• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1291 0

always the same, surrounded by bright colors and punctuated by dark voids in the fantastic chaos of a thousand dancing flames pouring from the shops, coloring the storefronts and kiosks, painting the façades with fiery ribbons, letters, and designs, studding the shadows with stars, and washing constantly over the roadway. The noise was deafening, a howl, a monotonous, steady hum that rose from the streets like the whine of an organ accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. At one point Renée thought there had been an accident. The crowd surged to the left just beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. When she took up her spectacles, however, she recognized the omnibus office. The crowd waiting on the sidewalk pressed forward whenever a bus arrived. She heard the gruff voice of the conductor calling out numbers, and then the crystalline tinkle of the bell. Her eyes lingered over the posters plastered to one of the kiosks, as gaudily colored as an Epinal print.2 One green-and-yellow frame featured a poster under glass depicting a grinning devil’s head with bristling hair, an ad for a hat-maker, which she failed to comprehend. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed with its red lights and yellow sides, turning the corner from the rue le Peletier and shaking the building with its rumble, and she saw the men on the upper deck look up with their tired faces, staring at her and Maxime with the curious gaze of famished men peering through a keyhole.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “At this hour, the Parc Monceau is fast asleep.”

That was the only remark she made. They stood there in silence for close to twenty minutes, surrendering to the intoxication of the noise and light. When the table was finally set, they went and sat down, and since Renée seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime sent him away.

“Leave us. I’ll ring for dessert.”

Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled. She looked as though she had just been running. Some of the din and bustle of the boulevard came away from the window with her, and she refused to allow her companion to pull the casement shut.

When he complained about the noise, she said, “Of course! It’s the orchestra! Don’t you find the music odd? It will go very nicely with our oysters and partridge.”

The escapade made her look younger than her thirty years. Her movements were quick, she felt a touch of fever, and this tête-à-tête with a young man in a private room filled with sounds of the street spurred her on and coarsened her appearance. She went at the oysters with gusto. Maxime, who wasn’t hungry, smiled as he watched her devour them.

“Damn!” he muttered. “You’d have made a fine companion for suppers like this.”

She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.

“Do I seem hungry? What do you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that left me feeling empty. . . . I feel sorry for you, my dear friend, to live in such society as that!”

“You know perfectly well,” he replied, “that I’ve promised to drop Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny the day your friends are willing to join me for supper.”

She reacted with a gesture of disdain.

“Well, I should think so! We’re far more amusing than ladies of that sort: admit it! . . . If one of us were to bore her lover the way your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore you—why the poor little woman wouldn’t keep her lover for a week! . . . But you never listen to me. Try it for yourself one of these days.”

Maxime, to avoid calling the waiter, got up, removed the oyster shells, and served the partridge that had been on the serving table. The table had the luxurious look of a first-class restaurant. A delightful breath of lasciviousnesss swept the damask tablecloth, and Renée felt little shivers of contentment as she slid her slender hands from her fork to her knife and from her plate to her glass. She drank white wine without water—she who ordinarily drank water barely tinged with red. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, served her with comical solicitude, resuming the conversation as he