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By Root 1363 0

Next came Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American embassy, who practically beat her and for that reason remained with her for more than a year. She then took on an aide-de-camp to the emperor, the comte de Chibray, a vain and handsome man whom she had begun to find oppressive when Duchess von Sternich took it into her head to fall for him and snatch him away. Renée of course then shed tears over him and led her friends to believe that her heart had been broken and that she was through with love. That was how she got to M. de Mussy, a person of no significance whatsoever, a young man who was making his way in the diplomatic corps by dint of his remarkable grace on the dance floor. Although she never knew exactly how she had given herself to him, she kept him for quite some time, gripped as she was by sloth, disgusted with this stranger about whom she had learned everything there was to know within an hour of their meeting, and unwilling to deal with the bother of making a change until some extraordinary adventure should present itself. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Boredom seemed all the more unbearable because her bourgeois virtues availed themselves of the hours of tedium to vex and annoy her. She shut her door and suffered from dreadful migraines. Yet when that door reopened, waves of silk and lace poured out of it in a rush, and no sign of worry or embarrassment disfigured the brow of this creature of luxury and pleasure.

Despite this banal socialite’s existence, Renée had had one romance in her life. She had gone out one day at dusk to visit her father, walking to his house because he did not like the sound of carriages at his door, and on her way back via the Quai Saint-Paul she noticed that she was being followed by a young man. It was hot; the day was dying with amorous softness. Used to being followed only by men on horseback on the bridle paths of the Bois, she found the adventure stimulating and was flattered by this new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very crudeness she found appealing. Rather than return directly home, she took the rue du Temple, leading her admirer along the boulevards. Emboldened, the man became so importunate, however, that Renée, rather taken aback, lost her head, turned down the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, and took refuge in her husband’s sister’s shop. The man followed her in. Mme Sidonie smiled, signaled her comprehension of the situation, and left the couple alone. When Renée made as if to follow her out of the room, the stranger called her back, spoke to her in a respectfully admiring way, and won her pardon. He was a clerk by the name of Georges, whose last name she never asked. She came to meet him twice, entering through the shop, while he used the entrance on rue Papillon. This chance love affair, which began with an encounter on the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame but also a singular smile of regret. Mme Sidonie’s profit from the adventure was to have become the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a role she had aspired to play from the day of the wedding.

Poor Mme Sidonie had suffered a setback. In brokering the marriage, she had hoped in a sense to marry Renée herself, to turn her into a client and reap from her a variety of rewards. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horses. So her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to get settled, she found Mme de Lauwerens already ensconced in their salon and realized that she had waited too long. Mme de Lauwerens, a beautiful woman of twenty-six, made it her business to launch newcomers to high society. She belonged to a very old family and was married to a man from the world of high finance, who had made the mistake of refusing to pay the bills submitted by his wife’s milliner and tailor. Highly intelligent, the lady minted whatever cash she needed and became her own keeper. Men horrified her, she said, yet she supplied all her lady friends with them. The apartment she occupied on the rue de Provence, above