Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

In the darkness, however, she again noticed the flesh-colored stain of the dressing room and imagined the gray softness of the bedroom, the tender gold of the small salon, the garish green of the conservatory—so many complicit riches. These were the places where her feet had soaked up the rotten sap. She would not have slept with Maxime on a pallet in some garret. That would have been too vile. Silk had made her crime stylish. And she dreamt of tearing down all this lace, of spitting on this silk, of kicking her big bed to pieces, and of trailing her luxury through some gutter from which it would emerge as worn and soiled as she was.

When she opened her eyes, she went over to the mirror and looked at herself again, examined herself closely. She was done for. She saw herself dead. Her whole face told her that her nervous breakdown was nearly complete. Maxime—the ultimate perversion of her senses– had finished his work, exhausted her flesh, unhinged her mind. She had no more joys to savor, no further hope of awakening. At this thought a savage rage was rekindled in her. And in one final paroxysm of desire, she dreamt of seizing her prey one more time, of dying in Maxime’s arms and taking him with her. Louise could not marry him. Louise knew full well that he did not belong to her, since she had seen them kissing each other on the lips. Then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders so as not to cross the dance floor naked. She went downstairs.

In the small salon she found herself face-to-face with Mme Sidonie, who had again stationed herself on the conservatory steps to relish the drama. But she no longer knew what to think when Saccard reappeared with Maxime and to her whispered questions brusquely replied that she was dreaming, that there was “nothing at all.” Then the truth dawned on her. Her yellow face turned white: this really was too much. Quietly, she went over and glued her ear to the door of the staircase, hoping that she would hear Renée sobbing upstairs. When the young woman opened the door, it nearly struck her sister-in-law in the face.

“You’re spying on me!” Renée said angrily.

But Mme Sidonie replied with splendid disdain: “As if I’d bother with your filth!”

Then, hiking up her magician’s robes, she withdrew with a majestic glare: “It’s not my fault, darling, if you’ve had some mishaps. . . . But understand that I hold no grudge. And that you would have found a second mother in me and may find one still. I’ll be happy to see you at my place whenever it suits you.”

Renée wasn’t listening. She walked into the large drawing room and made her way through a very complex figure of the cotillion without so much as noticing the surprise occasioned by her fur cloak. In the middle of the room, groups of ladies and gentlemen were milling around and waving streamers, and M. de Saffré’s high-pitched voice was saying, “Let’s go, ladies, it’s time for the ‘Mexican War.’ The ladies must pretend to be cactus plants by sitting on the floor and spreading their skirts out around them. . . . Now, the gentlemen will dance around the cacti. . . . Then, when I clap my hands, each gentleman must waltz with his cactus.”

He clapped his hands. The brass rang out, and couples once again waltzed around the salon. The figure was not much of a success. Two of the ladies remained sitting on the carpet, tangled up in their petticoats. Mme Daste said that what amused her in the “Mexican War” was making a “cheese” out of her dress as the girls used to do at boarding school.

When Renée reached the vestibule, she found Louise and her father with Saccard and Maxime. Baron Gouraud had left. Mme Sidonie was on her way out with Mignon and Charrier, and M. Hupel de la Noue escorted Mme Michelin, while her husband followed at a discreet distance. The prefect had spent most of the evening courting the pretty brunette. He had just persuaded her to spend a month of the summer season in the capital of his district, “where there are some truly unusual ancient artifacts to be seen.”

Louise, who was surreptitiously nibbling on the nougat she had hidden in her pocket, succumbed to a fit of coughing just as she was about to leave.

“Button up tight,” her father said.

And Maxime hastened to tighten the string on the hood of her evening wrap. She lifted her chin and allowed herself to be swaddled. But when Mme Saccard appeared, M. de Mareuil returned to say his good-byes. Everyone stood chatting for a while. To explain her pallor and shivering, she said that she had felt cold and had gone upstairs to fetch the fur now draped over her shoulders. Meanwhile, she was waiting for an opportunity to whisper something to Louise, who was staring at her with curious tranquillity. Since the men were still shaking hands, Renée leaned over to her and whispered: “You won’t marry him, will you? It’s out of the question. You know full well—”

But the child interrupted, rising up on her toes to whisper in Renée’s ear. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take him away. . . . It won’t matter, since we’ll be going off to Italy.”

