Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“My husband would be so glad to see you at our Thursdays!” the young woman continued.

M. Béraud Du Châtel took a few steps in silence. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Thank your husband for me. He’s an energetic fellow, it seems, and for your sake I hope that he does business honestly. But we don’t share the same ideas, he and I, and I’m not comfortable in your beautiful house at Parc Monceau.”

Aunt Elisabeth seemed saddened by this reply.

“Men are so disagreeable with their politics!” she said cheerfully. “Do you want to know the truth? Your father is furious with you because you go to the Tuileries.”

But the old man shrugged, as if to say that there were far graver reasons for his discontent. He resumed his slow pace, lost in thought. Renée remained silent for a moment, the request for 50,000 francs hanging on the tip of her tongue. But then she lost heart more than ever, went over and kissed her father, and walked out.

Aunt Elisabeth insisted on accompanying her as far as the staircase. In passing through the series of rooms, she continued the conversation in the soft voice of the elderly woman she was. “You’re happy, my dear. It gives me great pleasure to see you beautiful and healthy, because if your marriage hadn’t worked out, I would have blamed myself, you know. . . . Your husband loves you, and you have everything you need, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Renée answered, straining to smile though she felt sick at heart.

Her aunt continued to hold on to her with one hand, the other hand resting on the banister.

“I have just one fear, you see, which is that you don’t become intoxicated with all your happiness. Be careful, and above all, don’t sell anything. . . . If some day you have a child, you’ll have a tidy fortune ready and waiting for it.”

When Renée was safely back in her carriage, she gave a sigh of relief. She had drops of cold sweat on her temples. As she wiped them off, she thought of the damp chill of the Béraud house. When the carriage reached the bright sunshine of the Quai Saint-Paul, she remembered the 50,000 francs, and all her pain returned, sharper than ever. People thought of her as such a bold woman, but what a coward she’d just been! Yet it was all about Maxime, and his freedom, and their happiness together! As she reproached herself bitterly, a new idea suddenly came to her, compounding her despair: she should have mentioned the 50,000 francs to Aunt Elisabeth on the staircase. What had she been thinking? The good woman might have lent her the money or at the very least helped her out. She was already leaning out to tell the coachman to return to the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile when she had a vision of her father slowly making his way through the solemn gloom of the large drawing room. She would never be able to summon up the courage to return to that room right away. What would she say to explain this second visit? And in her heart of hearts, she realized that she also lacked the courage to discuss the matter with Aunt Elisabeth. She told the coachman to drive her to the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière instead.

Mme Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw Renée open the discreetly curtained door of her shop. She was there by chance, on the point of rushing out to court, where she had summoned one of her clients to appear before a justice of the peace. She would miss her day in court; that case could wait until another day, because she was too pleased that her sister-in-law had been so kind as to call on her at last. Renée smiled and looked embarrassed. Mme Sidonie insisted that she come upstairs and led her by way of the small staircase up to the bedroom after removing the brass knob from the shop door. She removed and replaced this knob, which was held in place by a single pin, twenty times a day.

“Now, my beauty,” she said after inviting Renée to sit on a chaise longue, “now we can have a nice chat. . . . You know, you’ve come at just the right moment. I intended to call on you this evening.”

Renée, who was familiar with this bedroom, felt a vague sense of unease, like a hiker who notices that a patch of forest has been cut from a familiar landscape.

“Oh!” she said after a while. “You moved the bed, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” came the milliner’s calm answer. “One of my customers thought it was much better facing the fireplace. She also advised me to get red curtains.”

“That’s just what I was thinking. The curtains weren’t that color before. . . . A very common color, red.”

She put on her glasses and examined the room, which had a sort of boardinghouse luxury. On the mantelpiece she saw long hairpins that surely didn’t come from Mme Sidonie’s small bun. In the place where the bed had been, the wallpaper was all scuffed, discolored, and dirty from the mattress. The businesswoman had tried to hide this eyesore behind two armchairs, but the backs of the chairs were rather low, and Renée’s eyes lingered on the worn strip of wallpaper.

“You have something to say to me?” she finally asked.

