CHAPTER IV.

The well-defined, galling desire which had risen to Renée's heart amid the troublous perfumes of the conservatory, while Maxime and Louise laughed on a couch of the little buttercup room, seemed to die away like a nightmare of which naught remains save a slight shudder. The young woman had retained the bitterness of the Tanghinia on her lips all night; and it had seemed to her, on feeling the burning of the cursed leaf, that a mouth of flame was pressing itself to hers, blowing her a devouring love. Then this mouth escaped her, and her dream was immersed in vast waves of shade which rolled around her.

In the morning she slept a little, and when she awoke she thought she was ill. She had the curtains drawn, spoke to her doctor of nausea and headache, and for a couple of days actually refused to go out. And as she pretended that she was being besieged, she forbade her door. Maxime came and knocked at it fruitlessly. He did not sleep in the house, as he preferred to be able to dispose freely of his rooms; indeed, he led the most nomadic life in the world, lodging in his father's new houses, selecting whatever floor suited him, and moving every month, often out of sheer caprice, and at times to make room for serious tenants. He dried the walls in the company of some mistress. Accustomed to his stepmother's whims, he feigned great compassion for her, and went upstairs four times a-day to inquire after her, with a most distressed look, though, in point of fact, he merely wished to tease her. On the third day he found her in the little drawing-room, rosy and smiling, and with a calm and rested look.

"Well, did you amuse yourself very much with Céleste?" he asked her, alluding to the long tête-à-tête she had had with her maid.

"Yes," she answered, "she is a very useful girl. She always has such cold hands; she placed them on my forehead, and soothed my poor head a little."

"But that girl's a remedy then!" cried the young fellow. "If I ever have the misfortune to fall in love, you'll lend her to me, eh? so that she may place her two hands on my heart."

They joked, and went for their usual drive to the Bois. A fortnight passed by. Renée had thrown herself more madly than ever into her life of visits and balls; her head seemed to have turned once more, she no longer complained of lassitude and disgust. Still, one might have thought that she had committed some secret sin, which she did not speak of, but which she confessed by a more strongly marked contempt for herself and by increased depravity in her whims as a fashionable woman. One evening she confessed to Maxime that she longed to go to a ball which Blanche Müller, an actress in vogue, meant to give to the princesses of the footlights and the queens of the fast world. This avowal surprised and embarrassed even the young man, and yet he was not particularly scrupulous. He tried to catechise his stepmother: really, that wasn't her place; besides, she would see nothing very funny there; and then, if she were recognised, it would cause a scandal. She answered all these good reasons with clasped hands, supplicating, and smiling.

"Come, my little Maxime, be kind. I'm determined on it. I will put on a very dark domino; we will only pass through the rooms."

Maxime always ended by giving way, and would have taken his stepmother to all the disreputable places in Paris had she but begged him ever so little to do so. So he consented to escort her to Blanche Müller's ball, whereupon she clapped her hands like a child to whom an unhoped-for holiday is granted.

"Ah! you are a dear fellow," said she. "It's for to-morrow, isn't it? Come and fetch me very early. I want to see those women arrive. You will name them to me, and we shall amuse ourselves awfully well."

She reflected, and then added:

"No, don't come. Wait for me in a cab on the Boulevard Malesherbes. I will go out by the garden."

This mysterious way of proceeding was a spice which she added to her escapade, a simple refinement of pleasure, for had she left the house at midnight by the front door, her husband would not even have put his head out of window.

On the morrow, after telling Céleste to sit up for her, she crossed the dark shadows of the Parc Monceaux with shudders of exquisite fear. Saccard had profited by his good understanding with the Hôtel de Ville authorities to obtain a key to a little gate of the park, and Renée had wished to have one for herself as well. She almost lost her way, however, and only found the cab, thanks to the two yellow eyes of the lamps. At that period the Boulevard Malesherbes, scarcely finished, was still a perfect solitude at night-time. The young woman glided into the vehicle in great emotion, her heart beating as delightfully as if she were going to some love meeting. Maxime was philosophically smoking, half asleep, in one corner of the cab. He wished to throw away his cigar, but she prevented him from doing so, and, as she tried to restrain his arm in the darkness, she placed her hand full on his face, which greatly amused them both.

"I tell you that I like the smell of tobacco!" she exclaimed. "Keep your cigar. Besides, we're going on the spree to-night. I'm a man, I am!"

The Boulevard was not yet lighted up, and while the cab rolled down it towards the Madeleine, it was so dark inside that they could not see each other. Every now and then, when the young fellow carried his cigar to his lips, a red point stood out amid the dense obscurity. This red point interested Renée. Maxime, who was half covered by the folds of her black satin domino, which filled the inside of the vehicle, continued smoking in silence, with a bored air. The truth was, that his stepmother's whim had prevented him from following to the Café Anglais a party of women who had determined to begin and finish Blanche Müller's ball there. He was crusty, and she discerned his sulkiness in the darkness.

"Are you ill?" she asked him.

"No, I am cold," he answered.

"Dear me. Why, I'm burning. I feel quite stifled here. Take part of my skirts on your knees."

"Oh! your skirts," he muttered, bad-humouredly. "I already have them up to my eyes."

But this remark made him laugh himself, and by degrees he grew lively. She told him of the fright she had had in the Parc Monceaux. And then she confessed another of her longings: she would like one night to go for a row in the boat which she could see from her windows, moored at the edge of a pathway. On hearing this, he considered that she was becoming sentimental. The cab still rolled on, the darkness remained, profound, and they leaned towards one another to hear each other amid the noise of the wheels, touching each other when they moved their arms, and at times, when they approached too closely, inhaling each other's warm breath. And at equal intervals Maxime's cigar was revivified, setting a red blur on the darkness, and casting a pale rosy flash on Renée's face. She looked adorable, seen by this fleeting glimmer; so much so that the young man was struck by it.

"Oh! oh!" said he. "We seem to be very pretty this evening, stepmamma. Let's see a bit."

He brought his cigar nearer, and precipitately drew a few puffs. Renée, in her corner was illumined by a warm and seemingly panting light. She had slightly raised her hood. Her bare head, covered with a mass of little curls, with a simple blue ribbon, looked like that of a real urchin peering above the large blouse of black satin which rose to her neck. She thought it very funny to be thus looked at and admired by the light of a cigar, and she threw herself back with little bursts of laughter, while he added with an air of comic gravity:

"The deuce! I shall have to watch over you, if I am to take you back safe and sound to my father."

Meanwhile the cab turned round the Madeleine and went up the Boulevards. Here it became filled with a leaping light, with the reflection of the shops, the fronts of which were flaming. Blanche Müller resided two steps off, in one of the new houses which have been built on the raised ground of the Rue-Basse-du-Rempart. As yet there were only a few vehicles at the door, it was barely more than ten o'clock. Maxime wanted to take a turn on the Boulevards and wait an hour, but Renée, whose curiosity was becoming more acute, straightway declared to him that she should go upstairs alone if he did not accompany her. He followed her therefore, and felt glad on finding that there was more company upstairs than he had expected. The young woman had put on her mask, and leaning on the arm of Maxime, to whom she gave peremptory orders in a low voice, and who submissively obeyed her, she ferreted about the rooms, raised the corners of the door-hangings, examined the furniture, and would perhaps have searched the drawers had she not feared being seen. Although the rooms were richly upholstered, there were corners suggestive of a Bohemian life, and in which one scented the mummer. It was particularly in these spots that Renée's nostrils dilated, and that she compelled her companion to walk slowly so as to lose nothing of the sight or the smell. She especially forgot herself in a dressing-room, the door of which had been left wide open by Blanche Müller, who, when she entertained company, gave everything up to her guests, even to her alcove in which the bed was pushed back to make room for card tables. But the dressing-room did not satisfy Renée: it seemed to her common, and even rather dirty, with its carpet which incandescent cigar ash had pitted with little round burns, and its blue silk hangings stained with pomatum and splashed with soap-suds. When she had fully inspected the rooms, and set every feature of the abode in her memory, so as to be able to describe it, later on, to her intimate friends, she passed on to the people who were present. As for the men she knew them; they were, for the most part, the same financiers, the same politicians, the same young fellows about town who came to her Thursday at-homes. She fancied herself in her own drawing-room at certain moments, when she found herself in front of a group of smiling dress coats, who, on the previous evening, had worn the same smile in speaking to the Marchioness d'Espanet, or to the fair Madame Haffner at her house. And even when she looked at the women her illusion was not completely dispelled. Laure d'Aurigny was in bright yellow like Suzanne Haffner, and Blanche Müller, like Adeline d'Espanet, wore a white dress which left her bare down to the middle of her back. At last Maxime implored mercy, and she consented to sit down on a couch beside him. They remained there for a moment, the young fellow yawning, the young woman asking him these ladies' names, undressing them with a glance and counting the yards of lace that they wore around their skirts. Seeing her absorbed in this serious study he ended by slipping away in compliance with a sign which Laure d'Aurigny made him with her hand. She joked him about the lady whom he had on his arm, and then made him swear to come and join her party at the Café Anglais, at one o'clock.

"Your father will be there," she shouted to him at the moment when he joined Renée again.

The latter found herself surrounded by a group of women who were laughing very loudly, while Monsieur de Saffré had profited by Maxime leaving his seat vacant to glide beside her and make gallant proposals in the style of a cab driver. Then Monsieur de Saffré and the women all began to shout and smack their hips to such a degree that Renée, fairly deafened, and yawning in her turn, rose up, saying to her companion--

"Let us go, they are too stupid."

As they were leaving the room, Monsieur de Mussy came in. He seemed delighted to meet Maxime, and without paying any attention to the masked woman who was with him.

"Ah, my dear fellow," he murmured with a love-sick air, "she will cause my death. I know that she is better, but she still forbids me her door. Tell her you have seen me with tears in my eyes."

"Be easy, your message shall be delivered," said the young fellow, with a strange laugh.

And on the way downstairs--

"Well, pretty mamma, didn't that poor fellow touch you?" She shrugged her shoulders without replying. Outside, on the pavement, she paused before getting into the cab which had brought them, looking hesitatingly in the direction of the Madeleine, and in the direction of the Boulevard des Italiens. It was scarcely half-past eleven, and the Boulevard was still very animated.

"So we are going home," she murmured regretfully.

"Unless you would like to take a drive along the Boulevards," answered Maxime.

She assented. She had been disappointed in her feast of feminine curiosity, and she was distressed at having to go home like that, with an illusion the less, and a headache setting in. She had long fancied that an actresses' ball was the height of fun.

As often happens during the last days of October, it seemed as if the spring had returned; the night air had a May-like warmth, and the occasional cold gusts that passed by lent an additional zest to the atmosphere. Renée, with her head at the window, remained silent, looking at the crowd, the cafés and the restaurants, the interminable line of which stretched away before her. She had become quite serious, absorbed in the depth of the vague wishes which fill the reveries of women. This broad side-walk, which was swept by the dresses of harlots, and on which the men's boots rung with peculiar familiarity, the grey asphalte over which, it seemed to her, the gallop of facile love and pleasure was passing, awoke her slumbering desires, and made her forget the idiotic ball that she had just left to allow her to espy other delights of enhanced spiciness. At the windows of Brébant's private rooms she perceived women's shadows against the whiteness of the curtains. And Maxime thereupon told her a very indecent story of a deceived husband who had thus detected, on a curtain, the shadow of his wife embracing the shadow of a lover. She scarcely listened to him, but he, growing lively, ended by taking hold of her hands and teasing her by talking about that poor Monsieur de Mussy.

As they drove back and again passed in front of Brébant's--

"Do you know," she said abruptly, "that Monsieur de Saffré invited me to supper this evening?"

"Oh! you would have fared badly," replied Maxime laughing. "Saffré doesn't possess the least culinary imagination. He hasn't got beyond lobster salad."

"No, no, he talked of oysters and cold partridge. But he thee-and-thou'd me, and that disturbed me."

She stopped short, looked again at the Boulevard, and, after a moment's silence, added with a distressed air--

"The worst of it is that I'm awfully hungry."

"What! you're hungry!" exclaimed the young man. "It's very simple, we'll sup together--Shall we?"

He spoke quietly, but she refused at first, declaring that Céleste had prepared her a collation at home. However, Maxime, who did not wish to go to the Café Anglais, had stopped the cab at the corner of the Rue Le Pelletier, in front of the restaurant of the Café Riche; he had even alighted, and as his stepmother still hesitated.

"After all," said he, "if you're afraid that I shall compromise you, say so. I'll get up beside the driver and take you back to your husband."

She smiled and alighted from the cab with the manners of a bird which is afraid of wetting its claws. She was radiant. The side-walk which she felt under her feet warmed her heels, and imparted to the surface of her skin a delightful quiver of fear and contented caprice. Ever since the cab had been rolling along she had had a mad longing to spring out upon this side-walk. She crossed it with short steps, and furtively, as if she derived a greater pleasure from the fear that she might be seen. Her escapade was decidedly turning into an adventure. She certainly did not regret having declined Monsieur de Saffré's coarse invitation. But she would have gone home terribly out of sorts if Maxime had not had the idea of letting her taste forbidden fruit. He went quickly up the stairs as if he had been at home. She followed him, rather short of breath. A slight fume of game and fish was wafted about, and the carpet, secured to the stairs with brass rods, had a smell of dust which increased her emotion.

Just as they were reaching the first landing they met a dignified looking waiter who drew back to the wall to let them pass him.

"Charles," said Maxime, "you'll serve us, eh? Give us the white room."

Charles bowed, reascended to the landing and opened the door of a private room. The gas was lowered, and it seemed to Renée as if she were penetrating into the twilight of a suspicious and charming spot.

A continuous rumble swept in through the window which was wide open, and in the reflection cast on the ceiling by the café below, the shadows of promenaders passed swiftly by. But with a touch of the thumb the waiter turned on the gas. The shadows on the ceiling vanished, and the room was filled with a glaring light which fell full upon the young woman's head. She had already thrown her hood back. The little curls had become slightly disordered in the cab, but the blue ribbon had not stirred. She began to walk about, abashed by the manner in which Charles looked at her; he blinked his eyes and screwed up their lids the better to see her, in a way which plainly signified, "I don't know this one yet."

"What shall I serve you, sir?" he asked aloud.

Maxime turned towards Renée.

"Monsieur de Saffré's supper, eh?" said he, "some oysters, a partridge--"

And seeing the young man smile, Charles discreetly imitated him, murmuring--

"Then the same supper as last Wednesday, if that will suit?"

"The supper of last Wednesday--" repeated Maxime. Then suddenly remembering: "Yes, it's all the same to me, give us Wednesday's supper."

When the waiter had retired Renée took her eye-glasses and went inquisitively round the little room. It was a square apartment all white and gold and furnished with boudoir-like coquetry. In addition to the table and the chairs, there was a low dinner waggon and a large divan, a perfect bed, placed between the chimney-piece and the window. A Louis XVI. clock and candlesticks adorned the white marble mantelshelf. But the curiosity of the room was the looking-glass, a handsome squat looking-glass which women's diamonds had covered with names, dates, murdered verses, prodigious sentiments and astounding avowals. Renée fancied she espied something beastly but she lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, experienced fresh embarrassment at the sight, and to give herself a countenance began gazing at the ceiling and the chandelier of gilt copper with five gas jets. However the uneasiness she felt was delightful. While she raised her brow, as if to study the cornice, looking grave and holding her eye-glasses in her hand, she derived profound enjoyment from the presence of the equivocal furniture, which she knew to be around her; that clear cynical looking glass, the purity of which, being wrinkled by those dirty scrawls, had proved useful in adjusting so many false chignons; that divan which shocked her by its breadth; the table and the carpet itself in which she found the same smell she had detected upon the stairs, a vague, penetrating and almost religious smell of dust.

Then, when it was at last necessary for her to lower her eyes:

"What is this Wednesday supper?" she asked of Maxime.

"Nothing," he answered, "a bet that one of my friends lost."

In any other spot, he would without any hesitation have told her that he had supped there on Wednesday with a lady whom he had met on the Boulevard. But since he had entered the private room he had instinctively treated her like a woman whom one has to please, and whose jealousy ought to be spared. However she did not insist on the point, but went and leaned on the rail of the window, where he soon joined her. Charles came in and went out behind them amid a noise of crockery and plate.

It was not yet midnight. On the Boulevard below, Paris was thundering and prolonging the ardent day before making up its mind to go to bed. The rows of trees separated in a confused line the whiteness of the foot walk from the vague darkness of the roadway along which passed the rumble and the fleet lamps of the vehicles. On either edge of this dim strip of ground, the kiosks of the newspaper vendors shed their light here and there, like great Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely variegated, which had been set at regular intervals on the ground for some colossal illumination. But at this time of night their subdued brilliancy was lost in the glare of the neighbouring shop fronts. Not a shutter was up, the foot walks stretched away without a line of shadow under a stream of rays which lighted them with a golden dust, with the warm brilliant glare of full daylight. Maxime pointed out to Renée the Café Anglais, the windows of which were shining in front of them. The lofty branches of the trees somewhat prevented them, however, from seeing the houses and the footway across the Boulevard. They leaned forward and looked below them. There was a continual coming and going: promenaders passed by in groups, harlots in couples trailed their skirts which they raised from time to time with a languid gesture, casting wearied yet smiling glances around them. Under the window itself the tables of the Café Riche were spread out in the blaze of the gas-jets, the brilliancy of which penetrated half across the thoroughfare; and it was especially in the centre of this ardent focus that they saw the wan faces and pale smiles of the passers by. Around the little tables men and women were mingled together drinking. The girls were in showy dresses with their hair down their necks; they lounged about on their chairs and made loud remarks which the noise of the traffic prevented one from hearing. Renée especially noticed one woman who was dressed in a blue costume trimmed with white Maltese lace, and who sat alone at a table, leaning back with her hands on her stomach; she was waiting with a gloomy resigned look and leisurely sipping a glass of beer. Those who were walking, slowly disappeared among the crowd, and the young woman, who took an interest in their doings, let her eyes follow them, and gazed from one end of the Boulevard to the other, into the noisy confused depths of the thoroughfare full of the black swarm of promenaders and where the lights became mere sparks. And the endless procession, a strangely mingled crowd always the same, passed by with fatiguing regularity amid the bright colours and the dark depths, in the airy-like confusion of the thousand leaping flames which swept like waves out of the shops, lending colour to the transparencies of the windows and the kiosks, tracing fillets, letters and fiery designs over the house fronts, studding the darkness with stars and gliding along the roadway continually. Amid the deafening noise which rose on high was a clamour, a prolonged monotonous rumble like an organ note accompanying an eternal procession of little automatic dolls. At one moment Renée thought that an accident had taken place. There was a stream of people in motion on the left, a little beyond the Passage de l'Opéra. But on taking her glasses she recognised the omnibus office; there were a great many people on the side-walk standing waiting, and rushing forwards as soon as a vehicle arrived. She could hear the rough voice of the official calling out the numbers, and then the tinkle of the registering bell was wafted to her like a crystalline ringing. Her eyes next lighted upon an advertisement on a kiosk glaringly coloured like an Épinal print. On the pane of glass, in a green and yellow frame, there was a sneering devil's head, with hair on end, a hatter's advertisement which she did not understand. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus with its red lamps and yellow body passed by, turning round the corner of the Rue Le Pelletier and shaking the house with its din; and she saw the men riding on the knife-board, fellows with weary faces who rose up to look at them, Maxime and herself, with the inquisitive glances of hungry people peeping through a keyhole.

"Ah!" said she, "the Parc Monceaux is quietly asleep by this time."

It was the only remark she made. They remained there for nearly twenty minutes, silent, and surrendering themselves to the intoxication of the noise and illumination. Then, the table being laid, they went and sat down, and as she seemed inconvenienced by the waiter's presence Maxime dismissed him.

"Leave us--I will ring for dessert."

Renée had little flushes on her cheeks, and her eyes shone; one would have thought she had just been running. She brought with her from the window some of the din and animation of the Boulevard. She would not let her companion close the sashes.

"Why! it's the orchestra," said she, when he complained of the noise. "Don't you think it a funny music? It will be a fine accompaniment to our oysters and partridge."

The escapade lent youth to her thirty years. She had quick movements and a dash of fever, and this private room, this tête-à-tête with a young man amid the din of the street, gave her the look of a fast girl. She attacked the oysters with resolution. Maxime was not hungry and he watched her with a smile while she devoured.

"The deuce!" he muttered, "you would have made a good supper companion."

She stopped short, annoyed that she had eaten so quickly. "You think that I'm too hungry. What would you? It's the hour we spent at that idiotic ball which emptied me. Ah! my poor fellow, I pity you for living in such society as that!"

"But you know very well," said he, "that I have promised you to send Sylvia and Laure d'Aurigny to the right about on the day that your friends consent to come and sup with me."

With a superb gesture she answered, "Of course! I quite believe it. We are a good deal more amusing than those women, confess it now--if one of us bored her lover like your Sylvia and your Laure d'Aurigny must bore you, why the poor little woman would not keep her lover a week! You will never listen to me, but try it one of these days."

To avoid summoning the waiter Maxime rose, removed the oyster shells and brought the partridge which had been placed on the dinner waggon. The table had the luxurious aspect customary in the fashionable restaurants. A breath of adorable debauchery sped over the damask cloth, and it was with little quivers of contentment that Renée let her slender hands stroll from her fork to her knife, from her plate to her glass. She who usually drank water barely tinged with wine, now drank white wine neat. As Maxime, standing with his napkin on his arm, waited on her with comical complaisance, he resumed:

"What can Monsieur de Saffré have said to you to make you so furious? Did he find you ugly?"

"Oh! he," she answered, "he is a nasty man. I should never have thought that a gentleman of such distinguished bearing, and so polite when he calls on me, could talk such language. But I forgive him. It was the women who irritated me. One might have thought they were apple-stall keepers. There was one who complained of a boil on her hip, and, a little bit more, I believe she would have turned up her skirt to shew her sore to everyone."

Maxime was splitting with laughter.

