What Maxime adored was living amid the women’s skirts, finery, and rice powder. He remained a girl in some ways, with his slender hands, beardless face, and fleshy white neck. Renée consulted him closely about her wardrobe. He knew all the good Paris designers and judged each of them with a word, speaking of the “flavor” of this one’s hats or the “logic” of that one’s gowns. At the age of seventeen, there was not a milliner he had not scrutinized in depth, not a bootmaker whose heart he had not studied and penetrated. This oddly stunted youth, who spent his time in English class reading the brochures his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have defended a brilliant thesis on Parisian high society, its purveyors and their clients, at an age when a provincial boy still wouldn’t dare look his maid in the face. On returning from the lycée he often brought with him a hat, a box of soap, or an item of jewelry ordered the day before by his stepmother. In one of his pockets he always carried a piece of perfumed lace.
What Maxime liked best, however, was to accompany Renée on her visits to the illustrious Worms, the genius tailor before whom the queens of the Second Empire fell to their knees. The great man’s showroom was a vast square filled with ample couches. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Clothing of course has a fragrance all its own. Silk, satin, velvet, and lace married their faint aromas to those of perfumed hair and shoulders, and the air in the salon retained a fragrant warmth, an incense of flesh and luxury, that transformed the room into a chapel consecrated to some secret deity. Renée and Maxime were frequently obliged to wait for hours. Twenty or so other importunate ladies waited their turn along with them, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira and helping themselves from a large central table laden with bottles and plates of petits fours. These ladies were at home here and spoke freely, and when they huddled about the room in small groups it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawing room. Maxime, whom they tolerated and loved for his girlish looks, was the only man allowed in this clique. Here he savored divine delights. He slithered along the sofas like an agile serpent. He might hide beneath a skirt, behind a bodice, or between two gowns, making himself small and remaining very quiet while he breathed in the perfumed warmth of the ladies in his vicinity with the expression of a choirboy swallowing the host.
“That boy sticks his nose everywhere,” said Baroness von Meinhold as she patted his cheeks.
He was such a slight youth that none of the ladies thought of him as being older than fourteen. They amused themselves by getting him tipsy on the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He said astounding things to them, which made them laugh until they cried. But it was the marquise d’Espanet who hit upon the best description of Maxime’s situation. One day he was spotted hiding behind her back at a place where two couches came together. “There’s a boy who ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured at the sight of him pink and flushed and thoroughly pleased at having been so close to her.
When at last the great Worms received Renée, Maxime accompanied her into his studio. He ventured two or three times to speak up while the master was absorbed in contemplation of his client, much as Leonardo da Vinci is said by the high priests of art to have been absorbed in the presence of Mona Lisa. The master deigned to smile at the accuracy of Maxime’s observations. He had Renée stand in front of a mirror that stretched from floor to ceiling and knitted his brows in meditation while the young woman, in the grip of emotion, held her breath and tried to remain motionless. After a few minutes, the master, as if seized and shaken by inspiration, painted in bold, rapid strokes the masterpiece he had just conceived, spitting out his description in sharp, brief sentences: “Montespan dress in pale gray faille. . . . The train describing a rounded basque in front. . . . Big bows of gray satin catching it up at the hips. . . . And to top it all off, a puffed pinafore of pearl gray tulle, with the puffs separated by strips of gray satin.”
He meditated a while longer, seemed to reach down into the depths of his genius, and at last with the triumphant expression of a Sibyl on her tripod3 concluded, “We shall adorn the hair on this happy head with Psyche’s dreamy butterfly4 and its iridescent wings of azure.”
On other occasions, however, inspiration dragged its feet. In vain did the illustrious Worms summon it forth, concentrating all his faculties to no avail. He knitted his brow, turned pale, took his poor head between his hands and shook it in despair until, defeated at last, he threw himself down in his chair. “No,” he murmured in a pained voice, “no, not today. . . . It’s impossible. . . . You ladies expect too much. The well is dry.”
And he showed Renée the door, repeating, “It’s impossible, impossible, dear lady. You must come back another day. . . . You elude me this morning.”
The fine education that Maxime was receiving yielded its first result. At seventeen the boy seduced his stepmother’s chambermaid. To make matters worse, the girl became pregnant and had to be sent away to the country with her infant and a small stipend. Renée was terribly put out by the whole episode and remained that way for some time. Saccard became involved just long enough to settle the pecuniary aspect of the matter, but the young woman scolded her pupil roundly. To think he’d gone and compromised himself with a girl of that sort when she wanted to make a distinguished gentleman of him! What a ridiculous and shameful debut! What a disgraceful escapade! He might at least have started out with one of the ladies!
“Absolutely!” he answered quietly. “If your good friend Suzanne had been willing, she’s the one who would be leaving for the country.”
“Oh, you filthy scoundrel!” she muttered, disarmed and amused by the idea of Suzanne hiding out in the country on a stipend of 1,200 francs.
Then an even more amusing thought occurred to her, and, forgetting her role as indignant mother, she began to titter, placed her fingers over her mouth to hold back the laughter, cast a sidelong glance at Maxime, and stammered, “You know, Adeline is the one who would have given you a hard time and made a scene—”
She did not finish her sentence. Maxime was laughing with her. Renée’s effort to turn this escapade into a lesson in morality ended then and there.
Meanwhile, Aristide Saccard spent little time worrying about the “two children,” as he called his son and his second wife. He granted them absolute freedom, glad to see that they were good friends who filled the apartment with boisterous gaiety. The second-floor flat on the rue de Rivoli was a place of unusual activity. Doors were swinging all day long. The servants spoke in loud voices. Billowing skirts swept constantly through the dazzling luxury of the brand-new rooms, along with processions of purveyors and gaggles of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s classmates, and Saccard’s visitors. From nine until eleven in the morning Saccard received the strangest assemblage of characters imaginable: senators and court clerks, duchesses and rag dealers— whatever flotsam the Parisian tempest dumped on his doorstep each morning, whether clad in silk gowns, filthy skirts, workmen’s smocks, or dark frock coats—and he received each one with the same clipped tones and impatient, nervous gestures. He dispatched business deals with a couple of words, dealt with twenty difficulties at once, and proposed solutions on the fly. It sometimes sounded as though this energetic little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, or with the furniture, turning somersaults and knocking his head against the ceiling to jar ideas loose before landing on his feet, ever victorious. Then, at eleven o’clock, he went out and was not seen again for the rest of the day. He took his lunch out and often his dinner as well. Then the house belonged to Renée and Maxime. They took over the old man’s study and unpacked the boxes from the stores, and articles of clothing were left lying on top of business files. There were times when grave men were obliged to wait for an hour outside the door of the study while the schoolboy and the young wife, seated at either end of Saccard’s desk, argued about a bow of ribbon. Renée ordered the horses hitched up ten times a day. The family seldom took meals together. Two of the three were always on the run somewhere, too absorbed in whatever they were doing to return before midnight. It was an apartment noisy with business and pleasure, where modern life rushed in like a gust of wind, accompanied by the clink of gold and the rustle of gowns.