“Yes, it’s quite a long story,” Mme Sidonie replied, clasping her hands and making an expression like a gourmet about to recount what she had for dinner. “Guess what. M. de Saffré is in love with beautiful Mme Saccard. . . . Yes, my darling, with you.”

Renée avoided any affectation of modesty.

“What!” she exclaimed. “You told me he was so taken with Mme Michelin.”

“Oh, that’s over, completely over! . . . I can give you proof, if you like. . . . Perhaps you didn’t know that Baron Gouraud took a shine to the Michelin girl? It’s quite baffling. Everyone who knows the baron is flabbergasted by it. . . . And did you know that she’s working on getting her husband a red ribbon? . . . A spirited girl, that one. Nothing frightens her, and she doesn’t need anyone to draw her pictures.”

She pronounced the last sentence with a mixture of regret and admiration.

“But to get back to M. de Saffré. . . . He claims to have run into you at a theatrical party wrapped up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly invited you out to supper. . . . Is there any truth to that?”

Renée was floored by this news.

“Quite true,” she murmured. “But who could have told him?”

“He claims to have recognized you afterward, once you had left the room, and he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm. . . . And since then he’s been madly in love. A fantasy has taken root in his heart, you see. . . . He came and asked me to apologize to you on his behalf.”

“Well, then, tell him that I forgive him,” Renée interrupted without taking stock of what she was saying.

Then, remembering all her woes, she went on. “You’re a good woman, Sidonie, and I’m in agony. I absolutely must have 50,000 francs by tomorrow morning. I came here to discuss the matter with you. You know people who lend money, you said?”

Annoyed by the brusque way in which her sister-in-law had cut her story short, the businesswoman made her wait a bit for an answer.

“Yes, of course. Only I advise you first and foremost to look to your friends. . . . If I were in your position, I know what I’d do. . . . I’d quite simply go to M. de Saffré.”

Renée gave a forced smile. “But that would hardly be proper,” she replied, “if as you say he’s so much in love.”

The old woman stared at her hard. Then her pudgy face gently softened into a smile of tender pity.

“Poor dear,” she murmured. “You’ve been crying. Don’t deny it. I see it in your eyes. Be strong, accept life as it is. . . . Come, let me arrange the little matter we’ve been discussing.”

Renée got up, wringing her hands so that her gloves made a crinkling sound. And she remained standing, badly shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She was on the point of parting her lips, perhaps to indicate her acceptance, when a bell rang in the next room. Mme Sidonie rushed out, leaving the door open just enough to reveal two rows of pianos. The young woman then heard a man’s step and muffled echoes of a whispered conservation. Without thinking, she went over to examine the yellow stain the mattress had left on the wall. That stain annoyed her, irritated her. Forgetting everything– Maxime, the 50,000 francs, M. de Saffré—she walked back around the bed, thinking, “It went much better where it was before. Some women truly have no taste. Lying this way you’re bound to have the light in your eyes.” A vague image rose from the depths of her memory, an image of the stranger from the Quai Saint-Paul and of a romance that had consisted of just two encounters—a chance affair she had savored in this very room, with the bed in the other place. All that remained of that affair was that worn spot on the wallpaper. The room now made her very uneasy, and she grew impatient at the continuing buzz of voices from the adjoining room.

When Mme Sidonie returned, carefully opening the door and closing it again, she repeatedly signaled with her fingers that Renée should speak in a low voice. Then she whispered in her ear, “You’ll never guess, but you’re in luck. M. de Saffré is here.”

“You didn’t tell him that I was here, did you?” the young woman asked anxiously.

The businesswoman looked surprised and, feigning innocence, answered, “Why, yes, I did. . . . He’s waiting for me to invite him in. Of course I didn’t say anything about the 50,000 francs.”

Renée, who had turned quite pale, straightened as if lashed by a whip. Her pride returned with a vengeance. The sound of boots in the next room, now ominously brutal, exasperated her. “I’m leaving,” she announced curtly. “Come open the door for me.”

Mme Sidonie attempted to smile. “Don’t be childish. . . . I can’t stay here with this boy on my hands now that I’ve told him you were here. . . . You’re really putting me in an awkward position.”

