The Kill - Emile Zola [53]
The apartments within the mansion exuded the same mournful calm and frigid formality as the courtyard. The stairwell leading up to them was broad and guarded with an iron rail, and within it every footstep, every cough, resounded as beneath the vault of a church. Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery. M. Béraud Du Châtel had chosen for himself an apartment in the gloomiest part of the house, on the second floor between the street and the courtyard. There he found himself in surroundings remarkable for their shadowy silence and conducive to meditation. When he pushed open the doors and made his slow, lugubrious way through the solemn apartments, he resembled one of the members of the old parlements whose portraits were affixed to the walls, a man lost in thought on his way home after debating and refusing to sign a royal edict.
But within this lifeless house, this cloister, there was a warm and vibrant nest, a pocket of sunshine and gaiety, a lovely lair of childish high spirits, fresh air, and bright light. To reach it one had to climb a host of small staircases, proceed along a dozen or so corridors, climb back down and then up again to complete a veritable journey ending at last in a vast chamber, a sort of belvedere on the rooftop in the back of the house above the Quai de Béthune. It enjoyed full southern exposure. The window was so wide that the sky, with all its radiance, all its fresh air, all its blue color seemed to enter in. Perched aloft like a dovecote, it contained long flower boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single piece of furniture. A simple mat had been laid down over the tile floor. This was the “children’s room.” Throughout the house this was the name by which the room was known and referred to. The house was so cold and the courtyard so damp that Aunt Elisabeth had been afraid that Christine and Renée might catch a chill from the walls. She had often scolded the active little girls, who liked to race through the arcades and dip their tiny arms into the frigid water of the fountain. Then it occurred to her to have the forgotten loft fixed up for them, this being for centuries the only spot in the house where the sun was allowed in to disport itself in solitude among the spider-webs. She had given them a mat, some birds, and flowers. The girls were delighted. During vacations, Renée lived up there, bathing in the warm yellow rays of the sun, which seemed pleased with the way its hideout had been fixed up and with the two blondes it had been sent. The chamber became a paradise, resounding with the songs of the birds and the babble of the little girls. Ownership had been ceded entirely to them. They called it “our room.” They were at home in it. They went so far as to lock themselves in to prove to themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the premises. What a happy place! A hecatomb of playthings lay strewn about the mat in the bright sunshine.
The best thing about the children’s room was the vast horizon. Looking out the other windows of the house one saw nothing but black walls a few feet away. But the children’s room offered a view of one end of the Seine, one whole side of Paris stretching from the Ile de la Cité 23 to the Pont de Bercy, flat and vast and looking like some quaint Dutch town. Below, on the Quai de Béthune, stood a series of ramshackle wooden sheds, and the children often amused themselves by watching enormous