The Kill - Emile Zola [126]
“Good night!” Maxime shouted as the door closed behind him.
Then, taking his father by the arm, he walked back up the boulevard alongside him. It was one of those clear, frosty nights when it is such a pleasure to walk on the hard ground in the frigid air. Saccard said that Larsonneau was making a mistake, that it was better to be the Aurigny woman’s friend than her lover. That led him to say that making love to whores of that sort was truly a bad idea. He presented himself as a moral authority, delivering himself of maxims and recommendations of astonishing propriety.
“You see,” he said to his son, “that sort of thing doesn’t last. . . . You lose your health that way without enjoying real happiness. You know I’m no prude. Well, I’ve had enough. I’m going to settle down.”
Maxime snickered. He stopped his father, contemplated him in the moonlight, and told him he was “a good-looking fellow.” But Saccard went on, graver than before. “Make fun of me as much as you like. I repeat: there’s nothing like marriage to preserve a man and make him happy.”
Then he brought up Louise. He slackened his pace and said that since they were already talking about marriage, now was the time to settle the matter. He informed Maxime that he and M. de Mareuil had set the Sunday after Mid-Lent Thursday12 as the date for signing the marriage contract. That night there was to be a big party at the Parc Monceau house, and he would take advantage of the occasion to announce the marriage publicly. Maxime was quite pleased with these arrangements. He was done with Renée and saw nothing else standing in the way, so he surrendered himself to his father as he had surrendered himself to his stepmother.
“Well, then, that’s settled,” he said. “Only don’t mention it to Renée. Her friends would kid me and tease me, and I’d rather they hear the news at the same time as everyone else.”
Saccard promised him that he would keep silent. Then, as they reached the top of the boulevard Malesherbes, he resumed dispensing excellent advice to his son. He explained to Maxime how to make his marriage a genuine paradise: “Above all, never break off relations with your wife. It’s a foolish thing to do. A wife with whom you no longer have relations costs you an arm and a leg. . . . To begin with, you’ve got to pay some whore, right? On top of that, the household expenses are much greater: there’s Madame’s clothing, her private pleasures, her bosom companions, and the devil knows what all else.”
He was for the time being in an extraordinarily virtuous mood. The success of the Charonne deal filled his heart with idyllic tenderness.
“I was born,” he continued, “to live in obscurity in some village, in the bosom of my family. . . . Nobody knows who I really am, my boy. . . . People take me for a fellow with his head in the clouds. Well, that’s nonsense. I’d love to stay at my wife’s side and would gladly give up business for a modest income that would allow me to retire to Plassans. . . . You’re going to be rich. Settle down with Louise and make yourself a nest you can live in like two turtledoves. What a fine thing! I’ll come visit you. It will do me good.”
He ended with tears in his voice. Meanwhile, they had reached the gate of the house and stood chatting on the curb outside. A north wind swept these Parisian heights. No sound rose in the frosty pallor of the night. Maxime, surprised by his father’s tender effusions, had remained a minute or two with a question on his lips.
“But you,” he came out with at last, “I had the impression—”
“What?”
“With your wife?”
Saccard shrugged. “Right, exactly! I was a fool. So I can speak to you from experience. . . . But we’ve patched it up, you know, absolutely. Almost six weeks ago. I go to her in the evening, when I don’t get home too late. Tonight,