Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Mr. Simpson, a little slow to take this in, replied that he would take verbena, whereupon M. de Saffré gave him the marquise: “Here is your verbena.”

The guests applauded discreetly. M. de Saffré had solved the problem quite nicely, they judged. As a cotillion leader he was “never at a loss,” as the ladies put it. Meanwhile, the orchestra had struck up the melody again with all instruments, and Mr. Simpson, after waltzing around the room with Mme d’Espanet, led her back to her place.

Renée was now able to pass. At the sight of “all this nonsense” she had bitten her lips until they bled. How stupid these men and women were with their tossing of scarves and naming themselves after flowers. There was a buzzing in her ears, and, furious with impatience, she felt like putting her head down and bulling her way through the crowd. She rapidly made her way across the drawing room, bumping into couples slow to regain their seats, and headed straight for the conservatory. Not having seen Louise or Maxime among the dancers, she told herself that they must be there, in some gap in the foliage, joined by that instinct for humor and ribaldry that led them to look for out-of-the-way places whenever they were together. But a visit to the gloomy conservatory turned up nothing. All she saw was a tall young man in the back of one of the arbors devoutly kissing the hands of little Mme Daste while whispering, “Mme de Lauwerens was right: you are an angel.”

This declaration, in her own house, her own conservatory, shocked her. Mme de Lauwerens really ought to transact her business elsewhere. Renée would have felt relieved if she could have driven all these loud people out of her house. Standing in front of the pool, she looked at the water and asked herself where Louise and Maxime might have gone to hide. The orchestra was still playing the same waltz, whose slow, swaying melody turned her stomach. It was unbearable not to be able to think in one’s own house. She couldn’t think. Forgetting that the young couple weren’t yet married, she decided that the answer really had to be quite simple: they had gone to bed. Then she thought of the dining room and ran hastily back up the stairs to the house. At the door of the large drawing room, however, her path was again blocked by yet another of the cotillion figures.

“This one is called ‘Dark Spots,’ ladies,” M. de Saffré announced in a flirtatious voice. “It’s my own invention, and you’re the first to hear of it.”

There was much laughter. The men explained the allusion to the ladies. The Emperor had just given a speech in which he had noted the presence of certain “dark spots” on the political horizon. For some reason, the phrase “dark spots” had caught on. All the wits of Paris had latched onto it, and for the past week “dark spots” had turned up everywhere. M. de Saffré placed the men at one end of the drawing room and had them turn their backs on the women at the other end. Then he ordered them to pull up their coats so as to hide the backs of their heads. Wild hilarity accompanied this maneuver. Hunchbacked, shoulders scrunched, their coattails up to their waists, the gentlemen looked truly hideous.

“Don’t laugh, ladies,” M. de Saffré shouted in a serious voice that could not have been more comical, “or I’ll make you lift your lace over your heads.”

The gaiety increased. The leader enthusiastically asserted his sovereign authority over several gentlemen who had declined to hide the backs of their necks.

“You are ‘dark spots,’ ” he said. “Cover your heads, show nothing but your backs. The ladies mustn’t see anything but black. . . . Now, move around, mix yourselves up so you can’t be recognized.”

The hilarity was at its height. The “dark spots” teetered to and fro on skinny legs like headless crows. One gentleman’s shirt showed, along with a bit of suspenders. Then the women begged for mercy: they were laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe, so M. de Saffré took pity on them and ordered them each to go over and pick out a “dark spot.” They took off like a covey of young partridges, with much rustling of skirts. Then, at the end of their run, each woman grabbed the man closest to her. The chaos was indescribable. One by one, the impromptu couples split off from the group and danced around the salon as the orchestra played even louder than before.

Renée leaned against the wall. She watched, looking pale, her lips pursed. An elderly gentleman gallantly approached her and asked why she wasn’t dancing. She was obliged to smile and offer some sort of response. Then she fled into the dining room. The room looked empty, but there, among the pillaged sideboards and abandoned dishes and bottles, were Maxime and Louise, dining quietly at one end of the table, side by side, on a napkin they had spread out between them. They seemed relaxed, laughing amid the chaos of dirty glasses, greasy plates, and warm leftovers overlooked by the gluttonous guests in white gloves. The young couple had simply brushed aside the crumbs. Baptiste moved gravely down the length of the table, ignoring the room, which seemed to have been overrun by a pack of wolves. He was waiting for the servants to come tidy up the sideboards.

