CHAPTER III.

Maxime remained at the college of Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was thirteen years and a few months old and had just passed through the fifth class. It was then that his father decided that he should come to Paris, reflecting that a son of Maxime's age would consolidate his position and establish him for good in the part he played as a rich and serious re-married widower. When he mentioned his plan to Renée, towards whom he prided himself upon being extremely gallant, she negligently answered:

"Quite so, let the little fellow come. He will amuse us a bit. One is bored to death of a morning."

The little fellow arrived a week afterwards. He was already a tall, spare urchin with an effeminate face, a delicate, wide-awake look, and pale flaxen hair. But how he was rigged out; good heavens! Cropped to the ears, with his hair so short that the whiteness of his skull was barely covered with a slight shadow, he moreover wore a pair of trousers too short for his legs, carter's shoes, and a frightfully threadbare tunic which was much too full and made him almost look hunchbacked. Thus accoutred, surprised by the new things he saw, he looked around him, not at all timidly but with the savage, cunning air of a precocious child who hesitates about trusting himself to anyone at once.

A servant had just brought him from the railway station, and he was in the large drawing-room, delighted with the gilding of the furniture and the ceiling, completely happy at sight of this luxury amid which he was going to live, when Renée, returning from her tailor's, swept in like a gust of wind. She threw off her hat and the white burnous which she had placed upon her shoulders to shield her from the cold, which was already keen; and she appeared before Maxime--stupefied with admiration--in all the glow of her marvellous costume.

The child thought she was disguised. Over a delicious skirt of blue faille with deep flounces, she wore a kind of _garde française_ habit in pale grey silk. The lappets of the habit, lined with blue satin of a deeper shade than the faille of the skirt, were coquettishly caught up and secured with bows of ribbon; the cuffs of the tight sleeves, the broad facings of the bodice expanded on either side trimmed with the same satin. And, as a supreme seasoning, as a bold stroke of eccentricity, large buttons imitating sapphires, and fastened on blue rosettes, adorned the front of the habit in a double row. It was at once ugly and adorable.

As soon as Renée perceived Maxime, "It's the little fellow, isn't it?" she asked of the servant; she was surprised to find him as tall as herself.

The child was eating her with his eyes. This lady, with so white a skin, whose bosom could be seen through a gap of her plaited chemisette, this sudden and charming apparition with her hair raised high on her head, her gloved slender hands and her little masculine boots with pointed heels, delighted him; she seemed to be the good fairy of this warm gilded room. He began to smile, and he was just awkward enough in manner to retain his urchin-like gracefulness.

"Why, he is funny!" exclaimed Renée. "But how horrible! How they have cut his hair! Listen, my little fellow, your father will probably only come home for dinner and I shall be obliged to settle you here. I'm your stepmamma, sir. Will you kiss me?"

"Willingly," answered Maxime without any fuss; and he kissed the young wife on both cheeks, taking hold of her by the shoulders, whereby the _garde française_ habit was a trifle crumpled.

She freed herself, laughing, and saying: "Dear me! how funny he is, the little shearling!" Then again approaching him and more serious: "We shall be friends sha'n't we? I want to be a mother to you. I reflected about it while I was waiting for my tailor, who was engaged, and I said to myself that I ought to be very kind and bring you up quite properly. I will be very nice!"

Maxime continued looking at her, with his blue, minx-like eyes, and suddenly: "How old are you?" he asked.

"But that is a question one never asks!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands together. "He doesn't know it, poor little fellow! It will be necessary to teach him everything. Fortunately I can still confess my age. I am twenty-one."

"I shall soon be fourteen. You might be my sister--"

He did not finish his sentence, but his eyes added that he had expected to find his father's second wife much older. He was very near her and looked at her neck so attentively that she almost finished by blushing. Besides, her giddy head was turning, it could never dwell for long on the same subject; and she began to walk about and talk of her tailor, forgetting that she was addressing a child.

"I ought to have been here to receive you. But, just fancy, Worms brought me this costume this morning. I tried it on and found it rather successful. It is very stylish, isn't it?"

She had placed herself before a mirror. Maxime was coming and going behind her to examine her on all sides.

"However as I put on the coat," she added, "I noticed there was a large fold there on the left shoulder, do you see? That fold is very ugly, it makes me look as if I had one shoulder higher than the other."

He had approached and passed his finger over the fold as if to smooth it down, and his vicious schoolboy hand seemed to tarry on the spot with a certain amount of satisfaction.

"Well," she continued, "I couldn't wait. I had the horses harnessed and I went to tell Worms what I thought of his inconceivable carelessness. He promised me he would set it right."

Then she remained in front of the mirror still looking at herself, lost as it were in a sudden reverie. She ended by placing a finger on her lips with an air of thoughtful impatience. And in a low voice as if talking to herself she said: "There is something wanting--yes, really, there is something wanting--"

Then, with quick motion, she turned and stationed herself in front of Maxime and asked him:

"Is it really the thing? Don't you think there is something wanting, a trifle, a bow somewhere?" The schoolboy, reassured by the young woman's familiarity, had regained all the assurance of his forward nature. He drew back, drew near, blinked his eyes and muttered:

"No, no, nothing's wanting, it's very pretty, very pretty--I rather think that there is something too much."

He slightly blushed despite his audacity, drew still nearer, and tracing with his finger-tip an acute angle on Renée's breast: "In your place," he continued, "I should round that lace like that and put on a necklace with a large cross."

She clapped her hands and looked radiant. "That's it, that's it," she cried, "I had the large cross on the tip of my tongue."

She folded back her chemisette, disappeared for a couple of minutes, and then returned with the necklace and the cross, and placing herself again in front of the mirror with an air of triumph:

"Oh! that's the ticket, quite the ticket," she muttered. "The little shearling isn't at all a fool. Did you dress women in the country then? I see that we shall really be good friends. But you must listen to me. To begin with, you must let your hair grow and you mustn't wear that frightful tunic any more. Besides, you must pay proper attention to my lessons in good manners. I want you to be a nice young man."

"Why, of course," said the child naively, "as papa is rich at present and as you are his wife."

She smiled and with her usual vivacity:

"Then let us begin by thee-and-thouing one another. I say thou and you in the same breath. It's stupid. You will love me a great deal?"

"I will love thee with all my heart," he answered with the effusive manner of an urchin towards his sweetheart.

Such was Maxime and Renée's first interview. The lad did not go to school till a month later. During the earlier days his stepmother played with him as with a doll. She polished off his countryfied air, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, dressed from head to foot in new clothes supplied by his father's tailor, she gave a cry of joyous surprise. He was as pretty as a heart, such was her expression. The only thing was that his hair grew with most annoying sluggishness. The young woman frequently said that all one's face was in one's hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long while she had been greatly worried by its colour, that particular pale yellow tint, which reminded one of the best butter. But when the fashion of wearing yellow hair set in she was delighted, and to make people believe that she did not follow the fashion by compulsion she declared that she dyed her hair every month.

Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. His was one of those frail precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He practised vice even before he knew desire. On two occasions he had all but been expelled from the college. Had Renée's eyes been accustomed to provincial graces she would have noticed that, despite his ill-fitting clothes, the little shearling, as she called him, smiled, turned his neck and extended his arms in a pretty way, with the feminine air of those who serve as schoolboys' girls. He was very careful about his hands, which were slight and long; and although his hair remained cropped short by order of the principal, an ex-colonel of engineers, he possessed a little looking-glass which he pulled out of his pocket during lesson time, which he placed between the pages of his book, and into which he gazed for whole hours, examining his eyes, his gums, making pretty faces at himself, and learning various kinds of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a skirt, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had a grown woman's slim waist and undulation of the hips. To tell the truth, he received as many blows as caresses. The college of Plassans, a den of little bandits, like most provincial colleges, thus proved to be a hotbed of contamination in which Maxime's neutral temperament and childhood fraught with evil owing to some mysterious hereditary cause, were singularly developed. Fortunately age was about to alter him. But the trace of his childish abandonments, the effemination of his whole being, the time when he had thought himself a girl, were destined to remain in him and strike him for ever in his virility.

