THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Эмиль Золя

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      The woman of business, offended at the abrupt way in which her sister-in-law broke up her recital, made her wait some time for an answer.

      “Yes, certainly, only I advise you first of all to look about among your friends…. Were I in your place I know very well what I should do…. I should just simply apply to M. de Saffré.”

      Renée gave a constrained smile.

      “But,” she retorted, “that would be hardly proper, considering you pretend that he is so much in love.”

      The old woman looked at her with a stare; then her flaccid face melted gently into a smile of affectionate pity.

      “You poor dear,” she murmured, “you’ve been crying; don’t deny it, I can see it by your eyes. You must be brave and take life as it comes…. Now then, let me arrange this little matter for you.”

      Renée rose, twisting her fingers, making her gloves crack. And she remained standing, completely shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She opened her lips, to accept perhaps, when suddenly the bell rang lightly in the next room. Mme. Sidonie hastily went out, leaving the door ajar, which showed a double row of pianos. Renée next heard a man’s step and the stifled sound of a conversation carried on in an undertone. She mechanically went and examined more closely the yellow streak with which the mattresses had stained the wall. This stain disturbed her, made her feel uncomfortable. Forgetting everything, Maxime, the fifty thousand francs, M. de Saffré, she returned to the side of the bed, reflecting: that bed looked much better placed as it used to be; some women really had no taste; surely, if you went to bed like that, you would have the light in your eyes. And vaguely, in the depths of her memory she saw rising the image of the stranger of the Quai Saint-Paul, her romance in two assignations, that chance amour which she had indulged over there, where the bed used to stand. The wearing away of the wallpaper was all that remained of it. Then the room filled her with uneasiness, and she lost patience with the hum of voices that still went on in the adjoining room.

      When Mme. Sidonie returned, circumspectly, opening and closing the door, she made repeated signs with her fingers to induce Renée to speak very low. Then, in her ear:

      “You have no idea, this is most fortunate: it is M. de Saffré who has called.”

      “You haven’t told him, surely, that I was here?” asked Renée, uneasily.

      The woman of business seemed surprised, and very innocently answered:

      “I did indeed…. He is waiting for me to tell him to come in. Of course, I said nothing to him of the fifty thousand francs….”

      Renée, very pale, had drawn herself up as though struck with a whip. An infinite pride rose to her heart. The rude creaking of boots which she now heard more distinctly in the room next door, exasperated her.

      “I am going,” she said, curtly. “Come and open the door for me.”

      Mme. Sidonie tried to smile.

      “Don’t be childish…. I can’t be left with that lad on my hands, now that I’ve told him you are here…. You compromise me, really….”

      But Renée had already descended the little staircase. She repeated before the closed shop-door:

      “Open it, open it.”

      The lace-dealer had a habit of putting the brass knob in her pocket after she had withdrawn it from the door. She wanted to continue arguing. At last, seized with anger herself, and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes, the sour barrenness of her nature, she cried:

      “But what on earth do you want me to tell the man?”

      “That I’m not for sale,” replied Renée, with one foot on the pavement.

      And it seemed to her that she heard Madame Sidonie mutter, as she banged the door to: “Ah, get out, you jade! you shall pay me for this.”

      “My God!” thought she, as she stepped into her brougham, “I prefer my husband to that.”

      She drove straight back home. After dinner she asked Maxime not to come; she was unwell, she needed rest. And the next day, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia’s jeweller, she was embarrassed in the midst of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had had a good stroke of business. But from that day forward she was more wayward, she frequently changed the hour of the appointments she gave Maxime, and often even watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not trouble much about these changes of mood; he took pleasure in being an obedient thing in the hands of women. What more annoyed him was the moral turn which their lovers’-meetings took at times. She became quite dismal; and it even happened that she had great tears in her eyes. She left off her refrain of “le beau jeune homme” in La Belle Hélène, played the hymns she had learnt at school, asked her lover if he did not think that sin was punished sooner or later.

      “There is no doubt she’s growing old,” thought he. “It will be the utmost if she’s amusing for another year or two.”

      The truth was that she was suffering cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Madame Sidonie’s she had revolted, she had yielded to instinctive pride, to disgust for that coarse bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything within her foundered, and she felt herself to be so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man that pushed open the door of the room with the pianos. Up to then, the thought of her husband had sometimes passed before her, in her incest, like a voluptuous accentuation of horror, but now the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that changed her most delicate sensations into intolerable pain. She, who found pleasure in the refinement of her sin, and who dreamt gladly of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods enjoyed their own kindred, was now drifting towards vulgar debauchery, and making herself the common property of two men. In vain did she endeavour to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. Her curiosity penetrated to the depth of those accursed enjoyments; she went so far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son in the embraces of the father. And she emerged yet more scared, more bruised from this journey into the unknown regions of sin, from this ardent darkness in which she confused her twofold lovers, with terrors that were as the death-rattle of her joys.

      She kept this tragedy for herself alone, and redoubled its anguish by the fever of her imagination. She would have died rather than confess the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear lest the young man might revolt and leave her; above all she had so absolute a belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the eternity of her damnation, that she would rather have crossed the Parc Monceau naked than have confessed her shame in a whisper. On the other hand, she still remained the scatter-brain who astonished Paris with her eccentricities. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices, which were discussed in the newspapers with her name disguised under initials. It was at this period that she seriously wanted to fight a duel, with pistols, with the Duchesse de Sternich, who had purposely, she said, upset a glass of punch over her gown; her brother-in-law, the minister, had to speak angrily to her before she would relinquish her idea. On another occasion she bet Madame de Lauwerens that she could run round the track at Longchamps in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her. Maxime himself began to be frightened of this head in which madness was shooting up, and in which he thought he could hear, at night, on the pillow, all the hubbub of a city on heat for enjoyment.

      One night they went together to СКАЧАТЬ