did not go on, but his look added that he had expected to find his father’s second wife much older. He was standing quite close to her, and examining her neck so attentively that she almost ended by blushing. Her giddy head, moreover, was turning: it was never able to fix itself long on the same subject; and she began to walk about, to speak of her tailor, forgetting she was talking to a child.
“I wanted to be here to receive you. But think, Worms brought me this dress this morning…. I tried it on and I thought it rather successful. It is very smart, is it not?”
She had moved before a mirror. Maxime walked to and fro behind her so as to examine her on every side.
“Only,” she continued, “when I put on the coat, I noticed there was a large fold, there, on the left shoulder, d’you see?… That fold is very ugly, it makes me look as if I had one shoulder higher than the other.”
He came up to her and pressed his finger over the fold as though to smooth it down, and his vicious schoolboy hand seemed to linger on that spot with a certain satisfaction.
“Well,” she continued, “I couldn’t wait. I had the horses put to, and I went to tell Worms what I thought of his outrageous carelessness…. He promised me to put it right.”
Thereupon she remained before the mirror, still looking at herself, lost in a sudden reverie. She ended by laying one finger on her lips, with an air of contemplative impatience. And quite low, as if talking to herself:
“It wants something…. Yes, really, it wants something….”
Then, with a quick movement, she turned round, placed herself in front of Maxime, and asked him:
“Is it really right?… Don’t you think it wants something, a trifle, a bow somewhere or other?”
The schoolboy was reassured by Renée’s familiarity, and resumed all the assurance of his forward nature. He drew back, came nearer, screwed up his eyes, and murmured:
“No, no, it wants nothing, it’s very pretty, very pretty indeed…. If anything, I think there is something too much.”
He blushed a little, despite his audacity, came nearer still, and with his fingertip tracing an acute angle on Renée’s breast:
“If I were you,” he continued, “I would hollow out that lace so, and wear a necklace with a great big cross.”
She clapped her hands, radiant with delight.
“That’s it, that’s it,” she exclaimed…. “I had the great big cross on the tip of my tongue.”
She folded back the chemisette, left the room for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. And resuming her place in front of the mirror she murmured triumphantly:
“Oh, perfect, quite perfect…. But he’s no fool, that little shaveling! Used you to dress the girls in the country, then? You and I are sure to get on well together. But you will have to do as I tell you. In the first place, you must let your hair grow and never wear that horrid tunic again. Then you must faithfully follow my lessons in good manners. I want you to become a smart young man.”
“But, of course,” said the child naïvely; “since papa is rich now and you are his wife.”
She smiled, and with her customary vivacity:
“Then let us begin by dropping the plural. I have been saying thou and you anyhow. It’s too silly…. Will you love me very much?”
“I will love you with all my heart,” he replied, with the effusiveness of a boy towards his sweetheart.
Such was the first interview between Maxime and Renée. The child did not go to school till a month later. During the first few days his stepmother played with him as with a doll; she brushed off his country manners, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, newly arrayed from head to foot by his father’s tailor, she uttered a cry of joyous surprise: he looked as pretty as a daisy, she said. Only his hair took an unconscionable time in growing. Renée used always to say that all one’s face lay in one’s hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long time she had been maddened by the colour of it, that peculiar pale yellow colour which reminded one of good butter. But when yellow hair came into fashion she was delighted, and to make believe that she did not follow the fashion because she could not help herself, she swore she dyed it every month.
Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. He was one of those frail, precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he knew the meaning of desire. He had twice narrowly escaped being expelled from school. Had Renée’s eyes been accustomed to provincial graces, she would have perceived that, strangely got-up though he was, the little shaveling, as she called him, had a way of smiling, of turning his neck, of putting out his arms prettily, with the feminine air of the love-boys at school. He took great pains over his hands, which were long and slender; and though his hair was cropped short by order of the headmaster, an ex-colonel of engineers, he owned a little looking-glass which he drew from his pocket during school-time and placed between the leaves of his book, looking at himself in it for hours, examining his eyes, his gums, pulling pretty faces, studying the art of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a petticoat, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had the slim waist and undulating hips of a grown woman. True it was, he received as many kicks as kisses. And so the school at Plassans, a den of little miscreants like most provincial schools, was a hotbed of pollution in which were singularly developed that epicene temperament, that childhood fraught with evil from some mysterious hereditary cause. Fortunately, age was about to improve him. But the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effemination of his whole being what time he had played the girl, was destined to remain in him, and to strike a lasting blow at his virility.
Renée called him “Mademoiselle,” not knowing that six months earlier she would have hit the truth. He seemed to her very docile, very affectionate, and indeed his caresses often made her feel ill-at-ease. He had a way of kissing that heated the skin. But what delighted her was his roguishness; he was as entertaining as could be, and bold, already talking of women with a smile, holding his own against Renée’s friends, against dear Adeline who had just married M. d’Espanet, and the fat Suzanne, wedded quite recently to Haffner, the big manufacturer. When he was fourteen he fell in love with the latter. He confided his passion to his stepmother, who was intensely amused.
“For myself I should have preferred Adeline,” she said, “she is prettier.”
“Perhaps so,” replied the scapegrace, “but Suzanne is much stouter…. I like fine women…. If you were very goodnatured, you would put in a word for me.”
Renée laughed. Her doll, this tall lad with the girl’s ways, seemed to her inimitable now that he had fallen in love. The time came when Mme. Haffner had seriously to defend herself. For the rest the ladies encouraged Maxime by their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes they assumed in presence of the precocious child. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in this. All three, in the midst of their life of tumult, scorched by passion, lingered over the boy’s delicious depravity as over a novel and harmless spice that stimulated their palates. They allowed him to touch their dresses, to pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the anteroom to help them on with their wraps; they passed him from hand to hand, laughing like madwomen when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, on the place where the skin is so soft; and then they became motherly, and learnedly instructed him