Renée called him "Mademoiselle," without knowing that six months earlier she would have spoken the truth. To her he seemed very obedient, very loving, and indeed his caresses often made her ill-at-ease. He had a manner of kissing that heated her skin. But what delighted her was his artfulness; he was exceedingly funny and bold, already speaking of women with a smile and holding his own against Renée's friends, dear Adeline who had just married M. d'Espanet, and fat Suzanne, married quite recently to the great manufacturer Haffner. When he was fourteen he had a passion for the latter. He had taken his stepmother into his confidence and she was greatly amused.

"For myself I should have preferred Adeline," she said, "she's prettier."

"Perhaps so," replied the urchin, "but Suzanne is ever so much fatter. I like fine women. It would be very kind of you to speak to her for me."

Renée laughed. Her doll--this tall urchin with a girl's manners--seemed to her more amusing than ever since he was in love. The time came when Madame Haffner seriously had to defend herself. Moreover the ladies encouraged Maxime with their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes which they assumed in his presence. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in all this. The three of them, scorched by passion amid their tumultuous life, lingered over the urchin's delightful depravity as over a novel harmless spice which tickled their palates. They let him touch their dresses, and pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the ante-room to help them on with their wrappers; they passed him along from hand to hand, laughing like lunatics when he kissed their wrists near the veins, on the spot where the skin is so soft; then they became maternal and learnedly taught him the art of being a fine gentleman and pleasing women. He was their toy, a little fellow of ingenious mechanism who kissed and courted, who had the most delightful vices in the world, but who remained a plaything, a little cardboard puppet whom they did not much fear, though just enough to quiver very agreeably at the touch of his childish hand.

After the holidays, Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the college of fashionable society, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. However soft and light headed the little fellow might be, he still had a keen intelligence; but he applied it to something very different to classical studies. However he was a tolerably efficient pupil who never fell to the Bohemian level of dunces, but remained among the well dressed and properly conducted young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his early youth was a perfect worship for dress. Paris opened his eyes, made him a swell young man, tightly buttoned up in his clothes and following the fashions. He was the Brummel of his class. He presented himself there as he would have presented himself in a drawing-room, daintily booted, tightly gloved, with prodigious neckties and ineffable hats. There were some twenty pupils of the kind who formed a sort of aristocracy, who in leaving school for the day offered each other Havannah cigars contained in cases with gold mountings, and who were followed by servants in livery carrying their packets of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse which were the admiration of his school fellows. He himself drove, while on the seat behind sat a footman with folded arms, who carried on his knees the collegian's copy book case, a perfect ministerial portfolio in brown leather. And you should have seen how lightly, scientifically and correctly Maxime came in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew his horse up sharp before the college door and said to the footman, "At half past four, Jacques, eh?" The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the grace of this fair haired youngster whom twice a day at regular hours they saw arrive and start off in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women and splashed the passers-by as if they were returning from the races. 'Twas an astonishing little world, a conceited foolish brood, that could be seen each day in the Rue du Havre, correctly attired in masher's jackets, aping rich and wearied men, whilst the Bohemian contingent of the college, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their heavy shoes, and with their hooks hanging at the end of a strap over their backs.

Renée, who wished to consider the part she played as a mother and a schoolmistress a serious one, was delighted with her pupil. It is true that she neglected nothing to perfect his education. She was then passing through a period full of mortification and tears; a lover had abandoned her, in scandalous style in sight of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchess de Sternich. She dreamt that Maxime would be her consolation, she made herself older, she endeavoured to be maternal, and became the most eccentric mentor that can be imagined. Maxime's tilbury often remained at home; it was Renée who came to fetch the collegian with her roomy carriage. They hid the brown portfolio under the cushion, and went to the Bois de Boulogne then in its freshness. She there gave him a course of lectures on high elegance. She pointed out to him the upper ten of imperial Paris, fat and happy, still ecstasied by the warm touch which changed the starvelings and pigs of the day before into great lords and millionaires puffing and fainting under the weight of their cash boxes. But the youngster particularly questioned her about women, and as she was very familiar with him, she gave him precise particulars: Madame de Guende was stupid but admirably formed; the wealthy Countess Vanska had been a street singer before she married a Pole who was said to beat her; as for the Marchioness d'Espanet and Suzanne Haffner they were inseparable; and although they were Renée's intimate friends, she added--compressing her lips as if to prevent herself from saying any more--that some very nasty stories were told about them; beautiful Madame de Lauwerens was also a very compromising woman, but she had such pretty eyes, and after all everyone knew that she herself was irreproachable, although somewhat too much mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who frequented her, Madame Daste, Madame Teissière and the Baroness de Meinhold. Maxime wished to have the ladies' portraits; and with them he adorned an album which remained on the drawing-room table. With that vicious artfulness which was his predominant characteristic he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking her for particulars concerning the fast women, at the same time pretending to take them for women of society. Renée, becoming moral and serious, said that they were frightful creatures and that he ought to carefully avoid them; then forgetting herself she talked about them as if they were people whom she had known intimately. One of the youngster's great delights was to set her talking about the Duchess de Sternich. Each time that her carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never missed naming the duchess with cruel artfulness and an under glance which proved that he was acquainted with Renée's last adventure. Then she in a harsh voice tore her rival to pieces; how old she was looking, poor woman, she painted her face, she had lovers hidden in all her cupboards, she had given herself to a chamberlain so as to be in the imperial bed. And Renée ran on and on, while Maxime, to exasperate her, declared that he thought Madame de Sternich charming. Such lessons singularly developed the collegian's intelligence, and this, all the more, as his young teacher repeated them every where, in the Bois, at the theatre, and in the drawing-rooms. The pupil thus became very proficient.

Maxime adored living amid women's skirts, finery and rice powder. He always remained somewhat girlish with his tapering hands, his beardless face, and his white, fleshy neck. Renée gravely consulted him about her dresses. He knew the good costumiers of Paris and pronounced judgment upon each of them in a word, he talked about the "savour" of such a one's bonnets and the "logic" of such a one's dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not proved, not a bootmaker whose heart he had not penetrated and studied. This strange abortion who during the English lessons at college, read the prospectuses that his perfumer sent him every Friday, would have delivered a complete discourse on Parisian society, customers and tradespeople included, at an age when country youngsters don't dare look a housemaid in the face. On his way home he often brought a bonnet, a box of soap or an article of jewellery that his stepmother had ordered the day before. Some strip of musk-scented lace always lingered in his pockets.

However his great affair was to accompany Renée when she called on the illustrious Worms, the tailor of genius, before whom the queens of the Second Empire fell on their knees. The great man's waiting room was vast, square and furnished with roomy divans. Maxime entered it with a feeling of religious emotion. Dresses certainly have a special perfume; silk, satin, velvet, lace had there mingled their light aroma with that of women's hair and amber-shaded shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained an oderiferous warmth, an incense of flesh and luxury which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to dance attendance during hours; a series of feminine solicitors were there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, taking a snack on the large central table covered with bottles and plates full of little cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked freely, and when they ensconced themselves around the room you would have thought that a flight of Lesbian nymphs had alighted on the divans of a Parisian drawing-room. Maxime, whom they put up with and even liked on account of his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted divine delight: he glided along the divans like a supple snake; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, or between two dresses, where he made himself as small as possible and kept very quiet, inhaling the perfumed warmth of his feminine neighbours.

"That youngster pokes himself everywhere," said the Baroness de Meinhold tapping him on the cheeks.

He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by intoxicating him with the illustrious Worms's Madeira, whereupon he said some astounding things which made them laugh till they cried. However it was the Marchioness d'Espanet who hit upon the right remark for the circumstance. As Maxime was discovered one day, in a corner of the divan, behind her back--

"That boy ought to have been a girl," she murmured, seeing him so rosy and blushing, so penetrated with the delight he had experienced at being close to her.

Then when the great Worms finally received Renée, Maxime followed her into the study. He had ventured to speak two or three times whilst the master became absorbed in contemplating his customer, just like Leonardo da Vinci in presence of the Joconde, according to the pontiffs of art. The master had deigned to smile at the appropriateness of Maxime's remarks; he made Renée stand upright before a mirror, rising from the parquetry to the ceiling, and he pondered with a contraction of the eyebrows, whilst the young woman, affected, caught her breath so as not to stir. And after a few minutes the master, as if seized and shaken by inspiration, roughly and jerkily described the work of art he had just conceived, exclaiming in curt phrases:

"Montespan dress in ash tinted silk--the train describing a rounded skirt in front--large bow of grey satin catching it up on the hips--finally an apron composed of puffs of pearl grey tulle, the puffs separated by bands of grey satin."