And she smiled the inscrutable smile of a wicked sphinx. All Renée could do was stammer. Understanding eluded her; she thought the hunchback was making a joke at her expense. Then, after the Mareuils had left, having repeated “Until Sunday!” several times before doing so, she looked with terrified eyes first at her husband, then at Maxime, and seeing them there, looking cool and smug, she hid her face in her hands and fled, taking refuge at the far end of the conservatory.

The paths were deserted. The great masses of foliage slept, while two budding water lilies slowly unfolded on the stagnant surface of the pool. Renée felt like crying, but the humid heat and strong odor that she knew so well took her by the throat and strangled her despair. She looked at her feet on the edge of the pool, on the patch of yellow sand where she had laid out the bearskin the previous winter. And when she looked up, she could still see a figure of the cotillion unfolding in the distance through the double doors, which had been left open.

There was a deafening noise, a chaotic free-for-all in which all she could make out at first were flying skirts and black legs stamping and whirling. M. de Saffré’s voice cried out: “Change your ladies! Change your ladies!” And couples passed by in a cloud of fine yellow dust. Each gentleman danced three or four turns of the waltz and then flung his lady into the arms of his neighbor, who did the same. Baroness von Meinhold, wearing her Emerald costume, passed from the hands of the comte de Chibray to those of Mr. Simpson. He caught her as best he could by one shoulder, while the fingers of his gloves slipped beneath her bodice. A flushed Countess Wanska, her coral pendants jangling, leapt in a single bound from the chest of M. de Saffré to that of the duc de Rozan, whom she wrapped herself around and forced to pirouette for five measures so that she might attach herself next to the hip of Mr. Simpson, who had just hurled the Emerald at the cotillion’s leader. And Mme Teissière, Mme Daste, and Mme de Lauwerens, gleaming like great living jewels with the pale yellow of Topaz, the soft blue of Turquoise, and the fiery blue of Sapphire, briefly let themselves go and arched their backs under the outstretched wrists of their waltzing partners, then started up anew, moving backward or forward into yet another embrace, and in this fashion sampled one after another the arms of every man in the room. Meanwhile, Mme d’Espanet, standing in front of the orchestra, managed to grab Mme Haffner as she passed and waltzed off with her, unwilling to let her go. Gold and Silver danced together, like lovers.

Renée now understood this whirl of skirts, this stamping of feet. Situated as she was below the level of the dance floor, she saw the frenzy of legs, the chaos of patent-leather boots and white ankles. At times it seemed as though a gust of wind might carry off the women’s gowns. The bare shoulders, arms, and heads that flew past, that whirled by only to be caught, flung off, and caught again at the far end of the gallery where the orchestra played ever more furiously and the red hangings seemed to droop as the ball succumbed to its final fever, struck her as a tumultuous reflection of her own life, with its moments of nakedness and surrender. And she experienced such pain at the thought that Maxime, in order to take the hunchback in his arms, had cast her aside into the very spot where they had loved each other, that she dreamed of plucking a branch of the tanghin that grazed her cheek and chewing it down to the heartwood. But she was a coward, so she stood in front of the shrub shivering under the fur, which she pulled over her arms and clutched tightly in a gesture of terrified shame.

7

Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings that bring the low clouds and gloomy dampness of winter back to Paris, Aristide Saccard stepped down from his carriage on the place du Châteaud’Eau and with four other gentlemen entered the gaping hole opened up by demolitions making way for the future boulevard du Prince-Eugène. The men were from the investigative commission that the jury on indemnities sent out to construction sites to estimate the value of certain properties, whose owners had not been able to reach agreement with the city.

Saccard was going for a repeat of the stroke of fortune he had pulled off on the rue de la Pépinière. In order to expunge his wife’s name from the record entirely, his first move had been to arrange a mock sale of the land and the music hall. Larsonneau transferred the entire property to a fictitious creditor. The deed bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This amount was so exorbitant that when the expropriation agent, acting on behalf of the imaginary creditor, asked for an indemnity equal to the selling price, the city hall commission refused to award more than two million five hundred thousand francs despite the surreptitious efforts of M. Michelin and the pleas of M. Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud. Saccard had expected this setback. He rejected the offer and allowed the case to go to the jury, of which he happened to be a member, along with M. de Mareuil– a lucky break that he had no doubt had a hand in arranging. That was how he came to be conducting an inquiry into his own property along with four of his colleagues.

