinking. In spite of herself she watched her husband’s increasingly clumsy efforts at the fireplace. She was tempted to offer him advice. Forgetting Worms, the bill, and her shortage of cash, she finally said, “Why don’t you put that big piece underneath? Then the others will stay in place.”

Her husband docilely obeyed. Then he said, “He can only come up with 50,000 francs. That’s still a nice advance. . . . But he doesn’t want to mix this business up with the Charonne arrangement. He’s only a go-between, you understand. Don’t you, my dear? The person who is lending the money is asking for enormous interest. He wants a promissory note for 80,000 francs due in six months.”

And having placed a sharp-pointed ember atop the pile, he folded his hands over the tongs and fixed his wife with a stare.

“Eighty thousand francs!” she exclaimed. “But that’s robbery! . . . Are you advising me to do something that foolish?”

“No,” he said curtly. “But if you’re in dire need of cash, I won’t forbid it.”

He got up as if to leave. Renée, torn by indecision, looked at her husband and at the bill he’d left on the fireplace. Then she took her poor head in her hands and murmured, “Oh, these business matters! . . . My head is splitting this morning. . . . Look, I’m going to sign this note for 80,000 francs. If I didn’t, I would become ill. I know myself. I’d spend the day in dreadful agony, worrying about what to do. . . . If I’m going to be foolish, I’d rather do it right away. It will ease the pain.”

She said she would ring for someone to bring the necessary forms, but he insisted on performing this service himself. He must have had the papers in his pocket, because he was gone for barely two minutes. While she was writing on a small table he had pushed close to the fireplace, he examined her with eyes bright with astonished desire. It was quite hot in the room, and the fragrance of the bedclothes and the young woman’s morning toilette still hung in the air. While talking she had allowed the dressing gown in which she had wrapped herself to fall open, and, as her husband stood in front of her, his eyes slipped from her bowed head and golden hair all the way down to the whiteness of her neck and bosom. He smiled strangely. The hot fire that had burned his face, the closed bedchamber whose heavy air retained a scent of love, the yellow hair and white skin that tempted him with a sort of conjugal disdain, filled his head with dreams, amplified the drama of which he had just played a scene, and stirred a secret and sensuous calculation in his brutal speculator’s flesh.

When his wife handed him the note and asked him to take care of everything, he took it but continued to stare at her.

“You are ravishingly beautiful,” he murmured.

And as she bent forward to push the table away, he kissed her roughly on the neck. She uttered a little cry. Then she got up, shaking, attempting to laugh, and thinking invincibly of the other man’s kisses of the night before. Saccard, meanwhile, regretted having kissed her like a coachman. In leaving he gave her hand a friendly squeeze and promised that he would have 50,000 francs for her that night.

Renée slept all day in front of the fire. In critical moments she could be as listless as a Creole. All her restless energy turned to laziness, nervous agitation, and numbness. She shivered, she needed a roaring fire, a suffocating heat that raised little drops of sweat on her forehead and made her drowsy. In this scorching climate, this bath of flames, her suffering almost ended. Her pain became a weightless dream, a vague sense of oppression, whose very ambiguity ultimately came to seem voluptuous. In this way, until evening arrived, she assuaged her remorse of the night before in the red glow of the fireplace, before a raging fire that caused the furniture around her to crack and at times left her unconscious of her existence. She was able to think of Maxime as of a searing ecstasy whose rays scorched her. She had a nightmare of strange loves atop flaming pyres, on white-hot beds. Céleste came and went, wearing the calm face of a servant with ice water in her veins. She had orders to admit no one. She even turned away “the Inseparables,” Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, who stopped by on their way back from lunch in a country house they had rented together in Saint-Germain. Toward evening, however, when Céleste came to inform her mistress that Monsieur’s sister Mme Sidonie wished to see her, she received orders to show the lady in.

Mme Sidonie generally came only at night. Her brother had nevertheless prevailed upon her to wear silk dresses. Yet even when the silk she wore came straight from the store, it somehow never appeared to be new. It seemed crumpled and without luster and looked like a rag. She had also agreed not to bring her basket to the Saccard household, but as a result her pockets were crammed with papers. She took an interest in Renée, whom she had never been able to turn into a client with a realistic appreciation of life’s exigencies. She visited her regularly and smiled at her with the discreet smile of a physician who does not wish to frighten his patient by revealing the name of her illness. She commiserated with the younger woman in her minor misfortunes, as if they were aches and pains that could be cured at once if only Renée would give her consent. Renée, who was in one of those states in which a person needs to be pitied, received her sister-in-law only to say that she was suffering from an unbearable headache.