He again reflected, seemed to dive to the very depths of his genius, and with the triumphant grimace of a python seated upon the tripod he concluded:

"In the hair, upon this smiling head, we will place the dreamy butterfly of Psyche with wings of changeful blue."

But on other occasions, inspiration was sluggish. The illustrious Worms summoned it in vain and concentrated his faculties to no purpose. He tortured his eyebrows, turned livid, took his poor head, which he wagged in despair, between his hands, and conquered, throwing himself into an arm-chair:

"No," he would mutter in a sorrowful voice, "no, not to-day--it isn't possible--These ladies presume too much. The source is dried up."

And he would turn Renée out of doors, repeating:

"Impossible, impossible, dear madame, you must call again another day. I'm not in the vein to deal with your style this morning."

The fine education that Maxime received had a first result. At seventeen the youngster seduced his stepmother's maid. The worst of the affair was that the girl found herself in the family way. It was necessary to send her into the country with the kid and make her a small allowance. Renée was terribly vexed by this adventure. Saccard occupied himself about it merely to settle the pecuniary side of the question; but the young woman roundly scolded her pupil. To think he should compromise himself with such a girl when she wanted to make a gentleman of him! What a ridiculous, shameful beginning, what a disgraceful prank! If he had at least only launched forth with one of those ladies!

"Oh! quite so," he answered quietly, "if your dear friend Suzanne had only chosen she could have gone into the country instead of the maid."

"Oh! you naughty fellow," muttered Renée, disarmed and enlivened by the idea of seeing Suzanne retire into the country with an allowance of twelve hundred francs a year.

Then a funnier thought occurred to her, and forgetting her part as an irritated mother, bursting into pearly laughter which she restrained with her fingers, she stammered, glancing at him out of the corner of her eyes:

"I say, how angry Adeline would have been with you, and what a scene she would have had with her--"

She did not finish. Maxime was laughing with her. Such was the fine ending of Renée's lecture on this occasion.

Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself but little concerning the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them complete liberty, feeling happy at seeing them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy gaiety. It was a singular flat, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were opening and shutting all day long, the servants talked aloud; through the fresh bright luxury of the place there constantly swept a flight of huge skirts, and processions of tradespeople; and in addition there was all the disorder occasioned by Renée's friends, Maxime's chums, and Saccard's visitors. From nine till eleven a.m. the last named received the strangest throng one could find, senators and lawyers' clerks, duchesses and old clothes-dealers, all the scum that the tempests of Paris landed of a morning at his door; silk dresses, dirty skirts, blouses, dress coats, all of which he received with the same hasty language and the same impatient nervous gestures. He settled a business affair in a couple of minutes, dealt with twenty difficulties at once and furnished solutions on the run. One would have thought that this restless little man, whose voice was very loud, was fighting in his study with his visitors, with the furniture, turning somersaults, knocking his head against the ceiling to make ideas flash forth from it, and always falling victorious on his feet again. Then at eleven o'clock he went out and was not seen again for the day; he lunched, and indeed, he often dined away from home. Then the house belonged to Renée and Maxime. They took possession of the father's study, they unpacked the tradespeoples' cardboard boxes there, and articles of finery lay about among the business papers. At times serious people waited for an hour at the door of the study whilst the collegian and the young woman seated at either end of Saccard's writing table, discussed a bow of ribbon. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They seldom shared a meal together; two of the three were ever on the wing, forgetting time, and only returning home at midnight. It was a dwelling of noise, business and pleasure, into which modern life swept like a gust of wind, with a sound of chinking gold and rustling dresses.

Aristide Saccard had found his vein at last. He had revealed himself as a great speculator and juggled with millions. After the masterly stroke of the Rue de la Pépinière he boldly threw himself into the struggle, which was beginning to scatter flashing triumphs and shameful wrecks through Paris. At first he executed safe strokes, repeating his first success, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilising his friends so as to obtain heavy indemnities. There came a moment when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so strangely in former times, as acquaintances of his when he was merely a poor road inspector. But all that was the mere infancy of art, it did not require much cunning to run out leases, to plot with tenants, and to rob the State and private people; and he considered that the game was not sufficiently remunerative. For that reason he soon placed his genius at the service of more complicated affairs.

Saccard at first invented the dodge of buying houses secretly on behalf of the city of Paris. The latter's situation had become a difficult one owing to a decision of the Council of State. The city authorities had purchased, by private contract, a large number of houses in the hope of running out the leases and getting rid of the tenants without the payment of an indemnity. But these purchases were considered by the Council of State to be real expropriations and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city; he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed the property over to the authorities at the date agreed upon. Indeed he finished by playing a double game; he bought property both for the city and for the prefect. When the affair was too tempting he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his services he obtained the right to cut bits of streets and open spaces which had been planned, a right which he sold again to some one else before the new thoroughfare was even commenced. It was a hot game; people gambled with the new streets just as with stocks and shares. Certain ladies, pretty prostitutes, intimate with high functionaries, were in the swing; one of them, whose white teeth are famous, nibbled whole streets on various occasions. Saccard grew more hungry than ever, feeling his desires increase at the sight of the flood of gold which glided between his fingers. It seemed to him as if a sea of twenty-franc pieces expanded around him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a strange wave-like noise, a metallic music which tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, becoming each day a bolder swimmer, diving, rising again to the surface, now on his back, now on his belly, crossing this immensity in fair and foul weather alike, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.

Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster dust. The times that Saccard had predicted on the heights of Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed to pieces with sabre strokes and he had a finger in every slash, in every wound. He had piles of building materials derived from demolished houses in the four corners of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astonishing story of a pit which a company dug to carry off five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in a gigantic enterprise, and which had to be filled up again by bringing soil from Saint-Ouen when the company had failed. Saccard got out of the affair with his conscience at ease and his pockets full, thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow to make way for the boulevard running from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Alma bridge. In the direction of Passy it was he who had the idea of scattering the refuse cleared away from the Trocadéro, upon the plateau, so that the good soil is now-a-days two yards below the surface, and even weeds refuse to grow amid the broken plaster. He might have been found in twenty directions at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a mass of clearings which no one knew what to do with, a hollow which it was difficult to fill up, a pile of soil mingled with plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but which he sifted with his own hands and in which he always finished by finding some sop or other, or a speculation in his own peculiar line. On the same day he ran from the works round about the Arc-de-Triomphe to those of the Boulevard St. Michel, from the clearings of the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments of Chaillot, dragging with him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and scamps.

But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had established in conjunction with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director, he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this circumstance Eugène had again done his brother a good turn. Thanks to him the government authorized the establishment of the company and watched its operations with great indulgence. On one difficult occasion, when an evil-minded newspaper ventured to criticise one of the company's operations, the "Moniteur" went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion concerning so honourable an undertaking, which the State deigned to patronize. The Crédit Viticole was based on an excellent financial system; it lent farmers half of the estimated value of their property, obtained a mortgage as guarantee for the loan, and received interest from the borrowers as well as an annual instalment of the principal. No financial system was ever more dignified or proper. Eugène had informed his brother with a sly smile that the Tuileries wished people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by letting the farmers' loan-machine work quietly, and by annexing to it a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching forth into all sorts of adventurous enterprises. The Crédit Viticole thanks to the formidable impulsion it received from its director, soon enjoyed a well-established reputation of solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in view of offering at the Bourse, at one go, a mass of shares freshly detached from their counterfoils, and to give them the aspect of having long been in circulation, Saccard ingeniously had them trodden on and beaten, during a whole night, by the bank collectors provided with birch brooms. The headquarters of the Crédit Viticole might have been taken for a branch of the Bank of France. The house where the offices were located seemed to be the grave and dignified temple of Mammon, with its courtyard full of equipages, its solemn iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious private rooms, and its world of clerks and liveried lackeys; and nothing could fill the public with more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier's office, reached by a passage of sacred bareness, and where one perceived the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somniferous with its three locks, its massive flanks, and its air of divine brutishness.