M. de Mareuil was at his side. Of the three other members of the committee, one was a doctor, who smoked a cigar and paid absolutely no attention to the rubble he was walking on, and two were businessmen, one of whom, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly been a knife sharpener who operated a grindstone on the street.

The path these gentlemen set out to follow was in terrible condition. It had rained all night. The soggy ground had turned into a river of mud between crumbling buildings, following a line marked out on earth so soft that carts hauling rubble sank in up to their axles. On either side stood sections of wall shattered by pickaxes. Tall buildings had been gutted so that their blanched entrails showed: empty stair-wells and gaping rooms hung in the air like the smashed drawers of some huge, ugly bureau. No sight could be sadder than the wallpaper in the bedrooms five or six stories up, yellow or blue squares now in tatters marking the places under the roofs where poor, wretched garrets had been—tiny holes that had once housed someone’s entire existence. Ribbons of flue pipe, depressingly black in color and with sharp elbows, climbed bare walls side by side. A forgotten weathervane made a grating sound as it rotated close to the edge of one roof, while half-detached gutters hung down like rags. And the chasm continued on into the ruins like a breach opened by cannon fire. The path of the roadway, still hard to make out, was filled with debris and marked by mounds of earth and deep puddles; on it went beneath gray skies, enveloped in a sinister cloud of falling plaster dust and lined by black ribbons of flue pipe, which were like the badges worn by mourners.

The visiting gentlemen, with their carefully polished boots, frock coats, and top hats, injected a singular note into this muddy landscape of brown filth in which the only things that moved were sallow workmen, horses spattered with mud all the way up their flanks, and wagons whose sides were completely coated with dust. They walked single file, jumping from stone to stone while mostly avoiding pools of liquid filth, but occasionally sinking in up to their ankles, which made them swear out loud and shake their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the rue de Charonne, which would have made it unnecessary to traverse this area of excavation, but unfortunately the committee had a number of buildings to visit up and down the lengthy boulevard. Driven by curiosity, they had decided to set a course right through the heart of the construction. In any case, it interested them greatly. At times one of them would stop and balance himself on a chunk of plaster lying in a rut, look up, and call the attention of the others to a gaping floor, a piece of flue pipe hanging in the air, or a beam that had fallen onto a neighboring roof. This razed section of city at the end of the rue du Temple actually struck them as quite funny.

“Now there’s something really unusual,” said M. de Mareuil. “Look up there, Saccard, at that kitchen. There’s still an old frying pan hanging over the stove. . . . I can make it out quite clearly.”

But the physician, his cigar clamped between his teeth, had planted himself in front of a demolished house, of which nothing remained but the rooms on the ground floor, now filled with rubble from the floors above. Only one section of wall rose above the heap of debris. To knock this wall down at one go, a rope had been wound around it, and thirty workmen were now pulling on that line.

“They won’t get it that way,” the doctor mumbled. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”

The other four men had retraced their steps in order to watch the wall come down. All five stared intently with bated breath as they waited, thrilled at the prospect of witnessing the collapse. The workers let the rope go slack and then suddenly gave another tug, shouting, “Heave, ho!”

“They won’t get it,” the doctor repeated.

Then, after a few seconds of anxious waiting, one of the businessmen gleefully shouted, “It’s moving, it’s moving!”

When the wall finally gave way, collapsing with a terrifying rumble that raised a cloud of plaster dust, the five gentlemen of the committee smiled at one another. They were enchanted. A fine powder settled onto their coats, turning their arms and shoulders white.

