The Kill - Emile Zola [112]
Mme Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw Renée open the discreetly curtained door of her shop. She was there by chance, on the point of rushing out to court, where she had summoned one of her clients to appear before a justice of the peace. She would miss her day in court; that case could wait until another day, because she was too pleased that her sister-in-law had been so kind as to call on her at last. Renée smiled and looked embarrassed. Mme Sidonie insisted that she come upstairs and led her by way of the small staircase up to the bedroom after removing the brass knob from the shop door. She removed and replaced this knob, which was held in place by a single pin, twenty times a day.
“Now, my beauty,” she said after inviting Renée to sit on a chaise longue, “now we can have a nice chat. . . . You know, you’ve come at just the right moment. I intended to call on you this evening.”
Renée, who was familiar with this bedroom, felt a vague sense of unease, like a hiker who notices that a patch of forest has been cut from a familiar landscape.
“Oh!” she said after a while. “You moved the bed, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” came the milliner’s calm answer. “One of my customers thought it was much better facing the fireplace. She also advised me to get red curtains.”
“That’s just what I was thinking. The curtains weren’t that color before. . . . A very common color, red.”
She put on her glasses and examined the room, which had a sort of boardinghouse luxury. On the mantelpiece she saw long hairpins that surely didn’t come from Mme Sidonie’s small bun. In the place where the bed had been, the wallpaper was all scuffed, discolored, and dirty from the mattress. The businesswoman had tried to hide this eyesore behind two armchairs, but the backs of the chairs were rather low, and Renée’s eyes lingered on the worn strip of wallpaper.
“You have something to say to me?” she finally asked.
“Yes, it’s quite a long story,” Mme Sidonie replied, clasping her hands and making an expression like a gourmet about to recount what she had for dinner. “Guess what. M. de Saffré is in love with beautiful Mme Saccard. . . . Yes, my darling, with you.”
Renée avoided any affectation of modesty.
“What!” she exclaimed. “You told me he was so taken with Mme Michelin.”
“Oh, that’s over, completely over! . . . I can give you proof, if you like. . . . Perhaps you didn’t know that Baron Gouraud took a shine to the Michelin girl? It’s quite baffling. Everyone who knows the baron is flabbergasted by it. . . . And did you know that she’s working on getting her husband a red ribbon? . . . A spirited girl, that one. Nothing frightens her, and she doesn’t need anyone to draw her pictures.”
She pronounced the last sentence with a mixture of regret and admiration.
“But to get back to M. de Saffré. . . . He claims to have run into you at a theatrical party wrapped up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly invited you out to supper. . . . Is there any truth to that?”
Renée was floored by this news.
“Quite true,” she murmured. “But who could have told him?”
“He claims to have recognized you afterward, once you had left the room, and he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm. . . . And since then he’s been madly in love. A fantasy has taken root in his heart, you see. . . . He came and asked me to apologize to you on his behalf.”
“Well, then, tell him that I forgive him,” Renée interrupted without taking stock of what she was saying.
Then, remembering all her woes, she went on. “You’re a good woman, Sidonie, and I’m in agony. I absolutely must have 50,000 francs by tomorrow morning. I came here