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By Root 1274 0

her husband’s offices, was always crowded with clients. It was an ideal setting for intimate little meals. Men and women could meet there in charming impromptu encounters. Where was the harm if a young woman went to visit her dear friend Mme de Lauwerens, and so what if some very respectable men from the best society chanced to arrive at her apartment at the same time? The mistress of the house looked lovely in her long lacy peignoirs. Many a visitor would have chosen her over any of the women in her collection of blondes and brunettes, but word had it that she was beyond reproach. That was the secret of her success. She maintained her position in society, enjoyed friendships with all the men, preserved her proud reputation as a respectable lady, and secretly enjoyed ruining the reputations of other women and profiting from their downfall. When Mme Sidonie had worked out the mechanism of this new system, she was mortified. It was the old school—a woman in a black dress carrying love notes in the bottom of her basket—versus the modern school—a great lady who sips tea while selling her friends in her own boudoir. The modern school won out. Mme de Lauwerens cast a cold eye on the threadbare clothing of Mme Sidonie, in whom she suspected a rival. And it was Mme de Lauwerens who saddled Renée with her first problem, the young duc de Rozan, for whom the financier’s beautiful wife had had a very hard time finding a match. The old school did not score a victory until later, when Mme Sidonie lent her sister-in-law her apartment so that she might indulge her whim with the strange man from the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained Renée’s confidante.

Among Mme Sidonie’s faithful allies, moreover, was Maxime. By the age of fifteen he was prowling around his aunt’s house, sniffing at gloves he found lying forgotten on the furniture. Although she detested any situation that was unambiguous and never admitted doing favors, eventually she agreed to lend him the keys to her apartment on certain days, saying that she would be off to the country overnight. Maxime had mentioned to her that there were friends he wished to entertain but did not dare bring to his father’s house. It was in his aunt’s apartment above the shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière that he had spent several nights with the poor girl who had had to be sent away to the country. Mme Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew and swooned at the sight of him, whispering sweetly in his ear that he was “as smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Meanwhile, Maxime had grown. He was now a slender, good-looking young man who still had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a child. His curly locks completed the “girlish look” that the ladies found so enchanting. He took after poor Angèle, with her gentle gaze and blond pallor. Yet he was even more worthless than that lazy, empty-headed woman. The Rougon blood ran thin in his veins and became tenuous and susceptible to vice. Born to a woman too young to be a mother, he was a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s capitulations and weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out. When Maxime went riding in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman and swaying slightly in the saddle to the rhythm of his horse’s canter, he was the god of the age, with his well-developed hips, his long, slender hands, his sickly, leering appearance, his punctilious elegance, and his music-hall slang. At twenty he considered himself beyond all possibility of surprise or disgust. He had certainly dreamt some unusually filthy dreams. Vice for him was not an abyss, as it is for some old men, but a natural and outward