Now, as the men went back to picking their way among the puddles, the conversation turned to workers. There weren’t many good ones. They were all lazy, wasteful, and pigheaded and dreamed of nothing but their employers’ ruin. M. de Mareuil, who for the past minute had been nervously watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof as they attacked a wall with pickaxes, nevertheless voiced the thought that fellows like those displayed splendid courage. The others stopped once more and looked up at the demolition workers balanced on the edge of the roof as they bent their backs and swung their axes with all their might. The workmen kicked stones from the wall with their feet and watched calmly as they crashed to the ground. If their picks had missed their marks, the sheer momentum of their swings would have sent them plunging off the roof.

“Bah, they’re used to it!” said the doctor, putting his cigar back in his mouth. “They’re brutes.”

Meanwhile the members of the committee had reached one of the buildings they were supposed to inspect. They polished off their work in fifteen minutes and resumed their walk. Little by little they lost their fear of the mud. They walked right through puddles, abandoning all hope of keeping their boots dry. As they passed rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the former knife grinder, grew anxious. He scrutinized the ruins around him, and the neighborhood no longer seemed familiar. He had lived there more than thirty years before, he said, just after arriving in Paris, and it would please him greatly to locate the spot. He continued to cast his eyes about until the sight of a house cut in two by the demolition workers’ axes brought him up short in the middle of the path. He studied the building’s door and windows. Then, pointing at a corner of the ruin, he cried out, “There it is! I recognize it!”

“What are you talking about?” asked the doctor.

“My room, for heaven’s sake! That’s it!”

It was a small bedroom on the sixth floor that must once have overlooked a courtyard. A breach in one wall exposed the room, already demolished on one side, and a large section of wallpaper bearing a yellow floral pattern had been torn away from the wall and could be seen flapping in the wind. On the left you could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And next to it was the hole for a stove, with a piece of pipe sticking out.

The erstwhile worker was gripped by emotion.

“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “Life was hard in those days, but it made no difference, I was young. . . . See that cupboard? That’s where I kept the 300 francs I saved sou by sou. And the hole for the stove—I can still remember the day I made it. The room had no fireplace, and it was bitter cold, all the more so because it wasn’t often that I was with somebody.”

“Hold on there,” the doctor interrupted in a jocular tone. “Nobody wants to know your secrets. You had your fun like everybody else.”

“That’s true,” the dignitary naïvely admitted. “I can still remember a laundress from the house across the street. . . . See up there, the bed was on the right, near the window. . . . What they’ve done to my poor bedroom!”

He was really quite sad about it.

“Now listen here,” said Saccard. “There’s nothing wrong with knocking down old dumps like these. They’re going to build fine new freestone houses in their place. . . . Would you still live in a hovel like that? Whereas on the new boulevard you’ll be able to find quite suitable housing.”

“That’s true,” repeated the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled by the thought.

The investigative commission stopped at two more buildings. The doctor remained outside, smoking and staring at the sky. When the men came to the rue des Amandiers, the houses thinned out, and now they made their way through fenced lots and land undeveloped but for a few tumbledown cottages. Saccard seemed delighted by this stroll through the ruins. He was reminded of the dinner he had had long ago with his first wife on the Buttes Montmartre and vividly recalled having gestured with the edge of his hand to indicate where Paris would be sliced open from the place du Château-d’Eau to the Barrière du Trône. It enchanted him to know that this prediction from the distant past had come true. He followed the line of that slice with the secret pleasure of an author, as if he himself had struck the first blows of the pickaxe with his iron fingers. And as he jumped the puddles, he relished the thought that three million francs awaited him beneath these ruins, at the end of this greasy river of muck.

Meanwhile, the members of the committee began to fancy that they had reached the countryside. The path of the roadway ran through gardens, whose walls had been knocked down to make way for it. Huge lilac bushes were in bud. The foliage was a very delicate light green in color. Each of these gardens opened out like a castle keep walled off by shrubbery, inside which lay a narrow pool, a miniature waterfall, and a section of wall featuring trompe-l’oeil representations of foreshortened bowers set against distant blue landscapes. The houses, spread out and discreetly hidden, resembled Italian pavilions or Greek temples. Moss ate away at the bottoms of the plaster columns, while weeds loosened the mortar of the pediments.

“These are petites maisons,” said the physician with a wink.

