At Parc Monceau it was a time of delirium and spectacular triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses. They had an army of servants, whom they dressed in dark blue livery with putty-colored breeches and black-and-yellow-striped waistcoats—rather severe colors that the financier chose in order to give himself a sober appearance, this being one of his fondest wishes. They displayed their luxury on the façade of their house and opened the curtains when they gave great dinners. The fresh breezes of contemporary life, which had rattled the doors of the second-floor flat on the rue de Rivoli, had by now reached the intensity of a genuine hurricane, which threatened to blow down the walls. Amid these princely apartments, along the gilded banisters, upon the thick wool carpets in this fantastic parvenu’s palace, the smell of Mabille lingered; hips were provocatively thrust about as in the fashionable quadrilles of the moment; and the whole era passed by with its mad and foolish laughter, its eternal hunger and eternal thirst. It was a dubious house of worldly pleasure, of impudent ecstasy that enlarged the windows the better to share the secrets of the alcoves with passersby. Here, husband and wife lived lives free of restraint before the eyes of their servants. They divided up the house and camped out in it, appearing to be not in their own home but as if cast ashore at the end of a tumultuous and dizzying voyage, living in a regal hotel, rushing out without even taking the time to unpack their bags so as to savor the pleasures of a new city as quickly as possible. They lodged there by the night, staying home in the evening only when there was a banquet and otherwise perpetually caught up in the whirlwind round of Parisian society, occasionally returning home for an hour as a traveler might return to a room in an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more anxious there, more nervous. Her silk skirts glided with a snakelike hiss over the thick carpets and along the satin upholstery of the love seats. She was irritated by the stupid gilding all around her, by the high, empty ceilings beneath which nothing remained after a festive evening except the laughter of the young fools and the sententious pronouncements of the old scoundrels. To fill this sumptuous space, to inhabit these radiant premises, she would have liked to find some supreme amusement, for which she avidly searched high and low throughout the mansion, from the small sun-colored salon to the conservatory with its thick vegetation, but to no avail. Saccard, meanwhile, realized his dream: he played host to the world of high finance, to MM Toutin-Laroche and de Lauwerens; he also received leading politicians such as Baron Gouraud and Haffner, the deputy; even his brother the minister had been kind enough to come two or three times to shore up Saccard’s situation with his presence. Like his wife, however, Saccard suffered from nervous anxieties, from a restlessness that made his laughter sound oddly like breaking glass. He became so frenetic and skittish that acquaintances said, “That devil Saccard is making too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he was decorated after doing the prefect a mysterious favor that involved acting as a front for a certain lady in a transaction related to land.

It was at about the time they moved to Parc Monceau that an apparition entered Renée’s life, leaving an indelible impression. The minister had previously resisted the pleas of his sister-in-law, who was enviously longing to be invited to the court balls. Believing that his brother’s fortune was at last assured, he finally gave in. Renée did not sleep for a month thinking about it. When the great night arrived, she sat trembling in the carriage that took her to the Tuileries.

She wore an outfit of prodigious grace and originality, a real find that had come to her in a bout of insomnia and had been put together by three of Worms’s employees, who came to her home to do their work under her supervision. It was a simple gown of white gauze, but trimmed with a multitude of little flounces scalloped out and edged with black velvet. The black velvet tunic featured a square neckline cut very low and framed by narrow lace, barely the width of a finger. Not one flower or piece of ribbon. On her wrists she wore bracelets without engraving, and on her head a thin diadem of gold, a plain circlet that fitted her like a halo.

When she reached the reception rooms and her husband deserted her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a moment of embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she could see that she looked lovely, quickly reassured her, and she was just getting used to the hot air, the murmur of voices, the crush of black evening dress and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who wheezed as if suffering from a problem of digestion. The shoulders aligned themselves in two rows, while the black tailcoats instinctively and discreetly fell back a step. Renée found herself shoved to the end of the line of shoulders, near the second door, toward which the Emperor was moving with a laborious, faltering step. She thus saw him come toward her from one door to the other.

He was wearing a tailcoat with the red sash of the Grand Cordon. ¹¹ Renée, once more in the grip of emotion, had difficulty seeing clearly, and to her this bloody stain seemed to splatter the prince’s entire chest. She found him small, with legs that were too short and jiggling flesh around his waist. But she was charmed and thought him handsome, with his pale face, and heavy, leaden lids that drooped over lifeless eyes. Underneath his mustache his mouth opened languidly, while the boniness of his nose was the only feature that stood out from his puffy face.

Appearing to support each other, the Emperor and the elderly general continued to move forward in a lethargic manner, taking short steps and smiling vaguely. They looked to the right and to the left, and as they did their gazes slipped into the bodices of the bowing ladies. The general leaned over and said something to the sovereign, giving his arm a comradely squeeze. And the Emperor, listless and impenetrable, even more vapid than usual, drew nearer and nearer in his dawdling way.

They had reached the middle of the reception room when Renée felt their eyes upon her. The general stared at her in astonishment, while the Emperor, raising his lids slightly, revealed a predatory gleam in the otherwise hesitant gray of his bleary gaze. Renée, taken aback, looked down and bowed until she could see nothing but the rose pattern in the carpet. But she followed their shadows and realized that they had paused for several seconds in front of her. And she thought she heard the Emperor, that lascivious dreamer, murmur as he gazed at her tightly wrapped in her skirt of muslin striped with velvet, “Now there, general, is a flower worth picking, a mysterious pink carnation with white and black streaks.”

To which the general replied in a more brutal tone, “Sire, that carnation there would look damned good in our buttonholes!”

Renée raised her head. The apparition had disappeared, and a throng was clogging the doorway. Since that evening, she had been back to the Tuileries many times and had even had the honor of being complimented out loud by His Majesty and becoming something of a friend of his. But she always remembered the sovereign’s slow, ponderous march through the reception room, between the two rows of shoulders. And as her husband’s fortune grew, whenever she experienced some new joy, she recalled the image of the Emperor towering over the bowed bosoms, coming toward her, and comparing her to a carnation, which the old general advised him to put in his buttonhole. This was the high point of her life.

4

The clear, burning desire that had risen in Renée’s heart as she breathed in the unsettling fragrances of the conservatory while Maxime and Louise laughed on a love seat in the little buttercup salon seemed to vanish like a nightmare, leaving behind only a vague shudder. The bitter taste of tanghin had lingered on the young woman’s lips throughout the night. The infernal leaf caused a burning sensation that made her feel as though a mouth of flame had pressed itself to hers, breathing into her a devouring love. Then that mouth fled from her, and great waves of darkness rolled over her, drowning her dream.