The Kill - Emile Zola [114]
“No doubt about it, she’s getting old,” he thought. “She’s got a year or two more of fun in her at most.”
The truth was that she suffered cruelly. Now she wished she had betrayed Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Mme Sidonie’s she had recoiled in horror, she had given in to her instinctive pride, her disgust at the sordid bargain that had been proposed to her. In subsequent days, however, as she endured the anguish of adultery, she collapsed within and felt so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man who had walked through the door from the room with the pianos. Previously, thoughts of her husband in the midst of incest had triggered shudders of voluptuous horror, but now her husband—the man himself—had thrust himself on her with a brutality that turned her most delicate feelings into intolerable tortures. She, who had taken delight in the refinements of sin and liked to dream of a heroic paradise in which the gods made love with their own kind, now found herself mired in vulgar debauchery, shared by two men. She tried to take pleasure in her infamy, but in vain. Her lips were still warm from Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. The depths of forbidden love fascinated her. She even combined the two loves, seeking the son in the father’s embraces. Yet from this journey into the unknown realm of evil, from this ardent darkness in which her two lovers melded into one, she emerged more frightened and bruised than ever, plagued by terrors that were like the death rattle of her pleasures.
She kept this drama to herself, her suffering redoubled by the fevers of her imagination. She would rather have died than confess the truth to Maxime. Inwardly she feared that the young man might rebel and leave her. Above all, she had such an absolute belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the prospect of eternal damnation that she would have crossed the Parc Monceau naked sooner than confess her shame in a whisper. Yet all the while she remained the madcap whose extravagance astonished Paris. She fell into the grip of a nervous gaiety, and the newspapers, designating her by her initials, spoke of her astounding caprices. It was during this period that she seriously proposed a duel, with pistols, with Duchess von Sternich, who she claimed had deliberately spilled a glass of punch on her dress. It took the ire of her brother-in-law the minister to put an end to this idea. On another occasion she bet Mme de Lauwerens that she could run a lap around Longchamp in less than ten minutes, and she would have done so had her costume allowed. Even Maxime began to be frightened by Renée’s increasingly insane behavior, and when he stared at her head on the pillow at night, it seemed to him filled with the crazed fury of a city bent on pleasure.
One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. 6 They had not even looked at the poster and went only because they wanted to see the great Italian tragedienne Ristori,7 who was drawing large crowds, so that fashion dictated they must see her. The play was Phèdre.8 Maxime remembered the classical repertory fairly well, and Renée knew enough Italian to follow the performance. And indeed, they responded to the drama with particular emotion, even though it was performed in a foreign tongue whose sonorities struck them at times as a mere orchestral accompaniment to the actors’ pantomime. Hippolyte was played by a tall, pale youth, a mediocre