Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

1

On the way back, in the crush of carriages returning via the lakeshore, the calèche was obliged to slow to a walk. At one point the congestion became so bad that it was even forced to a stop.

The sun was setting in a light gray October sky with streaks of thin cloud on the horizon. A last ray of sunlight descending from the distant heights of the falls threaded its way along the carriageway, bathing the long line of stalled carriages in a pale reddish light. Glimmers of gold and bright flashes from the wheels seemed to cling to the straw-yellow trim of the calèche, whose deep blue side panels reflected bits of the surrounding landscape. And higher up, fully immersed in the reddish light that illuminated them from the rear and caused the brass buttons of their cloaks, half-folded over the back of the seat, to glow, the coachman and footman in their dark blue livery, putty-colored breeches, and striped black-and-yellow waistcoats held themselves erect, grave and patient, as was only proper for the servants of a good house whom no crush of carriages would ever succeed in ruffling. Their hats, ornamented with black crests, possessed great dignity. Only the horses—a superb pair of bays—snorted with impatience.

“Look over there,” said Maxime. “Laure d’Aurigny, in that coupé.¹ . . . Do you see, Renée?”

Renée lifted herself up slightly and squinted with that exquisite pout she always made on account of her weak eyesight.

“I thought she’d run away,” she said. “She’s changed the color of her hair, hasn’t she?”

“Yes, she has,” Maxime laughed. “Her new lover can’t stand red.”

Renée, leaning forward with her hand resting on the low door of the calèche, stared, awakened at last from the melancholy dream that had kept her silent for the past hour as she lay stretched out in the back of the carriage like a convalescent resting on a chaise longue. Over a mauve silk dress fitted with pinafore and tunic and trimmed with wide pleated flounces, she wore a white cloth jacket with mauve velvet facings, which lent quite a swagger to her look. Her strange hair, of a pale tawny color reminiscent of the finest butter, was barely hidden by a thin hat embellished by a cluster of Bengal roses. Continuing to squint, she had the air of an impertinent youth, with a large furrow in her otherwise unblemished brow and an upper lip that protruded like a sulky child’s. Because it was hard for her to see, she took her eyeglasses—a man’s pince-nez with horn rims—and, holding them in her hand without setting them on her nose, examined the well-endowed Laure at her leisure and with an air of perfect calm.

The carriages remained motionless. Here and there amid the series of featureless dark patches formed by the long line of coupés—quite numerous in the Bois de Boulogne² that autumn afternoon—shone the corner of a mirror or the bit of a horse or the silvered handle of a lantern or the gold braids of a footman sitting high up on his seat. Occasionally one caught a glimpse of female finery in an open landau, a flash of silk here or velvet there. Little by little a profound silence subdued all the bustle, as everything ground to a halt. Inside the carriages one heard the conversations of people passing by on foot. Mute glances were exchanged through carriage doors. All gossip had ceased, and the wait was interrupted only by the creak of a harness or the sound of a horse pawing the ground impatiently. The indistinct voices of the forest died away in the distance.

Despite the lateness of the season, all Paris was there: Duchess von Sternich in an “eight-spring”; Mme de Lauwerens in a quite handsomely rigged victoria; Baroness von Meinhold in a ravishing reddish-brown cab; Countess Wanska, with her piebald ponies; Mme Daste and her famous black “steppers”; Mme de Guende and Mme Teissière, in a coupé; and little Sylvia in a dark blue landau. And then there was Don Carlos, in mourning, with his antiquated formal livery; Selim Pasha, with his fez and without his guardian; the duchesse de Rozan in a single-seat coupé with white-speckled livery; the comte de Chibray, in a dogcart; Mr. Simpson in the most elegant of coaches; the whole American colony; and, bringing up the rear, two academicians in a fiacre.³

The first carriages finally succeeded in extricating themselves, and one by one the whole line slowly began to move. It was like an awakening. A thousand lights began to dance, flashes darted among the wheels, and harnesses glinted as teams strained against their traces. Ground and trees shimmered in what seemed like the glare of moving ice. The glitter of harnesses and wheels, the amber glow of polished panels set ablaze by the setting sun, the shrill accents added by splendid liveries set up high against the open sky and sumptuous finery spilling out over carriage doors—all of this was swept along in a dull rumble, punctuated only by the hoofbeats of trotting horses. The whole parade moved steadily along in a uniform motion, sights and sounds unvarying from first to last, as if the lead carriages were pulling the rest after them.