Saccard jobbed a big affair with the city of Paris. The latter, hard-up, crushed by its debt, dragged into this dance of millions which it had started to please the Emperor and fill certain people's pockets, was now reduced to borrowing covertly, not caring to own its violent fever, its stone-and-pickaxe madness. It had just begun to issue what it called delegation bonds, real bills of exchange at a distant date, so as to pay the contractors on the very days that the agreements were signed, and thus enable them to obtain money by having these bonds discounted. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper from the contractors; and one day when the city was in need of money Saccard went to tempt it. A considerable sum was lent it on the security of delegation bonds which M. Toutin-Laroche swore he had obtained from contracting companies, and which he had dragged through all the gutters of speculation. After that the Crédit Viticole was above attack; it held Paris by the throat. The director now only talked with a smile about the famous Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; and yet it still existed, and the newspapers continued regularly extolling the great commercial stations. One day when M. Toutin-Laroche tried to persuade Saccard to take some shares in this enterprise, the latter laughed in his face, asking him if he thought him fool enough to invest his money in the "General Company of the Arabian Nights."

Saccard had so far speculated successfully, with safe profits, cheating, selling himself, making money by contracts, deriving some sort of gain from each of his operations. Soon, however, this jobbing did not suffice him, he disdained gleaning, picking up the gold which folks like Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud dropped behind them. He plunged his arms into the bag, up to the shoulders. He went into partnership with Mignon, Charrier & Co., the famous contractors, who were then just starting, and who were destined to make colossal fortunes. The city of Paris had already decided not to execute the works itself, but to have the boulevards laid out by contract. The contracting companies agreed to deliver a thoroughfare complete, with its trees planted, its benches and lamp-posts duly placed, in exchange for a specified indemnity; at times they even delivered the thoroughfare for nothing, finding themselves amply remunerated by retaining the bordering building ground, for which they asked a greatly enhanced price. The fever of speculation in land, the furious rise in the value of house property date from this period. Saccard, thanks to his connections, obtained a grant to lay out three lots of boulevard. He was the ardent and somewhat muddling soul of the partnership. Messieurs Mignon & Charrier, his dependents at the outset, were fat, artful fellows, master masons, who knew the value of money. They laughed slyly at sight of Saccard's equipages; they generally retained their blouses, never refused to shake hands with a workman, and returned home covered with plaster dust. They came from Langres both of them, and into this burning, never satisfied Paris they brought their Champagnese prudence, their calm brains, somewhat obtuse and deficient in intelligence, but very quick in profiting of opportunities for filling their pockets, free to enjoy themselves later on. If Saccard promoted the affair and infused life into it with his fire and rageous appetite, Messieurs Mignon & Charrier by their plodding habits, their narrow methodical management, prevented it a score of times from being capsized by the astonishing imagination of their partner. They would never consent to have superb offices in a mansion which he wanted to build to astonish Paris. They also refused to entertain the secondary speculations which sprouted in his brain every morning, such as the erection of concert halls and vast bathing establishments on the building ground bordering their thoroughfare; of covered galleries, which would have doubled the rent of the shops and have allowed people to circulate through Paris without getting wet. To put a stop to these plans, which frightened them, the contractors decided that the building ground should be divided between the three partners, and that each should do what he pleased with his share. They themselves wisely continued selling their lots while he built upon his. His brain boiled. He would, in all seriousness, have proposed placing Paris under a huge bell-glass to change it into a conservatory and grow pine apples and sugar cane there.

Turning over money by the shovelful he soon had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan, and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and indeed one of them, a vast enclosure of planks where a magnificent mansion was to rise, had only the flooring of the first floor laid. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to watch over and puppets to set in motion, that he slept barely three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous thing was that his cash-box seemed inexhaustible. He was a shareholder in every company, built houses with a kind of fury, turned himself to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, without once being seen to realise a clear profit or pocket a large sum shining in the sunlight. The river of gold, of unknown source, which seemed to flow from his study in quickly recurring waves, astonished the Parisian cockneys, and at one moment made him the prominent man to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms of the Bourse.

With such a husband Renée was about as little married as she could be. She remained for whole weeks almost without seeing him. On the other hand he was perfect; he threw his cash-box wide open for her. In point of fact, she liked him as she would have liked an obliging banker. When she went to the Béraud mansion she praised him highly before her father, whose severity and coldness did not abate on account of his son-in-law's fortune. Her contempt had fled; this man seemed so convinced that life is a mere business affair, he was so plainly born to coin money out of whatever fell into his hands, women, children, paving-stones, sacks of mortar, and consciences, that she could not reproach him for having made their marriage a bargain. Since that bargain he in a measure looked upon her as upon one of those fine houses which honoured him and from which he expected to derive large profits. He liked to see her well dressed, noisy, making all Paris turn the head. It consolidated his position, doubled the probable figure of his fortune. By his wife he seemed handsome, young, amorous, and giddy. She was a partner, an accomplice without knowing it. A new pair of horses, a dress costing two thousand crowns, a weakness for a lover, facilitated, often ensured the success of his most remunerative transactions. Moreover, he frequently pretended to be worn-out, and sent her to a minister's, or some functionary's, to solicit an authorisation or receive a reply. "And be good!" he said to her in a tone, at once jesting and coaxing, which only belonged to himself. And when she returned, when she had succeeded, he rubbed his hands, repeating his famous phrase, "And you were good?" Renée laughed. He was too active to wish his wife to be a Madame Michelin. He simply liked coarse witticisms and indecent suppositions. Besides, if Renée had "not been good" he would only have experienced the mortification of having really paid for the minister's or functionary's compliance. To dupe people, to give them less than their money's worth, was a feast for him. He often said: "If I were a woman I should perhaps sell myself, but I should never deliver the merchandise; it's too stupid."

This madcap Renée, who had appeared one night in the Parisian firmament like the eccentric fairy of fashionable sensuality, was the least analyzable of women. No doubt if she had been brought up at home she would by means of religion or some other satisfaction for the nerves have attenuated the desires by which she was at times really maddened. She belonged to the middle classes by her mind; she was perfectly upright, with a love for logical things, a fear of heaven and hell and a huge dose of prejudices; she belonged to her father's side, to the calm and prudent race among which fireside virtues flourish. And yet it was in this nature of hers that prodigious fancies, ever reviving inquisitiveness and desires not to be confessed, sprouted and grew. While she was with the ladies of the Visitation, free, her mind wandering amid the mystical voluptuousness of the chapel and the carnal attachment of her young friends, she had framed for herself a fantastic education, learning vice, throwing all the frankness of her nature into it, unsettling her young brain to such a point that she singularly embarrassed her confessor by owning to him that she had felt a most unreasonable longing to get up and kiss him one day during mass. Then she struck her breast, she turned pale at the thought of the devil and his cauldrons. The fault which, later on, had brought about her marriage with Saccard, that brutal rape which she had experienced with a kind of frightened expectation, made her despise herself and in a great measure caused the abandonment of her whole life. She thought that she no longer had to struggle against evil that it was in her, that logic authorized her to follow the bad science to the end. With her there was yet more curiosity than appetite. Thrown into the society of the Second Empire, abandoned to her imagination, provided with money, encouraged in her loudest eccentricities, she gave herself, regretted it, and finally succeeded in killing her expiring principles, always lashed, always urged onward by her insatiable longing to learn and feel.