Maxime had nevertheless managed to put together a very adequate supper. Louise loved nougat with pistachios, a plateful of which had been left on a sideboard. In front of the pair were three partially drunk bottles of champagne.

“Papa may have left,” said the young woman.

“Let’s hope so,” answered Maxime. “I’ll see you home.”

And when she laughed, he continued: “You know, they’ve made up their minds that I am to marry you. It’s not a joke anymore, it’s serious. . . . So what will we do when we’re married?”

“We’ll do what everybody else does, of course!”

This jest had escaped her rather quickly. As if to withdraw it, she hastily added, “We’ll go to Italy. It will be good for my lungs. I’m very sick. . . . Oh, my poor Maxime, what a strange wife you’re going to have! I weigh about as much as two sous’ worth of butter.”

She smiled with a touch of sadness in her pageboy costume. A dry cough turned her cheeks a glowing red.

“It’s the nougat,” she said. “At home I’m not allowed to eat it. . . . Pass me the plate. I’m going to stick the rest of it in my pocket.”

And she was emptying the plate when Renée walked in. She went straight over to Maxime, making an extraordinary effort not to swear, not to thrash the little hunchback who was sitting there next to her lover.

“I want to speak to you,” she stammered in a hollow voice.

He hesitated, in the grip of fear, dreading being alone with her.

“To you alone, right away,” Renée repeated.

“Why don’t you go, Maxime?” said Louise with an inscrutable look. “And while you’re at it, try to find my father. I lose him at every party.”

He got up and tried to stop Renée in the middle of the dining room by asking her what she had to say to him that was so urgent. But she muttered between her teeth: “Follow me, or I’ll tell all in front of everyone.”

He turned white and followed along behind her as docilely as a beaten animal. She suspected that Baptiste was staring at them, but just then she couldn’t have cared less about the butler’s piercing eyes. At the door, the cotillion delayed her for the third time.

“Wait,” she muttered. “Will these imbeciles ever be done?”

And she took him by the hand so that he would not try to escape.

M. de Saffré placed the duc de Rozan with his back to the wall in a corner of the drawing room, next to the dining room door. Then he placed a lady in front of him and, after that, a gentleman back-to-back with the lady, followed by another lady in front of the gentleman and so on, couple by couple, in a long serpent. But the dancers went on talking, dawdling instead of taking their places, so he shouted, “Now, ladies, everyone in position for ‘The Columns.’ ”

They came and formed “columns.” The indecency of being caught between two men, leaning against the back of one while pressed up against the chest of the other, filled the ladies with merriment. The tips of the women’s breasts rubbed the lapels of the men’s jackets, the gentlemen’s legs disappeared into their partners’ skirts, and when a woman, laughing suddenly, leaned forward, the mustache opposite was obliged to tilt to one side to avoid stepping over the line and planting a kiss. At one point a prankster must have given a slight push. The line tightened up, and coats pressed a little more deeply into skirts. There were little shouts and laughs—endless laughs. Baroness von Meinhold was heard to say, “But sir, I can’t breathe. Don’t hold me so tight!” which was so funny and made the whole line laugh so madly that the “columns,” shaken by all the hilarity, staggered, crashed into each other, and had to hold each other up to keep from falling. M. de Saffré waited with raised hands, ready to clap. Then he did clap, and at this signal each dancer suddenly turned around. The new partners, finding themselves face-to-face, took each other by the waist, and the line of waltzers then spread out around the room. The only one left out was the poor duc de Rozan, who on turning around found himself with his nose up against the wall. Everyone laughed at him.

“Come,” said Renée to Maxime.

The orchestra was still playing the waltz. The soft music, whose monotonous rhythm became insipid in the end, heightened the young woman’s exasperation. She made her way to the small salon, still holding Maxime by the hand, and pushed him into the stairway leading up to the dressing room.

“Go on up,” she ordered.

She followed. At that moment, Mme Sidonie, who had been prowling around her sister-in-law all evening, astonished by her restless scouting of all the rooms, happened to be coming up the conservatory steps. She saw a man’s legs disappear into the darkness of the small staircase. A pale smile lit up her waxen face, and, hiking up her magician’s skirt in order to move more quickly, she went looking for her brother, disrupting a figure of the cotillion along the way and questioning any servants she ran into. She finally found Saccard with M. de Mareuil in a room off the dining room that had been converted into a temporary smoking room. The two fathers were discussing dowries and marriage contracts. But after Saccard’s sister whispered something in his ear, he got up, excused himself, and disappeared.