Renée yielded to the slight jolt of the calèche as it resumed its forward progress and, dropping her pince-nez, once again leaned back against the cushions. With a shiver she drew over herself a corner of the bearskin that filled the interior of the carriage with a layer of silky snow. Her gloved hands luxuriated in the deep, soft curls of fur. The wind had picked up. The warm October afternoon that had brought spring back to the Bois and drawn the leading lights of high society out in open carriages threatened to end in a biting evening chill.

For a short while the young woman lay huddled in her warm corner, giving herself up to the voluptuous, hypnotic motion of so many wheels turning round and round in front of her. Then she lifted up her head toward Maxime, who with his eyes was calmly undressing the women on display in the nearby coupés and landaus.

“Honestly,” she asked, “do you think Laure d’Aurigny is pretty? You had nice things to say about her the other day, when the sale of her diamonds was announced! And by the way, have you seen the rivière and the aigrette⁴ your father bought me at that sale?”

Avoiding the first question, Maxime met the second with a nasty snicker. “You have to admit that he carried it off nicely. He found a way to pay off Laure’s debts and give his wife diamonds at the same time.”

The young woman gave a slight shrug.

“Naughty boy!” she murmured with a smile.

But the young man had leaned forward to stare at a woman whose green dress caught his eye. Renée laid her head down, her eyes half-closed, staring idly at either side of the carriageway, seeing nothing. To her right, a slow procession of shrubs and small trees with reddish foliage and slender branches slipped past. On the bridle path reserved for riders, narrow-waisted gentlemen occasionally galloped by on horses whose hooves raised small clouds of fine sand. To the left, flower beds of various shapes dotted the lawn that sloped down to the quiet lake, which was crystal clear, free of algae, and neatly edged as if by a gardener’s spade. From the far side of its mirror surface rose two islands, joined by the gray hyphen of a bridge, above which loomed charming cliffs whose theatrical rows of fir and other evergreens stood out against the pale sky, while reflections of their dark foliage on the water’s surface resembled the fringes of curtains artfully draped over the horizon. This little patch of nature, with its air of a freshly painted backdrop, lay immersed in a pale shadow, a bluish haze that added a finishing touch of exquisite charm, of delightful falsity, to the distances. On the other shore, the Chalet des Iles, looking freshly polished, gleamed like a brand-new toy. Snaking through the lawns of the park and around the lake, ribbons of yellow sand, narrow paths lined with the cast-iron branches of lampposts in imitation of a rustic copse, stood out in this final hour in the strangest way against the softened green of water and grass.

Accustomed to the contrived graces of these vistas, Renée, sinking back into lassitude, had closed her eyes almost completely, until all she could see was the way the long hair of the bearskin wound around the spindles of her slender fingers. But when something disrupted the regular trot of the line of carriages, she raised her head and nodded to two young women lying side by side in amorous languor in an eight-spring that had noisily turned off onto a side path leading away from the lakeshore. Mme la marquise d’Espanet, whose husband, to the great scandal of the recalcitrant old nobility, had recently embraced the imperial cause and accepted a position as aide-de-camp to the Emperor, was one of the most illustrious socialites of the Second Empire.⁵ The other woman, Mme Haffner, had married a well-known industrialist from Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was turning into a politician. Renée had known both women since boarding school, where others had referred to them with a knowing air as “the two Inseparables.” She called them by their first names, Adeline and Suzanne. After smiling at them, she curled up once more, but a laugh from Maxime made her turn around.

“No, really, I’m sad. Don’t laugh, this is serious,” she said on seeing that the young man was contemplating her with a mocking eye, making fun of her reclining posture.

Maxime replied in a queer tone.

“So we’re really hurt, are we? Really jealous?”

She seemed taken aback.

“Me! Why would I be jealous?”

Then, as if remembering, she added with her disdainful pout, “Oh, yes, of course, that fat cow Laure! As if I cared. If what everybody wants me to believe is true, and Aristide really paid that whore’s debts and spared her a trip abroad, he must be less in love with his money than I thought. That will put him back in the good graces of the ladies. . . . The dear man: I leave him perfectly free to do exactly what he wants.”

