The Kill - Emile Zola [70]
A still greater familiarity and lack of restraint existed between father and son. Saccard had grasped the fact that a great financier is bound to make love to women and on occasion lose his head over them. He was brusque in love and preferred money. It was a part of his plan, however, to frequent women’s bedrooms, to strew banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to use a celebrated prostitute as a gold-plated advertisement for one of his speculations. When Maxime left school, he and his father would occasionally run into each other at the home of the same lady, and they would laugh about it. To some extent they were even rivals. Sometimes, when the young man dined at the Maison d’Or with a noisy group of friends, he could hear Saccard’s voice in a private room nearby.
“Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Daddy next door!” he would shout, with an expression on his face borrowed from one of the popular actors of the day.
“Oh, it’s you!” his father would rejoin in a jocular tone of voice. “Come in, why don’t you? You’re making so much noise I can’t hear myself eat. So who are you with tonight?”
“Laure d’Aurigny, Sylvia, Crayfish, and two others I think. They’re astonishing: they poke at the plates with their fingers and throw handfuls of salad at our heads. My clothes are covered with oil.”
His father laughed at this story, which he thought quite funny.
“Ah, young people, young people,” he murmured. “Not like us, are they, my kitten? We’ve had a very quiet meal and will soon hit the hay.”
And with that he grabbed the chin of the woman next to him and cooed at her in his nasal Provençal, which produced a strange amorous music.
“Oh, you old fool!” the woman shouted. “Hello, Maxime. If I’m willing to have supper with your nasty father, I must be in love with you, don’t you think? . . . Where have you been keeping yourself? Come see me the day after tomorrow, early in the morning. . . . No, I mean it, I have something to tell you.”
With a blissful look on his face, Saccard polished off a dish of ice cream or fruit, taking small mouthfuls. He kissed the woman’s shoulders and said teasingly, “You know, my loves, if I’m in your way, I’ll be off. . . . You can ring when it’s safe to return.”
Then he would take the lady off, or sometimes he would take her to join the boisterous crowd next door. He and Maxime shared the same shoulders; their hands encircled the same waists. They called out to each other from the divans and repeated out loud confidences that women had whispered in their ears. Indeed, they carried intimacy to the point of conspiring, when one or the other had chosen a blonde or brunette from the company, to lure her away from the group and make off with her.
They were well-known at Mabille.9 They used to go there arm in arm after an elegant dinner party and stroll about the garden, nodding at the women and shouting comments after them as they passed. They laughed loudly without letting go of each other’s arms and when conversations became heated helped each other out. The father, who knew how to drive a hard bargain, negotiated a very good price when it came to his son’s amours. Occasionally they would sit down and have a drink with a group of whores. Then they might move to another table or continue their stroll. Until midnight they could always be seen, arms linked like a couple of schoolfellows, chasing skirts down the yellow walkways under the harsh flame of the gaslights.
When they returned home, they brought with them, on their clothing, traces of the tarts they had been with outdoors. Their provocative poses, hints of risqué language, and vulgar gestures filled the apartment on