"No, really now," she continued, growing more animated, "I don't understand you men, those women are dirty and stupid. And to think that when I saw you go to Sylvia's I imagined prodigious things, banquets in the ancient style, like one sees in paintings, with creatures crowned with roses, gold cups and extraordinary voluptuousness. What a sell! You showed me a dirty dressing-room and some women who swore like carters. Under such conditions it really isn't worth while to do wrong."

He wanted to protest, but she silenced him, and holding between her finger-tips a partridge bone which she was daintily nibbling, she added in a lower tone:

"Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear fellow. I, who am a respectable woman, when I feel bored and commit the sin of dreaming of impossibilities, I am sure that I devise much nicer things than such as Blanche Müller could think of."

And with a grave air she concluded by a profound remark of naive cynicism:

"It is a question of how one is brought up, do you see?"

She gently laid the little bone on her plate. The rumble of the vehicles continued without any louder sound rising above it. She was obliged however to raise her voice so that he might hear her; and her cheeks became still redder. On the dinner waggon there were still some truffles, a sweet entremets; and some asparagus, a curiosity for that time of the year. He set everything on the table, so as to avoid having to disturb himself again; and as the table was rather narrow he placed on the floor, between them, a silver pail containing a bottle of champagne surrounded by ice. The young woman's appetite had ended by overtaking him too. They tasted all the dishes, and emptied the bottle of champagne with brusque gaiety, launching out into suggestive theories, with their elbows on the table like two friends who ease their hearts after a drinking bout. The noise on the Boulevard was diminishing; but to Renée's ears it increased, and at times all those wheels seemed to be revolving in her head.

When he spoke of ringing for dessert she rose up and shook her long satin blouse to make the crumbs fall off, saying:

"That's it--You know you can light a cigar."

She felt somewhat giddy. Attracted by a peculiar noise which she could not explain to herself, she went to the window. The shops were being shut up.

"Dear me," said she, turning towards Maxime, "the orchestra is clearing off."

Then she leant out again. In the centre of the thoroughfare the coloured eyes of the cabs and omnibuses, fewer and moving faster, were still passing one another. Large pits of darkness seemed to have opened in front of the closed shops--along the footpaths on either side. The cafés alone were still flaming, striping the asphalte with sheets of light. From the Rue Drouot to the Rue du Helder she thus perceived a long row of white and black squares, amid which the last promenaders sprang up and vanished again strangely. The harlots, with the trains of their dresses, by turns glaringly illuminated and immersed in darkness, seemed like apparitions, like pale marionettes crossing the limelight of some extravaganza. Renée amused herself for a moment with the sight. There was no longer a full-shed light; the gas was being turned off; the variegated kiosks stood out more defined amid the darkness. From time to time a rush of people who had just left some theatre, passed by. But soon there was vacancy again, and then under the window there lingered two or three men together whom a woman accosted. They stood in a group and discussed terms. Some of their remarks rose audibly in the subsiding din, and then it generally happened that the woman went off with one of the men. Other girls wandered from café to café, strolled round the tables, pocketed the forgotten lumps of sugar, laughed with the waiters, and gazed fixedly at the belated customers, with a silent, questioning, proffering look. And then, just after Renée had let her eyes follow the all but unoccupied knife-board of a Batignolles omnibus, she recognised, at the corner of the foot-pavement, the woman in the blue dress and white lace, who stood glancing about her, still in search of a man.

When Maxime came to fetch Renée at the window, where she was forgetting herself, he smiled as he looked at one of the partly opened casements of the Café Anglais. The idea that his father was there supping on his side seemed comical to him; but that evening a peculiar pudicity restrained his customary banter. Renée only left the window-rail regretfully. An intoxication and languor rose from the vague depths of the Boulevard. There was a coaxing summons to self-indulgent sleep in the attenuated rumble of the vehicles, and the obliteration of the bright lights. The whispers that sped by, the groups assembled in shadowy corners, transformed the side-walk into the passage of some large inn, at the hour when travellers repair to their chance beds. The gleam and the noise became fainter and fainter, the city was falling asleep, and a breath of love swept over the housetops.

When the young woman turned her head the light of the little chandelier made her blink her eyes. She was now somewhat pale and felt slight quivers at the corners of her mouth. Charles was setting out the dessert; he left the room, came in again, swinging the door, slowly and phlegmatically like a well-bred man.

"But I'm no longer hungry!" exclaimed Renée, "take away all those plates and bring us the coffee."

The waiter, accustomed to the whims of the women he served, cleared the dessert away and poured out the coffee. He filled the whole room with his importance.

"Pray do send him away," said the young woman--half sickened by the sight of him--to Maxime.

Maxime dismissed him; but scarcely had he disappeared, than he returned once more to draw the large curtains of the window closely together with a discreet air. When he had at last retired, the young fellow, who, on his side, was beginning to feel annoyed, rose from his seat and going to the door:

"Wait a bit," he said, "I have the means of getting rid of him."

And he pushed the bolt.

"That's it," she rejoined, "we shall at least be by ourselves."

Their confidential, friendly chatting began again. Maxime had lighted a cigar. Renée sipped her coffee and even allowed herself a glass of chartreuse. The room grew warmer and became filled with bluish smoke. She ended by setting her elbows on the table and by resting her chin between her two half-closed fists. Under this slight pressure her mouth grew smaller, her cheeks were slightly raised, and her narrow eyes shone more brightly. Thus unsettled, her little face looked adorable, under the stream of golden curls which now fell down upon her eyebrows. Maxime gazed at her through the smoke of his cigar. He found she had an original look. At certain moments he was no longer quite sure as to her sex; the long wrinkle which crossed her forehead, the pouting forwardness of her lips, the undecided air imparted by her shortsightedness, made a tall young man of her; the more so, as her long black satin blouse rose so high that one barely espied a white fatty strip of neck under her chin. She let herself be looked at with a smile, no longer moving her head, but with her eyes lost in vacancy and her lips closed.

Then suddenly she woke up, and went to look at the mirror, towards which her dreamy eyes had turned since a few moments. She raised herself on tip-toe, and leant her hands on the edge of the mantelshelf to read the signatures, the coarse remarks which had shocked her before supper. She spelt the syllables with some little difficulty, laughed, and then still read on like a schoolboy who is turning over some pages of Piron in his desk.

"'Ernest and Clara'," said she, "and there is a heart underneath, which looks like a funnel. Ah! this is better, 'I love men because I like truffles.' Signed, 'Laure.' I say, Maxime, was it that woman d'Aurigny who wrote that?----Then here are the arms of one of these women, I fancy: a hen smoking a big pipe. And more names, a perfect calendar of saints: 'Victor, Amélie, Alexandre, Édouard, Marguerite, Paquita, Louise, Renée'--Ah, so there's one who is named like me--"

Maxime could see her ardent face in the looking-glass. She raised herself up still more, and her domino, drawn more closely behind, outlined the curve of her figure, the development of her hips. The young fellow's eyes followed the line of the satin which moulded her form like a chemise. He rose up in his turn and threw away his cigar. He was ill at ease and nervous. Something usual and accustomed was lacking about him.

"Ah, here's your name, Maxime," exclaimed Renée. "Listen--'I love--'"

But he had seated himself on a corner of the divan, almost at the young woman's feet. And after succeeding in taking hold of her hands with a prompt movement, and making her turn away from the looking-glass, he said in a strange voice:

"Pray don't read that."

She struggled, laughing nervously.

"Why not? Am I not your confidante?"

But he insisted in a more husky tone.

"No, no, not this evening."

He was still holding her, and she tried to free herself with little jerks of the wrists. Their eyes had an expression they were not acquainted with; there was a touch of shame in their long, constrained smile. She fell upon her knees at the edge of the divan. They continued struggling although she no longer made an effort to return to the mirror, and was already surrendering herself. And as the young fellow caught her round the body, she said with an embarrassed dying laugh:

"Come, leave me. You are hurting me--"

It was the sole murmur that came from her lips. Amid the profound silence of the room where the gas seemed to shoot up higher, she felt the ground tremble and heard the crash of a Batignolles omnibus which must have been turning the corner of the Boulevard. And it was all over. When they again found themselves, seated side-by-side on the divan, he stammered out, amid their mutual embarrassment:

"Bah! it was bound to happen one day or other."

She said nothing. With an overwhelmed air, she looked at the pattern of the carpet.

"Were you thinking of it?" continued Maxime, stammering more and more. "I wasn't, not at all. I ought to have mistrusted the private room."

But in a deep voice, as if all the middle-class uprightness of the Bérauds Du Châtel had been awakened by this supreme sin:

"What we have just done is infamous," she murmured, sobered, her face aged and very grave.

She was stifling. She went to the window, drew back the curtains, and leant over the rail. The orchestra was hushed; the sin had been committed amid the last quiver of the basses and the distant chant of the violins, the vague soft music of the Boulevard now sleeping and dreaming of love. The road and the side-walks stretched away below in grey solitude. All the rumbling cab wheels seemed to have gone off, taking the lights and the crowd away with them. Below the window, the Café Riche was closed, not a ray of light glided from between the shutters. Across the way, brazen-like gleams alone appeared upon the façade of the Café Anglais, especially lighting up one window which was partly open and whence a faint sound of laughter escaped. And all along this ribbon of darkness, from the turn at the Rue Drouot to the other end, as far as her eyes could reach, she no longer saw aught save the symmetrical blurs of the kiosks tinging the night with red and green, without illuminating it, and looking like night-lights spaced along some giant dormitory. She raised her head. The high branches of the trees stood out against a clear sky, while the irregular outline of the house roofs died away till it seemed like a clustering heap of rocks on the shore of a bluish sea. But this strip of sky saddened her all the more, and it was in the darkness of the Boulevard alone that she found some consolation. What lingered of the noise and vice of the evening on the surface of the deserted thoroughfare excused her. She thought she could feel the heat of all these men and women's footsteps ascend from the cooling footway. The shames that had trailed there, the desires of a minute, the whispered offers, the weddings of a night paid for in advance, were evaporating, floating about in a heavy mist rolled away by the breath of morning. Leaning out into the darkness she inhaled this quivering silence, this alcove-like smell, as an encouragement which came to her from below, as an assurance that her shame was shared and accepted by a colluding city. And when her eyes had grown accustomed to the obscurity she perceived the woman in the blue dress trimmed with lace, standing in the same place, alone in the grey solitude, waiting and offering herself to the deserted darkness.

On turning, the young woman beheld Charles who was looking around him, scenting like a dog. He ended by perceiving Renée's blue ribbon, lying rumpled and forgotten on a corner of the divan. And with his polite air, he hastened to take it to her. Then she realised all her shame. Standing in front of the looking-glass she tried with clumsy hands to tie the ribbon again. But her chignon had fallen, the little curls were flattened on her temples, and she was unable to tie the bow. Charles came to her help, saying, as if he were offering some usual thing, a finger glass or some toothpicks:

"If madame would like the comb?"

"Oh! no, there's no need," interrupted Maxime, giving the waiter an impatient look. "Go and fetch us a cab."

Renée made up her mind to pull the hood of her domino over her head. And as she was about to leave the looking-glass, she lightly raised herself in search of the words which Maxime's grasp had prevented her from reading. Slanting upwards towards the ceiling, and written in a large, abominable hand there was this declaration signed Sylvia: "I love Maxime." On reading it Renée bit her lip and drew her hood rather lower.

They experienced a horrible constraint in the vehicle. They had seated themselves one in front of the other as when they left the Parc Monceaux. They could not think of a word to say to each other. The cab was full of opaque darkness, and Maxime's cigar didn't even dot it with a red speck, a pink charcoal-like glimmer. The young fellow, again hidden among the skirts, "which he had up to his eyes," felt ill at ease amid this darkness and silence, near this speechless woman, whom he felt beside him, and whose eyes he imagined he could see gazing wide open into the night. To seem less foolish he ended by seeking her hand, and when he held it in his own he felt relieved and found the situation tolerable. Renée abandoned this hand of hers, languidly and dreamily.

The cab crossed over the Place de la Madeleine. Renée was reflecting that she was not guilty. She had not been bent on incest. And the more she descended into herself, the more innocent she considered she had been, at the outset of her escapade, at her furtive departure from the Parc Monceaux, at Blanche Müller's, on the Boulevard, and even in the private room at the restaurant. Why had she fallen on her knees at the edge of that divan? She no longer knew. She had certainly not thought of _that_ for a moment. She would have angrily refused. She had made this excursion as a joke, she had been bent on amusing herself, nothing more. Thus did she ponder, and in the rumbling of the cab she seemed again to find the deafening orchestra of the Boulevard, that coming and going of men and women, while bars of fire burned her tired eyes.

Maxime was also musing, with some sense of worry, in his corner. The adventure annoyed him. He laid the blame on the black satin domino. Had one ever seen a woman rig herself out in that style? You couldn't even see her neck. He had taken her for a boy, he had played with her, and it wasn't his fault if the game had become something serious. He certainly wouldn't have touched her with the tips of his fingers, had she only shown her shoulders a bit. He would then have remembered that she was his father's wife. Then, as he did not care for disagreeable reflections, he forgave himself. So much the worse, after all! he would try not to begin again. It was folly.

The cab stopped, and Maxime alighted the first, to help Renée out. But at the little gate of the park he did not dare to kiss her. They shook hands according to their wont. She was already on the other side of the railing, when, in view of saying something, and at the same time unwittingly confessing a preoccupation which had vaguely crossed her reveries since leaving the restaurant:

"What was that comb," she asked, "which the waiter spoke about?"

"That comb," repeated Maxime, embarrassed, "I'm sure I don't know."

But Renée abruptly realised the truth. The room, no doubt, had a comb which formed part of its appurtenances like the curtains, the bolt, and the divan. And without waiting an explanation, which did not come, she plunged into the darkness of the Parc Monceaux, hastening her steps, and thinking she could see behind her the tortoise-shell teeth in which Laure d'Aurigny and Sylvia had left some of their fair and their dark hairs. Renée was very feverish, and it became necessary for Céleste to put her to bed and watch her till the morning. On the side-walk of the Boulevard Malesherbes, Maxime consulted himself for a moment as to whether he should go and join the joyous party at the Café Anglais; then, with the idea that he was punishing himself, he decided that he ought to go home to bed.

On the morrow, Renée awoke at a late hour from a heavy dreamless sleep. She had a large fire lighted, and said that she should spend the day in her room. This was her refuge in serious moments. Towards noon, as her husband did not see her come down to lunch, he asked her permission to speak with her a moment. She was already refusing the request, with a tinge of nervousness, when she decided otherwise. On the day before she had sent Saccard Worms's bill, amounting to a hundred and thirty-six thousand francs, a rather high figure, and, no doubt, he wished to indulge in the gallantry of giving her a receipt in person.

A thought came to her of the little curls of the day before; and she mechanically looked in the glass at her hair, which Céleste had knotted in large tresses. Then she ensconced herself in a corner by the fire-place, burying herself in the lace of her dressing-gown. Saccard, whose rooms also were on the first floor, corresponding with his wife's, came to see her in his slippers, in the true style of a husband. He barely set foot in Renée's room once a month, and then only for some delicate pecuniary matter. That morning he had red eyes, and the wan complexion of a man who has not slept. He kissed the young woman's hand gallantly.

"You are not well, my dear?" he said, as he sat down on the other side of the chimney-piece. "A little headache, isn't it? Excuse my coming to worry you with my business rigmaroles, but the matter is somewhat serious."

From one of the pockets of his dressing-gown he drew forth Worms's bill, the glazed paper of which Renée recognised.

"I found this bill on my table, yesterday," he continued, "and I'm very sorry, but I really can't pay it just now."

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the effect that his words produced on his wife, who seemed to be deeply astonished. He resumed with a smile:

"As you know, my dear, I'm not in the habit of looking into your expenses. I don't say that certain items in this bill haven't surprised me a little. For instance, on the second page, I find this: 'Ball dress: material, 70 francs; making up, 600 francs; money lent, 5000 francs; perfumery, 6 francs.' That seventy franc dress comes to rather a stiff figure. But you know very well that I understand all kinds of weaknesses. Your bill amounts to a hundred and thirty-six thousand francs, and you have been almost moderate, relatively speaking, I mean--Only, I must repeat it, I can't pay, I'm hard up."

She stretched out her hand with a gesture of restrained mortification.

"Very well," she said curtly, "hand me back the bill. I will attend to it."

"I see that you don't believe me," muttered Saccard, enjoying his wife's incredulity respecting his financial embarrassment, as much as if it had been a triumph. "I don't say that my position is threatened, but business is very queer for the moment. I worry you, no doubt, but let me explain our position to you. You confided your dowry to me, and I owe you complete frankness."

He laid the bill on the mantelshelf, took up the tongs, and began to poke the fire. This mania for raking the cinders, while he was talking about business matters, was a system which had become a habit with him. Whenever he reached a figure or a remark, which it bothered him to enunciate, he brought about some downfall of the logs, which he began repairing laboriously, bringing the logs closer together, collecting and piling the little splinters of wood, one above the other. On other occasions he almost disappeared into the fire-place in search of some straying embers. He spoke in a lower tone, you grew impatient, you became interested in his skilful edification of incandescent firewood, you no longer listened to him, and, as a rule, you left his presence defeated but content. Even at other people's houses he despotically took possession of the tongs. In the summer he toyed with a pen-holder, a paper or a pen-knife.

"My dear," said he, giving a blow which sent the fire flying, "I must once again ask your forgiveness for entering into all these details. I have punctually paid you the interest of the funds which you placed in my hands. I can even say, without wishing to hurt your feelings, that I merely looked upon that interest as your pocket-money, paying your expenses, and never asking you to contribute your share of the household disbursements."

He paused. Renée suffered as she looked at him, while he made a large hole in the cinders to bring the end of a log among them. He was approaching a delicate matter.

"As you will understand, I was obliged to make your money yield a high interest. The funds are in safe hands, be assured of that. As for the amount coming from your property in Sologne, it partly served to pay for the house we live in, the remainder is invested in an excellent affair, the Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco. We are not settling accounts, are we? but I want to prove to you that very often we poor husbands are not judged at our worth."

A powerful motive must have impelled him to lie a little less than usual. The truth was that Renée's dowry had for a long time ceased to exist; it had simply become a fictitious asset in Saccard's safe. Although he paid the interest at the rate of two or three hundred per cent, he could not have produced a single security, or have found the smallest solid particle of the original capital. As he half confessed, the five hundred thousand francs derived from the Sologne property had served to give something on account for the house and the furniture, which between them had cost nearly two millions of francs. Saccard still owed a million to the upholsterer and the builder.

"I don't claim anything from you," said Renée at last, "I know that I owe you a deal of money."

"Oh! my dear," he exclaimed, taking hold of his wife's hand, but without relinquishing the tongs, "what a bad idea you have of me! In two words, now, I have been unlucky at the Bourse, Toutin-Laroche has been playing some foolish pranks, and Mignon and Charrier are a couple of brutes who have swindled me. And that is why I can't pay your bill. You will forgive me, won't you?"

He seemed really moved. He thrust the tongs between the logs and made the sparks dart forth like rockets. Renée remembered how nervous he had seemed for some time past. But she was unable to penetrate the astonishing truth. Saccard had reached the point that he had to accomplish a miracle every day. He resided in a house which had cost two millions of francs, he lived on the footing of a prince's civil list, and yet on certain mornings he had not a thousand francs in his safe. His expenditure did not seem to diminish, however. He lived upon debt among a people of creditors who swallowed up, day by day, the scandalous profits which he realised by certain transactions. In the meantime, at the same moment indeed, companies crumbled around; before him yawned fresh and deeper pits, over which he had to spring, being unable to fill them up. He thus went on over mined ground, amid a continuous crisis, settling bills of fifty thousand francs, and not paying his coachman's wages, still marching on with an assurance which became more and more regal, and emptying over Paris, more ragefully than ever, his empty safe, whence the golden river of legendary source still continued to flow.

The times were momentarily bad for speculation. Saccard was the worthy offspring of the Hôtel de Ville. Like Paris, he had been eager for transformation, feverishly bent upon enjoyment, and blindly lavish in expenditure. And at this moment, like the city itself, he found himself in the presence of a formidable deficit which it was necessary he should make good secretly; for he would not hear speak of sobriety, economy, calm, and simple life. He preferred to retain the useless luxury and real misery of these new thoroughfares, whence he had derived that colossal fortune ushered each morning into being, but always swallowed up when evening came. Passing from adventure to adventure, he now only possessed the gilded façade of an absent capital. In that time of fierce madness, Paris herself did not engage her future with less self-restraint, or march more straightly towards every folly and every financial trickery. The liquidation threatened to be a terrible one.

The finest speculations fell through in Saccard's hands. As he confessed, he had just experienced considerable losses on the Bourse. M. Toutin-Laroche had almost capsized the Crédit Viticole by a "bulling" game which had suddenly turned against him; fortunately the government, intervening secretly, had reset the famous farmers' loan machine on its legs. Saccard--already badly shaken by this double blow, warmly rated by his brother the minister on account of the danger which had threatened the delegation bonds of the city of Paris, compromised at the same time at the Crédit Viticole--was yet even unluckier in his speculations in house property. Mignon and Charrier had altogether ceased dealing with him. If he accused them it was because he was secretly enraged to think that he had blundered by building on his share of the land, whilst they prudently sold theirs. While they were netting a fortune, he remained hampered by his houses which he was often only able to dispose of at a loss. Among others he sold a mansion in the Rue de Marignan, on which he still owed three hundred and eighty thousand francs, for three hundred thousand. He had certainly invented a dodge worthy of him, which consisted in demanding ten thousand francs for a flat worth eight thousand at the most. The frightened tenant only signed a lease when the landlord consented to make him a present of the first two years' rent; the apartment was thus brought down to its real value, but the lease enunciated the figure of ten thousand francs, and when Saccard found a purchaser and capitalized the income of the property the valuation proved most fantastic. He could not apply this swindle on a large scale as his houses did not let; indeed he had built them too soon; the clearings, amid which they were so to say lost, in the mud and the winter cold, isolated them and lowered their value considerably. The affair, which affected Saccard the most, was the vulgar swindle of Messieurs Mignon and Charrier, who bought back from him the mansion which he had been compelled to give up building on the Boulevard Malesherbes. The contractors were at last smitten with the desire of residing on "their Boulevard." As they had sold their share of the building plots at a profit, and scented the embarrassed circumstances of their ex-partner, they offered to rid him of the enclosure in the centre of which the mansion rose to the flooring of the first storey, where the iron girders were partly placed. Only they talked of the solid foundations in cut stone as "useless rubbish," saying that they would have preferred the soil to be bare so as to build upon it according to their taste. Saccard had to sell, without taking the hundred and odd thousand francs which he had already expended into account. And what exasperated him the more was that the contractors would never agree to take the ground back at the rate of two hundred and fifty francs the metre, at which figure it had been valued when the plots were shared. They knocked off twenty-five francs per metre, like those second-hand dealers who will only give four francs for an object which they sold for five the day before. Forty-eight hours later, Saccard had the grief of seeing an army of masons invade the enclosure and continue building upon the so called "useless rubbish."

