The Kill - Emile Zola [25]
Near where they were standing, a servant was swaddling Baron Gouraud in a fur greatcoat, so Mme Michelin whispered in her husband’s ear. “The fellow who can seal the deal for you is that fat man over there,” she said, as he tied her hood under her chin. “He can get whatever he wants from the ministry. Tomorrow, at the Mareuils, we must try—”
M. Michelin smiled. He led his wife cautiously away, as if he were holding something precious and fragile. Maxime, after glancing around the vestibule and assuring himself that Louise was not there, headed straight for the small salon. And there he found her, almost alone, waiting for her father, who must have spent the evening in the smoking room with the political men. The marquise, Mme Haffner, and the other ladies had already left. Only Mme Sidonie remained, telling the wives of a couple of bureaucrats how much she loved animals.
“So there you are, my friend,” Louise exclaimed. “Sit down here and tell me what chair my father fell asleep in. He must be under the impression that he’s already made it to the Chamber.”
Maxime responded in kind, and the two young people were soon laughing again as loudly as they had done at dinner. Maxime sat on a very low stool at Louise’s feet, and by and by he took her hands and carried on with her as he would have done with a comrade. In her dress of white foulard with red polka dots and a high bodice, and with her flat chest, small ugly head, and cunning baby face, she looked like a boy disguised as a girl. Yet at times her slender arms and misshapen body assumed some rather provocative poses, ardor flickered in her still childlike eyes, and Maxime’s teasing failed to bring the slightest blush to her face. Both laughed in the belief that they were alone, unaware that Renée, standing half-hidden in the conservatory, was observing them from a distance.
A moment earlier, while crossing one of the conservatory walkways, Renée had caught sight of Maxime and Louise and stopped abruptly behind a bush. The hothouse in which she found herself was like the nave of a church, with thin iron columns soaring upward to support an arched glass roof that sheltered a profusion of lush vegetation, thick layers of leaves, and towering displays of greenery.
In the middle, in an oval pool at ground level, a multitude of aquatic flora from sunnier climes thrived in a watery world of slime and mystery. Green plumes of cyclanthus wound a monumental sash around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end of the pool, huge tornelia lifted their strangely scruffy appendages above the water, their bare, dry branches twisting like ailing serpents as they dropped aerial roots into the pool like fishnets suspended in midair. Near the edge, a pandanus from Java spread its coif of green leaves with white stripes, as thin as fencing foils yet as prickly and serrated as Malayan daggers. And grazing the lukewarm surface of the gently heated stagnant pool, water lilies opened their rosy stars, while euryales let their round, leprous leaves droop into the water, on whose surface they floated like the pustulated backs of monstrous toads.
A wide band of selaginella circled the pool. This dwarf fern created a thick carpet of soft green moss, a lawn of sorts. On the far side of the main circular path, four massive thickets of vegetation sent shoots soaring upward to the arched roof: the palms, leaning slightly in their grace, spread their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, and let their leafy branches droop like oars wearied by their eternal voyage through the blue of the sky; the great bamboo of India stood erect, slender and hard, letting loose a light rain of leaves from on high; a ravenala, or traveler’s tree,