It was Maxime who undressed Renée. He understood that sort of thing, and his quick hands divined pins and glided round her waist with innate science. He undid her hair, took off her diamonds, dressed her hair for the night. He added jests and caresses to the performance of his duties as lady’s-maid and hairdresser, and Renée laughed, with a broad stifled laugh, while the silk of her bodice cracked and her petticoats were loosened one by one. When she saw herself naked, she blew out the tapers of the candlestick, caught Maxime round the body, and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication. In her fever she was conscious of the previous day spent by the fireside, of that day of ardent stupor, of vague and smiling dreams. She still heard the harsh voice of Saccard and Madame Sidonie talking, calling out figures through their noses like lawyers. Those were the people who overwhelmed her, who drove her to crime. And even now, when she sought his lips in the depths of the vast, dark bed, she still saw Maxime’s image in the firelight of yesterday, looking at her with eyes that scorched her.
The young man did not leave her till six in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceau, and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawingroom by a servants’ staircase hidden in the wall, which connected all the rooms in the tower. From the drawingroom it was easy to pass into the conservatory and reach the gardens.
On going out at daylight in a thick fog, Maxime was a little bewildered by his adventure. He accepted it, however, with the epicene complacency that formed part of his being.
“So much the worse!” he thought. “It’s she who wishes it after all…. She is deucedly well made; and she was right, she is twice as jolly in bed as Sylvia.”
They had drifted towards incest since the day when Maxime, in his threadbare schoolboy tunic, had hung on Renée’s neck, creasing her French-guard’s coat. From that time forward there had been a long and constant perversion between them. The strange education the young woman gave the child; the familiarities that made boon companions of them; later on, the laughing audacity of their confidences; all this dangerous promiscuity had ended by linking them together by a singular bond, in which the delights of friendship came near to carnal indulgence. They had given themselves to one another for years; the animal act was but the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of passion. In the maddened world in which they lived, their sin had sprouted as on a dunghill oozing with equivocal juices; it had developed with strange refinements amid special conditions of debauch.
When the great calash carried them to the Bois and rolled them softly along the drives, their whispering of obscenities into each other’s ears, their searching to recall the spontaneous dirty practices of their childhood, was but a digression by the way and a tacit gratification of their passions. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as though they had just slightly touched one another; and even this first sin, this languor born of filthy conversations, though it wearied them with a voluptuous fatigue, tickled them yet more sweetly than plain, positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus the slow progress of two lovers, and was inevitably bound to lead them one day to the private room in the Café Riche and to Renée’s great pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have thought them two old lovers, whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had lost so many hours what time their whole beings had been in contact, that in spite of themselves they talked of that past which was full of their unconscious love.
“Do you remember, the day I came to Paris,” said Maxime, “what a funny dress you wore? and I drew an angle on your chest with my finger and advised you to cut down the bodice in a point…. I felt your skin under your shirt, and my finger went in a little…. It was very nice….”
Renée laughed, kissed him and murmured:
“You were nice and vicious already…. How you amused us at Worms’s, do you remember? We used to call you ‘our little toy man.’ I always believed that the fat Suzanne would have let you do anything you liked, if the marquise had not watched her with such furious eyes.”
“Ah, yes, we had some good laughs….” murmured Maxime. “The photograph album, what? and all the rest, our drives through Paris, our feeds at the pastrycook’s on the boulevard; you know, those little strawberry-tarts you were so fond of?… I shall never forget the afternoon when you told me the story of Adeline at the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed herself ‘Arthur d’Espanet’ like a man, and proposed to elope with her….”
The lovers grew merry again over this anecdote; and then Maxime continued in his coaxing voice:
“When you came to fetch me from school in your carriage, how funny we must have looked, you and I…. I used to disappear under your skirts, I was so little.”
“Yes, yes,” she stammered, quivering, and drawing Maxime towards her, “it was very delightful, as you say…. We loved one another without knowing it, did we not? I knew it before you did. The other day, driving back from the Bois, I just touched your leg, and I gave a start…. But you didn’t notice anything. Eh? you were not thinking of me?”
“Oh yes,” he replied, somewhat embarrassed. “Only I did not know, you see…. I did not dare.”
He lied. The idea of possessing Renée had never clearly come to him. He had covered her with all his viciousness, without really desiring her. He was too feeble for such an effort. He accepted Renée because she forced herself upon him, and he had drifted into her bed without willing or foreseeing it. When he had once rolled there, he remained because it was warm, and because he habitually lingered at the bottom of every pit he fell into. At the commencement he even felt the satisfaction of egotism. She was the first married woman he had had. He did not reflect that the husband was his father.
But Renée brought into her sin all the ardour of a heart that has lost caste. She too had glided down the slope. Only she had not rolled to the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Lust had been kindled within her when it was too late to combat it, and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly opened up before her as a necessary consequence of her weariness, as a rare and supreme enjoyment which alone was able to rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumn drive in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her like a titillation that sent an unknown thrill over her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, lashed by jealousy, this idea became more defined, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she stood before Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved for sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that was to fill her empty existence and bring her at last to that hell of which she was still afraid, as in the days when she was a little girl. Then, the next day, through a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude, her craving had left her. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it was not so pleasant as she had fancied, and that it would really be too disgusting. The crisis was bound to be a fatal one, to come of itself, without the help of these two beings, these comrades who were destined to deceive themselves one fine evening, to unite in a sexual embrace when they imagined they were shaking hands. But after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime back to her arms, curious about him, curious as to the cruel delights of a passion which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, demanded it, resolved to taste it to the end, even to remorse, should that ever come. She was active and cognizant. She loved with the transports of a woman of fashion, with the restless prejudices of a woman of the middle class, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman drowning herself in self-disdain.
Maxime returned every night. He came through the garden at about one o’clock. Oftenest Renée would wait for him in the conservatory, which he must cross to reach the small drawingroom. For the rest they were absolutely shameless, barely hiding themselves,