She was smiling as she said this, and pronounced the words “the dear man” in a tone of amicable indifference. Then, suddenly plunged again into deep sadness and darting her eyes about with the desperate look of a woman who can’t decide how to amuse herself, she muttered, “Oh, what I’d really like to do—but no, I’m not jealous, not jealous at all.”

She stopped, unsure of herself.

“Don’t you see? I’m bored,” was what she finally came out with, in an offhand voice.

Then, lips pinched, she fell silent. The line of carriages continued to move along the lake at a steady pace, sounding remarkably like a distant waterfall. Looming up on the left, between the water and the path, were small clumps of green trees with straight, slender trunks that oddly resembled a series of colonnades. The bushes and trees on the right had vanished, and the Bois now opened out into vast expanses of green, immense carpets of lawn punctuated here and there by clusters of tall trees. Gently undulating sheets of green stretched all the way to the Porte de la Muette,⁶ whose low gate, visible from quite a distance, resembled a piece of taut black lace stretched along the ground, and on the slopes, in the places where the undulations dipped down low, the grass had taken on a bluish tint. Renée stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed, as though this magnification of the horizon, these soft meadows moistened by the night air, had made her more acutely aware of the emptiness of her existence.

At length she broke her silence with these words, repeated in a tone of muffled anger: “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.”

“You’re not in good spirits, to be sure,” Maxime said quietly. “You’re on edge. No doubt about it.”

The young woman pushed back deeper into her seat.

“Yes, I’m on edge,” she responded curtly.

Then she took a maternal tone. “I’m getting old, my dear child. I’ll be thirty soon. It’s horrible. Nothing gives me pleasure. At twenty you can’t possibly have any idea—”

“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me along?” the young man interrupted. “That could take a devil of a long time.”

She met this impertinence with a feeble smile, as the gibe of a spoiled child who is allowed to do as he pleases.

“I advise you to feel sorry for yourself,” Maxime continued. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your wardrobe, you live in a splendid house, you have the finest horses, your every whim is received as holy writ, and the newspapers discuss each of your gowns as if dealing with an event of the utmost gravity. Women are jealous of you, and men would give ten years of their lives to kiss the tips of your fingers. . . . Am I right?”

She assented with a nod, without answering. With eyes cast down, she went back to curling the fur of the bearskin around her finger.

“Don’t be modest,” Maxime went on. “Come right out and admit that you’re one of the pillars of the Second Empire. You and I can say such things to each other. You’re the queen wherever you go: in the Tuileries,⁷ in the homes of ministers, or merely among millionaires, everywhere, from top to bottom, you’re in command. There is no pleasure you haven’t jumped into with both feet, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not hold me back, I would say—”

He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence in a cavalier manner: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple.”

She did not flinch.

“And you’re bored!” the young man resumed with comic passion. “You slay me! . . . But what do you want? What do you dream of ?”

She shrugged to indicate that she had no idea. Despite the tilt of her head, Maxime saw her at that moment as so serious, so somber, that he held his tongue. He gazed at the line of carriages, which, upon reaching the end of the lake, had spread out to fill the wide circle. Less bunched up now, the vehicles turned with magnificent grace. The volume of sound increased as the hooves of the horses struck the hard earth at a more rapid pace.

The calèche, making the wide turn to rejoin the queue, swung back and forth in a way that filled Maxime with a vaguely pleasurable sensation. With that he gave in to his desire to add insult to Renée’s injury. “You deserve to ride in a fiacre, you know. That would serve you right! . . . Just look at all these people heading back to Paris, people who are at your feet. They bow to you as though you were a queen, and your good friend M. de Mussy is all but blowing you kisses.”

Indeed, a man on horseback had been making signs in her direction. Maxime had spoken in a tone of hypocritical sarcasm. But Renée barely turned and shrugged her shoulders. This time the young man responded with a gesture of despair. “So, then, it’s as bad as that, is it? . . . But good God, you have everything, what more do you want?”

Renée raised her head. Her eyes were aglow with unslaked curiosity. “I want something different,” she muttered.

“But since you have everything,” Maxime laughed, “something different is nothing. . . . What do you mean, something different?”

“What do I mean?” she repeated.

