The Kill - Emile Zola [115]
“What a simpleton!” Maxime murmured.
But Ristori, whose broad shoulders shook with sobs and who had a tragic face and plump arms, moved Renée profoundly. Phèdre was of the blood of Pasiphaé, and Renée asked herself whose blood might flow in her veins as an incestuous stepmother of modern times. She saw nothing of the play but this tall woman trailing the ancient crime with her across the stage. In the first act, when Phèdre confesses her guilty love to Œnone; in the second, when, burning with ardor, she declares her love to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when she is crushed by the return of Thésée and curses herself in an access of dark fury; the actress filled the hall with such cries of wild passion and superhuman sensual need that the young woman felt every shudder of her desire and remorse in her own flesh.
“Wait,” Maxime whispered in her ear. “Now you’ll hear Théramène tell his story. The old fool!” And in a hollow voice he whispered:
Scarcely had we issued from Troezen’s gates, He on his chariot mounted . . .
But Renée was no longer watching or listening when the old man spoke. She found the light blinding and the heat from all those faces staring at the stage stifling. The monologue went on interminably. She was in the conservatory, beneath its ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She was suffering dreadfully and had lost consciousness when a repentant Phèdre, in convulsions from the poison, made her open her eyes again with her final agony. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself someday? How paltry and shameful her drama seemed alongside the ancient epic! And while Maxime fastened her evening wrap underneath her chin, she could still hear Ristori’s gruff voice growling behind her and Œnone’s indulgent murmur in reply.
In the coupé the young man prattled on all by himself, saying that on the whole he found tragedy “deadly” and preferred the plays at the Bouffes.9 Still, Phèdre was “pretty strong stuff.” It interested him because. . . . And to complete his thought he squeezed Renée’s hand. Then a strange idea occurred to him, and he yielded to the urge to say something witty. “I was right,” he whispered, “not to go too close to the ocean in Trouville.”
Renée, distracted by painful dreams, said nothing. He had to repeat what he had said.
“Why?” she asked with surprise, not understanding what he meant.
“Why, the monster . . .”
And then he snickered. At this Renée froze. Her mind went completely awry. Ristori was now just a big puppet who lifted her apron and stuck out her tongue at the audience like Blanche Muller in the third act of La Belle Hélène. Théramène danced the cancan, and Hippolyte ate toast with jelly and stuck his fingers up his nose.
When more searing pangs of remorse left her quivering, her pride sometimes rebelled. What crime had she committed, after all, and what reason did she have to blush? Did she not stumble upon greater infamies every day? Did she not rub elbows at the ministries and in the Tuileries—everywhere, in fact—with wretches like herself who draped their flesh with millions and whom men worshiped on their knees? And she thought of the shameful friendship of Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, about which people sometimes smiled at the Empress’s Mondays. She remembered the mercenary business of Mme de Lauwerens, whom husbands celebrated for her good conduct, her orderliness, and her punctiliousness in paying her suppliers. She pronounced the names of Mme Daste, Mme Teissière, and Baroness von Meinhold, ladies whose luxurious lifestyles were paid for by their lovers and whose prices were quoted in high society the way shares of stock are quoted on the Bourse. Mme de Guende had such an empty head and such a beautiful figure that she had three high-ranking officers as lovers at the same time and could not tell them apart because all of them wore the same uniform: that little devil Louise said she forced them all to strip down to their shirts so that she