The Kill - Emile Zola [116]
Eventually Renée got used to her incest as one might get used to a ball gown which at first seemed unbearably stiff. In the end she came to believe that she was living in a world apart, superior to the common morality, a world in which the senses could be refined and developed and where it was permissible to bare one’s flesh for the delectation of all Olympus. 10 Sin became a luxury, a flower stuck in her hair, a diamond affixed to her forehead. And as justification and redemption she once again conjured up the image of the Emperor passing between the two rows of bowed shoulders on the general’s arm.
Only one man—Baptiste, her husband’s valet—continued to worry her. Ever since Saccard had renewed his amorous relations with her, this tall, pale, sober servingman seemed to hover about her with a solemnity that conveyed a silent censure. He did not look at her. His cold stare passed above her, over the bun atop her head, as chaste as a beadle unwilling to sully his eyes by gazing at a sinner’s hair. She imagined he knew everything and would have bought his silence if she had dared. Then she became uneasy, and whenever she ran into Baptiste she felt a strange sort of respect for him, saying to herself that all the decency of her household had fled and taken refuge beneath this servant’s dark frock.
One day she asked Céleste, “Does Baptiste tell jokes in the servants’ hall? Do you know whether he’s ever had an affair, a mistress of some sort?”
“I should say so!” was all the maid replied.
“Well, then, he must have made love to you, no?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. He never looks at women. We seldom see him. . . . He’s always either with Monsieur or in the stables. He says he’s quite fond of horses.”
Renée found this honesty irritating. She pressed harder; she would have liked to be able to feel contempt for her servants. Although she felt affection for Céleste, she would have been pleased to learn that the girl had lovers.
“But don’t you find Baptiste handsome, Céleste?”
“Me, madame!” the maid exclaimed, with the stunned look of a person who has just heard something incredible. “I have very different ideas in my head. I don’t want a man. I have my plan. You’ll see later on. I’m not stupid, believe me.”
Renée could get nothing clearer out of her. Her worries were growing in any case. Her ostentatious life and extravagant escapades ran up against numerous obstacles, which occasionally resulted in bruises. One day, for instance, the subject of Louise de Mareuil came up in a conversation between her and Maxime. She felt no jealousy toward the “hunchback,” as she disdainfully called her. She knew that the doctors had pronounced the girl’s doom and could not believe that Maxime would ever marry such an ugly duckling, not even for a dowry of a million francs. While mired in sin, she clung to a bourgeois naïveté about people she loved. Though she despised herself, she was quite ready to think of them as superior beings altogether worthy of respect. Yet even as she denied the possibility of marriage between Louise and Maxime, which in her eyes would have been a despicably immoral thing—a theft—she found the familiarity and camaraderie of these two young people painful to behold. Whenever she mentioned the girl to her lover, he laughed freely, repeated the child’s clever remarks, and told her that “the kid calls me her little man, you know.”
He was such a free spirit, moreover, that she didn’t dare point out to him that the “kid” was seventeen years old and that their habit