The Kill - Emile Zola [165]
The Emperor, surprised, turned, no doubt recognized his enthusiastic subject, and returned the salute with a smile. Then everything vanished into the sunset, the carriages pulled back into line, and all Renée could see above the manes of the horses and between the backs of the footmen were the green caps of the outriders with their dancing tassels.
She sat a moment with her eyes wide open, full of what she had just seen, which reminded her of another time in her life. To her it seemed that the Emperor, by inserting himself into the line of carriages, had just added the last essential radiance to this triumphal procession and given it meaning. Now it was a glory to behold. All those wheels, all those decorated men, all those women lounging listlessly in their carriages vanished with the flash and rumble of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and painful that the young woman felt an imperious need to escape from this triumph, from Saccard’s shout, still ringing in her ears, and from the sight of the father and the son, arms linked, chatting as they ambled along. Looking for a way out, she brought her hands up to her chest, as if seared by a flame within. And it was with a sudden hope of relief, of a salutary cooling of a raging fever, that she leaned forward and told the coachman, “To the Hôtel Béraud.”
The courtyard, as always, had the chill of a cloister. Renée made her way around the arcade, reveling in the drops of moisture that fell on her shoulders. She walked over to the trough, covered with green moss, its edges worn smooth. She examined the half-vanished lion’s head, from whose gaping jaws a stream of water spurted through an iron tube. How many times had she and Christine as little girls taken that head in their arms, leaning forward to reach the stream of water, whose icy pressure they liked to feel against their little hands? Then she climbed the big silent staircase and spotted her father at the far end of the series of vast rooms. He pulled himself up to his full height and slowly moved deeper into the gloom of the old house and of that proud solitude in which he had completely cloistered himself since the death of his sister, while Renée thought of the men in the Bois and of that other elderly man, Baron Gouraud, who had had his carcass set upon pillows and driven around in the sun. She climbed still higher, explored the corridors and the service stairway, and made the trip up to the children’s bedroom. When she reached the very top of the house, she found the key hanging on the usual nail—a big, rusty key encased in a spider’s web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad the children’s room looked! She felt a pang in her heart on finding it so empty, so gray, and so silent. She closed the door of the aviary, which had been left open, thinking that somehow this must be the door through which the joys of her childhood had flown away. In front of the planters, which were still filled with soil hardened and cracked like dried mud, she stopped and snapped the stem of a rhododendron with her fingers. This skeleton of a plant, withered and white with dust, was all that remained of their once-vibrant tubs of greenery. And the matting—the very matting—faded and gnawed by rats, beckoned with the melancholy of a winding sheet that had lain for years awaiting its intended corpse. Over in a corner, in the midst of this scene of silent desperation, this mournful abandonment that made silence itself seem to sob, she found one of her old dolls. All the stuffing had leaked out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with enameled lips above the wasted body, seemingly exhausted by the doll’s follies.
To Renée the stale air of her childhood was stifling. She opened the window and looked out