He thus played the impecunious all the better before his wife, as his affairs were becoming more and more muddled. He was not the man to confess himself for the simple love of truth.

"But if you find yourself embarrassed," said Renée with an air of doubt, "why did you buy me that aigrette and necklace which cost you, I believe, sixty-five thousand francs? I have no use for those jewels and I shall be obliged to ask your permission to dispose of them so as to give Worms something on account."

"Never do that!" he exclaimed nervously. "If you were not seen wearing those jewels at the ball at the ministry to-morrow people would gossip about my position."

He was good-natured that morning, so he ended by smiling and muttering with a wink:

"We speculators, my dear, are like pretty women, we have our little trickeries. Pray keep your aigrette and your necklace for love of me."

He could not tell the story, for although a very amusing one, it was in somewhat questionable taste. Saccard and Laure d'Aurigny had entered into an alliance one night after supper. Laure was head over heels in debt, and was trying to find some nice young man who would kindly elope with her and take her to London. Saccard on his side felt the ground giving way beneath him; his failing imagination sought for an expedient which would show him to the public wallowing on a bed of gold and bank notes. The harlot and the speculator came to an understanding amid the semi-intoxication of dessert. He hit upon the idea of that sale of diamonds which attracted all Paris, and where amid a great fuss he purchased some jewels for his wife. Then with the product of the sale, some four hundred thousand francs, he succeeded in satisfying Laure's creditors who were owed about twice that amount. It may even be believed that he recouped a part of his sixty-five thousand francs. When he was seen liquidating the d'Aurigny's affairs, he was supposed to be her protector, people thought that he had paid her debts in full, and that he was doing all sorts of foolish things for her. Every hand was stretched out to him, and his credit returned, formidable. At the Bourse he was joked about his passion with smiles and allusions which delighted him. Meanwhile, Laure d'Aurigny, brought into notoriety by all this fuss, and with whom he did not even spend a single night, pretended she was deceiving him with eight or ten fools allured by the idea of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. In one month she obtained two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had sold. Saccard had fallen into the habit of going to smoke a cigar at her place of an afternoon on leaving the Bourse; and he often perceived coat tails flying off in terror through the doorways. When he and Laure were alone they could not look at each other without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead as if she were a perverse girl whose knavery delighted him. He did not give her a copper; on the contrary, she once lent him some money to pay a gambling debt.

Renée wished to insist, and spoke of at least pawning the jewels; but her husband made her understand that it was not possible, that all Paris expected to see her wearing them on the morrow. Thereupon the young woman who was greatly worried about Worms's bill tried to devise another expedient.

"But my Charonne affair," she suddenly exclaimed, "it is progressing well, isn't it? You told me only the other day that the profits would be superb. Perhaps Larsonneau would advance me the hundred and thirty-six thousand francs?"

For a minute Saccard had forgotten the tongs between his legs. He now hastily took hold of them again, leant forward and almost disappeared into the fire-place, whence the young woman heard his voice huskily muttering:

"Yes, yes, Larsonneau might perhaps--"

She was at last coming of her own accord to the point to which he had gently tried to lead her since the outset of the conversation. For two years already he had been preparing his masterly stroke in the direction of Charonne. His wife had never consented to part with Aunt Élisabeth's property; she had sworn to the latter that she would keep it intact to bequeath it to her children, should she become a mother. In presence of this obstinacy, the speculator's imagination had set to work and had ended by constructing something poetical--a design of exquisite knavery, a colossal piece of trickery by which the city of Paris, the State, his wife, and even Larsonneau would be victimized. He no longer talked about selling the ground; only he every day deplored the folly of leaving it unproductive, of contenting oneself with an income of two per cent. Renée, always pressed for money, had ended by entertaining the idea of a speculation. Saccard based his operation on the certainty of an approaching expropriation for the cutting of the Boulevard du Prince Eugène, the line of which was not yet clearly decided upon. And then it was that he brought forward his old accomplice Larsonneau, as a partner who made an agreement with his wife on the following basis. She on her side brought the ground representing a value of five hundred thousand francs; and Larsonneau, on his side, undertook to expend a similar sum in building upon this ground a popular music-hall with a large garden where games of all kinds, swings, skittles, and bowls should be installed. The profits were naturally to be divided, just as the losses were to be equally shared. In the event of one of the partners wishing to retire, he might do so by claiming his share, according to the valuation which would be made. Renée seemed surprised by this high figure of five hundred thousand francs, when the ground was worth three hundred thousand at the most. But Saccard made her understand that it was a skilful plan for tying Larsonneau's hands later on, for his buildings would never represent such an amount.

Larsonneau had become an elegant man about town, well gloved, with dazzling linen and astounding neckties. To go about he had a tilbury as light as a piece of clock-work, with a very high seat, and which he drove himself. His offices in the Rue de Rivoli were a set of sumptuous rooms in which one never saw the least portfolio or business paper lying about. His clerks wrote on tables of blackened pear-wood adorned with marquetry and ornaments of chased brass. He had assumed the style and title of an expropriation agent, a new calling which the works of Paris had brought into being. By his connection with the Hôtel de Ville he was informed in advance of the cutting of any new thoroughfares. When he had induced a road inspector to show him the proposed line of route of a new Boulevard, he went to offer his services to the threatened householders. And he brought forward his little plan for increasing the indemnity by acting before the decree of public utility was issued. As soon as a householder accepted his proposals, he took all the expense on himself, drew a plan of the property, brought the affair before the courts and paid an advocate, the whole for a percentage on the difference between the offer made by the city and the indemnity awarded by the jury. To this calling, which after all might be avowed, he annexed several others. He especially practised usury. He was not the usurer of the old school, ragged and dirty, with white expressionless eyes like five franc pieces, and pale lips tightly drawn together like the strings of a purse. He smiled, gave charming glances, had himself dressed by Dusautoy, and went to lunch at Brébant's with his victim, whom he called "My dear fellow" when he offered him an havannah at dessert. At bottom, despite his waistcoats tightly buckled round his waist, Larsonneau was a terrible fellow who, without losing aught of his amiability, would have prosecuted a debtor for payment of a bill until the unfortunate man was reduced to commit suicide.

Saccard would willingly have chosen another partner. But he still entertained anxiety respecting the false inventory which Larsonneau preciously preserved. So he preferred to interest him in the affair, hoping that he would be able to profit by some circumstance to regain possession of this compromising document. Larsonneau built the music-hall, an edifice in planks and plaster, surmounted by little tin belfries which he painted red and yellow. The garden and the games proved successful in the populous district of Charonne. At the end of a couple of years the speculation seemed a prosperous one, although the profits were in reality very small. So far, Saccard had always spoken enthusiastically to his wife concerning the prospects of such a fine idea.

On seeing that her husband did not make up his mind to come out of the fire-place, where his voice was becoming more and more indistinct, Renée exclaimed:

"I shall go to see Larsonneau to-day. It is my only resource."

Thereupon he abandoned the log with which he was struggling.

"The errand's done, my dear," he said smiling. "Don't I forestall all your desires? I saw Larsonneau last night."

"And he promised you the hundred and thirty-six thousand francs?" she asked anxiously.

Between the two flaming logs he was building a mountain of live cinders, delicately taking up the smallest fragments with the tongs, and looking with a satisfied air at the elevation which he raised with infinite art.

"Oh! how fast you go!" he muttered. "A hundred and thirty-six thousand francs make a large sum. Larsonneau is a good fellow, but his means are still limited. He is quite ready to oblige you--"

He paused, blinking his eyes and rebuilding a corner of the elevation which had fallen through. The pastime began to confuse the young woman's ideas. Despite herself she watched the work of her husband whose clumsiness increased. She felt inclined to give him advice. Forgetting Worms, the bill, and her need of money, she ended by exclaiming:

"But place that large bit, there, underneath; the others will then keep up."

Her husband submissively obeyed her, and added:

"He can only find fifty thousand francs. It will always make a nice instalment. Only, he won't mix this affair up with the Charonne one. He is but an intermediary, do you understand, my dear? The person who really lends the money demands enormous interest. He wants a note of hand for eighty thousand francs at six months' date."

And having crowned the height with a pointed cinder he crossed his hands over the tongs and looked fixedly at his wife.

"Eighty thousand francs!" she cried. "But that's robbery! Do you advise me to do anything so foolish?"

"No," he answered plainly. "But, if you are in absolute need of money, I won't forbid it."

He rose up as if he meant to leave the room. Renée, in a state of cruel indecision, looked at her husband, and at the bill which he laid upon the mantelshelf. She ended by taking her poor head in her hands and murmuring:

"Oh! these business matters! My head is splitting, this morning. Well, I shall sign this bill for eighty thousand francs. If I didn't, I should become altogether ill. I know myself, I should spend the day in frightful tortures--I prefer to be foolish at once. It will relieve me."

And she spoke of ringing to have a bill stamp fetched. But he insisted upon rendering her this service in person. No doubt he had the bill stamp in his pocket, for his absence scarcely lasted a couple of minutes. While she was writing at a little table which he had drawn to the fireside, he examined her and an astonished feeling of desire lighted up his eyes. It was very warm in the room, which was still full of the young woman's rising and the scent of her first toilet. Whilst speaking, she had let the folds of the dressing-gown in which she had swathed herself, fall down, and the eyes of her husband, who stood in front of her, glided over her bent head from amid the gold of her hair far down to the whiteness of her neck and bosom. He smiled with a singular air; this ardent fire which had burnt his face, this closed room, the heavy atmosphere of which was impregnated with a scent of love, this yellow hair and this white skin which tempted him with a kind of conjugal disdain, made him dreamy, enlarged the scope of the drama in which he had just played a scene, and prompted some secret voluptuous design in his brutal jobber's flesh.

When his wife held him out the bill, begging him to finish the affair for her, he took it, still looking at her.

"You are bewitchingly beautiful," he murmured.

And as she leant forward to push the table aside, he roughly kissed her on the neck. She gave a little cry. Then she rose up, quivering, trying to laugh, thinking despite of herself of the other's kisses the night before. But he regretted having given her this cabman's kiss, and on leaving he simply pressed her hand in a friendly manner and promised her that she should have the fifty thousand francs that same evening.

Renée dozed all day in front of the fire. At hours of crisis she experienced a creole-like languor; all her turbulent nature became lazy, chilly, benumbed. She shivered, she needed blazing fires, a suffocating heat, which brought little drops of perspiration to her forehead, and tranquillized her. In this burning atmosphere, in this bath of flames, she scarcely suffered; her pain became like a light dream, a vague oppression, the very ambiguity of which ended by becoming voluptuous. It was thus that, until the evening, she lulled her remorse of the night before, in the red glow of the hearth, opposite a terrible fire, which made the furniture around her crack, and at moments deprived her of the consciousness of being. She was able to dream of Maxime as of an inflamed enjoyment, the rays of which burnt her. She had a nightmare of strange amours, amid flaring logs, on beds heated white-hot. Céleste went to and fro about the room with the calm face of a servant with icy blood. She had orders not to admit anyone; and she even kept the door shut to those inseparables, Adeline d'Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, when they called on returning from lunching together at a villa which they had rented at Saint-Germain. However, towards the evening, when Céleste came to inform her mistress that her master's sister, Madame Sidonie, wished to see her, she received orders to show her in.

As a rule Madame Sidonie only called at dusk. And yet her brother had prevailed upon her to wear silk dresses. But no one knew how it happened, although the silk she wore came fresh from the shop, it never looked new; it was shabby, destitute of sheen, and seemed to be in tatters. She had also consented not to bring her basket to Saccard's house, but by way of compensation her pocket always overflowed with papers. She was interested in Renée, whom she was unable to transform into a reasonable customer resigned to the necessities of life. She visited her regularly, wearing the discreet smile of a doctor who does not like to frighten his patient by telling her the name of her disease. She commiserated her little worries, as if they had been petty ailments which she could cure immediately if the young woman only chose. The latter, who was in one of those moments when one feels the need of being pitied, simply received her to tell her that she had intolerable pains in her head.

"Why, my beauty," muttered Madame Sidonie, as she glided through the shade of the room, "why, you are stifling here! Still your neuralgic pains, eh? It's worry. You take life too much to heart."

"Yes, I have a great deal of worry," replied Renée.

Night was coming on. She had not allowed Céleste to light the lamp. The fire alone shed a grand red glow which fully illuminated her, as she reclined in her white dressing-gown, the lace of which had a pinkish tinge. At the edge of the shade one could just see an end of Madame Sidonie's black dress, and her two crossed hands encased in grey cotton gloves. Her soft voice emerged out of the darkness.

"Still worry about money?" she said, in a tone full of gentleness and pity, just as if she had spoken of the worries of the heart.

Renée lowered her eyelids, and made a gesture of avowal.

"Ah! if my brothers listened to me!" said Madame Sidonie, "we should all be rich. But they shrug their shoulders whenever I speak to them about that debt of three milliards, you know. Still I have good hopes. For the last ten years I have been wanting to make a journey to England, but I have so little time for myself. Anyhow I recently made up my mind to write to London, and I am waiting for the answer."

And as the young woman smiled:

"I know you are incredulous as well. Still you would be very pleased if I made you a present of a pretty million one of these days. Oh! the story is simple enough: it was a Paris banker who lent the money to the son of the King of England, and as the banker died without leaving any direct heirs, the State can now-a-days claim the reimbursement of the debt with compound interest. I have calculated it--it amounts to two milliards nine hundred and forty-three millions two hundred and ten thousand francs. It will come, it will come; never fear!"

"In the meantime," said the young woman with a dash of irony, "you ought to obtain me a hundred thousand francs. I could then pay my tailor, who is greatly worrying me!"

"A hundred thousand francs can be found," replied Madame Sidonie, quietly. "It is only a question of paying for them."

The fire was glowing. Renée, feeling more and more languid, stretched out her legs, and showed the tips of her slippers at the edge of her dressing-gown, while the woman of business resumed in her commiserating voice:

"Poor dear, you are really not reasonable. I know a great many women, but I have never seen a single one so careless about her health as you are. For instance, that little Michelin, there's one who knows how to manage. In spite of myself I think of you when I see her so happy and well. Do you know that Monsieur de Saffré is madly in love with her, and that he has already given her presents worth nearly ten thousand francs? I believe that her dream is to have a country house."

Madame Sidonie was growing more animated, and fumbled in her pocket.

"I still have about me a letter from a poor young woman. If we had a light I would let you read it. Just fancy, her husband doesn't provide for her. She had accepted some bills, and she has been obliged to borrow from a gentleman I know. It was I who rescued the promissory notes from the lawyer's clutches, and it wasn't an easy matter. The poor children, do you think they are wrong? I receive them at my place as if they were my son and daughter."

"You know a money-lender?" asked Renée negligently.

"I know ten. Between women one can say a number of things, can't one? and it isn't because your husband is my brother that I excuse his conduct in running after strumpets and leaving a beautiful woman like you to mope at the fireside. That Laure d'Aurigny costs him a fortune. It wouldn't astonish me if he had refused you money. He _has_ refused you, hasn't he? Oh, the wretch!"

Renée listened complacently to this voice which emerged out of the shade like the vague echo of her own dreams. With her eyelids half lowered, almost recumbent in her arm-chair, she no longer realised that Madame Sidonie was there; she fancied she dreamt that evil thoughts had come to her and tempted her with infinite gentleness; meanwhile the other spoke on at length, and her voice was like a monotonous flow of lukewarm water.

"It was Madame de Lauwerens who spoilt your life," she said. "You wouldn't believe me. Oh! you wouldn't be reduced to cry by your fireside if you hadn't mistrusted me; and I love you like my eyes, my beauty. You have a bewitching foot. You will no doubt laugh at me, but I must tell you my folly. When I haven't seen you for three days I am absolutely impelled to come and admire you. Yes, I lack something; I feel the need of feasting my eyes on your beautiful hair, your face which is so white and delicate, and your slim waist. Really I have never seen anyone else with such a figure."

Renée ended by smiling. Her lovers themselves had not shown such warmth, such pious ecstasy in speaking to her of her beauty. Madame Sidonie observed her smile.

"Come, it's agreed," she said, rising hastily. "I run on and on and forget that I make your head split. You will come to-morrow, won't you? We will talk over money matters; we will find a lender. You hear me? I'm determined that you shall be happy."

The young woman, still motionless and enervated by the heat, answered after a pause, as if she had had to make a laborious effort to understand what was being said around her:--

"Yes, yes, it's agreed, and we will have a chat; but not to-morrow. Worms will be satisfied with something on account. When he worries me again, we will see. Don't talk to me about all that now. Business has made my head split."

Madame Sidonie seemed greatly vexed. She was on the point of sitting down again and resuming her coaxing monologue, but Renée's weary attitude decided her to defer the attack till another occasion. She drew a handful of papers out of her pocket, searched among them, and ended by finding an object enclosed in a kind of pink box.

"I came to recommend you a new soap," she said, resuming her business voice. "I take a great interest in the inventor, who is a charming young man. It is a very soft soap, very good for the skin. You will try it, won't you! And you will speak of it to your friends--I will leave it there on your mantelshelf."

She had gone to the door when she returned again, and standing upright amid the rosy glow of the fire which lighted up her waxen face, she began to praise an elastic belt, an invention intended to take the place of stays.

"It gives you a perfectly round waist, a true wasp's waist," she said. "I saved it from bankruptcy. When you come, you will try the specimens, won't you? I had to run about among solicitors during a whole week. The documents are in my pocket and I am now going to my lawyer to have the last attachment raised--Good-bye for the present, pretty one. Remember that I am waiting for you and that I want to dry your beautiful eyes."

She glided away and disappeared. Renée did not even hear her close the door. She remained there, before the dying fire, continuing her dream of the whole day, with her head full of dancing cyphers, while in the distance she heard the voices of Saccard and Madame Sidonie who offered her considerable sums in the tone with which an auctioneer invites bids for a lot of furniture. She felt her husband's rough kiss on her neck, and when she turned round she fancied the other was there at her feet, with her black dress and her flabby face, making passionate speeches to her, praising her perfections, and begging for an appointment with the attitude of a lover past resignation. This made her smile. The heat became more and more stifling in the room. And the young woman's torpor, the strange dreams she made, were but a light, an artificial sleep, amid which she always beheld the little private room on the Boulevard, and the broad divan against which she had fallen on her knees. She no longer suffered at all. When she raised her eyelids again Maxime's image passed through the rosy mass of fire.

At the ministers' ball, on the morrow, beautiful Madame Saccard looked marvellous. Worms had accepted the fifty thousand francs on account, and she emerged from this pecuniary worry with the laughter of convalescence. When she crossed the reception rooms in her robe of pink faille with a long Louis XIV. train, edged with deep white lace, there was a murmur, and the men shoved one another aside to see her. Her intimate friends bent low with a discreet, knowing smile, rendering homage to those beautiful shoulders with which all official Paris was so well acquainted, and which were, indeed the firm columns of the Empire. She had bared her bosom with such a contempt for other people's looks, she walked by so tender and so gentle in her nudity, that it was almost not indecent. Eugène Rougon, the great politician, who felt that his sister-in-law's bare bosom was even more eloquent than his speeches in the chamber, softer and more persuasive in making people appreciate the charms of the reign and converting sceptics, went to compliment her on her happy audacity in lowering her dress-body a couple of finger-breadths. Almost all the Corps Législatif was there, and by the way that the deputies looked at the young woman, the minister made up his mind that he should have a fine success on the morrow in the delicate question of the loans of the city of Paris. People could not vote against a power which, on the hotbed of millions, reared such a flower as this Renée, so strange a flower of voluptuousness, with silken flesh and statuesque nudity, a living enjoyment that left a scent of tepid pleasure behind. But what made the whole ball whisper were the necklace and the aigrette. The men recognised the jewels and the women furtively called each other's attention to them with their eyes. These diamonds were the one subject of talk throughout the evening. And in the white light of the chandeliers, the reception rooms stretched away, filled with a resplendent throng which looked like a jumble of stars huddled into too small a corner of space.

At about one o'clock Saccard disappeared. He had enjoyed his wife's success like a man whose clap-trap succeeds. He had again consolidated his credit. A business matter required his presence at Laure d'Aurigny's so he went off, begging Maxime to take Renée home after the ball.

Maxime spent the evening soberly beside Louise de Mareuil, both of them very much occupied in saying frightful things about the women who passed by. And when they had said something rather stronger than usual, they stifled their laughter in their pocket handkerchiefs. Renée had to come to ask the young fellow for his arm when she wished to leave. She was nervously gay in the carriage; she still quivered with all the intoxication of the light, the perfumes, and the noise that she had just left. She moreover seemed to have forgotten their "nonsense" of the Boulevard as Maxime called it. She only asked him in a strange tone of voice:

"Is that little hunchback Louise so very funny then?"

"Oh! very funny," replied the young man, beginning to laugh again. "You saw the Duchess de Sternich with a yellow bird in her hair, didn't you? Well, Louise pretends that it is an automatic bird which flaps its wings every hour and cries: 'Cuckoo! Cuckoo!' to the poor duke."

This jest coming from a girl who had just left school seemed very comical to Renée. When they reached the house, as Maxime was about to take his leave, she said to him:

"Aren't you coming up? Céleste has no doubt prepared me something to eat."

