The Kill - Emile Zola [93]
When his wife handed him the note and asked him to take care of everything, he took it but continued to stare at her.
“You are ravishingly beautiful,” he murmured.
And as she bent forward to push the table away, he kissed her roughly on the neck. She uttered a little cry. Then she got up, shaking, attempting to laugh, and thinking invincibly of the other man’s kisses of the night before. Saccard, meanwhile, regretted having kissed her like a coachman. In leaving he gave her hand a friendly squeeze and promised that he would have 50,000 francs for her that night.
Renée slept all day in front of the fire. In critical moments she could be as listless as a Creole. All her restless energy turned to laziness, nervous agitation, and numbness. She shivered, she needed a roaring fire, a suffocating heat that raised little drops of sweat on her forehead and made her drowsy. In this scorching climate, this bath of flames, her suffering almost ended. Her pain became a weightless dream, a vague sense of oppression, whose very ambiguity ultimately came to seem voluptuous. In this way, until evening arrived, she assuaged her remorse of the night before in the red glow of the fireplace, before a raging fire that caused the furniture around her to crack and at times left her unconscious of her existence. She was able to think of Maxime as of a searing ecstasy whose rays scorched her. She had a nightmare of strange loves atop flaming pyres, on white-hot beds. Céleste came and went, wearing the calm face of a servant with ice water in her veins. She had orders to admit no one. She even turned away “the Inseparables,” Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, who stopped by on their way back from lunch in a country house they had rented together in Saint-Germain. Toward evening, however, when Céleste came to inform her mistress that Monsieur’s sister Mme Sidonie wished to see her, she received orders to show the lady in.
Mme Sidonie generally came only at night. Her brother had nevertheless prevailed upon her to wear silk dresses. Yet even when the silk she wore came straight from the store, it somehow never appeared to be new. It seemed crumpled and without luster and looked like a rag. She had also agreed not to bring her basket to the Saccard household, but as a result her pockets were crammed with papers. She took an interest in Renée, whom she had never been able to turn into a client with a realistic appreciation of life’s exigencies. She visited her regularly and smiled at her with the discreet smile of a physician who does not wish to frighten his patient by revealing the name of her illness. She commiserated with the younger woman in her minor misfortunes, as if they were aches and pains that could be cured at once if only Renée would give her consent. Renée, who was in one of those states in which a person needs to be pitied, received her sister-in-law only to say that she was suffering from an unbearable headache.
“Why, it’s stifling in here, my beauty!” Mme Sidonie murmured as she slipped into the dark room. “Is it your neuralgia again? It comes from worry. You take things too much to heart.”
“Yes, I have lots of worries,” Renée answered listlessly.
It was getting dark. Renée had asked Céleste not to light a lamp. The only light was the bright red glow from the fireplace, which illuminated her entire body as she lay stretched out in her white dressing gown, its lace tinged pink by the fire. At the edge of the shadow one could make out just a bit of Mme Sidonie’s black dress and her two hands, folded and covered with gray cotton gloves. Her tender