Upstairs, the dressing room was in total disarray. Tossed aside and left lying on the chairs were the nymph Echo’s costume, the torn tights, bits of crumpled lace, and balled-up underthings—the kinds of things a woman urgently expected elsewhere leaves behind in her haste. Little silver and ivory implements lay strewn about. Brushes and files had fallen onto the carpet; and the still-damp towels, the cakes of soap forgotten on the marble, the perfume bottles left unstoppered filled the flesh-colored tent with a strong, penetrating odor. In order to remove the white powder from her arms and shoulders, the young woman had soaked in the pink marble bathtub after the tableaux vivants. An iridescent film of soap spread in patches over the surface of the bathwater now grown cold.

Maxime tripped over a corset, nearly fell, and tried to laugh. But he was shivering at the sight of Renée’s severe countenance. She walked over to him, pushed him, and said in an undertone, “So, you’re going to marry the hunchback?”

“Why, not at all,” he murmured. “Who told you that?”

“Look, don’t lie. It’s pointless.”

A rebellious feeling rose within him. She made him anxious. He wanted to be rid of her.

“All right, yes, I’m marrying her. So what? . . . I’m in charge of my own life, am I not?”

She moved toward him, her head bowed slightly, and with a wicked laugh took him by the wrists: “In charge! You, in charge! . . . You know you’re not. I’m in charge. If I were a mean woman, I’d break your arm. You have no more strength than a girl.”

And since he struggled, she twisted his arms with a violent force that came from anger. He gave a feeble cry. Then she let him go and resumed her train of thought: “Let’s not fight. As you see, I’m stronger than you are.”

His pallor remained, and he felt ashamed of the pain in his wrists. He watched her move about the dressing room, pushing furniture around, meditating, pondering the plan that she had been turning over in her mind ever since her husband had told her of the marriage.

“I’m going to lock you up here,” she said at last, “and when day comes we’ll leave for Le Havre.”

He went white again with alarm and stupor.

“But that’s crazy!” he shouted. “We can’t run off together. You’re out of your mind.”

“That may be. In any case, it’s your fault and your father’s if I’ve lost my mind. . . . I need you, and I’m taking you. Too bad for the imbeciles.”

There was a red glow in her eyes. She approached Maxime again, scorching his face with her breath: “What would become of me if you married the hunchback? You’d all laugh at me, and I might be forced to take back that big lump Mussy, who can’t even keep my feet warm. . . . When you’ve done what we’ve done, you stay together. In any case, it’s perfectly clear, I’m bored when you’re not around, and since I’m leaving, I’m taking you with me. . . . You can tell Céleste what you need and she’ll go to your apartment and fetch it.”

The poor wretch held out his hands and begged: “Listen, my dear sweet Renée, don’t do anything foolish. Calm down. . . . Think a little about the scandal.”

“I don’t give a damn about the scandal! If you refuse, I’ll go down to the drawing room and shout out that I’ve slept with you and that you’re such a coward that now you want to marry the hunchback.”

He heard her and bowed his head, giving in already to this willful woman, who imposed herself on him so heedlessly.

“We’ll be going to Le Havre,” she resumed in a lower voice, savoring her dream, “and from there we’ll sail for England. Nobody will bother us anymore. If that isn’t far enough, we’ll go to America. Since I’m always cold, I’ll be better off there. I’ve often envied the Creoles.”

But as her plans for the future grew more grandiose by the minute, terror again took hold of Maxime. To leave Paris, to go so far with a woman who was assuredly mad, and to leave in his wake a scandal so shameful that he would be obliged to remain in exile forever—it was like a horrible nightmare snuffing the life out of him. He desperately sought a way out of that dressing room, that pink fortress in which he could hear the tolling of the madhouse bell at Charenton.⁹

Then he thought he saw a ray of hope. “The problem is that I have no money,” he said softly, so as not to set her off. “If you lock me up, I won’t be able to get any.”

“But I have money,” she replied triumphantly. “I have a hundred thousand francs. It’s all coming together quite nicely.”

She took from the mirror-front wardrobe the purchase-and-sale agreement that her husband had left her in the vague hope that she might change her mind. She brought it to the dressing table, ordered Maxime to fetch pen and ink from the bedroom, pushed the soap aside, and signed the document.

