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By Root 1260 0

about the prostitutes, whom he pretended to mistake for authentic socialites. With a moral and serious air Renée would then tell him that these were frightful creatures whom he must carefully avoid. Then she forgot herself and spoke about them as if they were people she had known intimately. One of the child’s great delights was to get her started about Duchess von Sternich. Whenever the duchess’s carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never failed to mention her name in a sly, cruel way and with a downward flick of his eyes which proved that he knew all about Renée’s most recent adventure. In a cutting tone Renée then tore her rival to pieces. How old she was getting! The poor woman! She painted her face, had lovers hidden in all her closets, and had given herself to a chamberlain to gain access to the imperial bed. And she ran on in this vein while Maxime tried to provoke her by saying that he found Mme von Sternich ravishing. Lessons such as these developed the student’s intelligence to a remarkable degree, especially since his young teacher repeated them everywhere, in the Bois, at the theater, and in various drawing rooms. The pupil became very proficient.

What Maxime adored was living amid the women’s skirts, finery, and rice powder. He remained a girl in some ways, with his slender hands, beardless face, and fleshy white neck. Renée consulted him closely about her wardrobe. He knew all the good Paris designers and judged each of them with a word, speaking of the “flavor” of this one’s hats or the “logic” of that one’s gowns. At the age of seventeen, there was not a milliner he had not scrutinized in depth, not a bootmaker whose heart he had not studied and penetrated. This oddly stunted youth, who spent his time in English class reading the brochures his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have defended a brilliant thesis on Parisian high society, its purveyors and their clients, at an age when a provincial boy still wouldn’t dare look his maid in the face. On returning from the lycée he often brought with him a hat, a box of soap, or an item of jewelry ordered the day before by his stepmother. In one of his pockets he always carried a piece of perfumed lace.

What Maxime liked best, however, was to accompany Renée on her visits to the illustrious Worms, the genius tailor before whom the queens of the Second Empire fell to their knees. The great man’s showroom was a vast square filled with ample couches. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Clothing of course has a fragrance all its own. Silk, satin, velvet, and lace married their faint aromas to those of perfumed hair and shoulders, and the air in the salon retained a fragrant warmth, an incense of flesh and luxury, that transformed the room into a chapel consecrated to some secret deity. Renée and Maxime were frequently obliged to wait for hours. Twenty or so other importunate ladies waited their turn along with them, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira and helping themselves from a large central table laden with bottles and plates of petits fours. These ladies were at home here and spoke freely, and when they huddled about the room in small groups it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawing room. Maxime, whom they tolerated and loved for his girlish looks, was the only man allowed in this clique. Here he savored divine delights. He slithered along the sofas like an agile serpent. He might hide beneath a skirt, behind a bodice, or between two gowns, making himself small and remaining very quiet while he breathed in the perfumed warmth of the ladies in his vicinity with the expression of a choirboy swallowing the host.

“That boy sticks his nose everywhere,” said Baroness von Meinhold as she patted his cheeks.

He was such a slight youth that none of the ladies thought of him as being older than fourteen. They amused themselves by getting him tipsy on the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He said astounding things to them, which made them laugh until they cried. But it was the marquise d’Espanet who hit