But the young woman had already started down the stairs. Standing in front of the closed door of the shop, she repeatedly cried, “Open it for me! Open it!”

The milliner was in the habit of putting the knob in her pocket after removing it from the door. She wanted the discussion to continue. Finally giving way to anger herself and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes the bitter desiccation of her nature, she shouted, “But what do you want me to tell this man?”

“That I’m not for sale,” Renée answered, with one foot already on the sidewalk. And as the door shut violently behind her, she thought she heard Mme Sidonie mutter, “Get out then, whore. You’ll pay for this.”

“My God!” the young woman thought as she climbed back into her coupé. “Even my husband is preferable to that.”

She drove straight back to the house. That night she told Maxime not to come. She felt ill and needed rest, she said. And the next day, when she handed him the 15,000 francs for Sylvia’s jeweler, his astonishment and questions embarrassed her. She said that her husband had done a nice stroke of business. From that day forward, however, she behaved more oddly than before, often changing the times of her rendezvous with Maxime and even waiting in the conservatory to send him away. He, for his part, worried little about these mood changes. He delighted in obeying women’s whims. What annoyed him more was the moral tone that their amorous encounters sometimes took. She became quite sad, and on occasion tears welled up in her eyes. She gave up singing the number about “the handsome young man” from La Belle Hélène, played hymns she had learned at boarding school, and asked her lover if he didn’t believe that evil was punished sooner or later.

“No doubt about it, she’s getting old,” he thought. “She’s got a year or two more of fun in her at most.”

The truth was that she suffered cruelly. Now she wished she had betrayed Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Mme Sidonie’s she had recoiled in horror, she had given in to her instinctive pride, her disgust at the sordid bargain that had been proposed to her. In subsequent days, however, as she endured the anguish of adultery, she collapsed within and felt so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man who had walked through the door from the room with the pianos. Previously, thoughts of her husband in the midst of incest had triggered shudders of voluptuous horror, but now her husband—the man himself—had thrust himself on her with a brutality that turned her most delicate feelings into intolerable tortures. She, who had taken delight in the refinements of sin and liked to dream of a heroic paradise in which the gods made love with their own kind, now found herself mired in vulgar debauchery, shared by two men. She tried to take pleasure in her infamy, but in vain. Her lips were still warm from Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. The depths of forbidden love fascinated her. She even combined the two loves, seeking the son in the father’s embraces. Yet from this journey into the unknown realm of evil, from this ardent darkness in which her two lovers melded into one, she emerged more frightened and bruised than ever, plagued by terrors that were like the death rattle of her pleasures.

She kept this drama to herself, her suffering redoubled by the fevers of her imagination. She would rather have died than confess the truth to Maxime. Inwardly she feared that the young man might rebel and leave her. Above all, she had such an absolute belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the prospect of eternal damnation that she would have crossed the Parc Monceau naked sooner than confess her shame in a whisper. Yet all the while she remained the madcap whose extravagance astonished Paris. She fell into the grip of a nervous gaiety, and the newspapers, designating her by her initials, spoke of her astounding caprices. It was during this period that she seriously proposed a duel, with pistols, with Duchess von Sternich, who she claimed had deliberately spilled a glass of punch on her dress. It took the ire of her brother-in-law the minister to put an end to this idea. On another occasion she bet Mme de Lauwerens that she could run a lap around Longchamp in less than ten minutes, and she would have done so had her costume allowed. Even Maxime began to be frightened by Renée’s increasingly insane behavior, and when he stared at her head on the pillow at night, it seemed to him filled with the crazed fury of a city bent on pleasure.

One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. ⁶ They had not even looked at the poster and went only because they wanted to see the great Italian tragedienne Ristori,⁷ who was drawing large crowds, so that fashion dictated they must see her. The play was Phèdre.⁸ Maxime remembered the classical repertory fairly well, and Renée knew enough Italian to follow the performance. And indeed, they responded to the drama with particular emotion, even though it was performed in a foreign tongue whose sonorities struck them at times as a mere orchestral accompaniment to the actors’ pantomime. Hippolyte was played by a tall, pale youth, a mediocre actor who wept his part.