“Why, it’s stifling in here, my beauty!” Mme Sidonie murmured as she slipped into the dark room. “Is it your neuralgia again? It comes from worry. You take things too much to heart.”

“Yes, I have lots of worries,” Renée answered listlessly.

It was getting dark. Renée had asked Céleste not to light a lamp. The only light was the bright red glow from the fireplace, which illuminated her entire body as she lay stretched out in her white dressing gown, its lace tinged pink by the fire. At the edge of the shadow one could make out just a bit of Mme Sidonie’s black dress and her two hands, folded and covered with gray cotton gloves. Her tender voice emerged from the darkness.

“Money troubles again!” she said, as if she were speaking of troubles of the heart, in a tone full of sweetness and pity.

Renée lowered her eyelids and nodded.

“Ah! If only my brothers listened to me, we’d all be rich. But they shrug their shoulders whenever I bring up that debt of three billion francs, you know. . . . My hopes are nevertheless still high. For the past ten years I’ve longed to go to England. I have so little time for myself ! . . . I finally made up my mind to write to London, and I’m waiting for a response.”

When Renée smiled, Mme Sidonie went on: “I know, you don’t believe me either. But you’ll be happy enough if I make you a gift one of these days of a nice round million. . . . You know, the story is quite simple: a banker from Paris lent the money to the son of the king of England, and since the banker died without a legitimate heir, the government is now entitled to demand repayment of the debt with compound interest. I’ve done the calculation, and it comes to 2,943,210,000 francs. . . . Rest assured, it will come, it will come.”

“In the meantime,” Renée put in with a touch of irony in her voice, “you might get someone to lend me 100,000 francs so that I could pay my tailor, who’s been giving me a hard time.”

“A hundred thousand francs can be found,” Mme Sidonie replied evenly. “It’s simply a matter of paying the price.”

The fireplace glowed. Renée, more languid than ever, stretched out her legs and revealed the tips of her slippers at the bottom of her dressing gown. The businesswoman’s tone reverted to pity.

“Poor dear, you’re really not reasonable. . . . I know many women, but I’ve never seen one who takes as little care of her health. You know, that Michelin girl is one who knows how to manage! I can’t help thinking of you when I see her happy and doing so well. . . . Do you know that M. de Saffré is madly in love with her and has already given her gifts worth almost 10,000 francs? . . . I believe her dream is to have a house in the country.”

Growing animated, she fumbled in her pocket.

“I have here a letter from an unfortunate young woman. . . . If we had a little light, I’d let you read it. . . . You see, her husband doesn’t take care of her. She was forced to borrow from a man I know and signed some IOUs. I was the one who had to pry the notes from the sheriff ’s clutches, and it took some doing. . . . Do you think those poor children were naughty? I welcome them in my home as if they were my son and daughter.”

“You know someone who lends money?” Renée asked casually.

“I know ten people who do. . . . You’re too good. Between women, we can speak frankly, no? Just because your husband is my brother is no reason to excuse him for running after tramps and leaving a lovely woman like you moldering by the fire. . . . This Laure d’Aurigny costs him a king’s ransom. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he refused you the money. He did refuse it to you, didn’t he? . . . The wretch!”

Renée listened complacently to this soft voice, which emerged from the shadows like a still-vague echo of her own dreams. Her eyes half-closed, she was practically lying down in her armchair and had forgotten that Mme Sidonie was there. She fancied she had dreamed of evil thoughts coming to her and tempting her with gentle blandishments. The businesswoman spoke at length, like a monotonous flow of lukewarm water.

“It’s Mme de Lauwerens who ruined your life. You’ve never wanted to believe me. You wouldn’t be there crying by your fireplace if you’d been willing to trust me. . . . And I love you as I love my own eyes, my pretty. Your foot is ravishing. You’re going to laugh at me, but I have to tell you how mad I am about you: if I go three days without seeing you, I absolutely must come to pay my respects. Yes, I feel I’m missing something. I need to feast my eyes on your beautiful hair, your face so white and delicate, your slender waist. . . . Really, I’ve never seen another woman with a figure like yours.”

In the end Renée smiled. Not even her lovers displayed such warmth, such rapt ecstasy, when they spoke to her of her beauty. Mme Sidonie saw that smile.

“All right, then, it’s agreed,” she said, rising abruptly from her seat. “I rattle on and on and forget that I’m giving you a headache. . . . You’ll come tomorrow, won’t you? We’ll talk money and find you a lender. . . . Hear me, now: I want you to be happy.”

