nerves are out of order, undoubtedly.”
Renée threw herself back in the carriage.
“Yes, my nerves are out of order,” she replied, dryly.
Then she became motherly:
“I am growing old, my dear child; I shall soon be thirty. It’s terrible. Nothing gives me pleasure…. You, who are twenty, cannot know….”
“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me out?” interrupted the young man. “It would take the devil of a long time.”
She received this impertinence with a faint smile, as though it were the outburst of a spoilt child that knows no restraint.
“I should recommend you to complain,” continued Maxime. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your dress, you live in a sumptuous house, you have splendid horses, your caprices are law, and the papers discuss each of your new gowns as an event of the most serious importance; the women envy you, the men would give ten years of their lives for leave to kiss the tips of your fingers…. Is what I say true?”
She nodded affirmatively, without replying. Her eyes cast down, she had resumed her task of curling the hairs of the bearskin.
“Come, don’t be modest,” Maxime continued; “confess roundly that you are one of the pillars of the Second Empire. We need not hide these things from one another. Wherever you go, at the Tuileries, at the houses of ministers, at the houses of mere millionaires, high or low, you reign a queen. There is not a pleasure of which you have not had your fill, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not restrain me, I should say….”
He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence cavalierly:
I should say you had bitten at every apple.”
She moved no muscle.
“And you are bored!” resumed the young man, with droll vivacity. “But it’s scandalous!… What is it you want? What on earth do you dream of?”
She shrugged her shoulders to imply that she did not know. Though she kept her head down, Maxime was able to see that she looked so serious, so melancholy, that he thought it best to hold his tongue. He watched the line of carriages, which, when they reached the end of the lake, spread out, filling the whole of the open space. The carriages, packed less closely, swept round with majestic grace; the quicker trot of the horses sounded noisily on the hard ground.
The calash, on going the round to join the line, rocked in a way that filled Maxime with vague enjoyment. Then, yielding to his wish to crush Renée:
“Look here,” he said, “you deserve to ride in a cab! That would serve you right!… Why, look at these people returning to Paris, people who are all at your feet. They hail you as their queen, and your sweetheart, M. de Mussy, can hardly refrain from blowing kisses to you.”
A horseman was, in fact, bowing to Renée. Maxime had been talking in a hypocritical, mocking voice. But Renée barely turned round, and shrugged her shoulders. At last the young man made a gesture of despair.
“Really,” he said; “have we come to that?… But, good God, you have everything: what do you want more?”
Renée raised her head. In her eyes was a glow of light, the ardent desire of unsatisfied curiosity.
“I want something different,” she replied, in a low voice.
“But since you have everything,” resumed Maxime, laughing, “there is nothing different…. What is the ‘something different’?”
“What?” she repeated.
And she did not continue. She had turned right round, and was watching the strange picture fading behind her. It was almost night; twilight was falling slowly like fine ashes. The lake, seen from the front, in the pale daylight that still hovered over the water, became rounder, like a huge tin dish; on either side the plantations of evergreens, whose slim straight stems seemed to issue from its slumbering surface, assumed at this hour the appearance of purple colonnades, delineating with the evenness of their architecture the studied curves of the shores; and again, in the background, rose shrubberies, confused masses of foliage, whose large black patches closed up the horizon. Behind these patches shone the glow of the expiring sunset, that set fire to but a small portion of the gray immensity. Above this placid lake, these low copses, this singularly flat perspective, stretched the vault of heaven, infinite, deepened and widened. This great slice of sky hanging over this small morsel of nature caused a thrill, an undefinable sadness; and from these paling heights fell so deep an autumnal melancholy, so sweet and so heartbreaking a darkness, that the Bois, wound little by little in a shadowy shroud, lost its mundane graces, widened, full of the puissant charm that forests have. The trot of the carriages, whose bright colouring was swept away in the twilight, sounded like the distant voices of leaves and running water. All died away as it went. In the centre of the lake, in the general evanescence, the lateen sail of the great pleasure-boat stood out, strongly defined against the glow of the sunset. And it was no longer possible to distinguish anything but this sail, this triangle of yellow canvas, immeasurably enlarged.
Renée, satiated as she was, experienced a singular sensation of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognizable, of this bit of nature, so worldly and artificial, which the great vibrating darkness transformed into a sacred grove, one of the ideal glades in whose recesses the gods of old concealed their Titanic loves, their adulteries, and their divine incests. And, as the calash drove away, it seemed to her that the twilight was carrying off behind her, in its tremulous veil, the land of her dream, the flagitious, celestial alcove in which her sick heart and weary flesh might at last have been assuaged.
When, fading into the shadow, the lake and the bushes showed only as a black bar against the sky, Renée turned round abruptly, and, in a voice that contained tears of vexation, resumed her interrupted phrase:
“What?… something different, of course; I want something different. How do I know what! If I did know…. But, look here, I am sick of balls, sick of suppers, sick of that sort of entertainment. It is so monotonous. It is deadly…. And the men are insufferable, ah! yes, insufferable.”
Maxime began to laugh. A certain eagerness became apparent under the aristocratic aspect of the woman of fashion. She no longer blinked her eyelids, the wrinkle on her forehead became more harshly accentuated; her lip, that was so like a sulky child’s, protruded in hot quest of the nameless enjoyments she pined for. She observed her companion’s laughter, but was too excited to stop; lying back, swayed by the rocking of the carriage, she continued in short, sharp sentences:
“Yes, certainly, you are insufferable…. I don’t include you, Maxime, you are too young…. But if I were to tell you how ponderous Aristide used to be in the early days! And the others! the men who have been my lovers…. You know, we are good friends, you and I: I don’t mind what I say to you; well then, there are really days when I am so tired of living this life of a rich woman, adored and worshipped, that I feel I should like to become a Laure d’Aurigny, one of those ladies who live like bachelors.”
And on Maxime laughing still lower, she insisted:
“Yes, a Laure d’Aurigny. It would surely be less insipid, less monotonous.”
She sat silent for a few minutes, as though picturing to herself the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, with a note of discouragement in her voice:
“After
