The Kill - Emile Zola [99]
In making his way out at dawn through a thick fog, Maxime was rather bewildered by his good fortune. He accepted it, moreover, with a smugness typical of his sexless nature.
“Too bad!” he thought. “She was the one who wanted it, after all. . . . She has an awfully fine body, and she’s right: she’s twice as much fun in bed as Sylvia.”
They had been drifting toward incest since the day when Maxime in his threadbare schoolboy’s tunic had flung himself at Renée’s neck and creased her French Guards jacket. Every minute that had passed between them since that moment had been a minute of perversion. The peculiar way in which the young woman had raised the child; the familiarities that had made comrades of them; and, later, the ribald audacity of their shared confidences—all that dangerous promiscuity had in the end formed a singular bond between them, turning the joys of friendship into almost carnal pleasures. They had been surrendering to each other for years. The brutal act was only the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of love. In the frenetic world in which they lived, their sin had grown as if fertilized by the impure secretions of a dung heap. It had developed with peculiar refinements, in conditions particularly conducive to debauchery.
When the big calèche carried them off to the Bois and gently along its carriageways as they whispered smutty stories in each other’s ears and searched their memories of childhood for dirty jokes, it was merely a diversion of their desires, an unavowed gratification of their wants. They felt vaguely guilty, as if they had grazed each other’s flesh. Indeed, that original sin, that languor born of filthy conversations that had left them weary with voluptuous fatigue, had stimulated them more gently than frank and unmistakable kisses would have done. Their camaraderie was thus the slow progress of two lovers fated to end one day in the private room at the Café Riche and finally in Renée’s large pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not feel the shock of sin. They were like old lovers, whose kisses were steeped in nostalgia. Their two beings had been in intimate contact for so long that despite themselves they spoke of a past that had been suffused with a tenderness of which they had been unaware.
“Do you remember the day I arrived in Paris?” Maxime asked. “You were wearing an odd outfit, and with my finger, I traced an angle on your breast and advised you to alter your neckline to a V.... I felt your skin under your blouse, and my finger went in a little. . . . It was very nice.”
Renée laughed and kissed him. “You were already an awfully naughty boy,” she murmured. “You had us in stitches at Worms’s, remember? We called you ‘our little man.’ I always thought Suzanne would have let you have your way with her if the marquise hadn’t kept shooting her such furious looks.”
“Yes, indeed, we laughed quite a lot,” the young man whispered. “The photo album, you know? And all the rest—our errands in Paris, our snacks at the pastry shop on the boulevard—you know, those little strawberry cakes you adore? . . . I’ll always remember that afternoon when you told me about Adeline’s little adventure in the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed them with a man’s name, Arthur d’Espanet, and asked him to come carry her off.”
The lovers laughed at this story yet again, and then Maxime went on in his flirtatious voice. “When you came in your carriage to pick me up at school, we must have made quite an unusual pair. . . . I was so small I vanished under your skirts.”
“Yes, yes,” she stammered, shivering and drawing the young man toward her. “That was so nice, as you say. . . . We loved each other without knowing it, didn’t we? I knew before you