He ascended in his usual easy manner. Upstairs however there was nothing to eat and Céleste had gone to bed. Renée had to light the tapers in a little candelabrum. Her hand slightly trembled.

"That foolish girl," she said, speaking of her maid. "She must have misunderstood my orders--I shall never be able to undress myself unhelped."

She passed into the dressing room. Maxime followed her to relate another remark of Louise's which had just recurred to his mind. He was as much at his ease as if he had stayed late at a friend's and was looking for his cigar-case to light an havannah. But when Renée had set the candelabrum down she turned round and fell, speechless and portentous, into the young man's arms, pressing her mouth upon his own.

Renée's private suite of rooms was a nest of silk and lace, a marvel of coquettish luxury. A tiny boudoir preceded the bedroom. The two apartments formed but one, or rather the boudoir was scarcely more than the threshold of the bedroom, a large alcove, furnished with couches and having a pair of curtains instead of a door. The walls in both apartments were hung with flax-tinted silken stuff, embroidered with huge bouquets of roses, white lilac and buttercups. The curtains and door-hangings were of Venetian lace over a silken lining formed alternately of grey and pink bands. In the bedroom the white marble chimney piece, a real jewel, displayed like a flower bed its incrustations of lapis lazuli and precious mosaics repeating the roses, white lilac and buttercups of the hangings. A large grey and pink bed, the padded and upholstered woodwork of which was not seen, and the head of which stood against the wall, filled quite one-half of the room with its flow of drapery, lace and silk, brocaded with bouquets and falling from the ceiling to the carpet. You would have taken it for a woman's dress, rounded, scalloped, decked with puffs, bows, and flounces; and the large curtain swelling out like a skirt made you dream of some tall love-sick wench, leaning back, fainting away, and almost sinking upon the pillows. Under the curtains it was quite a sanctuary--plaited cambric, a snowy mass of lace, all sorts of delicate transparent things, enveloped in a church-like dimness. Beside the bedstead, this monument the devout amplitude of which suggested a chapel adorned for some festival, the other articles of furniture, some low seats, a cheval glass six feet high, and chiffoniers provided with a multitude of drawers, subsided into nothingness. On the floor the bluish-grey carpet was studded with pale full-blown roses. And on either side of the bed lay two large black bearskins, edged with pink velvet, having silver claws, and with their heads turned towards the window, gazing fixedly at the empty sky through their glass eyes.

Soft harmony, muffled silence reigned in this room. No high note, no metallic reflection or bright gilding broke into the dreamy scale of pink and grey. Even the chimney ornaments, the frame of the mirror, the clock, the little candelabra, were of old Sèvres, and their mountings of gilt copper were barely visible. These ornaments were marvels, the clock especially, with its circle of podgy cupids, who descended and leaned around the dial like a band of naked urchins careless to the rapid flight of time. This discreet luxury, these colours and objects which Renée's taste had chosen soft and smiling, lent a crepuscular appearance to the room, the dimness of an alcove with the curtains drawn. It seemed as if the bed stretched afar, as if the whole room, indeed, were one huge bed with its carpets, bearskins, stuffed seats and padded hangings, prolonging the softness of the floor up the walls to the ceiling. And, as in a bed, the young woman left the imprint, the warmth and the perfume of her body upon all the things. When one drew aside the double hangings screening the room from the boudoir it seemed as if one raised some silken counterpane, and entered some vast couch still warm and moist, where one found on the fine linen the adorable figure, the slumber and dreams of a Parisian woman of thirty.

An adjoining spacious apartment, hung with old chintz, was simply furnished all round with lofty wardrobes containing Renée's army of dresses. Céleste, who was very methodical, classified the dresses according to their age, ticketed them and introduced arithmetic amid all her mistress's yellow or blue caprices, and kept the apartment in a state of vestry-like impressiveness and stable-like cleanliness. Beyond the wardrobes, there was not an article of furniture, and no finery was left lying about. The wardrobe doors shone cold and clean like the varnished panels of a brougham.

The marvel of the suite, however, the apartment that all Paris talked about, was the dressing-room. Folks said: "Beautiful Madame Saccard's dressing room," as one says; "The Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles." This apartment was situated in one of the towers of the mansion, just over the little buttercup drawing-room. On entering it one fancied oneself in a large circular tent, a fairy-like tent, pitched in full phantasy by some love-sick amazone. In the centre of the ceiling a crown of chased silver held up the drapery of the tent, which extended cupola-like to the walls, and then fell straight to the floor. This drapery, these rich hangings, were formed of pink silk covered with a muslin of a very open texture, which was caught in plaits at intervals. A band of lace separated the plaits, and silver fillets descended from the crown and glided along the hangings on either side of each of these bands. Here the pinkish grey of the bedroom grew brighter, became a pinkish white, like naked flesh. And in this bower of lace, beneath these curtains which hid all the ceiling save a bluish cavity inside the small circle described by the crown, where Chaplin had painted a laughing cupid, looking down and preparing his dart, one could have fancied oneself at the bottom of a sweetmeat box, or in some precious jewel-case, enlarged and made to display the nudity of a woman instead of the brilliancy of a diamond. The carpet of snowy whiteness stretched around without the least flowery design. A wardrobe with plate glass doors, and the two panels of which were mounted with silver; a couch, two arm-chairs, some white satin stools; a large toilet table, with a slab of pink marble, and the legs of which where screened by flounces of muslin and lace, furnished the room. The glasses, the vases, and the basin on the toilet table, were of old Bohemian crystal, streaked pink and white. And there was yet another table, incrusted with silver like the wardrobe, and on which all the implements, the toilet utensils, were ranged; it was like a strange surgical case, displaying a large number of little instruments, the purpose of which was not readily guessed--back scrapers, shining brushes, files of every dimension and every shape, straight and curved scissors, every variety of pincers and pins. Each one of these objects in silver and ivory was marked with Renée's monogram.

But the dressing-room had one delightful corner, and to that corner especially did it owe its fame. In front of the window the folds of the tent parted, and in a kind of alcove, of considerable length but limited breadth, one espied a bath, a tank of pink marble, embedded in the flooring and with its sides--chamfered like those of a large shell--rising to a level with the carpet. One descended into the bath by marble steps. Above the silver taps, shaped like swans' heads, a Venetian mirror, frameless, but with curved edges and a design ground in the crystal, filled the back of the alcove. Renée took a bath of a few minutes' duration every morning, and this bath filled the dressing-room with moisture, with a perfume of fresh, wet flesh for the whole day. At times an open scent bottle, a piece of soap left out of its dish, lent a dash of something stronger to this rather insipid smell. The young woman liked to remain there, almost in a state of nudity, until noon. The round tent itself was also naked. The pink bath, the pink tables and basins, the muslin of the ceiling and the walls, beneath which one seemed to see pink blood coursing, acquired the roundness of flesh, the curves of bare shoulders and bosoms; and, according to the hour of the day, one would liken the apartment to the snowy skin of a child or to the warm skin of a woman. It was one vast nudity. When Renée left her bath her fair form lent but a little more pink to all the rosy flesh of the room.

It was Maxime who undressed her. He understood that kind of thing, and his nimble hands divined pins, and glided round her waist with innate science. He let down her locks, took off her diamonds, and then dressed her hair for the night. And as he mingled jokes and caresses with his duties of chambermaid and hair-dresser, Renée laughed with a greasy stifled laugh, while the silk of her dress-body rustled and her petticoats were loosened one by one. When she saw herself naked, she blew out the tapers of the candelabrum, caught hold of Maxime round the body and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication, and in her fever she was conscious of the previous day which she had spent by the fireside, of that day of ardent torpor and vague and smiling dreams. She still heard Saccard's and Madame Sidonie's voices talking, calling out figures through their noses like lawyers. It was these people who bored her, who drove her to crime. And even now, when in the depths of the vast dark bed she sought for Maxime's lips, she still saw him amid the fire of the day before looking at her with scorching eyes.

The young fellow only went off at six o'clock in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceaux and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawing-room by a little staircase hidden in the wall, and connecting all the apartments of the tower. From the buttercup room it was easy to pass into the conservatory and thence reach the park.

On going out at dawn, amid a thick fog, Maxime was somewhat stupefied by his good fortune. He accepted it, however, with his usual complaisance as a neutral being.

"So much the worse!" thought he, "it's she who wishes it, after all. She's deucedly well formed; and she was quite right, she's twice as funny in bed as Sylvia is."

They had glided to incest from the day when Maxime, in his threadbare collegian's tunic, had hung on Renée's neck, creasing her _garde française_ habit. From that time forward there had been a prolonged perversion of every minute between them. The strange education which the young woman gave the child; the familiarities which made them boon comrades; later on the smiling audacity of their confidential chats; all this perilous promiscuity had ended by linking them together with a strange bond, the joys of friendship almost becoming carnal satisfactions. They had surrendered themselves to each other for years; the brutish act was but the acute crisis of this unconscionable malady of passion. Amid the maddened society in which they lived, their crime had sprouted as upon a rich dung-heap full of impure juices; it had developed itself with a strange refinement amid a particular kind of debauchery.

When the roomy carriage conveyed them to the Bois, and rolled them gently along the pathways, whispering smutty things into each other's ears, diving back into their childhood in search of the dirty practices of instinct--it was but a deviation, but an unconfessed mode of satisfying their desires. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as if they had just slightly touched one another; and this original sin, this languor born of dirty conversation, though it wearied them with voluptuous fatigue, titillated them even more softly than plain positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus a slow lover's march which was fatally destined to lead them some day or other to the private room at the Café Riche and to Renée's large grey and pink bed. When they found themselves in each other's arms they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have said that they were lovers of long standing whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had spent so much time in a contact of their whole beings, that despite themselves they talked of the past which was so full of their ignorant tenderness.

"Do you recollect the day when I came to Paris?" said Maxime; "you wore a funny costume; and I traced an angle on your bosom with my finger, and I advised you to open your dress, in a point. I felt your skin under your chemisette, and my finger embedded itself a little. It was very nice."

Renée laughed, kissing him and murmuring:

"You were already awfully vicious. How you did amuse us at Worms's--do you recollect? We used to call you 'our little man.' I always believed that fat Suzanne would have readily yielded to you, if the marchioness hadn't watched her with such furious eyes."

"Ah! yes, we had some good laughs," muttered the young fellow. "The photographic album, eh? And all the rest, our rambles through Paris, our snacks at the pastry cook's on the Boulevard; those little strawberry tarts which you liked so much, you know? For myself I shall always remember the afternoon when you related to me Adeline's adventure at the convent when she wrote letters to Suzanne, signing herself 'Arthur d'Espanet,' like a man, and proposing to carry her off."

The lovers again grew merry over this good story, and then Maxime continued in his coaxing voice:

"When you came to fetch me at the college in your carriage, we must have looked funny both of us. I was so small that I disappeared under your skirts."

"Yes, yes," she stammered, quivering, and drawing the young fellow towards her, "it was very nice, as you say. We loved each other without knowing it, eh? I realised it before you did. The other day, on returning from the Bois, my leg rubbed against yours, and I started. But you didn't notice anything, eh? You didn't think of me?"

"Oh, yes, I did," he replied, a little embarrassed. "Only I didn't know, you understand--I didn't dare--"

He lied. The idea of possessing Renée had never plainly occurred to him. He had rubbed up against her with all his vice, without really desiring her. He was too feeble for such an effort. He accepted Renée because she imposed herself upon him, and he had glided to her couch without willing or foreseeing it. When he had rolled there, however, he remained there, because it was warm, and because he habitually forgot himself at the bottom of all the holes into which he fell. At the outset he even tasted some satisfactions of self-love. She was the first married woman that he had possessed. He did not reflect that her husband was his father.

But Renée brought with her, in sinning, all the ardour of a heart which has lost caste. She also had slided down the slope. Only she had not rolled as far as the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Desire had been kindled within her when it was too late to resist it and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly appeared to her as one of the necessities of her boredom, as a rare extreme enjoyment which alone could rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumnal promenade, in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her, like a titillation which lent an unknown quiver to her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, this idea, lashed by jealousy, became precise, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she watched Maxime and Louise. At that hour she desired sin, the sin which no one commits, the sin which would fill her empty life, and finally set her in that hell of which she was still afraid, just as she had been when she was a little girl. Then on the morrow, by a strange sentiment of remorse and lassitude, she no longer wished it. It seemed to her as if she had already sinned, that it was not so nice as she had fancied, and that it would really be too dirty. The crisis was bound to be fatal, to come from herself, apart from those two beings, those comrades who were destined to deceive each other one fine evening, and to couple themselves, thinking they were merely exchanging a hand-shake. However, after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime in her arms again, inquisitive about him, inquisitive as to the cruel delights of a love which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, required it, decided upon tasting it to the end, even to remorse should that ever come. She was active, and conscious of her doings. She loved with the fury of a great fashionable lady, with the nervous prejudices she possessed as an offspring of the middle classes, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman who drowns herself in self-disdain.

Maxime returned every night. He came by way of the garden at about one o'clock. Renée usually awaited him in the conservatory, which he had to cross to reach the little drawing-room. They, moreover, displayed perfect audacity, barely concealing themselves, and forgetting the most classical precautions of adultery. It is true that this corner of the house belonged to them. Baptiste, the husband's valet, alone had a right to enter it; and Baptiste, like a serious man, took himself off as soon as his duties were over. Maxime even pretended with a laugh that he withdrew to go and write his memoirs. One night, however, when the young fellow had just arrived, Renée shewed him Baptiste, who was solemnly crossing the drawing-room with a candlestick in his hand. The tall valet, with his minister-like figure, lighted by the yellow glow of the wax, had a more dignified and severe physiognomy than usual. As the lovers leaned forward, they saw him blow out his candle and go towards the stables, where the horses and ostlers were asleep.

"He is going his round," said Maxime.

Renée remained quivering. Baptiste usually alarmed her. It often happened to her to say that, with his coldness and his clear glances which never fell upon women's shoulders, he was the only honest man in the house.

They then evinced some prudence in seeing each other. They closed the doors of the little drawing-room, and were able to dispose of this room, with the conservatory and Renée's apartments, in all tranquillity. It was a little world. And during the earlier months they there tasted the most refined, the most delicately sought-for delights. They promenaded their amours from the large grey and pink bed of the sleeping-room, to the white and rosy nudity of the dressing-room, and to the pale yellow symphony of the little drawing-room. Each chamber, with its particular scent, its hangings, its special life, lent them a different form of tenderness, and made Renée a different lover. She was delicate and pretty on her padded great lady's couch, in the warm aristocratic bedroom where love underwent a tasteful attenuation; she showed herself a capricious, carnal female under the flesh-coloured tent, amid the perfume and damp languor of the bath, on leaving which she surrendered herself to Maxime, who preferred her thus; then downstairs, in the bright sunrise of the little drawing-room, amid the yellow aurora which gilded her hair, she became a goddess with her fair Diana-like head, her bare arms which assumed chaste postures, her beauteous form which reclined on the couches in attitudes revealing noble outlines of antique gracefulness. But there was a spot which Maxime was almost frightened of, and where Renée only led him on evil days, the days when she felt the need of more bitter intoxication. Then they loved in the conservatory. It was there that they tasted incest.

One night, in an hour of anguish, the young woman had compelled her lover to go and fetch one of the black bearskins. Then they had stretched themselves on this inky fur, at the edge of an ornamental basin in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly amid the limpid moonlight. Maxime had arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers, and the conservatory was heated to such a point that he fainted on the bearskin. Coming from the dry biting cold, he entered into so heavy a flame that he felt a smarting as if he had been whipped with a rod. When he recovered himself, he saw Renée kneeling, leaning over him with fixed eyes and a brutish attitude which frightened him. With her hair down and her shoulders bare, she was resting herself on her fists, with her figure stretched out, and looking like a huge cat with phosphorescent eyes. Above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous animal gazing at him, the young fellow, lying on his back, perceived the marble sphinx, with her glistening hips lighted by the moon. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the feminine-headed monster, and in her loosened skirts, she looked like the white sister of this black deity.

Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating; it was a dull heat, which did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground, like some unhealthy exhalation, and its steam ascended like a storm-charged cloud. A warm humidity covered the lovers with a kind of dew, an ardent sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime flat and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple nervous hams. Outside, through the little panes of the conservatory, one caught glimpses of the Parc Monceaux, of the clumps of trees with fine black outlines, of the grass lawns as white as frozen lakes--quite a dead landscape, the delicate light tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese engravings. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers were stretched, boiled strangely amid the great mute cold.

They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate acting will. Maxime submitted. What with his lank limbs, his graceful slimness, like that of a Roman youth, this neutral, fair-haired pretty being, stricken in his virility since childhood, became a big girl in the young woman's inquisitive arms. He seemed to have been born and to have grown up for a perversion of love. Renée enjoyed her domination, and with her passion she bent this creature, whose sexuality always seemed indeterminate. For her it was a constant astonishment of desire, a surprise of the senses, a strange sensation of uncomfortableness and acute pleasure. She no longer knew what he was; and she thought doubtingly of his fine skin, his fleshy neck, his abandonment and fainting fits. She then enjoyed an hour of repletion. By revealing to her an unknown ecstasy, Maxime completed her foolish toilets, her prodigious luxury, her mad life. He set in her flesh the high note which she already heard singing around her. He was the lover who matched the fashions and follies of the period. This pretty young fellow whose puny figure was revealed by his attire, this man who ought to have been a girl, who strolled on the Boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée's hands the instrument of one of those debaucheries suited to days of decline, and which among rotten nations, at certain periods, use up flesh and unsettle intelligence.

And it was especially in the conservatory that Renée was the man. That ardent night they spent there was followed by several others. The conservatory loved and burnt with them. Amid the heavy atmosphere, in the whitish moonlight, they saw the strange world of plants around them, moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched right across the pathway. At their feet the basin steamed full of a swarming, a thick entanglement, of roots, while the rosy stars of the Nymphæa opened on the surface of the water like virgin bodices, and the bushy Tornelias drooped like the hair of languishing water nymphs. Then around them, the palms and the lofty Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, near which they leaned and mingled their leaves together, assuming the unsteady attitudes of tired lovers. Lower down the ferns, the Pteris, the Alsophilas looked like green ladies with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, and who, mute and motionless at the edge, of the pathway, awaited love. Beside them the twisted red-spotted foliage of the Begonias, and the white leaves shaped like lance heads of the Caladiums, furnished a vague suite of bruises and pallidities, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, but amid which they at times discerned roundnesses like those of hips and knees wallowing on the ground, beneath the brutality of bleeding caresses. And the Bananas, bending with the weight of their bunches of fruit, spoke to them of the rich fertility of the soil, while the Abyssinian Euphorbia, the prickly, deformed, tapering stems of which--covered with horrid excrescences--they could espy in the darkness, seemed to perspire with sap, with the overflowing flux of their fiery growth. But by degrees as the lovers' glances dived into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness was filled with a more furious debauchery of leaves and stems; they could not distinguish on the stages the Marantas, soft like velvet, the Gloxinias with violet bells, the Dracænas resembling blades of old varnished lacquer; it was a round dance of living plants pursuing each other with unquenched tenderness. At the four corners, at the point where the curtains of tropical creepers formed arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder again, and the supple shoots of the Vanillas, the Indian berries, the Quisqualis and the Bauhinias seemed to be the interminable arms of lovers who could not be seen, but who distractedly lengthened their embrace to draw all scattered delights towards them. These endless arms drooped with lassitude, locked together in a spasm of love, sought for each other, entwined together like a crowd bent on copulation. It was, indeed, the immense copulation of the conservatory, of this bit of virgin forest ablaze with the foliage and the flowers of the tropics.

Maxime and Renée, with their senses perverted, felt themselves carried away amid these mighty nuptials of nature. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap which arose in the tree trunks penetrated them as well, and imparted to them mad desires of immediate growth, of gigantic procreation. They took part in the copulation of the conservatory. It was then, in the pale glimmer, that visions stupefied them, nightmares amid which, during long intervals, they beheld the amours of the palms and ferns; the foliage assumed a confused, equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into something sensual; murmurs, whispers were wafted to them from the clumps of shrubs, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was noisy in their own kisses and that echo sent them back. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as if the earth itself, in a crisis of satisfied desire, had burst forth into voluptuous sobs.

If they had closed their eyes, if the suffocating heat and the pale light had not imparted to them a depravation of every sense, the aromas alone would have sufficed to throw them into an extraordinary state of nervous erethism. The basin enveloped them in a deep pungent aroma, amid which passed the thousand perfumes of the flowers and the foliage. At times the Vanilla sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the Stanhopeas whose streaked mouths had the same strong-smelling bitter breath as a convalescent. The orchids, in their baskets secured by wire chains, also breathed like animated incense burners. But the odour that predominated, the odour in which all these vague breaths were mingled, was a human odour, an odour of love, which Maxime recognised when he kissed Renée on the nape of her neck, when he plunged his head into her flowing hair. And they remained intoxicated by this scent, the scent of an amorous woman, which trailed through the conservatory as in an alcove where earth might be engaged in procreation.

As a rule, the lovers lay down under the Tanghinia from Madagascar, under the poisoned shrub, a leaf of which the young woman once had bitten. Around them the white statues laughed, gazing at the mighty coupling of foliage. The moon, as it turned, displaced the groups, and animated the drama with its changing light. They were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the easy life of the Bois de Boulogne and official drawing-rooms, in a corner of some Indian forest, of some monstrous temple, of which the black marble sphinx became the deity. They felt themselves rolling to crime, to accursed love, to wild-beast tenderness. All the pullulation which surrounded them, the swarming of the basin, the naked immodesty of the foliage, threw them fully into the Dantesque hell of passion. It was then, in the depths of this glass cage, boiling over with the flames of summer, lost amid the clear coldness of December, that they tasted incest, as though it had been the criminal fruit of some over-heated soil, feeling the while a dim fear of their terrifying couch.

And in the centre of the black bearskin Renée's body seemed whiter, as she crouched like a huge cat with her back stretched out, and her wrists extended like supple nervous shins. She was all swollen with voluptuousness, and the light outlines of her shoulders and loins stood out with feline angularity against the inky stain which blackened the yellow sand of the pathway with its fur. She watched Maxime, this prey extended beneath her, who abandoned himself, and whom she possessed completely. And from time to time, she abruptly leant forward and kissed him with her irritated mouth. Her lips then parted with the greedy bleeding brilliancy of the Chinese Hibiscus, the expanse of which covered the side of the mansion. She was then nothing but a burning daughter of the conservatory. Her kisses bloomed and faded like those red flowers of the gigantic mallow which last barely a few hours, and which ever spring to life again, like the bruised insatiable lips of a giant Messalina.

V.

The kiss which Saccard had imprinted on his wife's neck preoccupied him. He had not availed himself of his marital rights for a long time. The rupture had come quite naturally, neither the one nor the other caring for a connection which interfered with their habits. For Saccard to think of returning to Renée's room, some good stroke of business must necessarily be the object of his conjugal tenderness.

The Charonne affair, from which he hoped to derive a fortune, was progressing favourably, though he had some anxiety as to its termination. Larsonneau, with his dazzling shirt-front, smiled in a manner that displeased him. The expropriation agent was a simple go-between--a man of straw, whom he intended to remunerate for his obligingness with a commission of ten per cent on the ultimate profits. However, although the agent had not invested a copper in the enterprise, and although Saccard had taken every precaution--such as a deed of retrocession, letters, the dates of which had been left in blank, and receipts given in advance--he nevertheless experienced an inward fear, a presentiment of some treachery. He scented that his accomplice intended to blackmail him with the help of that false inventory which he preciously preserved, and to which alone he was indebted for his share in the enterprise.

However, the two accomplices shook hands vigorously. Larsonneau styled Saccard his "dear master." He had, at the bottom of his heart, a real admiration for this equilibrist, and watched his performances on the tight rope of speculation like a connoisseur. The idea of duping him titillated him like some rare and spicy voluptuousness. He caressed a plan which was still vague, however, for he did not very well know how to employ the weapon he possessed, and he feared wounding himself with it. Besides, he felt that he was at the mercy of his ex-colleague. The ground and the buildings, which carefully prepared inventories already valued at nearly two millions of francs, though they were not worth a quarter of that amount, must end by being swallowed up in a colossal bankruptcy, if the fairy of expropriation did not touch them with her golden wand. According to the original plans which the two confederates had been able to consult, the new Boulevard, opened in view of connecting the artillery depôt of Vincennes with the Prince Eugène barracks, and of bringing the guns and ammunition into the heart of Paris without passing through the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, would cross a part of the ground; but it was still to be feared that only a corner of the latter might be cut off, and that the ingenious speculation of the music hall would fall through by reason of its very impudence. In that case Larsonneau would remain with a delicate matter to deal with. Still this peril did not prevent him, despite the secondary part which he played perforce, from feeling soul-sick when he thought of the paltry ten per cent which he would pocket in this colossal robbery of millions. And at those moments he could not resist the furious longing he felt to extend his hand and carve out a larger share for himself.

Saccard had not even allowed him to lend money to his wife, he had preferred to amuse himself with this big piece of theatrical trickery, which delighted his partiality for complicated transactions.

"No, no, my dear fellow," he said, with his Provençal accent, which he exaggerated whenever he wished to impart additional salt to a joke, "don't let us mix up our accounts. You are the only man in Paris to whom I have sworn never to owe a copper."

Larsonneau contented himself with insinuating that his colleague's wife was a gulf. He advised him not to give her another sou, so that she would then be compelled to transfer her property to them immediately. He would have preferred to have to deal with Saccard alone. He probed him at times, and carried things so far as to say, with the weary indifferent air of a man about town:

"All the same, I must put my papers in a little order. Your wife frightens me, my good fellow. I don't want justice to place the seals on certain documents at my office."

Saccard was not the man to submit to such allusions patiently, especially as he was well acquainted with the frigid meticulous order which prevailed in the agent's offices. The whole of his cunning, active little person revolted against the terror with which this coxcomb of a usurer in yellow kid gloves tried to inspire him. The worst was that he felt himself seized with shudders when he thought of a possible scandal; and he beheld himself brutally exiled by his brother, and living in Belgium by some avocation not to be acknowledged. One day he grew angry and said to Larsonneau:

"Listen, my boy, you are a nice fellow, but it would be as well for you to return me the document you know of. You'll see, that scrap of paper will end by making us quarrel."

The agent feigned astonishment, pressed his "dear master's" hand, and assured him of his devotion. Saccard regretted his momentary hastiness. It was at this period that he began to think seriously of drawing nearer to his wife. He might yet have need of her against his accomplice, and he moreover said to himself that business matters are discussed marvellously well between man and wife in bed. That kiss on his wife's neck gradually revealed to him quite a new system of tactics.

Besides, he was not in a hurry, he husbanded his resources. He devoted the whole winter to ripening his plan, though worried by a hundred different affairs, each of which was more muddled than the other. It was a terrible winter for him, full of shocks, a prodigious campaign during which he had to conquer bankruptcy daily. However, far from cutting down his expenses at home, he gave fête after fête. But if he succeeded in meeting every difficulty, he had to neglect Renée, whom he reserved for a triumphal blow, when the Charonne transaction became ripe. He contented himself with preparing the finish, by continuing not to give her any money, save through the intermediary of Larsonneau. When he was able to dispose of a few thousand francs, and she complained of her poverty, he took them to her, saying that Larsonneau's people required a note of hand for double the amount. This comedy vastly amused him, the stories connected with these promissory notes delighted him by the touch of romance which they imparted to the affair. Even at the period of his clearest profits he had served his wife her income in the most irregular manner, at one time making her princely presents, abandoning handfuls of bank notes to her, and then leaving her in the lurch for a paltry amount during weeks together. Now that he found himself seriously embarrassed, he talked about the expenses of the household, and treated her like a creditor to whom one is unwilling to confess one's ruin, and whom one disposes to patience by means of cock-and-bull stories. She scarcely listened to him, however; she signed whatever he chose, and only pitied herself for not being able to sign more.

Already, however, there were two hundred thousand francs' worth of promissory notes signed by her which barely cost him one hundred and ten thousand. After having these bills endorsed by Larsonneau to whose order they were made payable, he placed them in circulation in a prudent manner, intending to employ them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have been able to hold out to the end of that terrible winter, to lend his wife money usuriously and keep up his style of living, but for the sale of his ground on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which Messieurs Mignon and Charrier paid him for in hard cash, retaining, however, a formidable discount.

For Renée this same winter was one long joy. Lack of money was her only suffering. Maxime cost her very dear; he still treated her as a stepmother, and allowed her to pay everywhere. But this hidden poverty was an additional delight for her. She exercised her wits and racked her brain, so that her dear child should want for nothing; and when she had prevailed upon her husband to find her a few thousand francs, she and her lover expended them in some costly folly, like two schoolboys let loose on their first escapade. When they were hard up they remained at home and derived their enjoyment from this large building of such new and insolently stupid luxury. The father was never there. The lovers sat by the fireside more frequently than formerly. The fact was, that Renée had filled the icy emptiness of the gilded ceilings with a warm enjoyment. The suspicious abode of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she secretly practised a new religion. Maxime did not merely lend to her nature that high note which harmonized with her mad dresses. He was the very lover fitted to this mansion, with broad windows like shop fronts, and which a flood of sculpture inundated from garret to cellar. He animated all this plaster, from the two podgy Cupids who let a stream of water flow from their shell in the courtyard, to the tall, naked women supporting the balconies, and playing with apples and ears of corn, amid the pediments. He explained the unduly ornate hall, the tiny dimensions of the garden, the dazzling rooms in which one saw too many arm-chairs, and not one work of art. The young woman who had formerly felt bored to death in the house, suddenly began to amuse herself there, and availed herself of it, just as she might have done with something, the use of which she had not understood at first. And it was not only through her own apartments, through the buttercup drawing-room, and the conservatory that she promenaded her love, but through the entire mansion. She even ended by finding an enjoyment in lying on the divan of the smoking-room. She forgot herself there, and declared that the vague smell of tobacco pervading the apartment was very agreeable.

She appointed two reception days instead of one. On Thursdays all the mere acquaintances called. But Mondays were reserved to intimate female friends. Men were not admitted. Maxime alone was present at those choice gatherings, which took place in the buttercup drawing-room. One evening she had the astounding idea, of dressing him up as a woman, and of presenting him as one of her cousins. Adeline, Suzanne, the Baroness de Meinhold, and the other friends who were there, rose up and bowed, astonished by the sight of this face which they vaguely recognised. Then when they realized the truth, they laughed a great deal, and absolutely refused to let the young man go and change his clothes. They kept him with them in his skirts, teasing him, and lending themselves to equivocal jokes. When he had seen these ladies off by the main gate he went round the park and returned into the house by way of the conservatory. Renée's dear friends never had the slightest suspicion of the truth. Indeed the lovers could not behave together more familiarly than they had previously done, when they declared themselves to be boon comrades. And if it happened that a servant saw them rather close together behind a door, he expressed no surprise at it, being used to the pleasantries of his mistress, and his master's son.

This complete liberty, this impunity emboldened them still more. If they slipped the bolts at night-time, in the daylight they kissed each other in every room of the house. They invented a thousand little games on rainy days. But Renée's great delight was still to pile up a terrible fire, and doze in front of the grate. Her linen was marvellously luxurious that winter. She wore the most costly chemises and wrappers, the cambric and inserted embroidery of which barely covered her with a white cloud. And in the red glow of the fire she looked naked, with rosy lace and skin, the heat penetrating through the thin stuff to her flesh. Maxime, squatting at her feet, kissed her knees, without even feeling the garment which had the same warmth and colour as her lovely form. In the dull cloudy weather a kind of twilight penetrated the bedroom hung with grey silk, whilst Céleste went backwards and forwards behind them, with a quiet step. She had naturally become their accomplice. One morning when they had forgotten themselves in the bed, she found them there, and retained all the coolness of a servant with icy blood. They then ceased restraining themselves, she came in at all hours without the sound of their kisses making her turn her head. They relied upon her to warn them in the case of alarm. They did not purchase her silence. She was a very economical, very honest girl, and was not known to have a single lover.

Renée, however, was not cloistered. Taking Maxime in her train, like a fair-haired page in a dress-coat, she frequented society, where she tasted even more acute pleasures. The season was one long triumph for her. Never had her imagination been bolder as regards toilets and head-dresses. It was then that she risked wearing that famous bush-tinted robe, on which a complete stag hunt was embroidered with such attributes as powder flasks, hunting horns, and broad bladed knives. It was then, also, that she set the fashion of wearing the hair in the antique style; Maxime having to go and sketch patterns for her at the Campana Museum which had recently been opened. She grew younger, she was in all the plenitude of her turbulent beauty. Incest lent her a fire which glowed in the depths of her eyes and heated her laughter. Her eye-glasses looked superbly insolent on the tip of her nose, and she gazed at the other women, at the dear friends who basked in the enormity of some vice, with the air of a bragging hobbledehoy, and with a fixed smile which signified "I also have my crime."

Maxime, on his side, declared that society was wearisome. It was not merely for show that he pretended to be bored in it, for he really did not amuse himself anywhere. At the Tuileries, at the ministers' residences, he disappeared amid Renée's skirts. But he became the master again as soon as some freak was in question. Renée wished to see the private room on the Boulevard again, and the breadth of the divan made her smile. Then he took her a little bit everywhere, to harlots' houses, to the opera ball, to the stage boxes of petty theatres, to all the equivocal places where they could elbow brutal vice and taste the delights of remaining incognito. When they furtively returned to the house, worn out with fatigue, they fell asleep in each other's arms, sleeping off the drunkenness of obscene Paris, with snatches of smutty verses still ringing in their ears. On the morrow Maxime imitated the actors, and Renée, accompanying herself on the piano of the little drawing-room, tried to recall the hoarse voice and the wriggling of Blanche Müller in her part of the _Belle Hélène_. The music lessons she had taken at the convent now only served her to murder the verses of the new burlesques. She had a religious horror of serious airs. Maxime poked fun at German music with her, and he thought it his duty to go and hiss _Tannhauser_, both by conviction and to defend his stepmother's sprightly refrains.

One of their great enjoyments was skating; it was fashionable that winter, the Emperor having been one of the first to try the ice on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Renée ordered a complete Polish costume, velvet and fur, of Worms; and insisted upon Maxime wearing high boots and a foxskin cap. They reached the Bois in the intense cold which made their noses and lips tingle as if the wind had blown fine sand into their faces. It amused them to feel cold. The Bois was quite grey, with threads of snow, like narrow lace, along the branches of the trees. And under the pale sky, above the congealed and bedimmed lake, only the pines of the islands still displayed on the edge of the horizon their theatrical drapery, on which the snow had also sewn broad bands of lace. The lovers darted along together in the frozen air, with the rapid flight of swallows skimming just above the ground. Setting one hand behind their backs, and placing one upon each other's shoulder, they went off, erect, smiling, side by side, and revolving round the broad space, marked out by thick ropes. Loungers looked on at them from the roadway. From time to time they came to warm themselves at the braziers lighted at the edge of the lake, and then they started off again. They enlarged the course of their flight, with their eyes watering both with pleasure and with cold.

Then when the spring came Renée remembered her old elegiac fancy. She insisted upon Maxime strolling with her in the Parc Monceaux at night time by moonlight. They went into the grotto and sat down on the grass, in front of the colonnade. But when she expressed a desire to row on the little lake they found that there were no oars in the boat, which could be seen from the house, moored at the edge of a pathway. They were evidently removed every evening. This was a disappointment. Besides the vast shadows of the park made the lovers nervous. They would have liked to have had a Venetian fête given there, with red lanterns and an orchestra. They preferred it during the day-time, of an afternoon, and they then often stationed themselves at one of the windows of the mansion to watch the equipages following the graceful curve of the main avenue. They enjoyed themselves in gazing upon this charming corner of new Paris, this clean smiling bit of nature, these lawns looking like stripes of velvet, dotted with flower beds and choice shrubs, and edged with magnificent white roses. Carriages passed by each other, as numerous as on the Boulevard; lady promenaders carelessly trailed their skirts as if they had not ceased treading the carpets of their drawing-rooms. And athwart the foliage, Renée and Maxime criticised the dresses and pointed out the equipages to each other, deriving real enjoyment from the soft tints of this large garden. A scrap of gilded railing shone between two trees, a party of ducks passed over the lake, the little renaissance bridge looked white and new amid the green stuff, whilst on either side of the main avenue, mammas seated on yellow chairs forgot, in their chatter, the little boys and girls who looked at one another with a pretty air, and pouted like precocious children.

The lovers had a great liking for new Paris. They often rambled through the city in their carriage, going out of their way so as to pass along certain Boulevards for which they had a personal affection. The lofty houses adorned with large carved doors, loaded with balconies, whereon names and callings glittered in large gold letters, delighted them. While the brougham darted along, they followed with a friendly glance the grey bands of interminable footways, with their seats, their variegated columns and their scrubby trees. This bright gap which extended to the limits of the horizon, growing narrower, and opening upon a bluey parallelogram of space, the uninterrupted double row of large shops, where shopmen smiled at female customers, the currents of the stamping swarming crowd, filled them little by little with a feeling of absolute and complete satisfaction, they realised that they beheld the perfection of street life. They were enamoured even of the jets of the watering hose, which passed like white smoke before their houses and then spread out and fell in a fine rain under the wheels of the brougham, darkening the ground and raising a slight cloud of dust. They still went on, and it seemed to them that the vehicle was rolling over carpets along the straight endless highway, which had been pierced solely so that they might not have to pass through dark alleys. Each Boulevard became some passage of their mansion. The gay sunshine smiled upon the house fronts, lit up the window panes, fell upon the verandahs of the shops and cafés and heated the asphalt under the busy tread of the crowd. And when they returned home, somewhat dazed by the bright confusion of these long bazaars, they found enjoyment in the Parc Monceaux, which was like the complementary plat-band of the new Paris which displayed its luxury amid the first warmth of spring.

When the exigencies of fashionable life absolutely compelled them to leave Paris, they went to the seaside, regretfully however, and thinking of the Boulevardian side-walks while on the shores of the ocean. Then love itself grew dull there. It was a hot-house flower which needed the spacious grey and pink bed; the naked fleshy aspect of the dressing-room and the gilded dawn of the little drawing-room. Alone of an evening, in front of the sea, they no longer found anything to say to each other. Renée tried to sing the airs she had heard at the Variety Theatre, accompanying herself on an old piano which was agonising in a corner of her room at the hotel, but the instrument, damp with the breezes from the open, had the dreary voice of the great waters. _La Belle Hélène_ seemed lugubrious and fantastic. To console herself Renée astonished the people on the sands by her prodigious costumes. The whole band of fashionable women there was yawning while waiting for the advent of winter, and trying despairingly to invent some bathing dress which would not make them look too ugly. Renée was never able to prevail upon Maxime to bathe. He had an atrocious fear of water, he turned quite pale when the tide reached his boots, and for nothing in the world would he have approached the edge of a cliff; he kept away from all pits, and made a long circuit to avoid any steep part of the shore.

Saccard came to see "the children" on two or three occasions. He was overwhelmed with worry, he said. It was only about October, when they all three found themselves again in Paris, that he seriously thought of drawing nearer his wife. The Charonne affair was ripening. His plan was a simple and brutal one. He relied upon capturing Renée by the same devices that he would have employed with a harlot. She lived on amid an increasing need of money, and out of pride she only applied to her husband at the last extremity. The latter resolved to profit by her first request to shew his gallantry, and, in the delight occasioned by the payment of some heavy debt, to resume relations which had so long been severed.

Some terrible embarrassments awaited Renée and Maxime in Paris. Several of the promissory notes drawn to Larsonneau's order had fallen due; but as Saccard naturally left them slumbering at the lawyer's, they did not cause the young wife much worry. She was far more alarmed by her debts as regards Worms, whose bill now amounted to nearly two hundred thousand francs. The tailor demanded something on account, and threatened to suspend all credit. Renée felt sudden shudders when she thought of the scandal of a law-suit, and especially of a quarrel with the illustrious man milliner. Moreover, she needed pocket money. She and Maxime would feel bored to death if they did not have a few louis a-day to spend. The dear boy was quite stumped since he had vainly rummaged through his father's drawers. His fidelity and exemplary behaviour during the last seven or eight months were largely due to the absolute emptiness of his purse. He did not always have twenty francs in his pocket to invite some street-walker to supper, and so he philosophically returned to the house. At each of their freaks the young woman handed him her purse so that he might defray the expenses in the restaurants, the balls and petty theatres. She continued treating him maternally, and, indeed, it was she who, with the tips of her gloved fingers, settled at the pastry-cook's, where they stopped almost every afternoon to eat little oyster patties. Of a morning he often found in his waistcoat some louis which he had not known to be there, and which she had placed there like a mother filling a schoolboy's pocket. And to think that this delightful life of snacks, satisfied fancies and facile pleasure was about to end! But a yet more grievous worry came to alarm them. Sylvia's jeweller, to whom Maxime owed ten thousand francs, grew angry and talked about Clichy, the debtors' prison. Such costs had accumulated on the notes of hand which he held, and had long since protested, that the debt had increased by some three or four thousand francs. Saccard plainly declared that he could do nothing in the matter. The imprisonment of his son at Clichy would increase his notoriety, and when he secured the young fellow's release he would make a great noise over his paternal liberality. Renée was in despair; she saw her dear child in prison--in a perfect dungeon, sleeping on damp straw. One evening, she seriously proposed to him not to leave her rooms, but to live there unknown to everyone, and sheltered from the bailiffs. Then she swore that she would procure the money. She never referred to the origin of the debt, of that woman Sylvia, who confided the secret of her affections to the mirrors of private rooms. Some fifty thousand francs--that was what she needed; fifteen thousand for Maxime, thirty thousand for Worms, and five thousand as pocket money. They would then have a fortnight's happiness before them. She embarked on the campaign.

Her first idea was to ask her husband for these fifty thousand francs, but it was only with a feeling of repugnance that she decided to do so. On the last occasions that he had entered her room to bring her some money he had printed fresh kisses on her neck, taking hold of her hands and talking about his affection. Women have acute powers of perception which enable them to guess men's feelings. So she expected some demand on his side, some tacit bargain concluded with a smile. And, indeed, when she asked him for the fifty thousand francs, he cried out, declared that Larsonneau would never lend such a sum, and that he himself was still too embarrassed. Then changing his tone, as if conquered and seized with sudden emotion:

"One cannot refuse you anything," he murmured; "I will run about Paris and accomplish the impossible. I want you to be pleased, my dear."

And setting his lips to her ear and kissing her hair, he added, in a slightly trembling voice--

"I will bring you the money to-morrow evening, here in your room--without any note to sign."

But she hastily said that she was not in a hurry, that she did not wish to trouble him so much. He, who had just set all his heart in that dangerous, "without any note," which had escaped him and which he regretted, did not appear to have encountered a disagreeable refusal. He rose up saying:

"Very well, I am at your disposal. I will find you the sum when the moment arrives. Larsonneau will be for nothing in it, you understand. It is a present which I mean to make you." He smiled with a good natured air. She remained in a state of cruel anguish. She felt she would lose the little equilibrium left her, if she surrendered herself to her husband. It was her last pride to be married to the father and to be only the son's wife. Often, when Maxime seemed to her to be cold, she tried to make him understand the situation by very transparent allusions; it is true that the young man, whom she expected to see fall at her feet after this revelation, remained altogether indifferent, imagining, no doubt, that she merely wished to reassure him as to the possibility of a meeting between his father and himself in the grey silk room.

When Saccard had left her, she hastily dressed herself and had the horses put to. While her brougham was conveying her towards the Île Saint-Louis, she prepared the manner in which she would ask her father for the fifty thousand francs. She flung herself into this sudden idea, without consenting to discuss it, feeling very cowardly at the bottom of her heart and seized with invincible fright at the thought of such a step. When she arrived, the courtyard of the Béraud mansion froze her with its mournful, cloister-like dampness, and it was with a desire to run away that she mounted the broad stone staircase on which her little high-heeled boots resounded terribly. She had been foolish enough in her haste to choose a costume of dead-leaf tinted silk, with long flounces of white lace trimmed with bows of ribbon and cut athwart by a plaited sash. This toilet, which was completed by a little hat with a large white veil, set such a singular note in the dark gloom of the staircase, that she herself became conscious of how strange she looked there. She trembled as she crossed the austere suite of spacious rooms, where the personages vaguely visible on the tapestry seemed surprised to see this stream of skirts pass by in the semi-daylight of their solitude.