“There,” she said, “the foolish thing is done. If I’m being robbed, it’s because I want to be robbed. . . . We’ll stop by Larsonneau’s office on the way to the railway station. . . . Now, my darling Maxime, I’m going to lock you up, and we’ll make our getaway through the garden when I’ve sent everyone home. We don’t even need to take any luggage.”

She was gay again. This madcap adventure delighted her. It was the ultimate eccentricity, an altogether original ending to the story, or so it seemed to Renée in the throes of her fever. It far surpassed her wish to take a trip in a balloon. She went and took Maxime in her arms, whispering, “I hurt you before, my poor darling. So you refused. . . . You’ll see how nice it will be. Would your hunchback love you as I love you? . . . That little half-breed isn’t a woman.”

She laughed, drew him toward her, and was kissing him on the lips when a noise made both of them turn their heads. Saccard was standing in the doorway.

A terrible silence ensued. Slowly, Renée removed her arms from around Maxime’s neck. She did not lower her brow but continued to stare at her husband with big eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a corpse. Meanwhile, Maxime, his head bowed, looking stunned and terrified, wobbled unsteadily now that he was no longer supported by her embrace. Saccard, thunderstruck by this ultimate blow, which at last drew a cry of pain from the husband and father in him, turned white as a sheet and did not move, but the fire in his eyes singed them from afar. In the moist and pungent air of the dressing room, the three candles burned quite high, their flames steady and erect, like glowing tears. And the only thing that broke the silence—the terrible silence—was the faint music that floated up the narrow staircase. The waltz, with its serpentine undulations, slithered and coiled and came to rest on the snowy-white carpet, amid the torn tights and discarded petticoats.

Then the husband moved forward into the room. A need for brutality mottled his face, and he clenched his fists to strike the guilty pair. Rage in this little dervish of a man exploded with the force of a pistol shot. As he continued to move toward them, he snickered: “You told her about your marriage, didn’t you?”

Maxime retreated until his back was to the wall.

“Listen,” he stammered, “She was the one—”

He was about to accuse her in the most cowardly way, to blame the crime on her, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself in the abject and quivering manner of a child caught misbehaving. But he lacked the strength to go through with it; the words stuck in his throat. Renée remained as rigid as a statue in mute defiance. Then Saccard rapidly surveyed the room, no doubt in search of a weapon. On the corner of the dressing table, among the combs and nail brushes, he spotted the purchase-and-sale agreement, on official stamped paper whose yellow color tinged the marble with its reflection. He looked at the document, then at the guilty pair. And leaning forward a little, he saw that the document was signed. His eyes moved from the open inkwell to the still-damp pen, lying by the base of the candelabra. He stood in front of that signed document and pondered his position.

The silence seemed to deepen, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz grew softer as the folds of the draperies wrapped themselves soothingly around it. Saccard gave an imperceptible flick of his shoulders. With a serious look he once again scrutinized his wife and son, as if to wring from their faces an explanation that was nowhere to be found. Then he slowly folded the document and put it in the pocket of his coat. All the color had gone out of his cheeks.

“You did well to sign, my dear,” he said quietly to his wife. “You’ve gained 100,000 francs. I shall give you the money tonight.”

He was almost smiling; only his hands were still trembling. He took a few steps, then added, “It’s stifling in here. Whatever possessed you to come and hatch one of your pranks in this steam bath!”

Then he turned to Maxime, who, surprised by the calmness of his father’s voice, had raised his head again. “Come down with me,” he continued. “I saw you go up and came after you so that you could say good-bye to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”

The two men went down together, chatting as they went. Renée was left standing alone in the middle of the dressing room, staring at the gaping void at the top of the small staircase into which she had just seen father and son vanish. She could not take her eyes off that void. To her astonishment, they had left quietly and amicably. They had not beaten each other to a pulp. She pricked up her ears and strained to hear whether some horrible struggle had broken out in the stairwell, sending bodies rolling down the stairs. In the tepid shadows nothing could be heard but the sound of dancing—a long lullaby. In the distance she thought she could make out the marquise’s laughter and the clear voice of M. de Saffré. So the drama was over? Her crime—the kisses in the big gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the conservatory, all the damnable love that had burned in her for months—had culminated in this insipid, ignoble end. Her husband now knew everything and had not even beaten her. And the silence that enveloped her—a silence in which the endless waltz dragged on—terrified her more than the sound of a murder. She was afraid of this peace, afraid of this soft, discreet dressing room redolent of the odor of love.

She caught sight of herself in the tall mirror of the armoire. She moved closer to it, surprised by her own image, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, wholly preoccupied by the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness was taking hold. Her yellow hair, pinned up around her temples and on the back of her neck, looked to her like a kind of nakedness, an obscenity. The furrow in her brow had deepened to the point where it created a dark streak above her eyes, like the thin blue mark of a whiplash. Who had done this to her? Her husband hadn’t raised a hand. She was stunned by the pallor of her lips, and her myopic eyes looked lifeless. How old she seemed! When she tilted her head forward and saw herself in tights and a light, gauzy blouse, she contemplated her appearance with lowered eyelids and sudden flushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing in such disarray, like a prostitute who bares her breasts and torso? She no longer knew. She looked at her thighs, made shapely by the tights; at her hips, whose supple lines she followed under the gauze; at her largely bare bosom; and she was ashamed of herself, and contempt for her own flesh filled her with dull rage against those who had left her that way, with nothing to hide her flesh but plain gold ringlets around her ankles and wrists.

Then, her drowning mind obsessed with but a single thought, she tried to understand what she was doing there stark naked in front of that mirror, and suddenly she leapt back in time to her childhood and saw herself at the age of seven in the somber shadows of the Hôtel Béraud. She remembered a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed her and Christine in gray wool dresses with red checks. It was Christmas. How happy they were with those two identical dresses! Their aunt spoiled them and went so far as to give each of them a bracelet and necklace of coral. Their sleeves were long, their bodices reached all the way up to their chins, and the jewelry stood out against the fabric, which seemed to them quite pretty. Renée still remembered that her father had been there and that he’d smiled with his melancholy smile. That day, she and her sister had moved about their room like grown-ups, not playing so as to avoid soiling their clothes. But when she went back to school with the Sisters of the Visitation, her classmates had teased her about her “clown’s dress,” with sleeves that went all the way down to her fingertips and a collar that reached up above her ears. She had cried in class. At recess, to stop the others’ making fun of her, she had pushed up those sleeves and turned down that collar. And the coral necklace and bracelet had looked prettier to her against the skin of her neck and arm. Was that the day she had begun to strip herself naked?

Her life unfolded before her. She experienced the slow onset of panic as swirling eddies of gold and flesh rose within her, first to her knees, then to her belly, and on to her lips, and now she could feel the current passing over her head, striking sharp, rapid blows against her skull. It was like rotten sap; it had drained the energy from her limbs, deformed her heart with the cancer of shameful loves, and planted sick and bestial whims in her brain. That sap had been absorbed through the soles of her feet from the carpet of her calèche and other carpets too and from all the miles of silk and velvet she had walked on since her marriage. Other people must have left poisonous seeds in their footsteps, and now those seeds were sprouting in her blood and circulating through her veins. She remembered her childhood very well. When she was little, she had merely been inquisitive. Even later, after the rape that had plunged her into evil, she had not coveted shame to that degree. Of course she would have been better off if she’d stayed home and knitted with Aunt Elisabeth. And she could hear the regular ticking of her aunt’s knitting needles as she stared into the mirror in search of the peaceful future that had eluded her. But all she saw was her pink thighs, her pink hips, this strange woman of pink silk she beheld before her, whose skin of fine, closely woven fabric seemed made for the amours of puppets and dolls. This was what she had come to: she was a big doll, from whose torn chest stuffing leaked in a thin stream. Then, confronted with the enormities of her life, her father’s blood—that bourgeois blood that tormented her in times of crisis—cried out in her and rebelled. She who had always trembled at the thought of hell—she should have lived her life within the dark austerity of the Hôtel Béraud. Who, then, had stripped her naked?

