The Kill - Emile Zola [77]
They exchanged pleasantries and went for their usual drive in the Bois. Two weeks passed. Renée threw herself more madly than ever into the round of visits and balls that was her life. She had apparently changed her mind once again and no longer complained of weariness and disgust. Yet she seemed to have suffered some secret fall, and though she did not speak of it, she revealed what she was going through by exhibiting a more pronounced contempt for herself and a more reckless depravity in her lady-about-town whims. One night she confessed to Maxime that she was dying to go to a ball that Blanche Muller, a fashionable actress, was giving for the princesses of the foot-lights and the queens of the demimonde. This confession surprised and embarrassed the young man, though he had no great scruples about such things. He tried to catechize his stepmother: she really didn’t belong there, and in any case she wouldn’t see anything very amusing. Besides which, if she were recognized, it would cause a scandal. In reply to all these excellent arguments she clasped her hands and smilingly pleaded, “Please, Maxime, darling, be nice. I want to go. . . . I’ll wear a dark blue domino, and we’ll just walk through the rooms.”
When Maxime, who always gave in eventually and would gladly have taken his stepmother to every disreputable place in Paris had she asked, agreed to accompany her to Blanche Muller’s ball, she clapped her hands like a child who has been granted an unexpected break from school.
“You’re a dear!” she exclaimed. “It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Come for me early. I want to see those women make their entrances. You’ll tell me who they are, and we’ll have a grand old time.”
She thought for a moment, then added, “No, don’t come for me. Wait for me in a cab on the boulevard Malesherbes. I’ll go out through the garden.”
This mysterious proposal was just a way of adding spice to the escapade, a simple refinement of her pleasure, since she could have walked out the front door at midnight and her husband wouldn’t even have poked his head out the window.
The next night, after telling Céleste to wait up for her, Renée, quivering with exquisite fear, made her way through the dark shadows of the Parc Monceau. Saccard had taken advantage of his connections at city hall to obtain a key to one of the park’s side gates, and Renée had asked to have one of them for herself. She nearly lost her way and only found the cab thanks to its two yellow eyes—the headlights. In those days the just-completed boulevard Malesherbes was still quite deserted at night. The young woman slipped into the carriage in a highly emotional state, her heart beating wildly as though she had just returned from a rendezvous with a lover. Maxime, half asleep in a corner of the cab, smoked philosophically. He tried to toss his cigar away, but she stopped him, and as she reached out to grab his arm in the darkness, her hand came right up against his face, to the great amusement of both.
“I tell you I like the smell of tobacco!” she exclaimed. “Keep your cigar. . . . Besides, we’re going to have a fling tonight. . . . I’m a man, see.”
The boulevard was not yet illuminated. As the cab proceeded toward the Madeleine, it was so dark in the carriage that they could not see. Each time the young man lifted the cigar to his lips, a spot of red pierced the thick darkness. That red spot drew Renée’s attention. Maxime, half covered by the flowing black satin domino1 that filled the cab’s interior, continued to smoke in bored silence. The truth was that his stepmother’s whim was preventing him from joining a group of women who planned to meet at the Café Anglais before Blanche Muller’s ball and return there afterward. He was grumpy, and Renée sensed his sulk through the gloom.
“Are you under the weather?” she asked.
“No, I’m cold,” he answered.
“Well, I’m on fire. It’s stifling in here. . . . Drape my skirt