And here and there beneath the arches and between the clusters of trees hung baskets attached to thin metal chains and filled with orchids, bizarre plants that grow in midair and put out compact shoots in all directions—gnarled, crooked shoots that dangle like diseased members. There were Venus’ slippers, the flowers of which resemble a marvelous slipper with dragonfly wings adorning the heel; aerides, so sweetly fragrant; and stanhopea, with pale, striped flowers whose strong, acrid odor can be smelled from quite a distance, like foul exhalations from the infected throat of a convalescent.
Yet what most struck visitors from every vantage in the conservatory was the giant Chinese hibiscus, which covered the entire side of the house where the conservatory was attached with a vast expanse of leaf and blossom. The big purple flowers of this gigantic mallow lived only a few hours, but fresh blossoms were constantly appearing to replace the ones that died. They looked for all the world like sensual, gaping female mouths—like the red lips, soft and moist, of some enormous Messalina,18 bruised by kisses yet perpetually resurrecting their insatiable bloody smiles.
Renée, standing close to the pool and surrounded by all this floral splendor, was shivering. Behind her, a great sphinx of black marble crouching on a block of granite turned its head toward the aquarium with a stealthy, cruel, feline smile. This figure, with its gleaming thighs, seemed to be the somber idol of this land of fire. At this hour the globes of frosted glass lent a milky sheen to the greenery. Statues, busts of women with their heads thrown back, puffed up with laughter, blanched in the thickets of vegetation, their mad glee contorted by patches of shadow. A strange light played over the viscous, stagnant water of the pool, revealing vague shapes, glaucous masses with monstrous outlines. Waves of brightness washed over the glossy leaves of ravenala and the lacquered fronds of fan palms, while light fell from the lacy ferns in a fine drizzle. Reflections from the glass shimmered above, amid the somber crowns of the tall palms. Meanwhile, darkness loomed all around. The arbors with their vine draperies were submerged in gloom, like the nests of dormant reptiles.
Renée stood musing in the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime from afar. This was no longer the vague daydream, the nebulous twilight temptation she had experienced on the cool byways of the Bois. No longer were her thoughts lulled to sleep by the hoofbeats of her horses trotting past manicured lawns and woods where cosseted families went on Sunday outings. A sharp, piercing desire had taken possession of her.
An overwhelming love, a sensual need, suffused this sealed nave seething with the ardent sap of the tropics. The young woman was caught up in the potent nuptials of the earth itself—nuptials from which issued the dark vegetation and colossal shoots that surrounded her. From the acrid depths of this sea of fire, this sylvan luxuriance, this vegetal mass burning with the entrails on which it fed, troubling currents flowed into her, intoxicated her. At her feet, the pool of hot water thick with the juices of floating roots gave off steam, wreathing her shoulders in a mantle of heavy vapors, a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with desire. The smell of the palms, the aroma shed by the quivering foliage atop their tall trunks, swirled around her head. More than the stifling hot air, more than the bright lights, more than the huge, brilliant blossoms like faces laughing or grimacing among the leaves, it was above all the odors that overpowered her. An indefinable fragrance, powerful and exciting, lingered in the air, compounded of a thousand smells: of human sweat, the breath of women, the smell of hair. Sweet breezes, hints of fragrance faint to the point of vanishing, mixed with coarse, pestilential blasts, heavy with poison. In all this strange symphony of odors, however, the melodic phrase that came back again and again, dominating everything else, smothering the tenderness of the vanilla and the harshness of the orchids, was a sharp, sensual, human odor—the odor of love that filters out of the closed bedroom of a young married couple at daybreak.
Sinking back slowly, Renée leaned against the granite pedestal. In her green satin dress, her breast and face flushed and glistening with diamond raindrops, she resembled a magnificent flower of pink and green, a water lily from the pond wilting in the heat. Now that her vision had cleared, all her good resolutions evaporated forever, and the intoxication of the dinner table went once more to her head, imperious, victorious, reinforced by the flames of the hothouse. Her thoughts were no longer about the calming coolness of the night, the murmuring shades of the park that had counseled her to live a life of happy tranquillity. Ardent but blasé, she felt her senses now aroused, her impulsiveness now awakened. Above her, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mysterious laugh, as if it had read the desire, at last articulated, that had galvanized this dead heart—the long-elusive desire, the “something else” that Renée had vainly sought in the swaying of the calèche, in the fine ash of the falling night, and that had just been suddenly revealed to her in the harsh light of this garden of fire by the sight of Louise and Maxime laughing and joking while sitting hand in hand.
At that moment, the sound of voices issued from one of the nearby arbors, into which Aristide Saccard had led Mignon and Charrier.
“No, really, Monsieur Saccard,” said the latter in an unctuous tone, “we can’t buy that back from you at more than 250 francs a meter.”
To which came Saccard’s sharp retort: “But you valued every meter in my share at 250 francs.”
“All right. Listen, we’ll make it 225.”
The blunt exchanges continued, sounding strange in those groves of drooping palms. But they passed in and out of Renée’s dream like so much useless noise, for what loomed before her, with all the allure of a dizzying gaze into the void, was an unknown ecstasy, hot with crime, keener than any pleasure she had yet tasted, the last drop remaining in her cup. Her weariness had evaporated.
The shrub behind which she stood half-concealed was a deadly plant, a tanghin from Madagascar, with broad, boxy leaves and whitish stems whose smallest veins distilled a milky poison. When Louise and Maxime, bathed in the yellow glow, the sunset, of the small salon, chanced to laugh a little louder than before, Renée, her mind awry, her mouth parched and irritated, took a dangling sprig of tanghin between her lips and bit down on one of its bitter leaves.
2
Aristide Saccard swooped down on Paris immediately after the Second of December1 with the keen instincts of a bird of prey capable of smelling a battlefield from a long way off. He came from Plassans, a small subprefecture in the south, where his father, fishing in the troubled waters of the times, had at last succeeded in landing a long-coveted prize: a nomination as tax collector. The son, still a young man, had foolishly compromised himself without reaping either glory or profit and had to count himself lucky to have come through the ruckus safely. He rushed off to Paris in a rage at having mistaken his true course, cursing the provinces while talking of the capital in terms that called to mind a ravenous wolf, and swearing that “he would never again be so stupid.” The bitter smile that accompanied these words took on a horrible significance on his thin lips.
He arrived in the very first days of 1852. With him he brought his wife Angèle, a drab blonde, whom he set up in a cramped apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques, like a bothersome piece of furniture he was in a hurry to get rid of. The young woman had refused to be separated from her daughter, little Clotilde, a child of four, whom her father would have been happy to leave in the care of his family. He had given in to Angèle’s wishes, however, only on condition that she agree to allow their son Maxime to remain in school in Plassans, where the boy’s grandmother could keep an eye on the troublesome eleven-year-old. Aristide did not want to be tied down. A wife and a daughter were already burden enough for a man out either to take the capital by storm or ruin himself and his reputation trying.