The Kill - Emile Zola [9]
“I advise you to feel sorry for yourself,” Maxime continued. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your wardrobe, you live in a splendid house, you have the finest horses, your every whim is received as holy writ, and the newspapers discuss each of your gowns as if dealing with an event of the utmost gravity. Women are jealous of you, and men would give ten years of their lives to kiss the tips of your fingers. . . . Am I right?”
She assented with a nod, without answering. With eyes cast down, she went back to curling the fur of the bearskin around her finger.
“Don’t be modest,” Maxime went on. “Come right out and admit that you’re one of the pillars of the Second Empire. You and I can say such things to each other. You’re the queen wherever you go: in the Tuileries,7 in the homes of ministers, or merely among millionaires, everywhere, from top to bottom, you’re in command. There is no pleasure you haven’t jumped into with both feet, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not hold me back, I would say—”
He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence in a cavalier manner: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple.”
She did not flinch.
“And you’re bored!” the young man resumed with comic passion. “You slay me! . . . But what do you want? What do you dream of ?”
She shrugged to indicate that she had no idea. Despite the tilt of her head, Maxime saw her at that moment as so serious, so somber, that he held his tongue. He gazed at the line of carriages, which, upon reaching the end of the lake, had spread out to fill the wide circle. Less bunched up now, the vehicles turned with magnificent grace. The volume of sound increased as the hooves of the horses struck the hard earth at a more rapid pace.
The calèche, making the wide turn to rejoin the queue, swung back and forth in a way that filled Maxime with a vaguely pleasurable sensation. With that he gave in to his desire to add insult to Renée’s injury. “You deserve to ride in a fiacre, you know. That would serve you right! . . . Just look at all these people heading back to Paris, people who are at your feet. They bow to you as though you were a queen, and your good friend M. de Mussy is all but blowing you kisses.”
Indeed, a man on horseback had been making signs in her direction. Maxime had spoken in a tone of hypocritical sarcasm. But Renée barely turned and shrugged her shoulders. This time the young man responded with a gesture of despair. “So, then, it’s as bad as that, is it? . . . But good God, you have everything, what more do you want?”
Renée raised her head. Her eyes were aglow with unslaked curiosity. “I want something different,” she muttered.
“But since you have everything,” Maxime laughed, “something different is nothing. . . . What do you mean, something different?”
“What do I mean?” she repeated.
But her voice trailed off. She had turned all the way round and was contemplating the strange tableau fading from view to her rear. Dusk came slowly, like a shower of fine ash. The lake, when viewed steadily in the pale light still lingering on the water, seemed to grow rounder, so that it resembled a huge slab of pewter. The trees lining both shores—evergreens whose straight, thin trunks seemed to surge up from the slumbering surface of the lake—at this hour took on the appearance of purplish colonnades whose regular architecture limned the studied curves of the water’s edge. Masses of foliage loomed in the distance, obscuring the horizon with broad dark patches. From behind those patches emanated a glow of embers, the light from a dying sun that set only a portion of the gray immensity aflame. Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature. The fading heights, slumbering sadly in mellow darkness, gave off