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By Root 1374 0

who never drew adverse comment. All that remained of his younger years was a veritable fetish about good grooming. Paris opened his eyes and made a handsome young man of him; following the latest fashions, he wore his clothes tight. He was the Beau Brummel1 of his class. He came to school turned out as if for a drawing room, elegantly shod, properly gloved, wearing fabulous ties and indescribable hats. There were twenty or so similar boys in his class, and they constituted an aristocracy, passing out Havana cigars after school from cases with gold clasps and having their books carried by liveried servants. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury2 and a small black horse that made him the envy of his classmates. He drove this rig himself, while a footman sat in the rear with arms crossed and Maxime’s books on his lap in a briefcase of textured brown leather worthy of a government minister. You had to see him to appreciate how effortlessly, cleverly, and skillfully he managed the ten-minute drive from the rue de Rivoli to the rue du Havre, stopping his horse in front of the lycée and tossing the reins to the footman with the reminder, “Jacques, until four-thirty, all right?” The neighborhood shopkeepers took delight in the grace of this fair-haired boy whose comings and goings they witnessed daily. After school, he would sometimes drive a friend home and drop him at his door. The two youths would smoke, look at women, and spatter pedestrians with mud as if returning from the races. It was an astonishing little world, a breeding ground for the snobs and imbeciles who could be seen every day on the rue du Havre, nattily dressed in their dandyish jackets, playing at being blasé men of means, while the school’s bohemians, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and pushing and pounding the pavement with their heavy boots while carrying their books slung over their backs at the end of a strap.

Renée, who took her role as mother and teacher seriously, was delighted with her pupil. Indeed, she left no stone unturned when it came to perfecting his education. She had been going through a period of bitterness and tears. A lover had left her in a scandalous way, obvious to all Paris, in order to be with Duchess von Sternich. She dreamt that Maxime would be her consolation; she made herself look older, contrived in all sorts of ways to be maternal, and became the most unusual mentor imaginable. On many days Maxime’s tilbury remained at the house, and Renée came to fetch the boy from school in her big calèche. They hid the brown briefcase under the seat and went to the Bois, then brand new. There she gave him a course in high elegance. She recited the most prominent names of imperial Paris— the names of fat, happy people still ecstatic about the stroke of the magic wand that had transformed them overnight from starving oafs into great lords breathing hard and fainting from the strain of lifting their cash boxes. But the child questioned her mainly about the women, and, being very free with him, she offered him precise details. Mme de Guende was stupid but admirably built; Countess Wanska, extremely wealthy, had been a street singer before marrying a Pole who was said to beat her; the marquise d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner were of course inseparable, and even though they were her intimate friends, Renée pressed her lips together as if to indicate she would say no more after remarking that some quite unpleasant rumors had been circulating about them; beautiful Mme de Lauwerens was terribly compromising as well, but she had such pretty eyes, and, to make a long story short, everybody knew that, while she herself was beyond reproach, she was a little bit too mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who often called on her, Mme Daste, Mme Teissière, and Baroness von Meinhold. Maxime asked for portraits of these ladies, which he placed in an album that remained on the drawing room table. With the salacious cunning that was the dominant trait of his character, he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking her for details