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By Root 1309 0

official or to receive his reply. On such occasions he would tell her, “And be good, now!” in a tone of voice that was all his own, at once mocking and cajoling. And when she returned, having been successful in her mission, he would rub his hands together and say, “And I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too busy to want someone like Mme Michelin. He merely liked to make crude jokes and nasty insinuations. In any case, had Renée not “been good,” his only irritation would have been at having had to pay in earnest for the minister’s or official’s favor. He delighted in duping people, in giving them less than their money’s worth. He often said, “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods. That would be idiotic.”

Irrepressible Renée, who had appeared one night in the Parisian firmament as a strangely enchanted creature from the world of fashionable sensuality, was the least analyzable of women. Had she been raised at home, she would no doubt have turned to religion or some other means of calming the nerves and drawing the sting of desires that now and again drove her wild. Her temperament was solidly bourgeois. She was absolutely honest, much given to logic, afraid of heaven and hell, and full of prejudices. She was her father’s daughter, one of that calm and prudent breed in whom the homely virtues flourish. And yet it was in this nature that prodigious fantasies, persistent curiosities, and unavowable desires germinated and grew. With the Sisters of the Visitation, among whom she was free to explore the mystical sensuality of the chapel and close attachments to her little friends, she had acquired a bizarre education, learning vice, investing it with all the sincerity of her nature, and unsettling her young mind to the point where she embarrassed her confessor no end by telling him that one day during mass she had experienced an impulsive desire to get up from her seat and kiss him. Then she beat her breast and turned pale at the thought of the devil and his cauldrons. The crime that led to her later marriage to Saccard, the brutal rape that she had endured with a sort of terrified anticipation, had made her despise herself and played a large part in the unrestrained way in which she lived her entire life. She believed she no longer had to struggle against evil, that it was inside her, that logic authorized her to pursue wicked knowledge to the end. For her that knowledge was still more a matter of curiosity than of appetite. Thrown into Second Empire society, abandoned to her fantasies, supplied with money, encouraged in her most ostentatious eccentricities, she surrendered, regretted it, and ultimately succeeded in killing off what remained of decency in her, lashed and driven as she was by her insatiable need to know and to feel.

In any case, she had as yet gone no further than anyone else. She liked to whisper laughingly about such extraordinary cases as the tender friendship between Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, Mme de Lauwerens’s questionable livelihood, and Countess Wanska’s prix-fixe kisses. But she still contemplated these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them perhaps, and this nebulous desire, which swelled in her when her mood turned foul, compounded her seething anxiety and spurred her on in her nervous quest for some unique, exquisite pleasure, some apple into which she alone would bite. Her first lovers had not spoiled her. Three times she had believed herself to be in the grip of a grand passion. Love burst in her head like a Roman candle, the sparks from which did not reach as far as her heart. One month she was madly in love and showed herself with her lord and master all over Paris. Then, one morning, in the midst of her ostentatious show of affection, she felt an oppressive silence, an immense void. Her first lover, the young duc de Rozan, was little more than a quick snack in the sun. Renée, who had picked him out for his gentle manner and excellent attire, found him, once they were alone together, absolutely empty, colorless, and tiresome.