In any case, she had as yet gone no further than anyone else. She liked to whisper laughingly about such extraordinary cases as the tender friendship between Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, Mme de Lauwerens’s questionable livelihood, and Countess Wanska’s prix-fixe kisses. But she still contemplated these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them perhaps, and this nebulous desire, which swelled in her when her mood turned foul, compounded her seething anxiety and spurred her on in her nervous quest for some unique, exquisite pleasure, some apple into which she alone would bite. Her first lovers had not spoiled her. Three times she had believed herself to be in the grip of a grand passion. Love burst in her head like a Roman candle, the sparks from which did not reach as far as her heart. One month she was madly in love and showed herself with her lord and master all over Paris. Then, one morning, in the midst of her ostentatious show of affection, she felt an oppressive silence, an immense void. Her first lover, the young duc de Rozan, was little more than a quick snack in the sun. Renée, who had picked him out for his gentle manner and excellent attire, found him, once they were alone together, absolutely empty, colorless, and tiresome. Next came Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American embassy, who practically beat her and for that reason remained with her for more than a year. She then took on an aide-de-camp to the emperor, the comte de Chibray, a vain and handsome man whom she had begun to find oppressive when Duchess von Sternich took it into her head to fall for him and snatch him away. Renée of course then shed tears over him and led her friends to believe that her heart had been broken and that she was through with love. That was how she got to M. de Mussy, a person of no significance whatsoever, a young man who was making his way in the diplomatic corps by dint of his remarkable grace on the dance floor. Although she never knew exactly how she had given herself to him, she kept him for quite some time, gripped as she was by sloth, disgusted with this stranger about whom she had learned everything there was to know within an hour of their meeting, and unwilling to deal with the bother of making a change until some extraordinary adventure should present itself. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Boredom seemed all the more unbearable because her bourgeois virtues availed themselves of the hours of tedium to vex and annoy her. She shut her door and suffered from dreadful migraines. Yet when that door reopened, waves of silk and lace poured out of it in a rush, and no sign of worry or embarrassment disfigured the brow of this creature of luxury and pleasure.

Despite this banal socialite’s existence, Renée had had one romance in her life. She had gone out one day at dusk to visit her father, walking to his house because he did not like the sound of carriages at his door, and on her way back via the Quai Saint-Paul she noticed that she was being followed by a young man. It was hot; the day was dying with amorous softness. Used to being followed only by men on horseback on the bridle paths of the Bois, she found the adventure stimulating and was flattered by this new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very crudeness she found appealing. Rather than return directly home, she took the rue du Temple, leading her admirer along the boulevards. Emboldened, the man became so importunate, however, that Renée, rather taken aback, lost her head, turned down the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, and took refuge in her husband’s sister’s shop. The man followed her in. Mme Sidonie smiled, signaled her comprehension of the situation, and left the couple alone. When Renée made as if to follow her out of the room, the stranger called her back, spoke to her in a respectfully admiring way, and won her pardon. He was a clerk by the name of Georges, whose last name she never asked. She came to meet him twice, entering through the shop, while he used the entrance on rue Papillon. This chance love affair, which began with an encounter on the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame but also a singular smile of regret. Mme Sidonie’s profit from the adventure was to have become the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a role she had aspired to play from the day of the wedding.

Poor Mme Sidonie had suffered a setback. In brokering the marriage, she had hoped in a sense to marry Renée herself, to turn her into a client and reap from her a variety of rewards. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horses. So her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to get settled, she found Mme de Lauwerens already ensconced in their salon and realized that she had waited too long. Mme de Lauwerens, a beautiful woman of twenty-six, made it her business to launch newcomers to high society. She belonged to a very old family and was married to a man from the world of high finance, who had made the mistake of refusing to pay the bills submitted by his wife’s milliner and tailor. Highly intelligent, the lady minted whatever cash she needed and became her own keeper. Men horrified her, she said, yet she supplied all her lady friends with them. The apartment she occupied on the rue de Provence, above her husband’s offices, was always crowded with clients. It was an ideal setting for intimate little meals. Men and women could meet there in charming impromptu encounters. Where was the harm if a young woman went to visit her dear friend Mme de Lauwerens, and so what if some very respectable men from the best society chanced to arrive at her apartment at the same time? The mistress of the house looked lovely in her long lacy peignoirs. Many a visitor would have chosen her over any of the women in her collection of blondes and brunettes, but word had it that she was beyond reproach. That was the secret of her success. She maintained her position in society, enjoyed friendships with all the men, preserved her proud reputation as a respectable lady, and secretly enjoyed ruining the reputations of other women and profiting from their downfall. When Mme Sidonie had worked out the mechanism of this new system, she was mortified. It was the old school—a woman in a black dress carrying love notes in the bottom of her basket—versus the modern school—a great lady who sips tea while selling her friends in her own boudoir. The modern school won out. Mme de Lauwerens cast a cold eye on the threadbare clothing of Mme Sidonie, in whom she suspected a rival. And it was Mme de Lauwerens who saddled Renée with her first problem, the young duc de Rozan, for whom the financier’s beautiful wife had had a very hard time finding a match. The old school did not score a victory until later, when Mme Sidonie lent her sister-in-law her apartment so that she might indulge her whim with the strange man from the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained Renée’s confidante.

Among Mme Sidonie’s faithful allies, moreover, was Maxime. By the age of fifteen he was prowling around his aunt’s house, sniffing at gloves he found lying forgotten on the furniture. Although she detested any situation that was unambiguous and never admitted doing favors, eventually she agreed to lend him the keys to her apartment on certain days, saying that she would be off to the country overnight. Maxime had mentioned to her that there were friends he wished to entertain but did not dare bring to his father’s house. It was in his aunt’s apartment above the shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière that he had spent several nights with the poor girl who had had to be sent away to the country. Mme Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew and swooned at the sight of him, whispering sweetly in his ear that he was “as smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Meanwhile, Maxime had grown. He was now a slender, good-looking young man who still had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a child. His curly locks completed the “girlish look” that the ladies found so enchanting. He took after poor Angèle, with her gentle gaze and blond pallor. Yet he was even more worthless than that lazy, empty-headed woman. The Rougon blood ran thin in his veins and became tenuous and susceptible to vice. Born to a woman too young to be a mother, he was a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s capitulations and weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out. When Maxime went riding in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman and swaying slightly in the saddle to the rhythm of his horse’s canter, he was the god of the age, with his well-developed hips, his long, slender hands, his sickly, leering appearance, his punctilious elegance, and his music-hall slang. At twenty he considered himself beyond all possibility of surprise or disgust. He had certainly dreamt some unusually filthy dreams. Vice for him was not an abyss, as it is for some old men, but a natural and outward flowering. It lived in his wavy blond hair, smiled on his lips, cloaked him in its robes. What was most typical of him, however, were his eyes, two blue apertures, radiant and smiling, mirrors of vanity that could not hide the emptiness of the brain behind. Those harlot eyes were never lowered. They never tired in their search for pleasure, which they summoned forth and drank in.