The Kill - Emile Zola [101]
“He’s making his rounds,” Maxime said.
Renée stood shivering. Baptiste generally made her anxious. She sometimes said that with his chilly demeanor and frank stare, which never came to rest on a woman’s shoulders, he was the only decent man in the house.
Thereafter they became more cautious in their meetings. They shut the doors to the small salon, which allowed them to enjoy that room, the conservatory, and Renée’s apartment in complete tranquillity. It was a whole world unto itself. There for the first few months they savored the most refined and exquisitely exotic pleasures. They moved the scene of their lovemaking from the big pink-and-gray bed in the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing room and the symphony in yellow minor of the small salon. Each room, with its own peculiar fragrance, its own hangings, its own special life, yielded a different sort of tenderness and made Renée a different kind of lover. In the plush bed of the grande dame in the warm aristocratic bedroom, where lovemaking took on the discreet accents required by good taste, she was delicate and pretty. Under the flesh-colored tent, amid the fragrances and humid languor of the bath, she displayed herself as a capricious and carnal whore, surrendering her body as it emerged from the bath, which was where Maxime preferred to take her. And finally, downstairs, in the morning sunlight of the small salon, bathed in an auroral yellow that gilded her hair, she became a goddess, with the head of a blonde Diana, her naked arms in chaste poses and her unblemished body positioned on the love seats in postures that revealed noble lines and an antique grace. Maxime was almost afraid of this place, however, and Renée enticed him there only on foul days, when her intoxication required a more pungent note. Then they made love in the conservatory. That was where they savored incest.
One night, in an hour of anguish, the young woman asked her lover to fetch one of the black bearskins. They lay down on that inky fur alongside a pool adjacent to the big circular walkway. Outside, in the limpid moonlight, the air was terribly cold. Maxime arrived shivering, his ears and fingers frozen. The conservatory was so overheated that he fainted on the bearskin. Coming in from the sharp, stinging cold, he entered an oven so oppressive that he felt a burning sensation, as if he were being beaten with birch rods. When he came to, he saw Renée kneeling over him with a fixed stare and in a brutal posture that frightened him. With her hair tumbling down and her shoulders bare, she supported herself on her fists, arching her back as if she were a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. Lying on his back, the young man, peering over the shoulders of the lovely, amorous beast that held him in her gaze, caught sight of the marble sphinx, its legs gleaming in the moonlight. Renée had assumed the posture and the smile of that monster with a woman’s head, and with her petticoats undone she looked like that black god’s white sister.
Maxime continued to lie on his back. The heat was suffocating. It was a somber heat, which did not fall from heaven as a rain of fire but hung about the earth like an unhealthy exhalation, giving off a mist that rose like a storm-laden cloud. The humid heat covered the lovers with a kind of dew, a hot sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and silent in this bath of flames, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists like an animal on supple and sinewy hocks. From outside, through the small panes of the conservatory windows, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, of clumps of trees with fine black outlines and lawns as white as frozen lakes, a whole lifeless landscape whose delicate touches and smooth, pale colors were reminiscent of Japanese engravings. And this scorching bit of earth, this blazing bed on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely amid the deep silent chill.
They had a night of wild love. Renée was the man, the passionate and active will. Maxime submitted. With the plucked limbs and slender grace of