He was their plaything, a little toy man of ingenious workmanship, that kissed, and made love, and had the sweetest vices in the world, but remained a plaything, a little cardboard man that one need not be too much afraid of, only just sufficiently to feel a very pleasant thrill at the touch of his childish hand.
After the holidays Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the fashionable public school, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The child, soft and light-headed though he was, had by that time a very quick intelligence; but he applied himself to far other things than his classical studies. He was nevertheless a well-behaved pupil, who never descended to the Bohemian level of dunces, and who forgathered with the proper and well-dressed young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his boyhood was a veritable cult of dress. Paris opened his eyes, turned him into a smart young man, with tight-fitting clothes of the latest fashion. He was the Brummel of his form. He appeared there as he would in a drawingroom, daintily booted, correctly gloved, with prodigious neckties and unutterable hats. There were about twenty like him in all, who formed a sort of aristocracy, offering one another, as they left the school, Havannah cigars out of gold-clasped cigar-cases, and having servants in livery to carry their parcels of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse, which were the admiration of his schoolfellows. He drove himself, while a footman sat with folded arms on the back seat, holding on his knees the schoolboy’s knapsack, a real ministerial portfolio in brown grained leather. And you should have seen how lightly, how cleverly, and with what excellent form Maxime drove in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew up his horse before the school-door, threw the reins to the footman, and said:
“Jacques, at half-past four, see?”
The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the fine grace of this fair-haired spark whom they saw regularly twice a day arriving and leaving in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women, splashed the passersby, as though they were returning from the races. An astonishing little world, a foolish, foppish brood which you can see any day in the Rue du Havre, smartly dressed in their dandy jackets, aping the ways of rich and wornout men, while the Bohemian contingent of the school, the real schoolboys, come shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their thick shoes, with their books hung over their backs by a strap.
Renée, who took herself seriously as a mother and as a governess, was delighted with her pupil. She left nothing undone, in fact, to complete his education. She was at that time passing through a period of mortification and tears; a lover had jilted her openly, before the eyes of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchesse de Sternich. She dreamt of Maxime as her consolation, she made herself older, she racked her brains to appear maternal, and became the most eccentric mentor imaginable. Often would Maxime’s tilbury be left at home, and Renée come to fetch the schoolboy in her big calash. They hid the brown portfolio under the seat and drove to the Bois, then in all the freshness of novelty. There she put him through a course of tip-top elegance. She pointed everyone out to him in the fat and happy Paris of the Empire, still under the ecstasy of that stroke of the wand which had changed yesterday’s starvelings and swindlers into great lords and millionaires snorting and swooning under the weight of their cashboxes. But the child questioned her above all about the women, and as she was very familiar with him, she gave him exact particulars: Madame du Guende was stupid but admirably made; the Comtesse Vanska, a very rich woman, had been a street-singer before marrying a Pole who beat her, so they said; as to the Marquise d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, they were inseparable, and though they were Renée’s intimate friends, she added, compressing her lips as if to prevent herself from saying more, that some very nasty stories were told about them; the beautiful Madame de Lauwerens also was a terribly compromising woman, but she had such fine eyes, and after all everybody knew that she herself was quite above reproach, although she was a little too much mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who frequented her, Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, and the Baronne de Meinhold. Maxime obtained the portraits of these ladies, and with them filled an album that lay on the table in the drawingroom. With that vicious artfulness which was the dominant note in his character, he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking for particulars about the fast women, pretending to take them for ladies in society. Renée became serious and moral, and told him that they were horrid creatures and that he must be careful and keep away from them; and then forgetting herself, she spoke of them as of people whom she had known intimately. One of the youngster’s great delights, again, was to get her on to the subject of the Duchesse de Sternich. Each time her carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never failed to mention the duchess’s name, with wicked slyness and an under-glance that showed that he knew of Renée’s last adventure. Whereupon in a harsh voice she tore her rival to pieces: how old she was growing! Poor woman! She made-up her face, she had lovers hidden in all her cupboards, she had sold herself to a chamberlain that she might procure admission to the imperial bed. And she ran on, while Maxime, to exasperate her, declared that he thought Madame de Sternich delicious. Such lessons as these singularly developed the schoolboy’s intelligence, the more so as the young teacher repeated them wherever they went, in the Bois, at the theatre, at parties. The pupil became very proficient.
What Maxime loved was to live among women’s skirts, in the midst of their finery, in their rice-powder. He always remained more or less of a girl, with his slim hands, his beardless face, his plump white neck. Renée consulted him seriously about her gowns. He knew the good makers of Paris, summed each of them up in a word, talked about the cunningness of such an one’s bonnets and the logic of such another’s dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not probed, not a bootmaker whom he had not studied through and through. This quaint abortion, who during his English lessons read the prospectuses which his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have delivered a brilliant lecture on the fashionable Paris world, customers and purveyors included, at an age when country urchins dare not look their housemaid in the face. Frequently, on his way home from school, he would bring back in his tilbury a bonnet, a box of soap, or a piece of jewellery which his stepmother had ordered the preceding day. He had always some strip of musk-scented lace hanging about in his pockets.
But his great treat was to go with Renée to the illustrious Worms, the tailor genius to whom the queens of the Second Empire bowed the knee. The great man’s show-room was wide and square, and furnished with huge divans. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Dresses undoubtedly have a perfume of their own; silk, satin, velvet and lace had mingled their faint aromas with those of hair and of amber-scented shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained that sweet-smelling warmth, that fragrance of flesh and of luxury, which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to wait for hours; a series of anxious women sat there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, helping themselves from the great table in the middle, which was covered with bottles and plates full of cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked without restraint, and when they ensconced themselves around the room, it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawingroom. Maxime, whom they endured and loved for his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted delights divine; he glided along the sofas like a supple adder; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, between two dresses, where he made himself quite small and kept very quiet, inhaling the warm fragrance of his neighbours with the demeanour of a choirboy partaking of the sacrament.
“That child pokes his nose in everywhere,” said the Baronne de Meinhold, tapping his cheeks.
He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by making him tipsy with the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He made astounding speeches to them, which made them laugh till they cried. However, it was the Marquise d’Espanet who found the right word to describe the position. One day when Maxime was discovered behind her back in a corner of the divan:
“That boy ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured, on seeing him so pink, blushing, penetrated with the satisfaction
