The Kill - Emile Zola [162]
Renée remained in the station until the locomotive blew its whistle. When the train pulled out, she felt desperate and didn’t know what to do. Her days seemed to stretch out before her as empty as the vast waiting room in which she was now left standing all alone. She climbed back in her coupé and told the coachman to drive home. On the way, however, she changed her mind. She was afraid of her room and of the boredom that awaited her there. She didn’t even have the heart to change clothes for her usual drive around the lake. She needed sun, and to be with people.
She ordered the coachman to go to the Bois.
It was four o’clock. The Bois was just awakening from the oppressive afternoon heat. Clouds of dust rose all along the avenue de l’Impératrice, and in the distance one could see expanses of greenery bordered by the slopes of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes and crowned by the gray mass of Mont-Valérien. 3 The sun, high on the horizon, flowed as if molten and filled the gaps in the foliage with a golden dust, setting the high branches ablaze and turning the ocean of leaves into an ocean of light. But beyond the fortifications, the carriageway that led to the lake had just been watered. The carriages rolled over the brown dirt as over a woolen carpet, enveloped in a cool fragrance of moist earth. On either side small trees drove their numerous young trunks into the low scrub and vanished into a sea of obscure greenery punctuated here and there by clearings aglow with yellow light. The nearer one got to the lake, the more numerous the chairs along the sidewalks became, and families sat on them and watched the endless parade of wheels with silent, tranquil faces. At the circle just before the lake a dazzling spectacle awaited. The sun’s oblique rays turned the round basin into a huge mirror of polished silver reflecting the star’s splendid face. Through squinting eyes it was hard to make out, on the left, near the bank, the dark outline of the excursion boat. The umbrellas of the carriages bowed in a gentle, uniform motion toward the source of the splendor and did not straighten up again until the carriages reached the carriageway that ran along the edge of the water, which from the height of the embankment took on a dark metallic hue with stripes of burnished gold. On the right, clumps of conifers lined up in regular colonnades, the soft violet tint of their straight, slender needles tinged red by the flames from the sky. On the left, expanses of lawn lay bathed in light like fields of emeralds all the way to the distant lace of the Porte de la Muette. Nearer the falls, the gloomy forest resumed on one side, while across the lake islands loomed against the blue sky with sunlit shores and shadowy slopes of vigorous fir, at the base of which the Chalet looked like a child’s toy lost in a corner of some virgin forest. The entire Bois shook with laughter in the sun.
On this splendid day Renée felt ashamed of her coupé and of her puce outfit, made of silk. She settled back a bit in the carriage and looked out through the open windows at the ripples of light on the water and greenery. At bends in the carriageway she caught glimpses of the line of wheels, revolving like golden stars in an endless stream of blinding flashes. The polished side panels, the glittering appurtenances of copper and steel, and the vividly colored outfits moved along at the regular pace of the trotting horses, so that it seemed that a large bar, a fallen ray of sunlight, was moving against the background of the Bois, stretching to wed the curves of the carriageway. By squinting from time to time, the young woman could make out within that ray the blonde bun of a woman’s hair, the dark back of a footman’s coat, or the white mane of a horse. The rounded contours of the watered-silk parasols shimmered like metal moons.
As Renée contemplated this bright day, these expanses of sunlight, she remembered the fine ash of dusk that had settled