But when he saw that the other gentlemen didn’t understand what he meant by this, he explained that in the time of Louis XIV nobles had kept retreats for assignations in the country. It was the fashion. “They called them petites maisons. This neighborhood was full of them. . . . You can bet that there were some wild goings-on in those places!”

The investigative committee had become quite attentive. Eyes glistening, the two businessmen smiled and examined these gardens and pavilions with great interest, even though they had not so much as glanced at them before hearing their colleague’s explanations. One grotto held their attention for quite some time. But when the doctor noticed one house that had already fallen victim to the pickaxes and mentioned that he recognized it as having been the petite maison of the comte de Savigny—and well-known for that gentleman’s orgies—the entire committee left the boulevard to visit the ruin. They climbed up over the rubble and entered through the first-floor windows. Since the workers were on their lunch break, they were able to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content. They stayed for more than half an hour, examining the rosettes in the ceilings, the paintings above the doors, and the overelaborate plaster moldings that had turned yellow with age. The doctor reconstructed the house.

“This room, you see, must have been the formal dining room. Over there, in that recess in the wall, there was surely a huge sofa. And wait a minute, I’m even certain there must have been a mirror above that sofa. There are the retainers for the glass. . . . Those bastards really knew how to enjoy life!”

They would never have left those old stones, which piqued their curiosity, if Saccard, impatient to get going, had not laughingly reminded them that “it’s no use looking for the ladies, they’re not here anymore. . . . It’s time to get back to business.”

Before leaving, however, the doctor climbed up on a mantel and with a deft blow from an axe detached the small painted head of a cupid, which he slipped into the pocket of his coat.

At last they came to the end of their route. The property that had previously belonged to Mme Aubertot was quite extensive. The music hall and garden occupied barely half of it. A few nondescript houses were scattered around the remaining land. The fact that the new boulevard cut diagonally across this large parallelogram had allayed one of Saccard’s fears. For a long time he had worried that only the music hall would be affected by the planned route. He had accordingly instructed Larsonneau to talk things up, since the value of the adjacent land should have increased at least fivefold. He was already threatening the city by saying that he might invoke a recent ordinance authorizing landowners to surrender only that portion of a property absolutely essential for public works.

It was the expropriation agent who received the gentlemen of the committee. He showed them around the garden and the music hall and gave them a huge file to examine. But the two businessmen had gone back downstairs with the doctor, whom they continued to question about the petite maison of the comte de Savigny, which had fired their imaginations. With jaws hanging, both men listened to the doctor’s stories, as all three stood alongside a “barrel ride” in the amusement park. And the doctor regaled them with tales of Mme de Pompadour and recounted the loves of Louis XV ¹ while M. de Mareuil and Saccard carried on with the investigation by themselves.

“This job is done,” said the latter upon returning to the garden. “If you’ll allow me, gentlemen, I’ll accept responsibility for writing up the report.”

The man who manufactured surgical instruments didn’t even hear what Saccard had said. He was lost in the Régence.²

“What a strange time, for sure!” he murmured.

Then they found a cab on the rue de Charonne and drove off, spattered with filth up to the knees and as pleased with their outing as if they’d been to a picnic in the country. In the cab the conversation turned to politics; they agreed that the Emperor was doing great things. No one had ever seen anything like what they had just seen. This big straight boulevard would be superb once houses were built along it.

Saccard drew up the report, and the jury awarded an indemnity of three million francs. The speculator had his back to the wall; he couldn’t have held out another month. This money saved him from ruin and perhaps even from the criminal courts. He paid 500,000 francs of the million he owed his upholsterer and contractor on the Parc Monceau house. He attended to other trouble spots, plunged into new ventures, and deafened Paris with the sound of the very real gold coins that he loaded into his safe by the shovelful. The river of gold at last had a source. But it was not yet a solid, entrenched fortune flowing at an even and steady rate. Saved from bankruptcy, Saccard considered himself a beggar reduced to living on the crumbs from his three million francs; naïvely he told himself that he was still too poor, that he could not stop. And soon the ground had opened up yet again beneath his feet.

Larsonneau had behaved so admirably in the Charonne business that Saccard, after only a moment’s hesitation, had pushed honesty to the point of paying him his ten percent plus a bonus of 30,000 francs. With that the expropriation agent opened a bank. When his accomplice grumpily accused him of having outstripped him in wealth, the yellow-gloved dandy replied with a laugh: “You see, my beloved teacher, you’re very clever at making money rain down, but you’ve no idea how to pick it up.”

Mme Sidonie took advantage of her brother’s stroke of fortune to borrow 10,000 francs from him, with which she spent two months in London. She returned without a penny. No one ever found out what had become of the 10,000 francs.

“Oh, my, you know everything costs money,” she replied when questioned. “I scoured all the libraries. I had three secretaries to help with my research.”

And when people asked if she had at last found out anything certain about her three billion, she smiled mysteriously at first and then murmured, “You’re all skeptics. . . . I didn’t find anything, but it makes no difference. You’ll see, one of these days you’ll see.”

She had not wasted all her time in England, however. Her brother the minister had availed himself of the opportunity to charge her with a delicate commission. When she returned, she received a number of large orders from the ministry. This was a new incarnation for her. She signed contracts with the government and undertook to supply goods of every conceivable kind. She sold rations and weapons to the army for its troops, furniture to prefectures and government bureaus, and firewood to public offices and museums. The money she earned was not enough to persuade her to put aside the black dresses she invariably wore, and her waxy, doleful countenance remained as it had always been. Saccard now reflected that it must indeed have been his sister he had seen furtively exiting their brother Eugène’s house that day long ago. She had probably been in secret contact with him all along, running errands that nobody in the world was aware of.

While all these pecuniary interests and ardent, unquenchable thirsts swirled around her, Renée was in agony. Aunt Elisabeth had died. Her sister, now married, had left the family home, in the gloom of whose cavernous rooms her father now lived alone. In one season she ran through her aunt’s bequest. Lately she had taken to gambling. She had found a salon in which ladies sat at tables until three in the morning, losing hundreds of thousands of francs a night. Inevitably she tried to drink, but she could not: uncontrollable waves of nausea overwhelmed her. On finding herself alone again, helpless against the social tide that was sweeping her away, she had surrendered to it more than ever, not knowing any other way to kill the time. She sampled everything until nothing was left, yet none of it diminished the crushing weight of her boredom. She aged; blue circles formed around her eyes; her nose grew thinner, and her pouting lips erupted in sudden laughter for no reason. For this woman it was the end of the line.

When Maxime married Louise and the young couple left for Italy, Renée stopped worrying about her lover and seemed to forget all about him. And when he returned alone six months later, having buried “the hunchback” in the cemetery of a small town in Lombardy, she greeted him with hatred. She remembered Phèdre and no doubt recalled having heard Ristori invest that envenomed love with her sobs. Then, so that she would not have to run into the boy in her own home, and in order to set an abyss of shame between father and son forever, she forced her husband to acknowledge the incest, telling him that his son had been after her for some time and that on the day Saccard had surprised her with him, Maxime had been attempting to assault her. Saccard was terribly vexed by her insistence on opening his eyes. He was obliged to quarrel with his son and refuse to see him. The young widower, wealthy by dint of his wife’s dowry, established bachelor quarters in a small house on the avenue de l’Impératrice. He turned down the Conseil d’Etat and took to racing horses instead. The rupture Renée had caused between father and son was one of her last satisfactions. Her vengeance was to throw the degradation these two men had imposed on her back in their faces. Now, she told herself, she wouldn’t have to watch anymore as they walked arm in arm like two comrades, mocking her.

With the collapse of her affections, there came a time when she had no one left to love but her maid. Little by little she conceived a maternal affection for Céleste. It may have been that this girl, the only residue of her love for Maxime, reminded her of hours of pleasure now gone forever. Or maybe she was just touched by this servant’s loyalty, by the fidelity of this stouthearted woman whose tranquil solicitude seemed unshakable. In the depth of her remorse she thanked Céleste for having witnessed her shame without abandoning her in disgust. She imagined all sorts of self-denial, a whole life of renunciation, in her effort to comprehend the maid’s calm acceptance of incest, her icy hands, her respectful, unflappable attentiveness. And Céleste’s devotion pleased Renée all the more because she knew her to be honest and thrifty, a woman without a lover and untouched by vice.