Still motionless, fainting from the heat, the young woman was silent for a while before answering, as though it took laborious effort on her part to understand what was being said. “Yes, I’ll come, it’s agreed, and we’ll talk, but not tomorrow. . . . Worms will be content with an installment on what I owe. When he bothers me again, we’ll see. . . . Don’t say anything more about all this. My head is splitting from talking business.”

Mme Sidonie looked quite upset. She was on the point of sitting down again and resuming her soothing monologue, but Renée’s weary attitude persuaded her to postpone her attack. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of papers, among which she searched for and eventually found an object enclosed in a pink box. “I came to recommend this new soap to you,” she said, reverting to her businesswoman’s voice. “I’ve taken a great interest in the inventor, a charming young man. It’s a very gentle soap, very good for the skin. You’ll try it, won’t you? And mention it to your friends? . . . I’ll leave it here, on the mantel.”

She had reached the doorway when she turned again and, standing in the rosy glow from the fireplace, her face like wax, she began to sing the praises of an elastic belt, an invention she said was destined to replace the corset.

“It gives you a perfectly round waist, a real wasp waist,” she said. “I rescued it from a bankruptcy. When you come, you can try on some samples, if you like. . . . It took me a week of running to the lawyers. The papers are in my pocket, and I’m on my way right now to see an official about having the final lien removed. . . . See you soon, my darling. Remember that I’m waiting for you and that I want to dry your beautiful eyes.”

She slipped out and disappeared. Renée didn’t even hear her close the door. She remained in front of the dying fire, continuing her daydream, her head full of dancing numbers, while in the distance she heard the voices of Saccard and Mme Sidonie talking, offering her considerable sums in the tone in which an auctioneer invites bids on a piece of furniture. On her neck she could still feel her husband’s brutal kiss, and when she turned around there was the businesswoman at her feet, with her black dress and pasty face, making passionate speeches to her, extolling her perfections, begging her for a tryst in the posture of a lover on the brink of despair. This made her smile. The heat in the room was more and more stifling. And the young woman’s stupor and bizarre dreams were merely the products of a light and artificial sleep, and behind that thin veil she could still see the small private room on the boulevard and the wide divan next to which she had fallen to her knees. She had ceased to suffer altogether. When she opened her eyes, Maxime flitted through the rosy firelight.

The next day, at the ministry ball, beautiful Mme Saccard was marvelous to behold. Worms had accepted the payment of 50,000 francs. She emerged from financial embarrassment laughing like a woman who has recovered from a serious illness. When she crossed the salons in her splendid pink faille gown with its long Louis XIV train edged with white lace, there was a murmur, and the men shouldered one another aside to catch a glimpse of her. Those who knew her intimately bowed with discreet, knowing smiles, paying homage to those beautiful shoulders, so well-known to all of official Paris—indeed, they were the stalwart pillars on which the Empire rested. She had bared her bosom with such scorn for gawkers, and walked with such tranquillity and tenderness in her nudity, that it almost ceased to be indecent. Eugène Rougon, the illustrious politician, recognizing that those bare breasts were even more eloquent than his speeches in the Chamber and better at convincing skeptics and making people savor the charms of the reign, went over and complimented his sister-in-law on her bold stroke in dropping her neckline yet another inch– a happy inspiration, he called it. Nearly all the members of the Corps Législatif were there, and from the way the deputies were looking at the young woman, the minister expected to win a handsome victory when the delicate matter of the City of Paris loans came before that body one day hence. No one could vote against a government that could take a compost of millions of francs and out of such a dung heap produce a flower like Renée—such a strangely voluptuous flower, with her silky flesh, her statuesque nudity, her sensuous presence that left a warm fragrance of pleasure in its wake. What had everyone at the ball whispering, however, were the necklace and the aigrette. The men recognized these gems. The women pointed them out to one another with furtive glances. No one talked about anything else the whole evening. And the salons, illuminated by white light from chandeliers, stretched off into the distance, filled with a resplendent throng, like a constellation of stars fallen into a space too small to hold them.

At around one o’clock Saccard disappeared. He had savored his wife’s success as a man who has successfully pulled the wool over people’s eyes. He had once again shored up his credit. A business matter called him to Laure d’Aurigny’s. In leaving he asked Maxime to escort Renée home after the ball.

