• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1314 0

to the contrived graces of these vistas, Renée, sinking back into lassitude, had closed her eyes almost completely, until all she could see was the way the long hair of the bearskin wound around the spindles of her slender fingers. But when something disrupted the regular trot of the line of carriages, she raised her head and nodded to two young women lying side by side in amorous languor in an eight-spring that had noisily turned off onto a side path leading away from the lakeshore. Mme la marquise d’Espanet, whose husband, to the great scandal of the recalcitrant old nobility, had recently embraced the imperial cause and accepted a position as aide-de-camp to the Emperor, was one of the most illustrious socialites of the Second Empire.5 The other woman, Mme Haffner, had married a well-known industrialist from Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was turning into a politician. Renée had known both women since boarding school, where others had referred to them with a knowing air as “the two Inseparables.” She called them by their first names, Adeline and Suzanne. After smiling at them, she curled up once more, but a laugh from Maxime made her turn around.

“No, really, I’m sad. Don’t laugh, this is serious,” she said on seeing that the young man was contemplating her with a mocking eye, making fun of her reclining posture.

Maxime replied in a queer tone.

“So we’re really hurt, are we? Really jealous?”

She seemed taken aback.

“Me! Why would I be jealous?”

Then, as if remembering, she added with her disdainful pout, “Oh, yes, of course, that fat cow Laure! As if I cared. If what everybody wants me to believe is true, and Aristide really paid that whore’s debts and spared her a trip abroad, he must be less in love with his money than I thought. That will put him back in the good graces of the ladies. . . . The dear man: I leave him perfectly free to do exactly what he wants.”

She was smiling as she said this, and pronounced the words “the dear man” in a tone of amicable indifference. Then, suddenly plunged again into deep sadness and darting her eyes about with the desperate look of a woman who can’t decide how to amuse herself, she muttered, “Oh, what I’d really like to do—but no, I’m not jealous, not jealous at all.”

She stopped, unsure of herself.

“Don’t you see? I’m bored,” was what she finally came out with, in an offhand voice.

Then, lips pinched, she fell silent. The line of carriages continued to move along the lake at a steady pace, sounding remarkably like a distant waterfall. Looming up on the left, between the water and the path, were small clumps of green trees with straight, slender trunks that oddly resembled a series of colonnades. The bushes and trees on the right had vanished, and the Bois now opened out into vast expanses of green, immense carpets of lawn punctuated here and there by clusters of tall trees. Gently undulating sheets of green stretched all the way to the Porte de la Muette,6 whose low gate, visible from quite a distance, resembled a piece of taut black lace stretched along the ground, and on the slopes, in the places where the undulations dipped down low, the grass had taken on a bluish tint. Renée stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed, as though this magnification of the horizon, these soft meadows moistened by the night air, had made her more acutely aware of the emptiness of her existence.

At length she broke her silence with these words, repeated in a tone of muffled anger: “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.”

“You’re not in good spirits, to be sure,” Maxime said quietly. “You’re on edge. No doubt about it.”

The young woman pushed back deeper into her seat.

“Yes, I’m on edge,” she responded curtly.

Then she took a maternal tone. “I’m getting old, my dear child. I’ll be thirty soon. It’s horrible. Nothing gives me pleasure. At twenty you can’t possibly have any idea—”

“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me along?” the young man interrupted. “That could take a devil of a long time.”

She met this impertinence with a feeble smile, as the gibe