Besides she was as yet only at the earlier pages. She willingly talked in a low tone, and laughing, about the extraordinary circumstances of the tender attachment between Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d'Espanet, of the questionable calling of Madame de Lauwerens, and of the kisses which the Countess Vanska gave at a fixed price; but she still contemplated these things from afar off, with a vague notion of perhaps tasting them, and this indeterminate desire which at evil moments rose within her, increased her turbulent anxiety still more and urged her on in her mad search for an unique exquisite enjoyment of which she alone would partake. Her first lovers had not spoiled her; she had on three occasions fancied herself seized with a great passion; love burst forth in her brain like a cracker, the sparks of which did not reach her heart. She was mad for a month, showed herself throughout Paris with her dear lord; and then one morning, amid all the racket of her love, she became conscious of depressing silence and immense vacuity. The first, the young Duke de Rozan, was barely more than a breakfast of sunshine; Renée who had noticed him on account of his gentleness and excellent manners, found him altogether superficial, washed out, and plaguy when they were alone together. Mr. Simpson, an attaché of the American embassy, who came next, almost beat her, and for that reason remained with her for nearly a year. Then she smiled on an aide-de-camp of the Emperor, the Count de Chibray, a vain handsome man who was beginning to tire her when the Duchess de Sternich took it into her head to fall in love with him and carry him off from her; thereupon she wept for him and let her friends understand that her heart was crushed, and that she should never love again. She thus progressed to the most insignificant being in the world, Monsieur de Mussy, a young man who was making his way in the diplomatic career by conducting cotillons with especial gracefulness; she never exactly knew why she had given herself to him but she retained him for a long time, feeling lazy, disgusted with an unknown land which one discovers in half an hour, and deferring the worry attendant upon a change until she had met with some extraordinary adventure. At twenty-eight years of age she already felt terribly wearied. Ennui appeared to her all the more insupportable, as her middle-class virtues profited by the hours when she was bored to complain and worry her. She closed her door, she had frightful headaches. Then when the door opened again it was a flood of silk and lace that swept forth with a great racket, a being of luxury and joy without a care or a flush upon the brow.

Still she had had a romance in her commonplace fashionable life. One day, at sunset, after going on foot to see her father, who did not like to hear the noise of carriages at his door, she noticed, while passing along the Quai Saint-Paul on her way home, that she was being followed by a young man. It was warm and the daylight was waning with amorous softness. She, who was usually only followed on horseback in the pathways of the Bois de Boulogne, found the adventure spicy and was flattered by it as by a new homage, somewhat brutal no doubt, but the very coarseness of which titillated her. Instead of returning home she took the Rue du Temple and promenaded her gallant along the Boulevards. The man however grew bolder and became so pressing that Renée, somewhat intimidated, lost her head, followed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, and took refuge in the shop kept by her husband's sister. The man came in behind her. Madame Sidonie smiled, seemed to understand, and left them alone. And when Renée wished to follow her sister-in-law the stranger retained her, spoke to her with feeling politeness and won her forgiveness. He was a clerk called Georges whose surname she never asked. She went to see him twice, going in by the shop while he arrived by the Rue Papillon. This chance love affair, found and accepted in the street, proved one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a little shame, but with a singular smile of regret. Madame Sidonie's profit in the affair was that she at last became the accomplice of her brother's second wife, a part which she had been anxious to play ever since the wedding-day.

Poor Madame Sidonie had experienced a deception. While she was promoting the marriage she had hoped in a degree to espouse Renée herself, make her a customer and derive a number of little profits by her. She judged women at a glance like connoisseurs judge horses. And so, after allowing the couple a month to settle themselves, her consternation was great when, on perceiving Madame de Lauwerens enthroned in the centre of the drawing-room, she realised that she came too late. Madame de Lauwerens, a handsome woman of twenty-six, occupied herself with launching newcomers into the swing. She belonged to a very old family and was married to a man of the upper financial world, who had the fault of refusing to settle tailors' and milliners' bills. His wife, a very intelligent person, coined money and kept herself. She held men in horror, she said; but she supplied all her female friends with them; there was always a full stock to choose from in the flat which she occupied in the Rue de Provence, over her husband's offices. Little collations took place there; and one met one another in an unforeseen charming manner. There was no harm in a girl going to see her dear Madame de Lauwerens, and if chance brought men there who were at all events very respectful and belonged to the best society--why so much the worse. The lady of the house was charming in her long lace wrappers. A visitor would very often have chosen her in preference to her collection of blondes and brunettes. But report asserted that she was altogether well conducted. The whole secret of the affair lay in that. She still held her high situation in society, had all the men for her friends, retained her pride as a virtuous woman, and experienced a secret joy in lowering the others and deriving a profit by their fall. When Madame Sidonie had enlightened herself as to the mechanism of the new invention she was sorely distressed. It was the classical school, the woman in an old black dress, carrying love letters at the bottom of her basket, set in front of the modern school, the lady of high degree, who sells her friends in her boudoir while sipping a cup of tea. The modern school triumphed. Madame de Lauwerens glanced coldly at the shabby dress of Madame Sidonie in whom she scented a rival; and it was from her hand that Renée received her first worry, the young Duke de Rozan, whom the beautiful financier found it difficult to dispose of. It was only later on that the classical school won the day, when Madame Sidonie lent her lodging to her sister-in-law so that she might gratify her fancy for the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained her confidante.

Maxime however was one of Madame Sidonie's boon friends. When only fifteen years old he went on the prowl to his aunt's, smelling the forgotten gloves which he found lying on the furniture. She, who hated clear situations and never owned her little services, ended by lending him the keys of her rooms, on certain days, saying that she would remain in the country until the morrow. Maxime talked about some friends whom he wished to entertain and whom he did not like to take to his father's. It was in the rooms of the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl whom one was afterwards obliged to send into the country. Madame Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew, and went into ecstacies before him, murmuring in a soft voice that he was "without a hair, as rosy as a Cupid."

Maxime had grown however. He was now a pretty, slightly built young man who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that girlish appearance, which so delighted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with his soft eyes and blonde pallor. But he was not even the equal of that indolent shallow woman. In him the race of the Rougons had a tendency to refinement and became delicate and vicious. The offspring of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and so to say unmingled combination of his father's furious appetites and his mother's self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental failings were completed and aggravated. This family of the Rougons lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature whose sex must have remained in suspense during formation, and who no longer represented a will, eager for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a species of cowardice, devouring fortunes already made; a strange hermaphrodite ushered at the right time into a society that was rottening. When Maxime went to the Bois de Boulogne, with his waist tightly compressed like a woman's, lightly dancing in the saddle on which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of the age, with his strongly developed hips, his long slender hands, his sickly lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his slang learnt at petty theatres. At twenty years of age he placed himself above all surprises and all disgusts. He had certainly dreamt of the most unusual beastliness. But with him vice was not an abyss, as it is with certain old men, but a natural external bloom. It curled upon his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, and dressed him like his clothes. However his great characteristic was especially his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, true mirrors for a coquette, but behind which one perceived all the emptiness of his brain. Those harlot eyes were never lowered; they courted pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue which one summons and receives.

The everlasting gust of wind which swept into the rooms in the Rue de Rivoli and banged their doors, blew stronger and stronger while Maxime grew up, while Saccard enlarged the sphere of his transactions, and Renée threw more fever into her search for unknown enjoyment. These three beings ended by leading an astonishing life of liberty and folly. It was the ripe and prodigious fruit of a period. The street invaded the flat with its rumble of vehicles, its elbowing of strangers, and its licence of language. The father, the stepmother, the stepson, acted, talked, and set themselves at ease just as if they had each been alone living a bachelor life. Three boon friends, three students sharing the same furnished room, would not have disposed of that room more unceremoniously to install therein their hobbledehoy vices, loves, and noisy pleasures. The Saccards met with hand-shakes, did not seem to suspect the reasons which united them under the same roof, and behaved cavalierly and joyously towards each other, each thus assuming absolute independence. They replaced family ties by a kind of partnership, the profits of which are divided in equal shares; each one drew his share of pleasure to himself, and it was tacitly understood that each should dispose of that share as he thought fit. They went so far as to take their enjoyment in presence of one another, to display it, and describe it without awakening aught but a little envy and curiosity.

