The Kill - Emile Zola [10]
Renée, for all her jadedness, experienced a singular sensation of unavowable desire at the sight of this landscape, which she no longer recognized, this tastefully fashionable piece of nature turned by the dark chill of night into a sacred wood, into one of those mythical glades in which the ancient gods hid their outsized loves, their divine adulteries and incests. As the calèche drove on, it struck her that the twilight behind her had wrapped the land of her dreams in its shimmering veils and was making off with it, snatching away the bower of illicit but superhuman love in which she might at last have assuaged her ailing heart, her weary flesh.
When the lake and the little woods, vanished into darkness, were reduced to no more than a black streak on the face of heaven, the young woman turned abruptly and in a voice marked by tears of spite took up where she had left off. “What do I mean? I mean something different, for heaven’s sake. I want something different. How would I know what? If only I did. But can’t you see, I’ve had enough of balls, of late suppers, of parties and all the rest. Always the same thing. It’s deadly. . . . Men are so tiresome! So unspeakably tiresome.”
Maxime began to laugh. Signs of passion were showing through the socialite’s aristocratic surface. She had stopped batting her eyelids. The furrow in her brow deepened. Her lower lip, which had protruded in a sulky child’s pout, pushed further forward in pursuit of pleasures she coveted but could not name. Although she noticed her companion’s laugh, she was trembling too much to stop. Half-reclining, yielding to the rocking of the carriage, she continued her thought with a series of short, sharp sentences: “Yes, no doubt about it, you’re all tiresome. . . . I don’t include you, Maxime. You’re too young. . . . But if I were to tell you how Aristide suffocated me at the beginning. And as for the rest of them—the men who have loved me. . . . You know, we’re good friends, I’m not inhibited with you. So listen to this: there are days when I’m so tired of living the life of the rich woman, worshiped and adored, that I’d rather be someone like Laure d’Aurigny, one of those women who live as men do.”
Because this only made Maxime laugh harder, she insisted. “Yes, someone like Laure d’Aurigny. It must be less insipid to live that way, less always the same thing.”
For a few instants she fell silent, as if to imagine the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, in a discouraged tone, she resumed. “But you know, women like that must have their troubles too. Life is certainly no barrel of laughs. It’s deadly. . . . As I was saying, what I need is something different. I have no idea what that might be, you understand. But something different, something that’s never happened to anyone else, something out of the ordinary, a pleasure of some rare, unfamiliar kind.”
Her speech had slowed. As she uttered those last words, she seemed to be searching for something, yielding to some profound reverie. The calèche was just then climbing the avenue leading to the exit of the Bois. The shadows grew deeper. The woods sped past on either side, like two gray walls. Dashing down the sidewalks went the yellow-painted cast-iron chairs on which, in the evening when the weather was fine, the bourgeoisie sat and showed off its Sunday best. Empty, these benches had the dark, melancholy look of lawn furniture surprised by winter, and the dull, rhythmic sound