The Kill - Emile Zola [68]
The wind that constantly rattled the doors of the apartment on the rue de Rivoli grew stronger as Maxime grew older, Saccard expanded the scope of his operations, and Renée searched ever more feverishly for unfamiliar pleasures. The lives these three people led were in the end astonishingly wild and free. Such was the fruit that the epoch ultimately produced in abundance. The street invaded the apartment with its rumble of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its unbridled speech. The father, the stepmother, and the stepson acted and spoke and made themselves at home as if each were alone, living the bachelor life. Three friends, three classmates sharing the same furnished room, could not have been less inhibited about their vices, their loves, and their boisterous adolescent pleasures. They greeted one another with handshakes, gave no hint of any doubts about why they were living under the same roof, and treated one another in a cavalier, carefree manner, thereby asserting their absolute independence. They banished the idea of family in favor of a kind of partnership, with each claiming an equal share of the profits. To each partner went a quota of pleasure to be consumed, it was tacitly understood, as he or she saw fit. Ultimately they gratified themselves in one another’s presence, making a parade of their pleasures, recounting them to one another without provoking anything but a bit of envy or curiosity, nothing more.
Maxime now became Renée’s teacher. When he went to the Bois with her, he amused her greatly with his stories about the whores. Whenever a new one turned up at lakeside, he set out at once to find out who her lover was, how much he paid her per month, and how she lived. He knew the interiors of these ladies’ apartments as well as intimate details of their lives and was nothing less than a walking catalog listing all the prostitutes of Paris, with complete descriptions of each and every one. This scandal sheet delighted Renée. On race days at Longchamp, she would listen avidly to all his stories as they drove past the racetrack in her calèche, yet she always maintained the hauteur of the true socialite. She liked to hear, for instance, how Blanche Muller was deceiving her embassy attaché with her hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his undershorts in the alcove of a skinny, redheaded celebrity who went by the name “Crayfish.” Each day yielded its quota of gossip. When the story was too coarse for a lady’s ears, Maxime lowered his voice but told all. Renée opened her eyes wide like a child listening to a good joke and restrained her laughter until she was obliged to stifle it with an embroidered handkerchief pressed delicately to her lips.
Maxime also brought her photographs of these ladies. His pockets and even his cigar case were always filled with portraits of actresses. Sometimes he emptied them out and put the ladies’ pictures in the album left lying about the drawing room, which already contained portraits of Renée’s friends. It also contained pictures of men such as MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, and de Mussy, along with actors, writers, and deputies who had somehow or other found their way into Maxime’s collection. It was a singularly mixed society, a faithful reflection of the motley assortment of ideas and people that came Renée and Maxime’s way. Whenever it rained, or they felt bored, this album served as a great conversation piece. Somehow it always seemed close at hand. Stifling a yawn, Renée would open it for perhaps the hundredth time. Then her curiosity would reawaken, Maxime would come and lean behind her, and they would fall into lengthy discussions about Crayfish’s hair, Frau von