Maxime now instructed Renée. When he went to the Bois with her he told her stories about prostitutes which greatly enlivened her. A new woman could not appear near the lake without his setting forth on a campaign to ascertain the name of her protector, the allowance he made her, and the style in which she lived. He was acquainted with these ladies' homes, and with the particulars of their private life; indeed he was a perfect living catalogue in which all the harlots were numbered, with a complete description of each of them. This gazette of scandal was Renée's delight. On race-days at Longchamps, when she passed by in her carriage, she listened eagerly, albeit retaining her haughtiness as a woman of good society, to the story of how Blanche Müller deceived her embassy attaché with a hair-dresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his drawers in the alcove of a skinny, red-haired notoriety who was called the Crawfish. Each day brought its tattle. When the story was rather too stiff Maxime lowered his voice, but he nevertheless went on to the end. Renée opened her eyes wide, like a child to whom a good trick is related, restrained her laughter, and then stifled it in her embroidered handkerchief, which she gently pressed to her lips. Maxime also brought these women's photographs. He had portraits of actresses in all his pockets and even in his cigar case. At times he had a clearing out and placed these women in the album which was always trailing over the furniture in the drawing-room, and which already contained the portraits of Renée's female friends. There was also some men's photographs in it, Messieurs de Rozan, Simpson, De Chibray, and De Mussy, as well as actors, writers, and deputies who had come to swell the collection no one knew how. It was a strangely mixed society, the prototype of the jumble of ideas and personages that crossed Renée's and Maxime's lives. Whenever it rained, or whenever one was bored, this album proved a great subject of conversation. It always ended by falling under one's hand. The young woman opened it with a sigh for the hundredth time perhaps. By-and-by, however, her curiosity was awakened and the young fellow came and leant behind her. Then long discussions began about the Crawfish's hair, Madame de Meinhold's double chin, Madame de Lauwerens's eyes, and Blanche Müller's bosom; about the Marchioness's nose, which was a trifle on one side, and about the mouth of little Sylvia, who was notorious for her thick lips. They compared the women with each other.

"For myself, if I were a man," said Renée, "I should choose Adeline."

"That's because you don't know Sylvia," answered Maxime, "she has such a funny style. For myself, I prefer Sylvia."

The pages were turned over; at times the Duke de Rozan or Mr. Simpson, or the Count de Chibray appeared, and Maxime added, sneering:

"Besides, your taste is perverted, everyone knows it. Can you see anything more stupid than these gentlemen's faces? Rozan and Chibray look like Gustave, my barber."

Renée shrugged her shoulders as if to say that this irony did not affect her. She still forgot herself in contemplating the wan, smiling, or stern faces which the album contained; she tarried longer over the portraits of the fast women, and inquisitively studied the exact microscopical details of the photographs, the little wrinkles and the little hairs. One day she even procured a strong magnifying glass, fancying she had perceived a hair on the Crawfish's nose. And, indeed, the glass revealed a slight golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose. This hair amused them for a long time. For a whole week the ladies who called had to assure themselves in person of the presence of this hair. Thenceforth the magnifying glass served to scrutinize the women's faces. Renée made some astonishing discoveries; she found some unknown wrinkles, rough skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder. And Maxime ended by hiding the magnifying glass, declaring that one ought not to disgust oneself with the human face like that. The truth was that she scrutinized too closely the thick lips of Sylvia, for whom he had a particular affection. They then invented a new game. They asked this question: "With whom would I willingly spend a night?" and they opened the album, which was entrusted with the duty of replying. This gave rise to some strange couplings. Renée's female friends played at the game during several evenings, and Renée herself was successively married to the Archbishop of Paris, to Baron Gouraud, to M. de Chibray, at which she greatly laughed, and to her husband in person, at which she was greatly distressed. As for Maxime, either by chance, or by the maliciousness of Renée, who opened the album, he always fell upon the Marchioness. But there was never so much laughter as when luck coupled two men or two women together.

The familiarity of Renée and Maxime went so far that she told him her private sorrows. He consoled her and gave her advice. It seemed as if his father did not exist. Then later on they began to tell each other about their childhood. It was especially during their drives in the Bois de Boulogne that they felt a vague languor, a longing to relate things which are difficult to tell and are not told. The delight that children take in whispering about forbidden things, the attraction that exists for a young man and young woman to lower themselves to sin, be it only in words, unceasingly brought them back to suggestive subjects. They partook deeply of voluptuousness, for which they did not reproach one another, but which they tasted together, lazily reclining in the two corners of their carriage, like two comrades who recall their past freaks. They ended by becoming perfect braggarts of immorality. Renée owned that the little girls at her school were very immodest. Maxime improved upon that and made so bold as to relate some of the shameful doings of the college of Plassans.

"Ah! I can't tell--" murmured Renée.

Then she leant forward close to his ear, as if the sound of her voice alone would have made her blush, and confided to him one of those convent stories which appear in disgusting songs. He, on his side, had too rich a collection of anecdotes of this kind to remain behindhand. He hummed in her ear some very indecent verses. And by degrees they found themselves in an especial state of beatitude, rocked by all the carnal fancies that they stirred, titillated by little desires which were not expressed. The carriage rolled gently on, and they returned home deliciously fatigued, more tired indeed than after a night of love. They had sinned, like two young fellows who, wandering along the country lanes without any mistresses, might content themselves with their mutual recollections.

Even greater familiarity and licence existed between the father and the son. Saccard had realised that a great financier ought to love women and do some foolish things for them. He was a rough lover and preferred money; but it formed part of his programme to hang about alcoves, scatter bank-notes on certain mantelshelves, and from time to time use some notorious wench as a gilded signboard for his speculations. When Maxime had left college he and his father met in the same women's rooms and laughed over it. They were even rivals in a degree. At times when the young fellow dined at the Maison-d'Or with some noisy party, he would overhear Saccard's voice in a neighbouring private room.

"Hallo, papa's next door," he would exclaim with a grimace which he borrowed from the actors then in favour.

And he would go and knock at the door of the private room, anxious to see his father's conquest.

"Ah! it's you?" Saccard would say in a gay tone, "come in. You make enough noise to prevent one from hearing oneself eat. Who are you with then?"

"Why, there's Laure d'Aurigny, Sylvia, the Crawfish, and two others, I fancy. They are awfully funny. They poke their fingers in the dishes and chuck handfuls of salad at our heads. My coat is all greasy with oil."

The father would laugh, thinking this very funny.

"Ah! young folks, young folks," he would mutter. "That isn't like us, is it, my little kitten? We have dined very quietly and now we are going to by-by."

And he would chuck the chin of the woman whom he had beside him, and coo with his Provençal snuffle, which produced strange music for a lover.

"Oh! the old noodle!" the woman would cry. "Good-day, Maxime. Mustn't I love you, eh! to consent to dine with your scamp of a father--One never sees you now. Come early on the day after to-morrow morning. No, really, I've something to tell you."

Saccard would finish eating an ice or some fruit, beatifically, taking small mouthfuls. Then he would kiss the woman's shoulder, saying humorously:

"You know, my ducks, if I'm in the way, I'll leave the room. You can ring the bell when you are ready for me to come in again."

Then he would take the woman off, or, at times, go with her to join in the racket in the neighbouring room. Maxime and he shared the same shoulders; their hands met round the same waists. They called to one another on the divans, and repeated to each other, aloud, the confidential statements which the women had whispered in their ears. And they carried their good fellowship so far as to conspire together to carry off from the gathering the blonde or brunette which one or the other of them had chosen.

They were well known at Mabille. They went there arm in arm, after some dainty dinner, strolled round the garden, nodding to the women, and tossing them a remark as they passed by. They laughed aloud, without unlocking their arms, and came to each other's assistance whenever business was discussed. The father, who was very expert on this point, negotiated his son's love affairs advantageously. At times they sat down and drank with a party of girls. Then they changed their table or resumed their stroll. And they were seen till midnight with their arms always linked like a couple of chums, following the skirts along the yellow pathways under the glaring flame of the gas jets.

When they returned home they brought with them, from out-of-doors, in their coats, a dash of the women they had just left. Their loose attitudes, and the after-part of certain suggestive remarks and low gestures, made the flat in the Rue de Rivoli seem like a fast woman's lodging. The gentle wanton way in which the father gave his hand to his son, of itself proclaimed whence they came. It was in this atmosphere that Renée inhaled her sensual caprices and longings. She chaffed them nervously:

"Where can you have come from?" she would say to them. "You smell of tobacco and musk. It's certain that I shall have a headache."

And indeed, the strange smell profoundly disturbed her. It was the regular perfume of this singular domestic hearth.

However, Maxime was smitten with a fine passion for little Sylvia. He bored his stepmother with this girl during several months. Renée soon knew her from one end to the other, from the soles of her feet to the tip of her hair. She had a bluish mark on the hip; nothing could be more adorable than her knees; and there was this peculiarity about her shoulders, that only the left one was dimpled. Maxime evinced some maliciousness in devoting his drives with Renée to the description of his mistress's perfections. One evening, on returning from the Bois, Renée's carriage and Sylvia's were caught in a block, and had to draw up, side by side, in the Champs-Elysées. The two women eyed each other with acute curiosity, while Maxime, whom this critical situation delighted, tittered on the quiet. As his stepmother preserved gloomy silence when the carriage began to roll on again he thought she was in the sulks, and expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those strange scoldings with which she still, at times, occupied her moments of lassitude.

