The Kill - Emile Zola [69]
“If I were a man,” Renée would say, “I’d choose Adeline.”
“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” Maxime would answer. “She’s so funny! . . . I prefer Sylvia.”
As the pages turned, an image of the duc de Rozan might pop up, or Mr. Simpson, or the comte de Chibray, and Maxime would add in a mocking tone, “In any case, your taste is perverted, as everyone knows. . . . Can you imagine anything stupider than the faces of these gentlemen? Rozan and Chibray look like Gustave, my barber.”
Renée shrugged as if to say that sarcasm like Maxime’s left her cold. She remained absorbed in the spectacle of faces, whether pallid, cheerful, or cross. She lingered longest over the portraits of the prostitutes, carefully scrutinizing the photographs for precise, microscopic details, for tiny wrinkles and hairs. One day she even called for a servant to bring her a magnifying glass after she thought she spotted a hair on Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the lens did reveal a thin golden filament, which had fallen from an eyebrow onto the middle of the nose. This hair amused the two of them for quite some time. For the next week, all the ladies who came to visit were obliged to verify its presence in the photograph for themselves. From then on the magnifying glass was put to regular use in scrutinizing the women’s faces. Renée made some astonishing discoveries. She found unsuspected wrinkles, rough skin, and pockmarks imperfectly concealed by rice powder. In the end Maxime hid the magnifying glass, on the grounds that it was not right to use such an instrument to make the human face look disgusting. The truth was that Renée had subjected Sylvia’s thick lips to excessively close scrutiny, Sylvia being a person for whom Maxime felt a special affection. He and Renée invented a new game. They asked the question, “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and then turned to the album for answers. This yielded some quite delightful couples. Renée spent any number of evenings playing this game with her friends and found herself married off in succession to the archbishop of Paris, Baron Gouraud, M. de Chibray, which made her laugh, and even her own husband, which depressed her. As for Maxime, whether by chance or as a result of Renée’s mischievous intervention, he always ended up with the marquise. But the laughs were never louder than when fate coupled two men or two women.
So close was the camaraderie between Renée and Maxime that she even told him about her heartaches. He consoled her and offered his advice. His father seemed not to exist. Eventually they even exchanged confidences about their younger years. During their drives in the Bois especially they felt a vague languor, a need to tell each other things that are difficult to say and usually left unspoken. The relish that children feel when speaking in low voices about forbidden subjects, the attraction that draws a young man and a young woman together into sin, albeit in word only, kept bringing them back to salacious subjects. This gave them deep pleasure, for which they did not reproach each other—a pleasure that each savored while reclining listlessly in a corner of their carriage, like old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. Eventually they boasted to each other of their debaucheries, like braggarts. Renée confessed that the little girls in her school were very naughty. Maxime outdid her and dared to recount some of the shameful things that went on at his school in Plassans.
“Ah!” Renée whispered. “I can’t tell . . .”
Then she leaned close to his ear, as if the only thing that would have made her blush was the sound of her own voice, and confided to him one of those convent stories that are often heard in lewd songs. He himself had too rich a collection of anecdotes of this sort to hold anything back. He warbled any number of very coarse verses in her ear. Little by little