She found her father in a drawing-room looking on to the courtyard, where he habitually remained. He was reading a large book placed on a desk adapted to the arms of his chair. In front of one of the windows Aunt Élisabeth sat knitting with long wooden needles; and in the silence of the room the tick-tack of these needles was the only sound one heard.

Renée sat down, ill at ease, unable to make a movement without disturbing the severity of the lofty ceiling by a noise of rustling silk. Her laces looked crudely white against the dark background of tapestry and old furniture. Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel gazed at her with his hands resting on the edge of the desk. Aunt Élisabeth talked about the approaching wedding of Christine who was to marry the son of a very rich attorney; the young girl had gone to a tradesman's with an old family servant; and the good aunt talked on alone, in her placid voice, without ceasing to knit, gossiping about household affairs, and casting smiling glances at Renée from above her spectacles.

But, the young woman became more and more disturbed. All the silence of the house weighed upon her shoulders, and she would have given a great deal for the lace of her dress to have been black. Her father's gaze embarrassed her to such a point that she considered Worms really ridiculous to have imagined such high flounces.

"How smart you are, my girl!" suddenly said Aunt Élisabeth, who had not yet even noticed her niece's lace.

She stopped knitting and settled her spectacles to see the better. Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel gave a faint smile.

"It is rather white," said he. "A woman must be greatly embarrassed with that on the side-walks."

"But one doesn't go out on foot, father!" cried Renée, who immediately afterwards regretted these words from her heart.

The old gentleman seemed about to reply. Then he rose up, straightened his high stature and began walking slowly, without again looking at his daughter. The latter remained quite pale with emotion. Each time that she exhorted herself to take courage, and that she tried to find a transition that would lead up to the request for money, she experienced a shooting pain at the heart.

"We never see you now, father," she murmured.

"Oh!" replied her aunt, "your father hardly ever goes out except at long intervals to stroll in the Jardin des Plantes. And I even have to get angry to make him do that! He pretends that he loses himself in Paris, that the city is no longer made for him. Ah! you do right to scold him!"

"My husband would be so happy to see you at our Thursdays, from time to time," continued the young woman.

Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel took a few steps in silence. Then in a quiet voice: "You must thank your husband for me," he said. "He is an active fellow, it appears, and I hope, for your sake, that he conducts his enterprises honestly. But we haven't the same ideas, and I feel ill at ease in your fine house in the Parc Monceaux."

Aunt Élisabeth seemed vexed by this reply.

"How wicked men are with their politics!" she said. "Would you like to know the truth? Your father is furious with you because you go to the Tuileries."

But the old gentleman shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that his dissatisfaction had far more grievous causes. He began slowly walking again, with a dreamy air. Renée remained for a moment silent, with the request for the fifty thousand francs on the tip of her tongue. But seized with even greater cowardice than before, she kissed her father and went off.

Aunt Élisabeth insisted upon accompanying her to the staircase. As they crossed the suite of rooms, she continued chattering in her old woman's squeaky voice:

"You are happy, my dear child. It pleases me very much to see you looking beautiful and well; for if your marriage had turned out badly I should have thought myself guilty! Your husband loves you, you have all you need, haven't you?"

"Of course," replied Renée compelling herself to smile though feeling sick at heart.

Her aunt still detained her, with her hand on the balustrade of the staircase.

"Do you see, I have only one fear, that you may become intoxicated with all your happiness. Be prudent, and above all don't sell anything. If you had a child some day, you would have a little fortune all ready for him."

When Renée was in her brougham again she heaved a sigh of relief. She had drops of cold perspiration on her forehead; she wiped them off, thinking of the icy dampness of the Béraud mansion. Then as the brougham rolled along amid the clear sunlight of the Quai Saint-Paul she remembered the fifty thousand francs, and all her suffering was revived again, acuter than before. She, whom people thought so bold, how cowardly she had just been! And yet it was a question of Maxime, of his liberty, of their joint delights. Amid the bitter reproaches which she addressed to herself, an idea suddenly sprung up which brought her despair to a climax; she ought to have spoken about the fifty thousand francs to Aunt Élisabeth on the stairs. What had she been thinking about? The worthy woman would perhaps have lent her the amount, or at all events have helped her. She was already leaning forward to tell her coachman to drive back to the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, when she thought she again beheld her father slowly crossing the solemn darkness of the grand drawing-room. She would never have the courage to return at once to that room. What could she say to explain this second visit? And in the depth of her heart she no longer even found the courage to speak of the affair to Aunt Élisabeth. So she told her coachman to drive her to the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière.

Madame Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw her opening the discreetly curtained door of the shop. She was there by chance, she was about to hasten to the magistrate's, where she had summoned a customer. But she would not put in an appearance, she could do so some other day; she was so happy that her sister-in-law had at length had the amiability to pay her a little visit. Renée smiled with an embarrassed air. Madame Sidonie would not by any means allow her to remain downstairs; she made her go up into her room, by the little staircase, after removing the brass knob from the shop door. She removed and refixed this knob, which was secured by a simple nail, at least twenty times a day.

"There, my beauty," she said, making Renée sit down on a couch, "we shall be able to chat nicely. Do you know that you come in the very nick of time--I meant to go and see you this evening."

Renée, who knew the room, experienced that vague feeling of uneasiness, which a promenader feels on finding that a strip of forest has been cut down in a favourite landscape.

"Ah!" she said at last, "you have changed the position of the bed, haven't you?"

"Yes," quietly replied the lace-dealer, "one of my customers thought it would be much better in front of the mantelpiece. She also advised me to have red curtains."

"That's what I was thinking, the curtains used not to be of that colour. Red is a very common colour."

She put on her eye-glasses, and looked at this room which displayed the kind of luxury one finds in a large hotel. On the mantelshelf she saw some long hair-pins which certainly did not come from Madame Sidonie's meagre chignon. The paper of that part of the wall, against which the bed had formerly stood, was all torn, discoloured and dirtied by the mattresses. The agent had certainly tried to hide this sore with the backs of two arm chairs, but these backs were rather low, and Renée's glance remained fixed on this worn strip of paper.

"You have something to say to me?" she asked at last.

"Yes, it's quite a story," said Madame Sidonie, joining her hands and assuming the expression of a glutton who is about to relate what she has eaten at dinner. "Just fancy, Monsieur de Saffré is in love with the beautiful Madame Saccard. Yes, with yourself, my pretty one."

Renée did not vouchsafe even a gesture of coquetry.

"Indeed!" she remarked, "but you said he was so smitten with Madame Michelin."

"Oh! that's finished, quite finished--I can prove it to you if you like. Don't you know then that little Michelin has pleased Baron Gouraud? It's incredible. Every one who knows the baron is amazed. And now she's on the way to obtaining the red ribbon for her husband! Ah, she's a woman of spirit. She isn't faint-hearted, she doesn't need any one to steer her boat."

Madame Sidonie said this with an air of some little regret mingled with admiration.

"But to return to Monsieur de Saffré--It would seem that he met you at an actresses' ball, muffled up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having somewhat cavalierly offered you a supper. Is it true?"

The young woman was quite surprised.

"Perfectly true," murmured she; "but who could have told him?"

"Wait a bit, he pretends that he recognised you later on, when you were no longer in the room, and that he remembered having seen you leave on Maxime's arm. Since then he has been madly in love. It has grown in his heart, you understand, been a sudden fancy. He came to see me to beg me to make you his apologies--"

"Well, tell him that I forgive him," interrupted Renée negligently.

And again assailed by all her worries, she continued:

"Ah! my good Sidonie, I am awfully bothered. It is absolutely necessary that I should have fifty thousand francs to-morrow morning. I came to speak to you about the matter. You know some money-lenders, you told me."

The agent, vexed by the abrupt manner in which her sister-in-law had interrupted her story, made her wait some time for an answer.

"Yes, certainly; only, I advise you, first of all to try and obtain the money from a friend. If I were in your place I know very well what I should do. I should simply apply to Monsieur de Saffré."

Renée smiled in a constrained manner.

"But it would hardly be proper," she answered, "since you pretend that he is so much in love."

The old woman looked at her with a fixed stare; then her flabby face gently softened into a smile of tender pity.

"Poor dear," she muttered, "you have been crying; don't deny it, I can see it by your eyes. You must be strong and accept life. Come, let me arrange the little matter in question."

Renée rose up, twisting her fingers, and making her gloves crack. And she remained standing, quite shaken by a cruel internal struggle. She was opening her mouth, to accept perhaps, when a gentle ring at the bell resounded in the next room. Madame Sidonie hastily went out, leaving the door ajar, so that a double row of pianos could be seen. The young woman then heard a man's step, and the stifled sound of a conversation carried on in an undertone. She mechanically went to examine more closely the yellowish stain with which the mattresses had streaked the wall. This stain disturbed her, made her ill at ease. Forgetting everything, Maxime, the fifty thousand francs, and Monsieur de Saffré, she stepped back to the front of the bed, reflecting; this bed had been much better placed, as it had formerly stood; some women were really wanting in taste; of a certainty when one lay down one must have the light in one's eyes. And in the depths of her memory she vaguely saw the figure of the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul rise up, her novel in two assignations, that chance amour which she had partaken of, there, at that other place. The wearing away of the wall paper was all that remained of it. Then the room filled her with uneasiness, and the hum of voices which continued in the next apartment made her feel impatient.

When Madame Sidonie returned, opening and closing the door with due precaution, she made repeated signs with the tips of her fingers, to recommend Renée to speak low. Then, she whispered in her ear:

"You don't know, the adventure's a good one: it's Monsieur de Saffré who's there."

"You didn't tell him though that I was here?" asked the young woman anxiously.

The agent seemed surprised, and with an air of great simplicity answered:

"But I did--He is waiting for me to tell him to come in. Of course I didn't speak about the fifty thousand francs--"

Renée, who was quite pale, had drawn herself up as if she had been struck with a whip. A great pride again rose to her heart. That creaking of boots, which she heard growing louder in the next room, exasperated her:

"I am going," she said curtly. "Come and open the door for me."

Madame Sidonie tried to smile.

"Don't be childish," she said. "I can't be left with that fellow on my hands, since I have told him you are here--You really compromise me--"

But the young woman had already descended the little staircase. She repeated, in front of the closed shop door:

"Open it, open it."

When the lace-dealer withdrew the brass knob, she had the habit of putting it in her pocket. She wished to continue parleying. Finally seized with anger herself, and displaying in the depths of her grey eyes the tart acridity of her nature, she cried: "But come, what shall I say to the man?"

"That I'm not for sale," replied Renée, who already had one foot on the side-walk.

And it seemed to her that she could hear Madame Sidonie muttering as she banged the door: "Eh! get off, you jade! you shall pay me for this!"

"By heavens," thought Renée as she again entered her brougham, "I prefer my husband to that."

She returned straight home. In the evening she told Maxime not to come; she was poorly, she needed repose. And, on the morrow, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia's jeweller, she remained embarrassed in presence of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had done a good stroke of business. From that day forth, however, she became more capricious, she often changed the hour of the appointments which she gave the young fellow, and even she frequently watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not worry himself much about these changes of humour; it pleased him to be an obedient thing in women's hands. What bored him a great deal more was the moral turn which their lovers' meetings took at times. She became quite sad; and it even happened that she had big tears in her eyes. She left off singing the refrain about the "handsome young man" in the _Belle Hélène_, she played the hymns she had learnt at school and asked her lover if he did not think that sin was always punished, sooner or later.

"She's decidedly growing old," he thought. "It will be the utmost if she's funny for another year or two."

The truth was that she suffered cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with Monsieur de Saffré. She had revolted at Madame Sidonie's, she had given way to instinctive pride, to disgust for such a low bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything in her foundered; and she felt herself so despicable that she would have surrendered herself to the first man who pushed open the door of the room containing the pianos. The thought of her husband had, at times, formerly passed before her, amid her incest, like a touch of voluptuous horror; but henceforth the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that transformed her most delicate sensations into intolerable sufferings. She, who had enjoyed the refinement of her sin, and had willingly dreamt of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods partook of their amours together, was now descending to vulgar debauchery, to being shared by two men. In vain did she try to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard's kisses when she offered them to Maxime's. Her inquisitiveness descended to the depths of these accursed pleasures. She went as far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son amid the father's hugs. And she emerged yet more alarmed and more bruised from this journey into unknown evil, from this ardent darkness in which she confounded the person of her double lover, with a terror which was like the death-rattle of her enjoyment.

She kept this drama to herself alone, and increased the suffering it occasioned by the feverishness of her imagination. She would have preferred to die rather than own the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear that the young man might revolt and leave her; she had such an absolute belief in the monstrosity of her sin and in eternal damnation, that she would have more willingly crossed the Parc Monceaux naked than have confessed her shame aloud. On the other hand, she still remained the madcap who astonished Paris by her extravagant conduct. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices which the newspapers talked about, designating her by her initials. It was at this period that she seriously wished to fight a duel with pistols with the Duchess de Sternich who had, intentionally, so she said, upset a glass of punch over her dress. To calm her, it was necessary for her brother-in-law, the minister, to get angry. On another occasion she bet with Madame de Lauwerens that she would make the round of the Longchamps racecourse in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her from doing so. Maxime himself began to feel afraid of this head, in which madness lurked; and on the pillow at night-time he thought he could hear all the hubbub of a city bent on enjoying itself.

One evening they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. They had not even looked at the bill. They wished to see the great Italian tragedian, Ristori, who then attracted all Paris, and in whom, by the command of fashion, they were bound to interest themselves. The play was _Phèdre_. Maxime remembered his classical repertory sufficiently, and Renée knew enough Italian to follow the performance. And indeed they derived an especial emotion from this drama, performed in a foreign language, the sonority of which seemed to them at times to be a simple orchestral accompaniment supporting the pantomime of the actors. Hippolytos was a tall, pale fellow, a very poor actor, who whimpered his part.

"What a ninny!" muttered Maxime.

However, Ristori, with her broad shoulders shaken by her sobs, with her tragical face and fat arms, moved Renée deeply. Phædra was of Pasiphae's blood, and she asked herself of what blood she was, the incestuous stepmother of modern times. She saw nought of the piece save this tall woman drawing the ancient crime over the stage. When Phædra confides her criminal tenderness to Œnone in the first act; when, all on fire, she declares herself to Hippolytos in the second; and later on, in the fourth act, when the return of Theseus overwhelms her and she curses herself, in a crisis of gloomy fury, she filled the house with such a cry of savage passion, with such a yearning for superhuman voluptuousness, that the young woman felt every shudder of her desire and remorse pass through her own flesh.

"Wait," murmured Maxime in her ears, "you are going to hear Theramene's narrative. The old fellow has a funny head!"

And he muttered in a hollow voice:

"Scarce had we passed the gates of Trezene, He on his chariot mounted--"

But while the old fellow spoke, Renée neither looked nor listened any more. The light blinded her, and stifling heat came to her from all the pale faces stretched out towards the stage. The monologue continued, interminable. She imagined herself in the conservatory under the ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She suffered horribly, she was losing consciousness, when the death-rattle of Phædra, repentant and dying in the convulsions caused by the poison, made her open her eyes again. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself some day? How petty and shameful her drama was beside the ancient epopœia! And while Maxime fastened her opera cloak under her chin, she still heard, growling behind her, Ristori's rough voice to which Œnone's complacent murmur replied.

In the brougham, the young fellow talked on alone. He considered tragedies sickening as a rule, and preferred the pieces performed at the Bouffes. However, _Phèdre_ was spicy. He had taken an interest in it, because--And he pressed Renée's hand to complete his meaning. Then a funny idea darted through his head, and he gave way to an impulse to say something witty.

"It was I," he murmured, "who did right not to approach the sea at Trouville."

Renée, lost in the depths of her painful dream, remained silent. It was necessary for him to repeat his phrase.

"Why?" asked she, astonished and failing to understand.

"But the monster--"

And he gave vent to a little titter. This joke froze the young woman. Everything was upset in her head. Ristori was no longer aught, but a big puppet who tucked up her peplum and poked out her tongue to the public like Blanche Müller in the third act of the _Belle Hélène_; Theramene danced the cancan, and Hippolytos eat bread and jam while stuffing his fingers into his nose.

When a more galling remorse made Renée shudder, she evinced superb revolt. What was her crime after all, and why should she blush? Did she not every day tread upon greater infamies? Did she not elbow at the ministers', at the Tuileries, everywhere in fact, wretches like herself who had millions on their flesh, and who were adored on both knees! And she thought of the shameful friendship of Adeline d'Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, at which one smiled, at times, at the Empress's Mondays. And she recalled to herself the traffic of Madame de Lauwerens, whom husbands celebrated for her good conduct, her order, and her exactitude in settling her tradesmen's bills. She named Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, the Baroness de Meinhold, those creatures whose luxury was paid for by their lovers, and who were quoted in society like shares are quoted upon change. Madame de Guende was so stupid and so well formed, that she had three superior officers for her lovers at the same time, and was unable to distinguish them from each other on account of their uniforms. This made that demon of a Louise say that she first of all made them strip to their shifts so as to know which of the three she was talking to. As for the Countess Vanska, she remembered the courtyards in which she had sung, the side-walks on which people pretended they had again seen her, dressed in printed calico, and prowling about like a she-wolf. Each of these women had her shame, her triumphant, displayed sore. And, overtopping them all, the Duchess de Sternich rose up, ugly, old, worn out, with the glory of having passed a night in the Imperial bed; she typified official vice, from which she derived the majesty of debauchery and a kind of sovereignty over this band of illustrious hussies.

The incestuous stepmother accustomed herself to her sin, as to a gala robe the stiffness of which might at first have inconvenienced her. She followed the fashions of the period, she dressed and undressed herself in the style of others. She ended by believing that she lived amid a circle above common morality, in which the senses became more acute and developed, and in which one was allowed to strip oneself naked for the joy of all Olympus. Sin became a luxury, a flower set in the hair, a diamond fastened on the brow. And she again saw, like a justification and redemption, the Emperor passing on the general's arm, between two rows of inclined shoulders.

Only one man, Baptiste, her husband's valet, continued to disturb her. Since Saccard showed himself gallant, this tall, pale, dignified valet, seemed to walk around her with the solemnity of mute censure. He did not look at her, his cold glances passed higher, above her chignon, with the modesty of a beadle who refuses to defile his eyes by letting them rest on a hair of a sinner. She imagined that he knew everything, and she would have purchased his silence had she dared. Then feelings of uneasiness took possession of her, she experienced a kind of confused respect when she met Baptiste, and said to herself that all the honesty of her household had withdrawn and hidden itself under this lackey's dress-coat.

One day she asked Céleste:

"Does Baptiste joke in the servants' hall? Do you know if he has had any adventure, if he has any mistress?"

"What a question!" was all the maid replied.

"Come, he must have paid you some attentions?"

"Why! he never looks at women. We barely see him. He is always in master's rooms or in the stables. He says that he is very fond of horses."

Renée was irritated by this respectability, for she would have liked to be able to despise her servants. Although she had taken a liking to Céleste, she would have rejoiced to learn that she was someone's mistress.

"But you, Céleste," she continued, "don't you think that Baptiste is a good-looking fellow?"

"I, madame!" cried the chambermaid with the stupefied air of a person who has just heard something prodigious. "Oh! I've very different ideas in my head. I don't want a man. I've my plan. You will see later on. I'm not a fool, no."

Renée could not draw anything more precise from her. Moreover, her worries were growing. Her noisy life, her mad rambles, met with numerous obstacles which she had to overcome, and against which she at times bruised herself. It was thus that Louise de Mareuil rose up one day between herself and Maxime. Renée was not jealous of the "hunchback," as she disdainfully called her; she knew her to be condemned by the doctors, and could not believe that Maxime would ever marry such an ugly chit, even at the price of a dowry of a million. In her fall she had retained a middle-class naivete respecting the people around her; although she despised herself, she readily believed that they were superior and very estimable. But whilst rejecting the possibility of a marriage which would have seemed to her a piece of sinister debauchery and a theft, she suffered from the young folks' familiarities and friendliness. When she spoke of Louise to Maxime, he laughed with satisfaction, he repeated the child's sayings to her, and said:

"The urchin calls me her little man, you know."

And he displayed such freedom of mind that she did not dare to tell him that this urchin was seventeen, and that their playfulness with their hands, and their eagerness when they met in drawing-rooms to find out some shady corner to poke fun at everybody, grieved her and spoilt her most pleasant evenings.

An incident occurred which imparted a strange character to the situation. Renée often felt the need of acting boastingly, and she had whims of brutal boldness. She dragged Maxime behind a curtain, behind a door, and kissed him at the risk of being seen. One Thursday evening, when the buttercup drawing-room was full of people, she was seized with the fine idea of calling the young fellow who was talking with Louise, she advanced from the depths of the conservatory where she was to meet him, and abruptly kissed him on the mouth between two clumps of shrubbery, thinking that she was sufficiently concealed. But Louise had followed Maxime, and when the lovers raised their heads, they saw her a few paces off, looking at them with a strange smile, without the least blush or astonishment, but with the quiet friendly air of a companion in vice, who is learned enough to understand and appreciate such a kiss.

Maxime felt really frightened that day, and it was Renée who showed herself indifferent and almost joyful. It was all over. It was now impossible for the hunchback to take her lover from her. She thought:

"I ought to have done it on purpose. She now knows that her 'little man' belongs to me."

Maxime felt reassured when he again found Louise as gay and as funny as before. He considered her to be "very acute and a very good-natured girl." And that was all.