“What a simpleton!” Maxime murmured.

But Ristori, whose broad shoulders shook with sobs and who had a tragic face and plump arms, moved Renée profoundly. Phèdre was of the blood of Pasiphaé, and Renée asked herself whose blood might flow in her veins as an incestuous stepmother of modern times. She saw nothing of the play but this tall woman trailing the ancient crime with her across the stage. In the first act, when Phèdre confesses her guilty love to Œnone; in the second, when, burning with ardor, she declares her love to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when she is crushed by the return of Thésée and curses herself in an access of dark fury; the actress filled the hall with such cries of wild passion and superhuman sensual need that the young woman felt every shudder of her desire and remorse in her own flesh.

“Wait,” Maxime whispered in her ear. “Now you’ll hear Théramène tell his story. The old fool!” And in a hollow voice he whispered:

Scarcely had we issued from Troezen’s gates, He on his chariot mounted . . .

But Renée was no longer watching or listening when the old man spoke. She found the light blinding and the heat from all those faces staring at the stage stifling. The monologue went on interminably. She was in the conservatory, beneath its ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She was suffering dreadfully and had lost consciousness when a repentant Phèdre, in convulsions from the poison, made her open her eyes again with her final agony. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself someday? How paltry and shameful her drama seemed alongside the ancient epic! And while Maxime fastened her evening wrap underneath her chin, she could still hear Ristori’s gruff voice growling behind her and Œnone’s indulgent murmur in reply.

In the coupé the young man prattled on all by himself, saying that on the whole he found tragedy “deadly” and preferred the plays at the Bouffes.⁹ Still, Phèdre was “pretty strong stuff.” It interested him because. . . . And to complete his thought he squeezed Renée’s hand. Then a strange idea occurred to him, and he yielded to the urge to say something witty. “I was right,” he whispered, “not to go too close to the ocean in Trouville.”

Renée, distracted by painful dreams, said nothing. He had to repeat what he had said.

“Why?” she asked with surprise, not understanding what he meant.

“Why, the monster . . .”

And then he snickered. At this Renée froze. Her mind went completely awry. Ristori was now just a big puppet who lifted her apron and stuck out her tongue at the audience like Blanche Muller in the third act of La Belle Hélène. Théramène danced the cancan, and Hippolyte ate toast with jelly and stuck his fingers up his nose.

When more searing pangs of remorse left her quivering, her pride sometimes rebelled. What crime had she committed, after all, and what reason did she have to blush? Did she not stumble upon greater infamies every day? Did she not rub elbows at the ministries and in the Tuileries—everywhere, in fact—with wretches like herself who draped their flesh with millions and whom men worshiped on their knees? And she thought of the shameful friendship of Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, about which people sometimes smiled at the Empress’s Mondays. She remembered the mercenary business of Mme de Lauwerens, whom husbands celebrated for her good conduct, her orderliness, and her punctiliousness in paying her suppliers. She pronounced the names of Mme Daste, Mme Teissière, and Baroness von Meinhold, ladies whose luxurious lifestyles were paid for by their lovers and whose prices were quoted in high society the way shares of stock are quoted on the Bourse. Mme de Guende had such an empty head and such a beautiful figure that she had three high-ranking officers as lovers at the same time and could not tell them apart because all of them wore the same uniform: that little devil Louise said she forced them all to strip down to their shirts so that she could tell which one she was talking to. Countess Wanska remembered the courtyards she had sung in and the sidewalks where people said they had seen her prowling like a wolf in calico. Those women wore their shame in triumph, displayed their wounds as trophies. And lording it over them all was the wasted, old, and ugly Duchess von Sternich, who gloried in having spent a night in the imperial bed. She was vice made official, and from this past she retained something of a majesty in debauchery, a sovereign power over this illustrious band of harlots.

Eventually Renée got used to her incest as one might get used to a ball gown which at first seemed unbearably stiff. In the end she came to believe that she was living in a world apart, superior to the common morality, a world in which the senses could be refined and developed and where it was permissible to bare one’s flesh for the delectation of all Olympus. ¹⁰ Sin became a luxury, a flower stuck in her hair, a diamond affixed to her forehead. And as justification and redemption she once again conjured up the image of the Emperor passing between the two rows of bowed shoulders on the general’s arm.