"Do you know that person's jeweller?" she abruptly asked him, at the moment when they reached the Place de la Concorde.

"Alas, yes!" he answered with a smile; "I owe him ten thousand francs--Why do you ask me that?"

"For nothing."

Then after a fresh silence:

"She had a very pretty bracelet, the one on the left wrist. I should have liked to see it close to."

They reached home. She said no more on the matter then. Only on the following day, just as Maxime and his father were going out together, she took the young fellow aside, and spoke to him in an undertone, with an embarrassed air, and a pretty smile which courted indulgence. He seemed surprised and went off, laughing in his wicked way. In the evening he brought Sylvia's bracelet which his stepmother had begged him to show her.

"There's what you wanted," said he. "One would thieve for your sake, pretty mamma."

"She didn't see you take it?" asked Renée who was eagerly examining the bracelet.

"I don't think so--She wore it yesterday, so she certainly wouldn't put it on to-day."

Meantime the young woman approached the window. She had put the bracelet on and she held her wrist somewhat raised slowly turning it round, delighted and repeating:

"Oh! very pretty, very pretty. There are only the emeralds that don't quite please me."

At this moment Saccard came in, and as she still held her wrist up in the white light from the window:

"Hallo!" he cried in astonishment, "Sylvia's bracelet!"

"You know this jewel?" said she, more embarrassed than he was and not knowing what to do with her arm.

He had recovered himself, and he threatened his son with his finger, muttering:

"That scamp always has some forbidden fruit in his pockets! One of these days he will bring us the lady's arm as well as her bracelet."

"Why! it isn't my doing," replied Maxime with cunning cowardice. "It's Renée who wanted to see it."

The husband contented himself with saying, "Ah!" And he looked at the bracelet in his turn, repeating like his wife, "It is very pretty, very pretty."

Then he quietly went off and Renée scolded Maxime for having betrayed her like that. But he declared that his father did not care a fig about the matter! Whereupon she returned him the bracelet, adding:

"You must call on the jeweller, and order one exactly like it for me; only, you must have the emeralds replaced by sapphires."

Saccard could not keep any living or inanimate object near him for any length of time without trying to sell it, or derive some profit by it. His son was not twenty when he already thought of utilising him. A handsome fellow, the nephew of a minister and the son of a great financier, ought to be invested well. He was certainly rather young, still one could always seek a wife and a dowry for him, and, afterwards, one could have the wedding deferred or hastened according to the financial position of the establishment. Saccard proved lucky. On a board of directors, to which he belonged, he found a tall handsome man, M. de Mareuil, who in a couple of days belonged to him. M. de Mareuil, rightly named Bonnet, was an ex-sugar refiner of Le Havre. After amassing a large fortune he had married a young girl of noble birth and also very rich, who was looking out for a fool of stylish appearance. Bonnet obtained permission to assume his wife's name, which was a first satisfaction for his pride; but his marriage had made him madly ambitious, and he dreamt of remunerating Hélène for this noble name by acquiring a high political position. From that time forward he invested money in new newspapers, bought a large estate in the depths of the Nièvre, and by all known means prepared for himself a candidature to the Corps Législatif. So far he had failed but without losing aught of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain that could be met with. He was of superb stature, with the white pensive face of a great statesman; and as he listened marvellously well, with a deep look, and majestic calmness of face, people could readily imagine that a prodigious work of comprehension and deduction was going on in his mind. In reality he was thinking about nothing. But he succeeded in disturbing people, who no longer knew whether they had to deal with a man of superior attainments or a fool. M. de Mareuil attached himself to Saccard as to a raft that might save him. He was aware that an official candidature would be vacant in the Nièvre, and he ardently hoped that the minister would select him; it was his last card. So he handed himself up, bound hand and foot, to the minister's brother. Saccard, who scented a remunerative transaction, gradually set him thinking of a marriage between his daughter Louise and Maxime. De Mareuil then became most effusive, thought that he himself had initiated this idea of a marriage, and considered himself very fortunate to enter a minister's family and give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects.

Louise, said her father, would have a dowry of a million francs. Deformed, ugly, and yet adorable, she was condemned to die young; a chest complaint was stealthily undermining her, lending her nervous gaiety and caressing grace. Young girls who are ailing quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was sensually ingenuous, she seemed to have been born at fifteen years of age in full puberty. When her father, a healthy brutified colossus, looked at her he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, during her lifetime, had also been a strong well-built woman; but stories were told about her which explained this child's stuntedness, her manners of a millionaire Bohemian, and her vicious and charming ugliness. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died from the most shameful profligacy. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband realising her lucid madness, though he ought to have had her shut up in a private asylum. Developed in this diseased form, Louise had left it with impoverished blood and crooked limbs, with her brain attacked and her memory already full of a dirty life. She thought at times that she could confusedly remember another existence, she saw strange scenes unfolded before her in a vague dimness, men and women kissing one another, quite a carnal drama with which her childish curiosity was amused. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice remained in her throughout her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she went to forbidden things, with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, seem like a person returning home after a long absence, and only having to stretch out his hand to set himself at ease and partake of the comforts of his abode. This singular girl, whose evil instincts flattered Maxime, and who, moreover--in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the science and shame of a grown woman--possessed an ingenuous effrontery, a spicy mixture of childishness and boldness, was bound in the result to please the young fellow, and seem to him very much funnier even than Sylvia, who, the daughter of a worthy stationer, possessed a usurer's heart and was horribly middle-class at bottom.

The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that "the youngsters" should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived on a footing of close friendship. M. de Mareuil promoted his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination as an auditor of the Council of State among the marriage presents.

Meanwhile the Saccards' fortune seemed to have reached its culminating point. It blazed in the midst of Paris like a colossal bonfire. It was the moment when the ardent sharing of the hounds' fees fills a corner of the forest with the barking of dogs, the clacking of whips and the blazing of torches. The appetites let loose were at last satisfied in the impudence of triumph, amid the racket of falling houses and of fortunes built up in six months. The city was now but a great saturnalia of millions and women. Vice, coming from above, flowed along the gutters, spread itself out in the sheets of ornamental water, reascended in the fountains of the public gardens to fall again on to the roofs in a fine penetrating rain. And at night time, when one passed over the bridges, it seemed as if the Seine drew along with it, amid the sleeping metropolis, all the refuse of the city--crumbs fallen from tables, bows of lace left on divans, false hair forgotten in cabs, bank notes that had slipped out of bodices, everything that the brutality of desire, and the immediate satisfaction of instinct fling into the street broken and soiled. Then amid the feverish sleep of Paris, and better still amid its breathless hankering in the broad daylight, one realised the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city, madly enamoured of its gold and its flesh. The violins sounded till midnight: then the windows became dark and shadows descended over the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last virtue extinguished. In the depths of the shade there was nothing left save a great rattle of furious, wearied love; while the Tuileries, on the river bank, stretched their arms out into the night as if for a huge embrace.

Saccard had just had his mansion of the Parc Monceaux built on some ground stolen from the city. He had reserved for himself on the first floor, a superb private room, all violet ebony and gold, with lofty glass doors to the book-cases, which were full of business papers but where not a book was to be seen; the safe, embedded in the wall, had the depths of an iron alcove large enough to accommodate the amours of a milliard. It was here that his fortune bloomed, impudently displayed itself. Everything seemed to succeed with him. When he left the Rue de Rivoli, increasing his household, doubling his expenditure, he talked to his friends about some considerable winnings. According to his account his partnership with Mignon and Charrier brought him enormous profits; his speculations on house property were more remunerative still; and as for the Crédit Viticole, it was an inexhaustible milch cow. He had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from clearly seeing the truth. His Provençal snuffling increased, and, with his curt phrases and nervous gestures, he let off fireworks, in which millions rose like rockets, and which finished by dazzling even the most incredulous. The reputation which he had acquired as a lucky gamester was mainly due to this turbulent pantomimic action. To tell the truth, no one knew him to be possessed of a clear solid capital. His different partners, who perforce were acquainted with his situation as regarded themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing him to be invariably fortunate in other speculations, those which they were not acquainted with. He spent a deal of money: the effluence of his cash-box continued, without the sources of this golden river having so far been discovered. It was pure madness, a frenzy for scattering money, handfuls of louis flung out of window, the safe emptied every evening to its last copper, but filling itself again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended he had lost the keys.