But her voice trailed off. She had turned all the way round and was contemplating the strange tableau fading from view to her rear. Dusk came slowly, like a shower of fine ash. The lake, when viewed steadily in the pale light still lingering on the water, seemed to grow rounder, so that it resembled a huge slab of pewter. The trees lining both shores—evergreens whose straight, thin trunks seemed to surge up from the slumbering surface of the lake—at this hour took on the appearance of purplish colonnades whose regular architecture limned the studied curves of the water’s edge. Masses of foliage loomed in the distance, obscuring the horizon with broad dark patches. From behind those patches emanated a glow of embers, the light from a dying sun that set only a portion of the gray immensity aflame. Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature. The fading heights, slumbering sadly in mellow darkness, gave off such an autumnal melancholy that the Bois, gradually enveloped in a shroud of shadow and magnified by the potent magic dwelling in the wood, shed its worldly graces. As the vivid colors of the equipages were swallowed up by darkness, the sound of hooves could be heard more distinctly, like the whisper of distant leaves or the hiss of a faraway stream. Everything was receding and dying away. Amid this universal obliteration, the lateen sail of the big excursion boat stood out clearly and vigorously against the sunset’s amber. This sail, this inordinately enlarged triangle of yellow canvas, was all that could still be seen.

Renée, for all her jadedness, experienced a singular sensation of unavowable desire at the sight of this landscape, which she no longer recognized, this tastefully fashionable piece of nature turned by the dark chill of night into a sacred wood, into one of those mythical glades in which the ancient gods hid their outsized loves, their divine adulteries and incests. As the calèche drove on, it struck her that the twilight behind her had wrapped the land of her dreams in its shimmering veils and was making off with it, snatching away the bower of illicit but superhuman love in which she might at last have assuaged her ailing heart, her weary flesh.

When the lake and the little woods, vanished into darkness, were reduced to no more than a black streak on the face of heaven, the young woman turned abruptly and in a voice marked by tears of spite took up where she had left off. “What do I mean? I mean something different, for heaven’s sake. I want something different. How would I know what? If only I did. But can’t you see, I’ve had enough of balls, of late suppers, of parties and all the rest. Always the same thing. It’s deadly. . . . Men are so tiresome! So unspeakably tiresome.”

Maxime began to laugh. Signs of passion were showing through the socialite’s aristocratic surface. She had stopped batting her eyelids. The furrow in her brow deepened. Her lower lip, which had protruded in a sulky child’s pout, pushed further forward in pursuit of pleasures she coveted but could not name. Although she noticed her companion’s laugh, she was trembling too much to stop. Half-reclining, yielding to the rocking of the carriage, she continued her thought with a series of short, sharp sentences: “Yes, no doubt about it, you’re all tiresome. . . . I don’t include you, Maxime. You’re too young. . . . But if I were to tell you how Aristide suffocated me at the beginning. And as for the rest of them—the men who have loved me. . . . You know, we’re good friends, I’m not inhibited with you. So listen to this: there are days when I’m so tired of living the life of the rich woman, worshiped and adored, that I’d rather be someone like Laure d’Aurigny, one of those women who live as men do.”

Because this only made Maxime laugh harder, she insisted. “Yes, someone like Laure d’Aurigny. It must be less insipid to live that way, less always the same thing.”

For a few instants she fell silent, as if to imagine the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, in a discouraged tone, she resumed. “But you know, women like that must have their troubles too. Life is certainly no barrel of laughs. It’s deadly. . . . As I was saying, what I need is something different. I have no idea what that might be, you understand. But something different, something that’s never happened to anyone else, something out of the ordinary, a pleasure of some rare, unfamiliar kind.”

Her speech had slowed. As she uttered those last words, she seemed to be searching for something, yielding to some profound reverie. The calèche was just then climbing the avenue leading to the exit of the Bois. The shadows grew deeper. The woods sped past on either side, like two gray walls. Dashing down the sidewalks went the yellow-painted cast-iron chairs on which, in the evening when the weather was fine, the bourgeoisie sat and showed off its Sunday best. Empty, these benches had the dark, melancholy look of lawn furniture surprised by winter, and the dull, rhythmic sound of the returning carriages wafted over the deserted path like a sad lament.

Maxime was of course fully aware that it was quite bad form to think that life was a barrel of laughs. Though still young enough to succumb to bursts of enthusiasm, he had a selfish streak too deep, an indifference too scornful, and had already experienced too much genuine lassitude not to pronounce himself disgusted, blasé, and at the end of his tether. Ordinarily he would have taken a certain pride in such a confession.

