The Kill - Emile Zola [14]
“Yes, Madame, he is dressing,” the servant replied, with a nod worthy of a prince saluting a crowd.
Renée climbed the stairs slowly, pulling off her gloves as she went.
The vestibule was most luxurious. On entering it, one experienced a slight feeling of suffocation. The thick carpets covering the floor and staircase and the broad expanses of red velvet that hid the walls and doors made the air heavy with the silence, the stale fragrance, of a chapel. Draperies hung down from above, and the very high ceiling was adorned with ornamental rosettes on a latticework of gilt molding. The staircase had a double balustrade of white marble equipped with a red velvet handrail, and it opened out into two gently curving branches, between which stood the door of the drawing room. An immense mirror covered the entire wall of the first landing. Below, at the foot of each branch of the staircase, standing on marble pedestals, two women of gilt bronze, naked to the waist, held up two large lamps with five burners each, whose intense light was softened by globes of frosted glass. On either side, rows of lovely majolica pots were filled with rare plants.
Renée climbed, and with each step her image in the mirror grew larger. With doubt akin to that felt by the most acclaimed of actresses, she wondered if she was really as delectable as people said she was.
When she reached her apartment on the second floor, with its windows overlooking the Parc Monceau, she rang for her chambermaid Céleste to dress her for dinner. That took a full hour and a quarter. After the last pin had been set in place, she opened the window because the room was very hot, leaned against the sill, and stood there lost in thought. Céleste worked discreetly behind her, putting away the various items of her toilette one by one.
The park below was a seething sea of shadows. Inky masses of lofty foliage, buffeted by sudden gusts of wind, ebbed and flowed over a broad expanse, and the dry leaves made a sound reminiscent of waves draining from a pebbly beach. In the swirl of shadows only the two yellow eyes of an occasional carriage stood out now and then, appearing and disappearing amid the stands of trees lining the road that runs from the avenue de la Reine-Hortense to the boulevard Malesherbes. Staring at this melancholy autumn scene, Renée felt her heart fill once again with sadness. She imagined herself a child back in her father’s house, a big silent town house on the Ile Saint-Louis, 10 which for two centuries had been home to the black-robed gravity of a family of magistrates, the Béraud Du Châtels. Then she recalled the magical stroke of her marriage, to a widower who had sold himself to marry her, who had bartered the name of Rougon for that of Saccard, whose two sharp syllables had, on first hearing, struck her ear with the brutality of two rakes scraping up gold. He had taken her and propelled her into this life of excess, which with each passing day left her poor mind a little more unhinged. Then, with childish pleasure, she dreamt of the wonderful games of badminton she used to play with her younger sister, Christine. And one morning she would wake from the voluptuous dream in which she’d been living for the past ten years, and she would be mad, and her reputation would have been destroyed by some speculation of her husband’s, which would have sucked him under with it. This came to her as a quick premonition. The wailing of the trees grew louder. Upset by these thoughts of shame and punishment, Renée gave in to instincts that lay dormant deep inside her, the instincts of an old and respectable bourgeois family. She promised the dark night that she would mend her ways, spend less on clothes, and find some innocent pastime with which to amuse herself, as in her happy days at boarding school, where the girls all sang “Nous n’irons plus au bois” while cavorting sweetly under the sycamores.
At that moment, Céleste, who had gone downstairs, returned and whispered in her mistress’s ear: