The Kill - Emile Zola [27]
Renée stood musing in the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime from afar. This was no longer the vague daydream, the nebulous twilight temptation she had experienced on the cool byways of the Bois. No longer were her thoughts lulled to sleep by the hoofbeats of her horses trotting past manicured lawns and woods where cosseted families went on Sunday outings. A sharp, piercing desire had taken possession of her.
An overwhelming love, a sensual need, suffused this sealed nave seething with the ardent sap of the tropics. The young woman was caught up in the potent nuptials of the earth itself—nuptials from which issued the dark vegetation and colossal shoots that surrounded her. From the acrid depths of this sea of fire, this sylvan luxuriance, this vegetal mass burning with the entrails on which it fed, troubling currents flowed into her, intoxicated her. At her feet, the pool of hot water thick with the juices of floating roots gave off steam, wreathing her shoulders in a mantle of heavy vapors, a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with desire. The smell of the palms, the aroma shed by the quivering foliage atop their tall trunks, swirled around her head. More than the stifling hot air, more than the bright lights, more than the huge, brilliant blossoms like faces laughing or grimacing among the leaves, it was above all the odors that overpowered her. An indefinable fragrance, powerful and exciting, lingered in the air, compounded of a thousand smells: of human sweat, the breath of women, the smell of hair. Sweet breezes, hints of fragrance faint to the point of vanishing, mixed with coarse, pestilential blasts, heavy with poison. In all this strange symphony of odors, however, the melodic phrase that came back again and again, dominating everything else, smothering the tenderness of the vanilla and the harshness of the orchids, was a sharp, sensual, human odor—the odor of love that filters out of the closed bedroom of a young married couple at daybreak.
Sinking back slowly, Renée leaned against the granite pedestal. In her green satin dress, her breast and face flushed and glistening with diamond raindrops, she resembled a magnificent flower of pink and green, a water lily from the pond wilting in the heat. Now that her vision had cleared, all her good resolutions evaporated forever, and the intoxication of the dinner table went once more to her head, imperious, victorious, reinforced by the flames of the hothouse. Her thoughts were no longer about the calming coolness of the night, the murmuring shades of the park that had counseled her to live a life of happy tranquillity. Ardent but blasé, she felt her senses now aroused, her impulsiveness now awakened. Above her, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mysterious laugh, as if it had read the desire, at last articulated, that had galvanized this dead heart—the long-elusive desire, the “something else” that Renée had vainly sought in the swaying of the calèche, in the fine ash of the falling night, and that had just been suddenly revealed to her in the harsh light of this garden of fire by the sight of Louise and Maxime laughing and joking while sitting hand in hand.
At that moment, the sound of voices issued from one of the nearby arbors, into which Aristide Saccard had led Mignon and Charrier.
“No, really, Monsieur Saccard,” said the latter in an unctuous tone, “we can’t buy that back from you at more than 250 francs a meter.”
To which came Saccard’s sharp retort: “But you valued every meter in my share at 250 francs.”
“All right. Listen, we’ll make it 225.”
The blunt exchanges continued, sounding strange in those groves of drooping palms. But they passed in and out of Renée’s dream