Renée's dowry was shaken, carried off and drowned in this fortune which clamoured and overflowed like a winter-torrent. The young wife, who had been distrustful in earlier days and desirous of managing her fortune herself, soon grew tired of business matters; besides, she felt herself poor beside her husband, and crushed by her debts, she was obliged to have recourse to him, to borrow money from him, and place herself at his discretion. At each fresh bill, which he paid with the smile of a man who is indulgent towards human weakness, she surrendered herself a little more, confided State bonds to him, and authorized him to sell this or that. When they went to live in the mansion in the Parc Monceaux she already found herself almost completely stripped. He had taken the place of the State and served her the interest of the hundred thousand francs coming from the Rue de la Pépinière; on the other hand, he had induced her to sell the estate in La Sologne to place the proceeds in a great affair, a superb investment, he said. She therefore had nothing left her excepting the property at Charonne, which she obstinately refused to part with so as not to sadden that excellent Aunt Élisabeth. And, in this respect again, he was preparing a stroke of genius with the assistance of his former accomplice Larsonneau. She certainly remained under obligations to him; if he had taken her fortune, he paid her the income it would have furnished, five or six times over. The interest on the hundred thousand francs, with the revenue of the Sologne money, scarcely amounted to nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to pay for her linen and boots. He gave her or paid away for her fifteen and twenty times that paltry sum. He would have worked for a week to rob her of a hundred francs, but he kept her in regal style. And thus like everybody she held her husband's monumental safe in respect without trying to penetrate the nihility of the river of gold which passed under her eyes and into which she threw herself every morning.

At the Parc Monceaux there was a mad crisis, a flashing triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses; they had an army of servants, whom they dressed in a dark-blue livery with putty-coloured breeches, and waistcoats striped black and yellow--somewhat quiet colours that the financier had selected so as to seem altogether serious-minded, which was one of the dreams he had most caressed. They displayed their luxury on the house top, and drew back the curtains when they gave grand dinners. The breeze of contemporary life, which had banged the doors of the first floor in the Rue de Rivoli, became in the mansion a perfect whirlwind that threatened to carry off the very partitions. In the midst of these princely rooms, along the gilded balustrades, over the fine woollen carpets, in this fairy palace of the parvenu, there trailed the smell of Mabille; the fashionable quadrilles were danced there with all their wriggling jactitance, the whole period passed with its mad stupid laugh, its eternal hunger and its eternal thirst. It was the suspicious abode of fashionable pleasure, the pleasure which widens the windows so that passers-by may see what is transpiring in the alcoves. The husband and the wife lived there, freely, under the eyes of their servants. They had divided the house between them, and they camped in it, scarcely looking as though they were at home, but rather as if tossed, at the end of a tumultuous bewildering journey, into some regal hotel, where they had merely taken the time to open their trunks, so as to hasten the more speedily to the delights of a fresh city. They lodged there by the night, only remaining at home on the days when grand dinners were given, ever carried away by a ceaseless peregrination through Paris, but returning at times for an hour, as one returns into a room at an inn between two excursions. Renée felt herself become more anxious, more nervous there; her silken skirts glided with snake-like hisses over the thick carpets, past the satin of the couches; she was irritated by the stupid gilding which surrounded her, by the high empty ceilings where after fête nights there only lingered the laughter of young fools and the remarks of old scoundrels; and to fill this luxury, to abide amidst this effulgence, she longed for a supreme amusement which her curiosity vainly sought for in all the corners of the mansion, in the little sun-tinted drawing-room, in the conservatory full of luxuriant vegetation. As for Saccard he began to realise his dream; he received great financiers, Monsieur Toutin-Laroche and Monsieur de Lauwerens; and great politicians also, Baron Gouraud and Deputy Haffner; his brother the minister had even condescended to come two or three times to consolidate his position by his presence. And yet like his wife he experienced nervous anxiety, a disquietude which lent a strange sound of broken window panes to his laughter. He became so ungovernable, so scared, that his acquaintances remarked, "That devil of a Saccard! he makes too much money, it will end by driving him mad!" In 1860 he had been decorated with the Legion of Honour, after rendering a mysterious service to the prefect, by lending his name to a lady for the sale of some land.

It was about the time when they went to live near the Parc Monceaux that an apparition crossed Renée's life, leaving her an ineffaceable impression. The minister had so far resisted the supplications of his sister-in-law, who was dying with a longing to be invited to the court balls. However, he gave way at last, believing that his brother's position was definitely established on a sound basis. For a month Renée did not sleep for thinking of it. But the great evening arrived at last, and she sat trembling all over, in the carriage which was taking her to the Tuileries.

She wore a costume of prodigious grace and originality, a real gem which she had lighted upon during a night of sleeplessness, and which three of Worms's workpeople had come to her house to make up under her eyes. It was a simple dress of white gauze, trimmed however with a multitude of little scalloped flounces edged with bands of black velvet. The black velvet tunic was cut square, very low to show her bosom, framed with some narrow lace, barely a finger broad. There was not a flower, not a bit of ribbon; but round her wrists, some bracelets without the least chasing, and on her head a narrow diadem of gold, a plain circlet which seemed to be an aureola.

When she reached the reception rooms, and her husband had left her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a momentary embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she saw herself look adorable, soon reassured her, and she was accustoming herself to the warm atmosphere, to the murmur of voices, to the crush of dress coats and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who puffed as if he were troubled with a bad digestion. The bare shoulders ranged themselves in two lines, whilst the dress coats, with a discreet air, instinctively drew back a step. Renée found herself pushed to the end of the line of shoulders near the second door, the one that the Emperor was approaching with a faltering, unsteady step. She thus saw him come towards her from one door to the other.

He wore a dress coat, with the red ribbon of the Grand Cordon. Renée, again seized with emotion, retained but imperfect vision, and to her this bleeding stain seemed to cast splashes over the whole of the sovereign's breast. As a rule, she thought him little, with swaying loins, and legs too short for the trunk of his body; but now she was delighted, and, as she saw him, he looked handsome, despite his pale face and the heavy leaden lids which fell over his lifeless eyes. Under his moustaches, his lips were languidly parted, and his nose alone remained bony amid the whole of his puffy face.

With a worn-out air, and vaguely smiling, the Emperor and the old general continued to advance with short steps, seemingly sustaining each other. They looked at the ladies bending forward, and their glances, cast to the right and to the left, glided into the bodices. The general leant on one side, said a word to his master, and pressed his arm in the manner of a gay companion. And the Emperor, supine and nebulous, duller even than usual, still approached with his lagging step.

They were in the middle of the room, when Renée felt their glances fall upon her. The general gazed at her with a look of surprise, while the Emperor, half raising his eyelids, let a sensual gleam shoot from his grey, hesitating, bleared eyes. Renée, losing countenance, lowered her head, bowed, and saw nothing more but the pattern of the carpet. Still, she watched their shadows, and she understood that they were pausing for a few seconds before her. And she fancied that she heard the Emperor, that licentious dreamer, murmur, as he gazed at her, immersed in her muslin skirt striped with velvet:

"Look there, general, a flower to be culled, a mysterious pink, variegated white and black."

And the general answered in a more brutal voice:

"That pink would look awfully well in our button-holes, sire."

Renée raised her head. The apparition had disappeared, the crowd was thronging round about the doorway. After that evening she often returned to the Tuileries, she even had the honour of being complimented by his majesty aloud, and of becoming a little bit his friend; but she always remembered the sovereign's slow, heavy walk along the centre of the reception-room between the two rows of shoulders; and whenever she experienced any new joy amid her husband's growing prosperity, she again saw the Emperor overtopping the bowing bosoms, coming towards her, and comparing her to a pink which the general advised him to place in his button-hole. For her this was the high note of her life.