He stretched out like Renée and affected a doleful tone. “Of course you’re right,” he said. “It is tedious. I’m not enjoying myself much more than you are. I’ve often dreamed of something different. . . . Nothing is as stupid as traveling. As for making money, I’d rather run through it, though that isn’t always as amusing as one first imagines. Loving, being loved—one soon gets sick of it, no? . . . Yes indeed. One gets sick of it.”

As the young woman did not answer, he continued, hoping to shock her with blatant sacrilege. “I’d like to be loved by a nun, you know. Now that might be amusing. . . . Have you ever dreamed of loving a man you couldn’t think about without committing a crime?”

She remained somber, however, and Maxime, seeing that she stayed silent, concluded that she wasn’t listening. With the back of her neck resting on the padded sill of the carriage, she seemed to be asleep with her eyes wide open. She lay inert, in the grip of her dreams, while now and then her lips twitched nervously. The shadow of twilight softly invaded her. All that that shadow contained of vague sadness, of discreet pleasure, of unavowed hope, penetrated her, bathing her in a sort of languid and morbid atmosphere. While staring at the round back of the footman perched on his bench, she was no doubt thinking about her pleasures of the past, of the parties she now found so dreary and no longer cared for. She looked back on her former life: the immediate gratification of her appetites, the loathsome luxury, and the oppressive monotony of the same caresses and the same betrayals repeated time and time again. Then there dawned in her something like a ray of hope, along with shudders of desire: the idea of that “something else” that her feverish mind had failed to discover. At this point her reverie went awry. Despite her efforts, the word she was looking for eluded her in the gathering darkness, was swallowed up by the steady rumble of the carriages. The soft swaying of the calèche was yet another obstacle that prevented her from formulating what it was she wanted. A tremendous temptation welled up from all that emptiness, from the shrubbery slumbering in the darkness on either side of the path, from the sound of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the carriage, which filled her with a delicious drowsiness. A thousand tiny breaths blew across her flesh: unfinished dreams, unnamed pleasures, vague wants—all the exquisite and monstrous things that a drive home from the Bois at the hour when the sky turns pale can put into a woman’s weary heart. She kept her two hands buried in the bearskin and felt very warm in her white cloth jacket with its mauve velvet lining. As she stretched her leg, relaxing in snug comfort, her ankle brushed the warmth of Maxime’s leg. He took no particular notice of this touch. A jolt wrenched her from her half-sleep. Lifting her head, she turned her gray eyes on the young man sprawled in all his elegance and stared at him oddly.

At that moment the calèche left the Bois. The avenue de l’Impératrice stretched straight ahead into the dusk, lined on both sides by green-painted wooden fences converging to a point on the horizon. On the side path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance pierced a bright hole in the gray shadow. Scattered along the path on the other side of the avenue, tardy strollers formed groups of black dots slowly moving in the direction of Paris. At the very top of the scene, at the end of the chaotic, crawling train of carriages, the Arc de Triomphe, set at an angle, grew whiter against a vast expanse of soot-colored sky.

As the calèche proceeded on its way at a brisker pace than before, Maxime, charmed by the English allure of the landscape, took in the hôtels on both sides of the avenue, town houses of fanciful design whose lawns stretched all the way down to the bridle paths. Renée, still lost in her daydream, was delighted to see the gaslights on the place de l’Etoile illuminated on the horizon one by one, and as those dancing lights stained the dying daylight with small yellow flames, she thought she heard secret calls and was convinced that the flamboyant Paris of winter nights was being kindled for her benefit, lighting the way to that unknown ecstasy for which her jaded senses longed.

The calèche turned down the avenue de la Reine-Hortense and stopped at the end of the rue Monceau, a few steps from the boulevard Malesherbes, before a large mansion with a courtyard in front and a park to the rear. Two gates encrusted with gilt ornaments opened onto the courtyard, each gate flanked by a pair of lamps in the shape of urns similarly bristling with gold appurtenances and equipped with large gaslights. Between the two gates the concierge occupied an elegant gatehouse vaguely reminiscent of a small Greek temple.

Just as the carriage was about to enter the court, Maxime jumped nimbly to the ground.