There was good reason, however, for Renée to be disturbed. For some little time past Saccard had been thinking of his son's marriage with Mademoiselle de Mareuil. There was a dowry of a million francs to be had, which he did not wish to let escape, meaning to get his hands into this money later on. As Louise remained in bed during nearly three weeks at the beginning of the winter, he was so afraid of seeing her die before the projected union was accomplished, that he decided the children should marry at once. He certainly thought them rather young; but the doctors feared the month of March for the consumptive girl. Monsieur de Mareuil on his side was in a delicate position. He had eventually succeeded in getting himself returned as a deputy at the last poll. Only the Corps Législatif had just quashed his election, which had provoked a great scandal when the Chamber deliberated on the validity of the returns. This election was quite a heroi-comical poem, on which the newspapers lived for a whole month. Monsieur Hupel de la Noue, the prefect of the department, had displayed such vigour that the other candidates had not even been able either to placard their addresses to the electors, or to distribute their voting papers. At his advice, Monsieur de Mareuil covered the constituency with tables at which the peasants ate and drank for a week. He, moreover, promised a railway line, the erection of a bridge and three churches, and on the eve of the poll he forwarded to the influential electors the portraits of the Emperor and Empress, two large engravings covered with glass and set in gold frames. This gift met with tremendous success, and the majority in Monsieur de Mareuil's favour was overwhelming. But when the Chamber, in presence of the bursts of laughter which came from all France, found itself compelled to send Monsieur de Mareuil back to his electors, the minister flew into a terrible passion with the prefect and the unfortunate candidate who had really shown themselves too "zealous." He even spoke of choosing someone else as the official candidate. Monsieur de Mareuil was terrified, he had spent three hundred thousand francs in the department, he owned there some large estates where he felt bored, and which he would have to sell at a loss. So he came to beg his dear colleague to appease his brother, and to promise him in his name a most properly conducted election. It was on this occasion that Saccard again spoke of the children's marriage and that the two fathers finally decided upon it.

When Maxime was sounded on the subject he felt embarrassed. Louise amused him, and the dowry tempted him still more. He said yes, he accepted all the dates that Saccard named to avoid the worry of a discussion. But, at heart, he owned to himself that matters would unfortunately not be arranged with such charming facility. Renée would never consent, she would cry, she would upbraid him, she was capable of provoking some great scandal to astonish Paris. It was very disagreeable. She now frightened him. She watched him with alarming eyes, and she possessed him so despotically that he thought he could feel claws digging into his shoulder whenever she laid her white hand on it. Her turbulence became roughness, and there was a cracked sound in the depths of her laughter. He really feared that she would go mad one night in his arms. With her, remorse, fear of being surprised, the cruel joys of adultery did not manifest themselves as with other women, by tears and dejection, but by greater extravagance, and a more irresistible longing for noise. And amid her growing affrightment one began to hear a rattling, the derangement of this adorable, astonishing machine which was breaking up.

Maxime passively awaited an occasion which would rid him of this troublesome mistress. He again said that they had been very stupid. If their comradeship had at first lent additional voluptuousness to their love, it now prevented him from breaking off as he would certainly have done from any other woman. He would not have returned; that was his mode of bringing his amours to a finish so as to avoid any effort or any quarrel. But he felt himself incapable of a row, and he still even willingly forgot himself in Renée's embraces; she behaved maternally, she paid his expenses, and she would pull him out of embarrassment if any creditors became angry. Then the thought of Louise, the thought of the dowry of a million of francs returned to him, and made him reflect--even amid the young woman's kisses--"that it was all very charming and nice, but that it wasn't serious and must come to an end."

One night Maxime was so rapidly stumped at the house of a woman where one often gambled till daylight, that he experienced one of those mute attacks of anger familiar to the gamester whose pockets are empty. He would have given everything in the world to have been able to fling a few more louis on the table. He took up his hat, and with the mechanical step of a man who is impelled by a fixed idea, he repaired to the Parc Monceaux, opened the little gate, and found himself in the conservatory. It was past midnight. Renée had forbidden him to come that night. When she now closed her door to him she did not even try to invent an explanation, while he merely thought of profiting of his holiday. He only clearly remembered the young woman's prohibition when he was in front of the glass door of the little drawing-room which was closed. As a rule when he was to come, Renée undid the fastening of this door in advance.

"Bah!" said he on seeing that the window of the dressing-room was lighted up, "I will whistle and she will come down. I sha'n't disturb her; if she has a few louis, I will go off at once."

And he whistled gently. He indeed often employed this signal to announce his arrival. But that evening he fruitlessly whistled several times. He grew obstinate, raising the key, and unwilling to abandon his idea of an immediate loan. At last he saw the glass door opened with infinite precaution and without his having heard the least sound of footsteps. In the dim light of the conservatory Renée appeared to him, with her hair down, and scarcely dressed, as if she were going to bed. She was barefooted. She pushed him towards one of the arbours, descending the steps and walking over the gravel of the pathways, without seeming to feel the cold or the roughness of the ground.

"It's stupid to whistle as loud as that," she muttered with restrained anger. "I told you not to come. What do you want with me?"

"Eh? Let's go up," said Maxime, surprised by this reception. "I will tell you upstairs. You will catch cold here."

But as he stepped forward she held him back and he then perceived that she was horribly pale. Mute fright bent her form. Her clothes, the lace of her linen, hung down like tragic shreds upon her shuddering skin.

He examined her with growing astonishment:

"What is the matter with you? You are ill?"

And instinctively he raised his eyes and looked through the glass panes of the conservatory at the window of the dressing-room where he had seen a light.

"But there's a man in your room," he said suddenly.

"No, no, it isn't true," she stammered, supplicating, distracted.

"Pooh, my dear, I see his shadow."

Then, for a minute they remained there face to face, not knowing what to say to each other. Renée's teeth chattered with terror, and it seemed to her as if some one were throwing bucketsful of iced water over her bare feet. Maxime experienced more irritation than he would have believed; but he still remained sufficiently possessed to reflect, and say to himself that the occasion was a good one, and that he would now break off the connection.

"You won't make me believe that Céleste wears a coat," he continued. "If the glass panes of the conservatory were not so thick I should perhaps recognize the gentleman."

She pushed him deeper into the shadow of the foliage, saying, with her hands clasped, and seized with growing terror:

"I beg of you, Maxime--"

But all the young fellow's teasing faculties were aroused, a ferocious malice which sought for vengeance. He was too weak to ease himself by anger. Spite compressed his lips; and, instead of striking her, as he had at first had the impulse of doing, he sharpened his voice and rejoined:

"You ought to have told me of it, I shouldn't have come to disturb you--It happens every day that one no longer cares for one another. I myself was beginning to have enough of it--Come, don't be impatient. I will let you go up again; but not before you have told me the gentleman's name--"

"Never, never!" murmured the young woman, forcing back her tears.

"It isn't to call him out, it's to know--The name, tell me the name, quick, and off I go."

He had caught hold of her wrists and he looked at her, laughing his wicked laugh. She struggled, distracted, bent upon not opening her lips again, so that the name he asked for might not escape from them.

"We shall make a noise, you will be nicely placed then. Why are you frightened? Aren't we good friends? I want to know who replaces me, it's legitimate--Come, I will help you--It's Monsieur de Mussy whose grief has touched you."

She did not answer. She bowed her head beneath such an interrogatory.

"It isn't Monsieur de Mussy? The Duke de Rozan, then? Really, nor he either? Perhaps the Count de Chibray? Not even he?"

He stopped short, he reflected.

"The devil, I can't think of any one else. It can't be my father after what you told me--"

Renée quivered as if she had been burnt, and said huskily:

"No. You know very well that he no longer comes. I shouldn't accept, it would be ignoble."

"Then who is it?"

And he pressed her wrists still more tightly. The poor woman struggled for a few moments longer.

"Oh, Maxime, if you knew! I can't, however, tell you--"

Then conquered, crushed, looking with affright at the lighted window: "It is Monsieur de Saffré," she stammered in a very low voice.

Maxime, whom the cruel game had amused, turned extremely pale on hearing this confession which he had asked for so persistently. He was irritated by the unexpected pain which this man's name caused him. He violently threw back Renée's wrists, drawing near to her, and saying to her full in the face, and with clinched teeth:

"Well, do you want to know you are a ----!"

He said the word. And he was going off, when she hastened to him, sobbing, taking him in her arms, murmuring tender things, requests for pardon, swearing that she still adored him, and that she would explain everything to him on the morrow. But he disengaged himself, and banged the door of the conservatory, replying:

"No! all's over, I've had quite enough of it."

She remained crushed. She watched him crossing the garden. It seemed to her that the trees of the conservatory revolved round her. Then she slowly dragged her bare feet over the gravel of the pathways, she reascended the steps, her skin discoloured by the cold, and more tragical than ever amid the disorder of her lace. Upstairs she answered, in reply to the questions of her husband who was waiting for her, that she had thought she could recollect where she had dropped a little note-book she had lost since the morning. And when she was in bed, she suddenly felt immense despair on reflecting that she ought to have told Maxime that his father, after returning home with her, had followed her into her room to talk to her about some money matter.

It was on the morrow that Saccard decided to hasten the finish of the Charonne matter. His wife belonged to him; he had just felt her, soft and inert in his hands, like something that surrenders itself. On the other hand, the line which the Boulevard du Prince Eugène was to follow was about to be decided upon, and it was necessary that Renée should be despoiled before the approaching expropriation was noised about. Saccard displayed an artist's love in all this affair; it was with devotion that he watched his plan ripen, and he set his traps with the refinement of a sportsman who prides himself on capturing his game in skilful fashion. He felt the satisfaction of an expert gamester, of a man who derives a special enjoyment from stolen gain; he wished to obtain the ground for a crust of bread, and then to give his wife a hundred thousand francs' worth of jewellery, amid the joy of the triumph. The simplest operations grew complicated, became black dramas, as soon as he dealt with them; he became impassioned, he would have beaten his father for five francs. But afterwards he scattered gold in regal fashion. However, before obtaining from Renée the cession of her share in the property, he prudently went to probe Larsonneau as to the black-mailing intentions which he had scented in him. His instinct saved him on this occasion. The expropriation agent had imagined, on his side, that the fruit was ripe and that he could pluck it. When Saccard entered the office in the Rue de Rivoli he found his compeer overcome, and showing signs of the most violent despair.

"Ah! my friend," murmured Larsonneau, taking hold of his hands, "we are lost. I was about to hasten to your place so that we might consult together and get out of this horrible scrape."

While he wrung his arms and tried to sob, Saccard noticed that he had been engaged in signing letters prior to his arrival, and that the signatures were penned with admirable precision. He accordingly looked at him quietly, saying:

"Bah! what has befallen us then?"

But the agent did not reply at once; he had thrown himself into his arm-chair in front of his writing table, and there, with his elbows on the blotting pad and his brow between his hands, he furiously shook his head. Finally in a husky voice:

"I have been robbed of the ledger containing the inventory, you know."

And he related that one of his clerks, a scamp worthy of the galleys, had abstracted a large number of papers among which the famous inventory figured. The worst was that the thief had realized to what use he might turn the document in question, and he wished to sell it back for a hundred thousand francs.

Saccard reflected. The story seemed to him altogether too clumsy. Plainly enough Larsonneau did not much care at heart whether he was believed or not. He sought for a simple pretext to make Saccard understand that he wanted a hundred thousand francs in the Charonne affair; and indeed, that he would, on this condition, return the compromising papers which were in his possession. The bargain seemed too onerous to Saccard. He would willingly have allowed his ex-colleague a share, but he was irritated by the setting of this snare, by this pretension to make a dupe of him. On the other hand he was not without his apprehensions; he knew the personage he had to deal with, he knew that he was quite capable of taking the documents to his brother, the minister, who would certainly have paid a price for them so as to stifle any scandal.

"The devil!" he muttered, sitting down in his turn, "this is a nasty story. And can one see the scamp in question?"

"I will have him sent for," said Larsonneau. "He lives close by, in the Rue Jean-Lantier."

Ten minutes had not elapsed when a little young fellow with a squint, light hair, and a face covered with freckles, stepped softly into the room, taking care that the door should not make a noise. He wore an old black frock coat, too large for him and horribly threadbare. He remained standing at a respectful distance, quietly looking at Saccard out of the corner of his eye. Larsonneau, who called him Baptistin, made him undergo an interrogatory, to which he replied in monosyllables without humbling himself the least in the world; indeed he accepted with the utmost indifference the epithets of thief, swindler and scoundrel, which his master thought fit to adjoin to each of his questions.

Saccard admired this wretched fellow's coolness. At one moment the expropriation agent sprang from his arm-chair as if to strike him; and he contented himself with retreating a step, squinting with still more humility.

"That will do, leave him alone," said the financier. "And so, sir, you demand a hundred thousand francs for the papers."

"Yes, a hundred thousand francs," replied the young man.

And he went off. Larsonneau seemed unable to calm himself.

"What a blackguard, eh?" he stammered. "Did you see his underhand looks? Fellows of that stamp have a timid air, but they would murder a man for twenty francs."

Saccard however interrupted him, saying:

"Pooh! he isn't terrible. I think one will be able to arrange matters with him--I came to see you about a much more worrying affair--You were right in mistrusting my wife, my dear friend. Just fancy, she's going to sell her share of the property to Monsieur Haffner. She needs money, she says. Her friend Suzanne must have influenced her."

The other abruptly ceased despairing; he listened, rather pale, readjusting his stick-up collar, which had become bent during his fit of anger.

"This sale," continued Saccard, "means the ruin of our hopes. If Monsieur Haffner becomes your fellow-partner, not only will our profits be compromised, but I am dreadfully afraid that we shall find ourselves in a most disagreeable position towards that over-scrupulous fellow, who will want to go over the accounts."

The expropriation agent began walking about with an agitated step, his patent leather boots creaking on the carpet.

"You see," muttered he, "in what a position one puts oneself to oblige people! But, my dear fellow, if I were in your place, I should absolutely prevent my wife from doing anything so foolish. I would beat her sooner."

"Ah! my friend!" said the financier with a wily smile, "I have no more power over my wife than you seem to have over that blackguard of a Baptistin."

Larsonneau stopped short in front of Saccard, who was still smiling, and gazed at him with a profound air. Then he resumed walking up and down, but with a slow measured step. He approached a looking glass, pulled up the bow of his necktie, and then walked on again, regaining his usual elegant manner. And suddenly:

"Baptistin!" he cried.

The little young fellow who squinted came in, but by another door. He no longer carried his hat, but twisted a pen between his fingers.

"Go and fetch the ledger," said Larsonneau to him.

And when the clerk was no longer there, the agent discussed the sum that was to be given him.

"Do it for me," he ended by plainly saying.

Thereupon Saccard consented to give thirty thousand francs out of the future profits of the Charonne affair. He considered that he still escaped cheaply from the usurer's gloved hand. The latter had the promise made out in his name, prolonging the comedy to the end, and stating that he would be accountable to the young man for the thirty thousand francs. It was with a laugh of relief that Saccard burnt the ledger page by page at the fire flaming in the grate. Then, this operation over, he exchanged vigorous hand shakes with Larsonneau, and left him saying:

"You are going to Laure's this evening, aren't you? Wait for me there. I shall have arranged everything with my wife, I we will decide on our final plans."

Laure d'Aurigny, who often moved, then resided in a large apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, in front of the Expiatory Chapel. She had just fixed one day a week to be at home, like a lady of real society. It was a manner of assembling on the same occasion, the men who saw her, one by one, during the week. Aristide Saccard triumphed on Tuesday evenings; he was the acknowledged protector; and he turned his head with a vague laugh whenever the mistress of the house betrayed him between two doors, by giving one of the gentlemen an appointment for the same night. When he remained there, the last of the set, he lit another cigar, talked business, and joked about the gentleman who was dancing attendance in the street, waiting until he left; then after calling Laure his "dear child," and giving her a little pat on the cheek, he quietly went off by one door while the gentleman came in by another. The secret treaty of alliance which had consolidated Saccard's credit and procured the d'Aurigny two sets of furniture in a month, still continued to amuse them. But Laure wanted a finish to the comedy. This finish, a predetermined one, was to consist in a public rupture, to the profit of some fool who would pay dearly for the right of being the serious protector, known as such to all Paris. The fool was found. The Duke de Rozan, tired of uselessly boring the women of the same social standing as himself, dreamt of acquiring the reputation of a debauchee, so as to lend some relief to his insipid personality. He was very assiduous at the Tuesday at homes of Laure, whom he had conquered by his absolute simplicity. Unfortunately, although thirty-five years old, he was still dependent upon his mother, to such a point that he could at the most dispose of merely ten louis at a time. On the evenings when Laure deigned to take his ten louis, pitying herself, and talking of the hundred thousand francs she needed, he sighed, and promised her the amount on the day when he would be the master. It was then that she had the idea of putting him on friendly terms with Larsonneau, who was one of her good friends. The two men went to lunch together at Tortoni's; and at dessert Larsonneau, while relating his amours with a delicious Spanish beauty, pretended that he knew some money-lenders; but he strongly advised Rozan never to let himself pass into their hands. This confidential announcement inflamed the duke, who ended by wringing from his dear friend a promise that he would occupy himself about his "little affair." He occupied himself about it so well that he was to bring the money on the very evening that Saccard was to meet him at Laure's.

When Larsonneau arrived, the d'Aurigny's large white and gold drawing-room only contained some five or six women, who took hold of his hands, and clung to his neck with a furious outburst of affection. They called him "that big Lar!" a caressing nickname which Laure had invented. And he in a fluty voice exclaimed:

"There, that'll do, my little kittens; you will crush my hat."

They calmed down, and gathered close around him on a couch, while he told them about an attack of indigestion which had befallen Sylvia, with whom he had supped the night before. Then drawing a sweetmeat box from the pocket of his dress-coat he offered them some burnt almonds. Meanwhile, Laure came out of her bedroom, and as several gentlemen arrived, she drew Larsonneau into a boudoir situated at one end of the drawing-room, from which it was separated by double hangings.

"Have you got the money?" she asked him when they were alone.

Larsonneau, without replying, bowed in a jocular manner and tapped the inner pocket of his coat.

"Oh! you big Lar!" murmured the delighted young woman.

She took him round the waist and kissed him.

"Wait a bit," she said, "I want the flimsies--Rozan is in my room, I will go and fetch him."

But he detained her, and, in his turn, kissing her shoulders:

"You know what commission I asked of _you_."

"Why, yes, you big stupid, it's agreed."

She came back bringing Rozan. Larsonneau was dressed more correctly than the duke, with better fitting gloves, and a more artistic bow to his necktie. They negligently touched hands, and talked about the races of two days before, at which one of their friends had had a horse beaten. Laure stamped impatiently.

"Come, never mind all that, my darling," said she to Rozan. "Big Lar has the money, you know. The affair had better be settled."

Larsonneau pretended to remember.

"Ah, yes, it's true," he said, "I have the amount--But how much better you would have done had you listened to me, my dear fellow! To think that these rogues demanded fifty per cent of me. However I agreed to it all the same, as you told me that it didn't matter."

Laure d'Aurigny had procured some bill stamps during the day. But when it was a question of a pen and an inkstand, she looked at the two men with an air of consternation, doubting whether these objects would be found in the place. She wanted to go and look in the kitchen, when Larsonneau drew from his pocket, the pocket containing the sweetmeat box, two marvels, a silver pen-holder which lengthened by means of a screw, and a steel and ebony inkstand, of jewel-like finish and delicacy. And as Rozan sat down:

"Draw the notes to my name," the agent said. "I didn't wish to compromise you, you understand? We will arrange matters together. Six notes of twenty-five thousand francs each, eh?"

Laure counted the flimsies on a corner of the table. Rozan did not even see them. When he had signed and raised his head, they had already disappeared in the young woman's pocket. However she came to him and kissed him on both cheeks, which appeared to delight him. Larsonneau looked at them philosophically while folding the promissory notes, and replacing the inkstand and pen-holder in his pocket.

The young woman still had her arms round Rozan's neck, when Aristide Saccard raised a corner of the door-hanging.

"Well, don't disturb yourselves," he said, laughing.

The duke blushed. But Laure went to shake the financier's hand, exchanging a wink of intelligence with him. She was radiant.

"It's done, my dear," said she. "I warned you of it. You are not too angry with me?"

Saccard shrugged his shoulders with a good-natured air. He pulled back the hanging, and drawing aside to allow Laure and the duke to pass, he cried out in an usher's yelping voice:

"The duke, the duchess!"

This witticism met with tremendous success. On the morrow the newspapers repeated it, plainly naming Laure d'Aurigny, and designating the two men, by extremely transparent initials. The rupture between Aristide Saccard and fat Laure, caused even more of a stir than their pretended amours had done.

Saccard had let the door curtain fall again amid the burst of gaiety which his jocularity had occasioned in the drawing-room.

"Ah! what a good girl!" said he, turning towards Larsonneau. "She is vicious! It's you, you scamp, who no doubt profits by all this. What are you to have?"

But the agent protested, with smiles, and pulled down his shirt-cuffs, which had caught up under the sleeves of his coat. At last he went and sat down near the door, on a couch to which Saccard motioned him:

"Come here, I don't want to confess you, dash it all! Let us now deal with serious matters, my dear fellow. I have had a long talk with my wife this evening. Everything is decided."

"She consents to cede her share in the property?" asked Larsonneau.

"Yes, but it wasn't without trouble on my part--Women are so obstinate! My wife, you know, had promised an old aunt not to sell the ground. There was no end to her scruples. Luckily, however, I had prepared quite a decisive story."

He rose up to light a cigar at the candelabrum which Laure had left on the table, and returning and stretching himself languidly on the couch:

"I told my wife," he continued, "that you were completely ruined--You had gambled at the Bourse, spent your money with harlots, dabbled in bad speculations; in fact you are on the point of ending by a frightful bankruptcy--I even let it be understood that I did not consider you perfectly honest--Then I explained to her that the Charonne affair would be wrecked in your fall, and that the best course would be for her to accept the proposal you had made to me to disengage her, by buying her share, for a crust of bread, it's true."

"It isn't an able story," muttered the expropriation agent. "Do you fancy your wife will believe such trash?"

Saccard smiled. He was in a disposition to be communicative.

