whole winter to ripening his plan, bothered by a hundred affairs, one more involved than the other. It was a horrible winter for him, full of shocks, a prodigious campaign, during which he had daily to vanquish bankruptcy. Far from cutting down his domestic expenses, he gave entertainment upon entertainment. But if he successfully faced every obstacle, he was compelled to neglect Renée, whom he reserved for a triumphant stroke when the Charonne operation became ripe. He contented himself with preparing the catastrophe by continuing to give her no money except by the intermediary of Larsonneau. When he had a few thousand francs lying idle, and she complained of her poverty, he brought them to her, saying that Larsonneau’s people required a note of hand for twice the amount. This farce amused him enormously, the story of those promissory notes delighted him because of the air of romance they imparted to the affair. Even at the period of his clearest profits he had served out his wife’s income in a very irregular fashion, making her princely presents, throwing her handfuls of banknotes, and then for weeks leaving her in the lurch for a paltry amount. Now that he found himself seriously embarrassed, he spoke of the household expenses, he treated her as a creditor to whom one is unwilling to confess one’s ruin, gaining time by making excuses. She barely listened to him; she signed anything he asked; she only pitied herself for not being able to sign more.
Already, however, he held two hundred thousand francs’ worth of her promissory notes, which cost him barely one hundred and ten thousand francs. After having these notes endorsed by Larsonneau, in whose favour they were made out, he put 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, lending money to his wife at usury and keeping up his household expenses, but for the sale of his building-plots on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier bought of him for cash down, deducting, however, a formidable discount.
For Renée this same winter was a long joy. She suffered only from the want of ready money. Maxime proved a great expense; he still treated her as his stepmother, and allowed her to pay wherever they went. But this secret poverty was for her a delight the more. She taxed her ingenuity and racked her brains so that “her dear child” should want for nothing; and when she had persuaded her husband to find her a few thousand francs, she ran through them with her lover in costly frivolities like two schoolboys let out on their first escapade. When they had spent the last sou, they remained at home, they revelled in the great piece of masonry built with such new and such insolently meaningless luxury. The father was never there. The lovers sat by the fireside more often than formerly. The fact was that Renée had at last filled the icy emptiness of those gilded ceilings with a warm joy. The disorderly house of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she secretly practised a new religion. Maxime did not merely strike in her the shrill note that matched her extravagant costumes; he was the lover fashioned for this house, with its windows wide as shopwindows and its flow of sculpture from garret to base; he gave life to all this plaster, from the two chubby Cupids who in the courtyard let flow a sheet of water from their shell to the great naked women who supported the balconies and played with apples and ears of corn amid the pediments; he gave a meaning to the over-decorated hall, the circumscribed garden, the dazzling rooms in which one saw too many armchairs and no single work of art. Renée, who had bored herself to death in this house, began suddenly to take pleasure in it, using it as she might use a thing whose purpose she had not at first understood. And it was not only in her own rooms, in the buttercup drawingroom, and in the hothouse that she carried her love, but through the whole house. She even ended by finding pleasure in lying on the divan in the smoking-room; she lingered there, saying that the room had a vague and very agreeable smell of tobacco.
She had two days every week now instead of one. On Thursdays any called who pleased. But Mondays were reserved to bosom friends. Men were excluded. Maxime alone was admitted to these select gatherings, which took place in the small drawingroom. One evening she conceived the amazing idea of dressing him up as a woman and introducing him as her cousin. Adeline, Suzanne, Baronne Meinhold, and the other ladies present rose and bowed, astonished at this face, which they vaguely recognized. Then, when they understood, they laughed a great deal, they absolutely refused to let the young man go and undress. They kept him with them in his skirts, teasing him and permitting themselves equivocal pleasantries. When he had seen these ladies out by the front door, he went round the gardens and returned by the conservatory. Renée’s dear friends never had the slightest suspicion of the truth. The lovers could not be more familiar than they already were when they used to declare themselves boon companions. And if a servant happened to see them pressing rather close together, in the doorways, he felt no surprise, being accustomed to the frolicsomeness of madame and of the son of monsieur.
This complete sense of liberty and impunity made them still bolder. They fastened the door at night, but in the daytime they embraced in every room in the house. On rainy days they invented a thousand little pastimes. But Renée’s great delight still was to heap up a tremendous fire and doze away before the grate. Her linen was marvellously luxurious that winter. She wore chemises and wrappers of ruinous costliness, whose cambric and lace insertions barely covered her with a cloud of white smoke. And in the red glow of the firelight she lay as though naked, with rosy lace and skin, the heat penetrating through the thin stuff to her flesh. Maxime, crouched at her feet, kissed her knees without even feeling the cambric, which had the warmth and colour of that beautiful body. The daylight was not fully admitted, it fell like a twilight into the gray silk room, while Céleste behind them went to and fro with her quiet step. She had become their accomplice, quite naturally. One morning when they had forgotten themselves in bed, she found them there and retained the impassiveness of her cold-blooded, servant-maid’s nature. They then ceased to restrain themselves, she came in at all hours without the sound of their kisses causing her to turn her head. They relied on her to warn them in case of danger. They did not purchase her silence. She was a very economical, very good girl, and had never been known to have a lover.
However, Renée had not encloistered herself. Taking Maxime in her train, like a fair-haired page in dress-clothes, she threw herself into society, where she tasted even keener pleasures. The season was a long triumph for her. Never had she imagined bolder toilettes or headdresses. It was then that she had the courage to wear that famous gown of forest-coloured satin on which was embroidered a complete stag-hunt with its accessories, powder-flasks, hunting-horns, big-bladed knives. It was then also that she set the fashion of dressing the hair in the classical style; Maxime was sent to make sketches for her in the Musée Campana, which had been recently opened. She grew younger, she was at the acme of her turbulent beauty. Incest lent her a fire that glowed in the depths of her eyes and warmed her laughter. Her eyeglass looked supremely insolent at the tip of her nose, and she glanced at the other women, at the dear friends pluming themselves upon the enormity of some vice or other, with the air of a boastful boy, with a fixed smile that said: “I have my crime.”
Maxime for his part considered society tedious to a degree. It was to seem “smart” that he pretended to bore himself there, for he did not really amuse himself anywhere. At the Tuileries, at the ministers’ houses, he disappeared behind Renée’s skirts. But he resumed the reins so soon as there was a question of some escapade. Renée wanted to see the private-room on the boulevard again, and the width of the sofa made her smile. Then he took her to all sorts of places, to the houses of fast women, to the opera-balls, to the stage-boxes of the burlesque theatres, to every equivocal place where they could rub shoulders with animal vice and taste the delights of their incognito. When they stealthily returned home, worn out with fatigue, they fell asleep in each other’s arms, sleeping off the intoxication of obscene Paris, with snatches of ribald couplets still singing in their ears. The next day Maxime imitated the actors, and Renée, seated at the piano in the small drawingroom, endeavoured to reproduce the raucous voice and jaunty attitudes of Blanche Muller as la Belle Hélène. Her convent music-lessons now only assisted her to murder the verses of the new burlesques. She had a holy horror of serious airs. Maxime “humbugged” German music with her, and he felt it his duty to go and hiss Tannhäuser both by conviction and in defence of his stepmother’s sprightly refrains.
One of their great delights was skating; that winter skating was fashionable,