Renée, grabbing hold of his hand, said, “You know, we sit down to dinner at seven-thirty. You have more than an hour to dress. Don’t keep us waiting.”

With a smile she added, “The Mareuils will be there. . . . Your father wants you to pay particular attention to Louise.”

Maxime shrugged. “That’s some job,” he mumbled grumpily. “I want to get married, but courting her is just too silly. . . . It would be awfully nice of you, Renée, if you saved me from Louise tonight.”

He put on a funny face, borrowing his expression and accent from the actor Lassouche,⁸ as he did when he was about to come out with one of his customary pleasantries: “Will you, step-mama dear?”

Renée shook hands with him as with a friend. Quickly, in a mocking tone, she tried a nervous sally: “You know, if I hadn’t married your father, I think you might make love to me.”

The young man must have found this idea quite funny, because he was still laughing as he rounded the corner of the boulevard Malesherbes.

The calèche entered the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps of the mansion.

The wide, low steps were sheltered by a huge glass canopy, which was edged with a lambrequin trimmed with gold fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose above a servants’ hall, whose small, square windows of frosted glass could be seen almost level with the ground. At the top of the stairs the entrance to the vestibule was set forward and flanked by thin columns recessed into the wall, forming a protruding portion of the façade that had a round bay window on each floor and stretched all the way up to the roof, where it ended in a delta. On either side of this projection each floor had five windows, regularly spaced along the façade and set in simple stone frames. The mansard roof was cut square, with large sections almost vertical.

The façade on the park side was quite a bit more sumptuous. A royal staircase led up to a narrow terrace dominating the entire length of the ground floor. The banister of this terrace, in the style of the gates of the Parc Monceau, was even more gold-encrusted than the canopy and lamps on the courtyard side. Behind it stood the hôtel, with a pavilion at each corner, consisting of a sort of tower half set into the body of the structure, which created space for round rooms inside. In the middle, another turret set still more deeply into the structure made a slight bulge. The windows, high and thin for the pavilions, more widely spaced and almost square on the flat parts of the façade, featured stone balustrades on the ground floor and gilded wrought-iron railings on the upper floors. It was a parade of wealth, a profusion, an embarrassment of riches. The mansion disappeared beneath its sculptures. Around the windows and along the ledges ran coils of branches and flowers. There were balconies that resembled planters held aloft by huge naked women, their hips twisted and nipples thrust forward. Attached to the walls here and there were fantastic escutcheons, grapes, roses, efflorescences in stone and marble of every imaginable variety. The higher the eye looked, the more the mansion bristled with flowers. Circling the roof was a balustrade on which were set at intervals urns ablaze with sprays of gems. And there, amid the oeils-de-boeuf of the mansards, which looked out on an incredible tangle of fruit and foliage, lay the culminating elements of this astonishing décor, the pediments of the pavilions, in the center of which stood additional huge female nudes—naked women playing with apples or striking poses in thickets of bulrushes. The roof, laden with these ornaments and capped by additional fretwork in lead, along with two lightning rods and four enormous, symmetrical chimneys sculpted like everything else, seemed to mark the climax of this display of architectural fireworks.

On the right stood a vast conservatory, attached to the side of the mansion and communicating with the ground floor by way of a glass door in one of the salons. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low fence hidden behind a hedge, was rather steeply sloped. Too small for the house, so narrow that a lawn and a few clumps of trees sufficed to fill it, it was simply a mound, a pedestal of greenery, on which the mansion stood proudly ensconced and decked out for a ball. Seen from the park, looming above its neat lawn and the polished leaves of its gleaming shrubbery, that huge edifice, still brand-new and quite pale, had the wan face and rich, idiotic self-importance of a par-venue, with its heavy slate chapeau, its gilt railings, and its façade dripping with sculptures. It was a scale model of the new Louvre,⁹ one of the most characteristic examples of the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed. On summer nights, when the sun’s slanting rays lit up the gold of the railings against the white façade, people strolling in the park stopped to stare at the red silk curtains hanging in the first-floor windows. Through windows so large and so clear that they seemed to have been placed there, like the windows of a great modern department store, to display the sumptuous interior to the outside world, these petit-bourgeois families caught glimpses of the furniture, of the fabrics, and of the dazzlingly rich ceilings, the sight of which riveted them to the spot with admiration and envy.