Only one man—Baptiste, her husband’s valet—continued to worry her. Ever since Saccard had renewed his amorous relations with her, this tall, pale, sober servingman seemed to hover about her with a solemnity that conveyed a silent censure. He did not look at her. His cold stare passed above her, over the bun atop her head, as chaste as a beadle unwilling to sully his eyes by gazing at a sinner’s hair. She imagined he knew everything and would have bought his silence if she had dared. Then she became uneasy, and whenever she ran into Baptiste she felt a strange sort of respect for him, saying to herself that all the decency of her household had fled and taken refuge beneath this servant’s dark frock.

One day she asked Céleste, “Does Baptiste tell jokes in the servants’ hall? Do you know whether he’s ever had an affair, a mistress of some sort?”

“I should say so!” was all the maid replied.

“Well, then, he must have made love to you, no?”

“You don’t know what you’re saying. He never looks at women. We seldom see him. . . . He’s always either with Monsieur or in the stables. He says he’s quite fond of horses.”

Renée found this honesty irritating. She pressed harder; she would have liked to be able to feel contempt for her servants. Although she felt affection for Céleste, she would have been pleased to learn that the girl had lovers.

“But don’t you find Baptiste handsome, Céleste?”

“Me, madame!” the maid exclaimed, with the stunned look of a person who has just heard something incredible. “I have very different ideas in my head. I don’t want a man. I have my plan. You’ll see later on. I’m not stupid, believe me.”

Renée could get nothing clearer out of her. Her worries were growing in any case. Her ostentatious life and extravagant escapades ran up against numerous obstacles, which occasionally resulted in bruises. One day, for instance, the subject of Louise de Mareuil came up in a conversation between her and Maxime. She felt no jealousy toward the “hunchback,” as she disdainfully called her. She knew that the doctors had pronounced the girl’s doom and could not believe that Maxime would ever marry such an ugly duckling, not even for a dowry of a million francs. While mired in sin, she clung to a bourgeois naïveté about people she loved. Though she despised herself, she was quite ready to think of them as superior beings altogether worthy of respect. Yet even as she denied the possibility of marriage between Louise and Maxime, which in her eyes would have been a despicably immoral thing—a theft—she found the familiarity and camaraderie of these two young people painful to behold. Whenever she mentioned the girl to her lover, he laughed freely, repeated the child’s clever remarks, and told her that “the kid calls me her little man, you know.”

He was such a free spirit, moreover, that she didn’t dare point out to him that the “kid” was seventeen years old and that their habit of holding hands and eagerness to seek out dark corners of drawing rooms from which to make fun of everyone else hurt her and ruined even the gayest of evenings.

An incident occurred that significantly altered the situation. Renée frequently felt a need to show off, and there was at times a crude boldness to her capriciousness. She would entice Maxime behind a curtain or a door and kiss him, despite the risk of being seen. One Thursday night, when the buttercup salon was full of visitors, she had the bright idea of calling out to Maxime, who was chatting with Louise. She moved toward him from the far end of the conservatory, where she had been, and when they came together suddenly kissed him on the mouth, in the belief that two clumps of shrubbery provided sufficient cover. But Louise had followed the young man, and when the lovers looked up, they saw her a few steps away staring at them with a strange smile, betraying neither a blush nor a sign of astonishment but staring with the quiet, friendly air of a companion in vice clever enough to understand and appreciate such a kiss.

That day Maxime was genuinely alarmed, whereas Renée seemed indifferent and even pleased. It was over. Now it was impossible for the hunchback to take her lover from her. She thought, “I should have done it on purpose. Now she knows that her ‘little man’ is mine.”

Maxime felt reassured on finding Louise as cheerful and funny as before. He judged her to be a “very smart, very good girl.” And that was all.