Maxime had spent the evening quietly at Louise de Mareuil’s side, both of them very much occupied with making disparaging comments about every woman who passed. Whenever they noticed some particularly egregious bit of fatuousness, they stifled their laughter with their handkerchiefs. Renée had to come over and ask the young man for his arm so that she could leave the salons. In the carriage she exhibited a nervous gaiety. She was still aflutter with the intoxicating mix of light, perfume, and noise she had just sampled. In any case she seemed to have forgotten their “foolishness” on the boulevard, as Maxime called it. Yet she queried him in a strange tone of voice: “So that little hunchback Louise is quite amusing, is she?”

“Oh, very amusing!” the young man responded, laughing some more. “You saw Duchess von Sternich with a yellow bird in her hair, didn’t you? . . . Well, would you believe that Louise says it’s a mechanical bird that flaps its wings and cries, ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ at the poor duke every hour?”

Renée found this emancipated schoolgirl’s joke quite amusing. When they arrived home, as Maxime was about to say good night, she said, “Won’t you come up? Céleste has probably made me something to eat.”

He went up with his usual carefree manner. But no snack was waiting upstairs, and Céleste had gone to bed. Renée had to light the three candles in a small candlestick. Her hand was shaking a little.

“That idiot,” she said, referring to her chambermaid. “She must have misunderstood my orders. . . . I’ll never be able to undress all by myself.”

She went into her dressing room. Maxime followed her, intending to repeat another of Louise’s jokes, which had just come to him. Feeling as much at home as he would have felt in a friend’s apartment, he was already looking for his cigar case so that he could light a Havana. But Renée put down the candlestick, turned, and fell, speechless and provocative, into the young man’s arms, pressing her mouth to his.

Renée’s private apartment was a nest of silk and lace, a marvel of stylish luxury. A small boudoir preceded the bedroom. The two rooms were really just one, or at any rate the boudoir was little more than the antechamber of the bedroom, a large alcove furnished with chaises longues and a pair of curtains in lieu of a door. The walls of both rooms were hung with a heavy gray silk brocade featuring enormous bouquets of roses, white lilacs, and buttercups. The window and door curtains were of Venetian lace lined with alternating strips of gray and pink silk. In the bedroom, the white marble fireplace, a veritable jewel, was encrusted with lapis lazuli and precious mosaics that repeated the roses, white lilacs, and buttercups of the tapestry, displayed as in a bed of flowers. A large gray-and-pink bed, its woodwork hidden beneath padding and upholstery and its headboard pressed against the wall, filled an entire half of the room with its flowing draperies, its curtains of lace and silk brocade covered with bouquets from ceiling to carpet. It resembled a woman’s gown, rounded, patterned, and trimmed with puffs, bows, and flounces. The ample curtain, swelling out like a skirt, suggested a great lady in love—leaning back, swooning, almost collapsing onto the pillows. Beneath the curtain was a sanctuary of pleated linen and snowy lace, all sorts of delicate and transparent things bathed in a religious twilight. Alongside the bed—a monument whose devout splendor called to mind a chapel decked out for some holy day or other—the rest of the furniture was of no account: some low chairs, a full-length cheval glass, and various dressers with an infinite number of drawers. The blue-gray carpet featured a pattern of pale roses in full bloom, and on either side of the bed lay great black bearskin rugs trimmed with pink velvet and silver claws, positioned so that the bears’ heads faced the window and stared through glass eyes at the empty sky.

This bedroom possessed a gentle harmony, a muffled silence. No shrill note, no glint of metal or bright flash of gold, intruded upon the dreamy melody of pink and gray. Even the fireplace ornaments—the mirror frame, the clock, the small candelabra—were of old Sèvres ⁴ whose gilt copper mountings were barely visible. These were marvelous pieces, especially the clock, with its round of chubby-cheeked Cupids swooping down upon the dial and peering over its edge like a gang of naked scamps mocking the rapid passage of the hours. This subdued luxury, these colors, these objects reflected Renée’s taste for the soothing and pleasant and created a twilit setting, as in an alcove with curtains drawn. The bed seemed to go on and on, as if the entire room were one immense bed, with its carpets, its bearskins, its upholstered seats and padded wall-hangings, which carried the softness of the floor up along the walls and all the way to the ceiling. As in a bed, moreover, the young woman left the imprint, the warmth, the fragrance of her body on everything in the room. When you pulled back the double curtain of the boudoir it was as if you were lifting a silk counterpane to enter a big bed still warm and moist, covered with fine linen, upon which lay in dreamy slumber the lovely shape of a thirty-year-old Parisienne.