The wind that constantly rattled the doors of the apartment on the rue de Rivoli grew stronger as Maxime grew older, Saccard expanded the scope of his operations, and Renée searched ever more feverishly for unfamiliar pleasures. The lives these three people led were in the end astonishingly wild and free. Such was the fruit that the epoch ultimately produced in abundance. The street invaded the apartment with its rumble of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its unbridled speech. The father, the stepmother, and the stepson acted and spoke and made themselves at home as if each were alone, living the bachelor life. Three friends, three classmates sharing the same furnished room, could not have been less inhibited about their vices, their loves, and their boisterous adolescent pleasures. They greeted one another with handshakes, gave no hint of any doubts about why they were living under the same roof, and treated one another in a cavalier, carefree manner, thereby asserting their absolute independence. They banished the idea of family in favor of a kind of partnership, with each claiming an equal share of the profits. To each partner went a quota of pleasure to be consumed, it was tacitly understood, as he or she saw fit. Ultimately they gratified themselves in one another’s presence, making a parade of their pleasures, recounting them to one another without provoking anything but a bit of envy or curiosity, nothing more.

Maxime now became Renée’s teacher. When he went to the Bois with her, he amused her greatly with his stories about the whores. Whenever a new one turned up at lakeside, he set out at once to find out who her lover was, how much he paid her per month, and how she lived. He knew the interiors of these ladies’ apartments as well as intimate details of their lives and was nothing less than a walking catalog listing all the prostitutes of Paris, with complete descriptions of each and every one. This scandal sheet delighted Renée. On race days at Longchamp, she would listen avidly to all his stories as they drove past the racetrack in her calèche, yet she always maintained the hauteur of the true socialite. She liked to hear, for instance, how Blanche Muller was deceiving her embassy attaché with her hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his undershorts in the alcove of a skinny, redheaded celebrity who went by the name “Crayfish.” Each day yielded its quota of gossip. When the story was too coarse for a lady’s ears, Maxime lowered his voice but told all. Renée opened her eyes wide like a child listening to a good joke and restrained her laughter until she was obliged to stifle it with an embroidered handkerchief pressed delicately to her lips.

Maxime also brought her photographs of these ladies. His pockets and even his cigar case were always filled with portraits of actresses. Sometimes he emptied them out and put the ladies’ pictures in the album left lying about the drawing room, which already contained portraits of Renée’s friends. It also contained pictures of men such as MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, and de Mussy, along with actors, writers, and deputies who had somehow or other found their way into Maxime’s collection. It was a singularly mixed society, a faithful reflection of the motley assortment of ideas and people that came Renée and Maxime’s way. Whenever it rained, or they felt bored, this album served as a great conversation piece. Somehow it always seemed close at hand. Stifling a yawn, Renée would open it for perhaps the hundredth time. Then her curiosity would reawaken, Maxime would come and lean behind her, and they would fall into lengthy discussions about Crayfish’s hair, Frau von Meinhold’s double chin, Mme de Lauwerens’s eyes, Blanche Muller’s bosom, the marquise’s slightly crooked nose, or little Sylvia’s mouth with its notoriously thick lips. They compared one woman with another.

“If I were a man,” Renée would say, “I’d choose Adeline.”

“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” Maxime would answer. “She’s so funny! . . . I prefer Sylvia.”

As the pages turned, an image of the duc de Rozan might pop up, or Mr. Simpson, or the comte de Chibray, and Maxime would add in a mocking tone, “In any case, your taste is perverted, as everyone knows. . . . Can you imagine anything stupider than the faces of these gentlemen? Rozan and Chibray look like Gustave, my barber.”

Renée shrugged as if to say that sarcasm like Maxime’s left her cold. She remained absorbed in the spectacle of faces, whether pallid, cheerful, or cross. She lingered longest over the portraits of the prostitutes, carefully scrutinizing the photographs for precise, microscopic details, for tiny wrinkles and hairs. One day she even called for a servant to bring her a magnifying glass after she thought she spotted a hair on Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the lens did reveal a thin golden filament, which had fallen from an eyebrow onto the middle of the nose. This hair amused the two of them for quite some time. For the next week, all the ladies who came to visit were obliged to verify its presence in the photograph for themselves. From then on the magnifying glass was put to regular use in scrutinizing the women’s faces. Renée made some astonishing discoveries. She found unsuspected wrinkles, rough skin, and pockmarks imperfectly concealed by rice powder. In the end Maxime hid the magnifying glass, on the grounds that it was not right to use such an instrument to make the human face look disgusting. The truth was that Renée had subjected Sylvia’s thick lips to excessively close scrutiny, Sylvia being a person for whom Maxime felt a special affection. He and Renée invented a new game. They asked the question, “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and then turned to the album for answers. This yielded some quite delightful couples. Renée spent any number of evenings playing this game with her friends and found herself married off in succession to the archbishop of Paris, Baron Gouraud, M. de Chibray, which made her laugh, and even her own husband, which depressed her. As for Maxime, whether by chance or as a result of Renée’s mischievous intervention, he always ended up with the marquise. But the laughs were never louder than when fate coupled two men or two women.

So close was the camaraderie between Renée and Maxime that she even told him about her heartaches. He consoled her and offered his advice. His father seemed not to exist. Eventually they even exchanged confidences about their younger years. During their drives in the Bois especially they felt a vague languor, a need to tell each other things that are difficult to say and usually left unspoken. The relish that children feel when speaking in low voices about forbidden subjects, the attraction that draws a young man and a young woman together into sin, albeit in word only, kept bringing them back to salacious subjects. This gave them deep pleasure, for which they did not reproach each other—a pleasure that each savored while reclining listlessly in a corner of their carriage, like old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. Eventually they boasted to each other of their debaucheries, like braggarts. Renée confessed that the little girls in her school were very naughty. Maxime outdid her and dared to recount some of the shameful things that went on at his school in Plassans.

“Ah!” Renée whispered. “I can’t tell . . .”

Then she leaned close to his ear, as if the only thing that would have made her blush was the sound of her own voice, and confided to him one of those convent stories that are often heard in lewd songs. He himself had too rich a collection of anecdotes of this sort to hold anything back. He warbled any number of very coarse verses in her ear. Little by little they entered their own peculiar state of beatitude, gently stimulated by the many carnal thoughts they stirred up and titillated by unavowed desires. The carriage drove quietly on, and they returned home pleasantly fatigued, more tired than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned, like two boys who, while strolling together in the country without their mistresses, make do with mutual recollections.