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By Root 1279 0

of a new city as quickly as possible. They lodged there by the night, staying home in the evening only when there was a banquet and otherwise perpetually caught up in the whirlwind round of Parisian society, occasionally returning home for an hour as a traveler might return to a room in an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more anxious there, more nervous. Her silk skirts glided with a snakelike hiss over the thick carpets and along the satin upholstery of the love seats. She was irritated by the stupid gilding all around her, by the high, empty ceilings beneath which nothing remained after a festive evening except the laughter of the young fools and the sententious pronouncements of the old scoundrels. To fill this sumptuous space, to inhabit these radiant premises, she would have liked to find some supreme amusement, for which she avidly searched high and low throughout the mansion, from the small sun-colored salon to the conservatory with its thick vegetation, but to no avail. Saccard, meanwhile, realized his dream: he played host to the world of high finance, to MM Toutin-Laroche and de Lauwerens; he also received leading politicians such as Baron Gouraud and Haffner, the deputy; even his brother the minister had been kind enough to come two or three times to shore up Saccard’s situation with his presence. Like his wife, however, Saccard suffered from nervous anxieties, from a restlessness that made his laughter sound oddly like breaking glass. He became so frenetic and skittish that acquaintances said, “That devil Saccard is making too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he was decorated after doing the prefect a mysterious favor that involved acting as a front for a certain lady in a transaction related to land.

It was at about the time they moved to Parc Monceau that an apparition entered Renée’s life, leaving an indelible impression. The minister had previously resisted the pleas of his sister-in-law, who was enviously longing to be invited to the court balls. Believing that his brother’s fortune was at last assured, he finally gave in. Renée did not sleep for a month thinking about it. When the great night arrived, she sat trembling in the carriage that took her to the Tuileries.

She wore an outfit of prodigious grace and originality, a real find that had come to her in a bout of insomnia and had been put together by three of Worms’s employees, who came to her home to do their work under her supervision. It was a simple gown of white gauze, but trimmed with a multitude of little flounces scalloped out and edged with black velvet. The black velvet tunic featured a square neckline cut very low and framed by narrow lace, barely the width of a finger. Not one flower or piece of ribbon. On her wrists she wore bracelets without engraving, and on her head a thin diadem of gold, a plain circlet that fitted her like a halo.

When she reached the reception rooms and her husband deserted her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a moment of embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she could see that she looked lovely, quickly reassured her, and she was just getting used to the hot air, the murmur of voices, the crush of black evening dress and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who wheezed as if suffering from a problem of digestion. The shoulders aligned themselves in two rows, while the black tailcoats instinctively and discreetly fell back a step. Renée found herself shoved to the end of the line of shoulders, near the second door, toward which the Emperor was moving with a laborious, faltering step. She thus saw him come toward her from one door to the other.

He was wearing a tailcoat with the red sash of the Grand Cordon. 11 Renée, once more in the grip of emotion, had difficulty seeing clearly, and to her this bloody stain seemed to splatter the prince’s entire chest. She found him small, with legs that were too short and jiggling flesh around his waist. But she was charmed and thought him handsome, with his pale face, and heavy, leaden