In the dim blue surface of the mirror she thought she saw the figures of Saccard and Maxime. Saccard, swarthy and sneering, had a color that resembled iron, a laugh that was torture to listen to, and skinny legs. What a will the man had! For ten years she had watched him at work in the forge, enveloped in sparks of red-hot metal, his flesh singed, breathing hard, tapping steadily, lifting hammers twenty times too heavy for him, heedless of the risk that he might be crushed. She understood him now. He seemed magnified by his superhuman effort, his scheming on a vast scale, his obsession with acquiring an immense fortune immediately. She remembered his jumping over obstacles, rolling in the mud, and not even taking the time to wipe himself off in order to arrive ahead of schedule, not even stopping to enjoy himself along the way, chewing on gold pieces as he ran. Then Maxime’s pretty blond head appeared behind his father’s stout shoulders. He wore the bright smile of a streetwalker and the blank stare of a whore who never lowered her eyes, and he parted his hair in the middle, revealing the whiteness of his cranium. He made fun of Saccard and deemed it “bourgeois” to go to so much trouble to earn the money that he consumed with such admirable indolence. He was kept. His long, soft hands told of his vices. His hairless body struck the weary pose of a satiated woman. Vice flowed as easily as lukewarm water through this soft, spineless creature, utterly devoid of curiosity about evil. He was passive. And Renée, as she watched these two apparitions emerge from the dim shadows of the mirror, took a step backward and saw that Saccard had tossed her out as a prize, an investment, and that Maxime had happened along to pick up the gold coin the speculator had let drop. She had always been an asset in her husband’s portfolio. He had encouraged her to wear gowns for a night and take lovers for a season. He had rotated her in the flames of his forge, used her as one might use a precious metal to gild the iron in his hands. Little by little, the father had thus made her mad enough and miserable enough to accept the son’s kisses. If Maxime was the impoverished blood of Saccard, she felt that she was the fruit these two worms had ruined, the vileness at which both had eaten away and in which both now lay coiled.

She knew now. These were the men who had stripped her naked. Saccard had unhooked her bodice, and Maxime had removed her skirt. Then, just now, both of them had ripped off her slip. Now she remained without a shred of clothing, with her gold ringlets, like a slave. When they had looked at her earlier, they hadn’t said, “You’re naked.” The son had quivered like a coward, trembling at the idea of seeing his crime through to the end, and had refused to follow her in her passion. The father, instead of killing her, had robbed her. He was a man who punished people by picking their pockets. A signature had appeared like a ray of sunlight in the midst of his wrath, and as vengeance he had carried that signature off with him. Then she had watched their shoulders disappear into the darkness. No blood on the carpet, not a single cry, not a whimper. These men were cowards. They had stripped her naked.

On one solitary occasion, she told herself, she had read the future: on that day when with burgeoning desires she had braved the murmuring shadows of the Parc Monceau and been terrified by the thought that her husband would someday defile her and plunge her into madness. Oh, but her poor head ached! How acutely she now felt the fallacy of the imagination that had led her to believe she was living in a blessed realm of divine ecstasy and impunity! She had lived in the land of shame, and she was punished by the surrender of her entire body and the annihilation of her being, now in its final agony. She wept that she had not listened to the resonant voices of the trees.

Her nakedness vexed her. She turned her head and looked around. The dressing room retained its heavy odor of musk, its overheated silence disturbed only by snatches of the never-ending waltz, like dying ripples on a sheet of water. Like attenuated laughter from some far-off sensual encounter, the music passed over her, and its mockery was more than she could bear. She stopped her ears so as to hear no more. Then her eyes took in the luxurious appointments of the dressing room. Her gaze followed the pink draperies all the way up to the silver crown, through which peered a cherub with plump cheeks readying his arrow. Her eyes lingered on the furniture, on the marble top of the dressing table crowded with jars and implements she no longer recognized. She went to the bathtub, still filled with stagnant water. With her foot she kicked away the fabrics left lying on the white satin armchairs: Echo’s costume, petticoats, towels she had tossed aside. And all these things spoke with the voices of shame: the nymph’s costume told of her having accepted the role of Echo for the novel thrill of offering herself to Maxime in public; the bathtub exhaled the fragrance of her body; the water in which she had soaked filled the room with a sick woman’s fever; the dressing table, with its soaps and oils, and the round curves of the furniture, so reminiscent of a bed, spoke brutally to her of her flesh, her loves, and all the filth she wanted to forget. She went back to the center of the room, her face crimson, because she had no idea how to escape from this bedroom scent, this luxury that revealed itself as brazenly as a prostitute, parading this abundance of pink. The room was as naked as she was. The pink tub, the pink skin of the tent, the pink marble of the two tables seemed to come alive, to stretch and curl and wrap themselves around her with such a living sensual embrace that she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and gave in to the crushing weight of the lace that adorned the ceilings and walls.