"You are simple, my dear fellow," he resumed. "The basis of the story is of little consequence; the details, gestures and tone of voice are everything. Call Rozan and I bet I will persuade him that it is broad daylight. My wife has scarcely any more brains than Rozan--I let her have a glimpse of a precipice. She hasn't the least idea of the coming expropriation. As she was astonished, that in the midst of a catastrophe, you could think of taking a still heavier burden on your shoulders, I told her that no doubt she hampered you in dealing some ugly blow intended for your creditors. Finally, I advised the transaction as the only means of avoiding being mixed up in interminable law suits, and of deriving some money from the ground."

Larsonneau still considered the story somewhat brutal. His method was less dramatic; each of his operations was concocted and unravelled with the elegance of a drawing-room comedy.

"I should have imagined something different," he said. "However, everyone his own system. So all we have to do now is to pay--"

"It is on this point," replied Saccard, "that I want to make arrangements with you. To-morrow I will take the deed of sale to my wife, and she will simply have to send you this deed to receive the stipulated amount. I prefer to avoid any interview."

He had indeed never allowed Larsonneau to visit them on a footing of intimacy. He did not invite him to his entertainments, and he accompanied him to Renée's on the days when it was absolutely necessary that they should meet; this had happened on three occasions at the utmost. He almost always transacted matters with a power of attorney from his wife, not wishing to let her see too closely into his affairs.

He now opened his pocket-book, adding:

"Here are the two hundred thousand francs' worth of bills accepted by my wife; you will give them her in payment, and you will add to them a hundred thousand francs which I will bring you to-morrow morning. I am bleeding myself, my dear friend. This business will cost me a fortune."

"But that will only make three hundred thousand francs," remarked the expropriation agent. "Will the receipt be for that amount?"

"A receipt for three hundred thousand francs!" rejoined Saccard, laughing. "Ah! in that case we should be nicely placed later on! According to our inventories, the property must now be estimated at two millions five hundred thousand francs. The receipt will naturally be for half that amount."

"Your wife will never sign it."

"Yes, she will. I tell you that it is all agreed. Why, dash it all! I told her that that was your first condition. You present a pistol at our heads with your bankruptcy, do you understand? And it was for that reason that I appeared to doubt your honesty, and accused you of wanting to dupe your creditors. Do you think my wife understands anything of all that?"

Larsonneau shook his head, muttering:

"No matter, you ought to have devised something simpler."

"But my story is simplicity itself!" said Saccard, very much astonished. "How the devil do you find it complicated?"

He was not conscious of the incredible number of devices which he tacked on to the most ordinary transaction. He derived real enjoyment from the cock-and-bull story which he had just told Renée; and what delighted him was the impudence of the lie, the piling up of impossibilities, the astonishing complicacy of the plot. He would long since have had the ground if he had not imagined all this drama; but he would have experienced less enjoyment had he obtained it easily. Besides, he displayed the utmost simplicity in making the Charonne speculation quite a financial melodrama.

He rose up, and taking Larsonneau's arm, walked towards the drawing-room:

"You have perfectly understood me, eh?" he said. "Content yourself with following my instructions, and you will applaud me later on. Do you know, my dear fellow, you do wrong to wear yellow gloves, they quite spoil your hands."

The expropriation agent contented himself with smiling and murmuring:

"Oh! gloves have their value, dear master: one can touch anything without dirtying oneself."

As they returned into the drawing-room, Saccard was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find Maxime on the other side of the door curtains. He was seated on a couch beside a fair-haired woman, who was telling him, in a monotonous voice, a long story, no doubt her own. The young fellow had, in point of fact, overheard the conversation between his father and Larsonneau. The two accomplices seemed to him to be a pair of sharp blades. Still vexed by Renée's betrayal, he tasted a cowardly enjoyment in learning the theft of which she was about to be the victim. It avenged him a little. His father came and shook his hand with a suspicious air; but Maxime, showing him the fair-haired woman, whispered in his ear:

"She isn't bad looking, is she? I mean to have her this evening."

Thereupon Saccard attitudinized, and showed himself gallant. Laure d'Aurigny came and joined them for a moment. She complained that Maxime scarcely paid her one visit a month. But he pretended that he had been very much occupied, which statement made everybody laugh. He added that in future he should be here, there and everywhere.

"I have written a tragedy," said he, "and I only hit on the fifth act last night--I now mean to rest myself at the abodes of all the pretty women in Paris."

He laughed and enjoyed his allusions which he alone could understand. However, the only other persons now remaining in the drawing-room were Rozan and Larsonneau, on either corner of the mantelpiece. The Saccards rose up, as well as the fair-haired woman who lived in the house. The d'Aurigny then went to speak in a low tone to the duke. He seemed surprised and vexed. Seeing that he did not make up his mind to leave his arm-chair:

"No, really, not this evening," she said in an undertone, "I've a headache! To-morrow evening, I promise you."

Rozan had to obey. Laure waited till he was on the landing and then said quickly in Larsonneau's ear:

"Eh! big Lar, I keep my word. Shove him into his carriage."

When the fair-haired woman took leave of the gentlemen to return to her rooms on the floor above, Saccard was surprised that Maxime did not follow her.

"Well?" he asked him.

"Well, no," replied the young fellow. "I've reflected--"

And he had an idea which he thought a very funny one:

"I abandon my rights to you, if you like. Make haste, she hasn't yet shut her door."

But his father gently shrugged his shoulders, saying: "Thanks, youngster, I've something better than that for the time being."

The four men went down. Outside, the duke absolutely wished to take Larsonneau with him in his carriage. His mother lived in the Marais, and he would have dropped the expropriation agent at his door in the Rue de Rivoli. The latter refused, however, shut the carriage door himself, and told the coachman to drive off. And he then lingered on the side-walk of the Boulevard Haussmann, talking with the two others instead of going away.

"Ah, poor Rozan!" said Saccard, who suddenly understood the truth.

Larsonneau swore that it was not so, that he didn't care a fig for all that, that he was a practical man. And as the other two continued joking, and the cold was very keen, he finished by exclaiming:

"'Pon my word, so much the worse; I'm going to ring! You are indiscreet, gentlemen."

"Good night!" called Maxime, as the door closed again.

And taking his father's arm he went up the Boulevard with him. It was one of those clear, frosty nights when it is so agreeable to walk on the hard ground, in the icy atmosphere. Saccard remarked that Larsonneau was wrong, that it was preferable to be simply the d'Aurigny's comrade. He started from this point to declare that the love of these women was really pernicious. He showed himself moral, and hit upon sentences and advice of astonishing wisdom.

"You see," said he to his son, "all that only lasts for a time, my good fellow. A man loses his health at it, and doesn't taste real happiness. You know that I'm not a puritan. All the same, I've had quite enough of it; I'm going to settle down."

Maxime chuckled; he stopped his father and gazed at him by the moonlight, declaring that he had a fine head. But Saccard became still more grave.

"Joke as much as you like. I repeat to you that there is nothing like married life to preserve a man and make him happy."

Thereupon he spoke of Louise. And he began walking more slowly so as to settle that matter, he said, since they were talking of it. Everything was fully arranged. He even informed Maxime that he and Monsieur de Mareuil had fixed the signing of the contract for the Sunday following the Mid-Lent Thursday. On that Thursday there was to be a grand party at the mansion in the Parc Monceaux, and he could profit by the occasion to make a public announcement of the marriage. Maxime considered all this to be very satisfactory. He had rid himself of Renée, he saw no more obstacles, and he surrendered himself to his father, as he had surrendered himself to his stepmother.

"Well, it's understood," said he. "Only don't talk about it to Renée. Her friends would twit and tease me, and I prefer that they should know the news at the same time as everyone else."

Saccard promised him to keep silent. Then, as they approached the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes he again gave him a quantity of excellent advice. He told him how he ought to act to make his home a paradise.

"Above everything never break off with your wife. It's folly. A wife with whom you no longer have connection costs you a fortune. In the first place a man has to pay some harlot, hasn't he? Then the expenditure is much greater at home: there are dresses, madame's private pleasures, her dear friends, the devil and all his train."

He was in a moment of extraordinary virtue. The success of his Charonne affair had set idyllic tenderness in his heart.

"I," he continued, "was born to live happy and ignored in the depths of some village with all my family around me. People don't know me, my little fellow. I seem to be very flighty. But in reality not at all, I should adore remaining near my wife, I would willingly abandon my affairs for a modest income which would enable me to retire to Plassans. You are about to become rich, make yourself a home with Louise in which you will live like two turtle-doves. It's so nice! I will go to see you. It will do me good."

He ended by having sobs in his voice. Meanwhile they had reached the iron gate of the mansion, and stood talking on the curb of the side-walk. A sharp north-east wind swept over these Parisian heights. Not a sound arose in the pale night, white with frost. Maxime, surprised by his father's sentimentality, had for a moment past had a question on his lips.

"But you," he said at last, "it seems to me--"

"What?"

"As regards your wife!"

Saccard shrugged his shoulders.

"Eh! quite so! I was a fool. That's why I speak to you by experience--However we have become husband and wife again, oh! quite so. It happened nearly six weeks ago. I go and join her of an evening when I don't return home too late. To-night however the poor ducky must dispense with me; I have to work till daylight. She has such an awfully fine figure!"

As Maxime held out his hand to his father the latter detained him, and added in a lower key, in a confidential tone:

"You know Blanche Müller's figure, well, it's that, but ten times more supple. And such hips! They have a curve, a delicacy--"

And then he concluded by saying to the young fellow who was going off:

"You are like me, you have a heart, your wife will be happy. Good-bye youngster!"

When Maxime had at last rid himself of his father, he went rapidly round the park. What he had just heard surprised him so much, that he experienced an irresistible desire to see Renée. He wished to ask her forgiveness for his brutality, to find out why she had lied to him in naming Monsieur de Saffré, and to learn the story of her husband's tenderness. He thought of all this confusedly, however, with but the one distinct wish to smoke a cigar in her room and renew their comradeship. Providing she were well disposed he would even announce his marriage to her, so as to make her understand that their amours must remain dead and buried. When he had opened the little door, the key of which he had fortunately retained, he ended by saying to himself that after his father's confidential revelations, his visit was necessary and quite proper.

In the conservatory he whistled as he had done the night before; but he did not have to wait. Renée came to open the glass door of the little drawing-room, and went upstairs before him without speaking a word. She still wore a dress of white tulle forming puffs and covered with satin bows; the tails of the satin body were edged with a broad band of white jet which the light of the candelabra tinged with blue and pink. When Maxime looked at her upstairs he was touched by her pallor and the deep emotion which deprived her of her voice. She could not have been expecting him, she still quivered all over at seeing him arrive as quietly as usual, with his coaxing air. Céleste returned from the wardrobe, where she had gone to fetch a night-gown, and the lovers remained silent, deferring their explanation until the girl had withdrawn. As a rule they did not inconvenience themselves in her presence; but the things which they felt upon their lips filled them with a kind of shame. Renée would have Céleste undress her in the bedroom, where there was a large fire. The chambermaid removed the pins, took off each article of finery, one by one, without hurrying herself. And Maxime, feeling bored, mechanically took up the chemise which was lying on a chair beside him, and warmed it in front of the flames, leaning forward with his arms apart. It was he who used to render Renée this little service in happy times and she felt moved when she saw him delicately holding the gown to the fire. Then as Céleste showed no signs of finishing the young fellow asked:

"Did you enjoy yourself at the ball?"

"Oh! no, it's always the same thing you know," answered Renée. "A great deal too many people, a perfect crush."

Maxime turned the night-gown, which was now warm on one side.

"What did Adeline wear?" he asked.

"A mauve dress, rather awkwardly devised. Although she is short she is mad on flounces."

They then talked about the other women. Maxime was now burning his fingers with the gown.

"But you will scorch it," said Renée whose voice was maternally caressing.

Céleste took the gown from the young fellow's hands. He rose up, and went to look at the large pink and grey bed, fixing his eyes upon one of the bouquets embroidered on the curtains, so as to be able to turn his head, and not see Renée's bare bosom. It was instinctive. He no longer considered himself her lover, so he no longer had the right to look. Then he drew a cigar from his pocket and lighted it. Renée had given him permission to smoke in her apartments. At last Céleste retired, leaving the young woman by the fireside, quite white in her night attire.

Maxime walked about for a few moments longer, silent, and looking out of the corner of his eye at Renée who seemed to be again seized with a shudder. Then stationing himself in front of the mantelpiece with his cigar between his teeth, he asked in a curt voice:

"Why didn't you tell me that it was my father who was with you last night?"

She raised her head, his eyes dilated with supreme anguish; then a rush of blood crimsoned her face, and, overwhelmed with shame, she hid it with her hands and stammered:

"You know that? you know that?"

Regaining her self-possession she tried to lie:

"It's not true--Who told it you?"

Maxime shrugged his shoulders.

"Why my father himself, who considers you nicely formed, and talked to me about your hips."

He had allowed a little vexation to show itself while saying this; but he now began walking about again, continuing in a chiding but friendly voice, between two puffs of smoke:

"Really now I don't understand you. You are a singular woman. It was your fault if I was rude yesterday. If you had told me that it was my father, I should have gone off quietly, you understand? I have no right--But you go and name Monsieur de Saffré to me!"

She was sobbing, with her hands over her face. He drew near, knelt down before her, and forcibly drew her hands aside.

"Come, tell me why you named Monsieur de Saffré?" he said.

Then, still averting her head, she answered in a low tone, amid her tears:

"I thought that you would leave me, if you knew that your father--"

He rose to his feet, took up his cigar which he had laid on a corner of the mantelshelf, and contented himself with muttering: "You are very funny, really!"

She no longer cried. The flames of the grate and the fire of her cheeks were drying her tears. Her astonishment at seeing Maxime so calm in presence of a revelation which, she had thought, was bound to crush him, made her forget her shame. She looked at him as he walked about; she listened to him speaking, as if she had been in a dream. Without abandoning his cigar, he repeated to her that she was unreasonable, that it was quite natural she should have connection with her husband, and that he really could not think of resenting it. But to go and confess that she had a lover when it was not true! And he constantly returned to that point, which he could not understand, and which seemed really monstrous to him. He talked about women's "mad imaginations."

"You are a little bit cracked, my dear," he said, "you must take care."

Then he ended by asking inquisitively:

"But why Monsieur de Saffré rather than anyone else?"

"He courts me," said Renée.

Maxime restrained an impertinent remark; he had been on the point of saying that she had fancied herself a month older on owning that Monsieur de Saffré was her lover. However, he merely gave expression to the evil smile which this spiteful idea prompted, and throwing his cigar into the fire, he went and sat down on the other side of the mantelshelf. There he talked reason, and gave Renée to understand that they ought to remain good friends. The young woman's fixed gaze certainly embarrassed him somewhat; he did not dare to announce his marriage to her. She contemplated him for a long time, her eyes still swollen by her tears. She found him petty, narrow-minded, despicable, but she still loved him with the same tenderness that she felt for her lace. He looked pretty in the light of the candelabra placed on the corner of the mantelshelf beside him. As he threw his head back, the light of the candles gilded his hair and glided over his face, amid the soft down of his cheeks, with a charming aurulent effect.

"All the same I must be off," said he several times.

He had quite decided not to stop. Besides, Renée would not have allowed it. They both thought it, and said it: they were now nothing more than two friends. When Maxime had at last pressed the young woman's hand, and was on the point of leaving the room, she detained him for another moment by speaking to him about his father, upon whom she bestowed great praise.

"You see, I felt too much remorse," she said. "I prefer that this should have happened. You don't know your father; I was astonished to find him so kind, so disinterested. The poor fellow has such great worries just now!"

Maxime looked at the tips of his boots without replying, and with an embarrassed air. She dwelt on the subject.

"As long as he did not come into this room, it was all the same to me. But afterwards--When I saw him here so affectionate, bringing me money which he must have picked up in all the corners of Paris, ruining himself for me without a murmur, I felt ill--If you knew how carefully he has watched over my interests!"

The young fellow returned softly to the mantelpiece, and leant against it. He remained embarrassed, with bowed head and a smile gradually rising to his lips.

"Yes," muttered he, "my father is very skilful in watching over people's interests."

His tone of voice astonished Renée. She looked at him, and he, as if to defend himself, added:

"Oh! I know nothing. I only say that my father is a skilful man."

"You would do wrong to speak ill of him," she rejoined. "You must judge him rather superficially. If I acquainted you with all his worries, if I repeated to you what he confided to me again this evening, you would see how mistaken people are, when they think he cares for money."

Maxime could not restrain a shrug of the shoulders. He interrupted his stepmother with an ironical laugh.

"Ah, I know him, I know him well," he said. "He must have told you some very pretty things. Relate them to me."

This tone of raillery wounded her. She then enlarged upon her praises; she considered her husband quite a great man; she talked about the Charonne affair, that piece of jobbery of which she had understood nothing, as about a catastrophe in which Saccard's intelligence and kindness had been revealed to her. She added that she should sign the deed of cession on the morrow, and that if this affair were really a disaster, she accepted it in punishment for her sins. Maxime let her go on, sneering and looking at her slyly; then he said, in an undertone:

"That's it; that's just it."

And raising his voice, and settling his hand on Renée's shoulder:

"Thanks, my dear, but I already know the story. You are of nice composition!"

He again seemed to be on the point of leaving, but he felt a furious itching to tell Renée everything. She had exasperated him with her praises of her husband, and he forgot that he had promised himself not to speak, so as to avoid anything disagreeable.

"What! what do you mean?" she asked.

"Why, that my father has 'done' you in the prettiest way in the world. I really pity you--you are too much of a simpleton!"

And he then cowardly, craftily, related to her what he had heard at Laure's--tasting a secret delight in descending into these infamies. It seemed to him that he was taking his revenge for a vague insult which some one had just addressed to him. With his harlot's temperament he lingered beatifically over this denunciation, over this cruel chatter of what he had overheard behind a door. He spared Renée nothing, neither the money which her husband had lent her usuriously nor that which he meant to steal from her, with the help of ridiculous stories fit to send children to sleep. The young woman listened to him, very pale and with clinched teeth. Standing in front of the chimney-piece, she slightly lowered her head, and looked at the fire. Her night dress, the gown which Maxime had warmed, spread out, revealing the motionless, statue-like whiteness of her limbs.

"I tell all this," continued the young man, "so that you may not seem to be a fool. But you would do wrong to get angry with my father. He isn't wicked. He has his failings like every one. Till to-morrow, eh?"

He still advanced towards the door. But Renée stopped him with a sudden gesture:

"Stay!" she cried, imperiously.

And taking hold of him, drawing him to her, almost seating him on her knees in front of the fire, she kissed him on the lips, saying:

"Ah, well! it would be too stupid to put ourselves to inconvenience now. Don't you know that my head has no longer seemed to belong to me since yesterday, since you wanted to break off? I am like an idiot. At the ball to-night I had a fog before my eyes. It is because I cannot now live quite without you. When you leave me I shall be done for. Don't laugh; I tell you what I feel."

She looked at him with infinite tenderness, as if she had not seen him for a long time.

"You found the word," she continued. "I was a simpleton. Your father would have made me see stars in broad daylight. Did I know anything about it? While he was telling me his story, I only heard a loud buzzing, and I was so crushed that, if he had chosen, he could have made me go down on my knees to sign his papers. And I fancied to myself that I felt remorseful--I was really as stupid as that!"

She burst out laughing, and gleams of folly shone in her eyes. Pressing her lover still more tightly, she went on:

"Do we sin, we two? We love each other, we amuse ourselves as it pleases us. Everyone has come to that, eh? You see your father doesn't put himself out. He likes money, and he takes it wherever he finds it. He's right, it sets me at my ease. In the first place, I sha'n't sign anything, and then, you will come here every evening. I was afraid that you wouldn't, you know, on account of what I told you. But as you don't mind it--Besides, I shall close my door to him now, you understand?"

She rose up and lighted the night-light. Maxime hesitated in despair. He realised what a piece of folly he had perpetrated, and he harshly reproached himself for having said too much. How could he announce his marriage now? It was his fault. The rupture had been accomplished, there had been no need for him to go up into that room again, or especially to prove to the young woman that her husband deceived her. Maxime's anger with himself was increased, as he no longer knew what feeling he had first obeyed. But if for a moment he thought of being brutal a second time, of going away, the sight of Renée, who was letting her slippers fall, lent him invincible cowardice. He felt frightened. He remained.

On the morrow, when Saccard came to his wife's apartments to make her sign the deed of cession, she quietly answered him that she should not do so, that she had reflected. She did not, however, allow herself even an allusion to the truth; she had sworn that she would be discreet, for she did not want to create worries for herself, but rather wished to taste the renewal of her amours in peace. The Charonne affair would finish as it could; her refusal to sign was merely an act of vengeance; she did not care a fig for the rest. Saccard was on the point of flying into a passion. All his dream crumbled. His other affairs were going from bad to worse. He found himself at the end of his resources, and merely sustained himself by performing miraculous feats of equilibrity; that very morning he had been unable to pay his baker's bill. This did not prevent him, however, from preparing a splendid entertainment for the Mid-Lent Thursday. In presence of Renée's refusal he experienced the white rage of a vigorous man impeded in his work by a child's whim. With the deed of cession once in his pocket, he had relied upon raising funds pending the award of the indemnity. When he had slightly calmed down, and his intelligence had become clear again, his wife's sudden change astonished him; she must, undoubtedly, have been advised. He scented a lover. This was so clear a presentiment, that he hastened to his sister's to question her, to ask her if she did not know anything about Renée's private life. Sidonie showed herself very bitter. She had not forgiven her sister-in-law for the affront she had given her by refusing to see Monsieur de Saffré. So when, by her brother's questions, she understood that the latter accused his wife of having a lover, she cried out that she was certain of it. And of her own accord she offered to spy upon "the turtle doves." In that way, the haughty thing would see who it was she had to deal with. Saccard did not habitually seek after disagreeable truths; his interest alone compelled him to open his eyes, which, as a rule, he wisely kept closed. He accepted his sister's offer.

"Oh! be easy, I shall learn everything," said she to him in a voice full of compassion. "Ah! my poor brother! Angèle would never have betrayed you! So good, so generous a husband! These Parisian dolls have no hearts. And to think that I never cease giving her good advice!"