Renée worried, with reason. Saccard had for some time been thinking about marrying his son off to Mlle de Mareuil. There was a dowry worth a million francs that he did not want to let slip through his fingers, for he meant to get his hands on the money eventually. When Louise remained bedridden for three weeks at the beginning of the winter, he became so frightened that she might die before the planned wedding took place that he made up his mind to do it immediately. They were indeed a little young, but the doctors warned that the month of March was particularly dangerous for a girl with tuberculosis. Meanwhile, M. de Mareuil found himself in a delicate situation. In the last election, he had finally managed to get himself elected as deputy, but the Corps Législatif had quashed the result, which had been the scandal of the governmental reorganization. The story of the vote had made for a comic epic, in fact, and the newspapers had made hay with it for a month. M. Hupel de la Noue, the prefect of the département, had acted with such vigor that the other candidates had not been able to post their platforms or distribute their brochures. Following his advice, M. de Mareuil had covered the district with tables that had distributed food and drink to the peasants for an entire week. He had promised, moreover, to build a railroad, a bridge, and three churches, and on the eve of the voting had sent influential voters portraits of the Emperor and Empress, two large engravings under glass in gold frames. This gift had proved fabulously successful; the majority was overwhelming. But when the Chamber, faced with laughter from all of France, found itself forced to send M. de Mareuil back to confront the voters a second time, the minister flew into a rage against the prefect and the hapless candidate, who had really been too “clumsy.” He even broached the idea of choosing another man as the official candidate. M. de Mareuil was terrified. He had spent 300,000 francs in the département, where he owned vast estates that bored him to tears and that he would be forced to sell at a loss. He therefore begged his dear colleague to calm his brother down and promise him, in the candidate’s name, an altogether proper election. It was in these circumstances that Saccard again brought up the matter of the marriage of their two children, on which the fathers finally agreed.

When Maxime was sounded out on this subject, he found himself in a quandary. Louise amused him, and the dowry tempted him even more. He said yes and agreed to all the dates Saccard proposed so as to avoid the vexation of further discussion. Inwardly, however, he acknowledged that unfortunately things were unlikely to work themselves out quite so easily. Renée would never go along. She would weep, she would make scenes, she was capable of causing a scandal big enough to set Paris on its ear. It was quite unpleasant. Lately she frightened him. She doted on him with such anxious eyes, she possessed him so despotically, that he could almost feel her claws digging into his skin each time she placed her white hand on his shoulder. Her restlessness became impetuousness, and there was a new staccato note in her laughter. He truly feared that some night she might go mad in his arms. In her, the remorse, the fear of being caught, and the cruel pleasures of adultery expressed themselves, not as with other women in the form of tears and misery, but as a more unfettered extravagance and a more irresistible need to kick up a fuss. As her terror increased, a rattle began to make itself heard, a sound that signaled a breakdown of this lovely and astonishing machine, which was falling to pieces.

Maxime passively waited for an occasion that would allow him to get rid of this troublesome mistress. He said again that they had done something foolish. Although their camaraderie had initially added a novel pleasure to their amours, it now prevented him from breaking off the relationship, as he certainly would have done with another woman. He simply wouldn’t have returned: that was his way of ending his affairs, so as to avoid all effort and any possibility of a quarrel. But he felt incapable of any grand gesture and was indeed still glad to abandon himself to Renée’s caresses. She was motherly, she paid his way, she rescued him from difficulty when a creditor lost patience with him. The idea of Louise came back to him, the idea of the million-franc dowry, and this made him think, even as Renée showered him with kisses, “that all this is fine and dandy, but it isn’t serious, and it’s high time to end it.”

One night, Maxime went to play cards at the home of a lady where the game often continued until dawn, and he was wiped out so quickly that he fell prey to the kind of silent rage that often afflicts gamblers whose pockets are empty. He would have given anything in the world for a few more louis to lay on the table. He took his hat, and with the mechanical step of a man driven by an unalterable idea, he went to the Parc Monceau, opened the side gate, and found himself in the conservatory. It was past midnight. Renée had forbidden him to come that night. Now, when she shut her door to him, she no longer even tried to fob him off with an explanation, and he could think of nothing but taking advantage of his day off. He didn’t clearly remember the young woman’s warning to stay away until he was standing in front of the glass door to the small salon, which he found locked. On nights when he was expected, Renée normally left the door unlatched.