In the morning she slept a little. When she woke up, she felt sick. She ordered the curtains drawn, spoke to her doctor of nausea and a headache, and for two days absolutely refused to go out. Since she was pretending to be under siege, moreover, she closed her door to all visitors. Maxime came and knocked, but to no avail. In order to be free to use his apartment as he pleased, he had stopped sleeping at home. Indeed, he led the most nomadic life imaginable, taking up residence in new houses his father had built, choosing whatever floor he liked, and moving monthly from one place to another, often on a whim but sometimes to make room for paying tenants. He would move in with a mistress before the paint had dried. Accustomed to his stepmother’s caprices, he feigned great compassion and went up to her room four times a day to put on a long face and ask how she was, just to tease her. On the third day he found her in the small salon, in the pink, smiling, looking calm and rested.
“So, did you have a good time with Céleste?” he asked, alluding to the long tête-à-tête that she’d just had with her chambermaid.
“Yes,” she replied, “the girl is precious. Her hands are always ice cold. She put them on my brow and calmed my poor head a bit.”
“So she’s medicine!” the young man exclaimed. “If ever I suffer the misfortune of falling in love, you’ll lend her to me, won’t you? So that she can lay both of her hands on my heart?”
They exchanged pleasantries and went for their usual drive in the Bois. Two weeks passed. Renée threw herself more madly than ever into the round of visits and balls that was her life. She had apparently changed her mind once again and no longer complained of weariness and disgust. Yet she seemed to have suffered some secret fall, and though she did not speak of it, she revealed what she was going through by exhibiting a more pronounced contempt for herself and a more reckless depravity in her lady-about-town whims. One night she confessed to Maxime that she was dying to go to a ball that Blanche Muller, a fashionable actress, was giving for the princesses of the foot-lights and the queens of the demimonde. This confession surprised and embarrassed the young man, though he had no great scruples about such things. He tried to catechize his stepmother: she really didn’t belong there, and in any case she wouldn’t see anything very amusing. Besides which, if she were recognized, it would cause a scandal. In reply to all these excellent arguments she clasped her hands and smilingly pleaded, “Please, Maxime, darling, be nice. I want to go. . . . I’ll wear a dark blue domino, and we’ll just walk through the rooms.”
When Maxime, who always gave in eventually and would gladly have taken his stepmother to every disreputable place in Paris had she asked, agreed to accompany her to Blanche Muller’s ball, she clapped her hands like a child who has been granted an unexpected break from school.
“You’re a dear!” she exclaimed. “It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Come for me early. I want to see those women make their entrances. You’ll tell me who they are, and we’ll have a grand old time.”
She thought for a moment, then added, “No, don’t come for me. Wait for me in a cab on the boulevard Malesherbes. I’ll go out through the garden.”
This mysterious proposal was just a way of adding spice to the escapade, a simple refinement of her pleasure, since she could have walked out the front door at midnight and her husband wouldn’t even have poked his head out the window.
The next night, after telling Céleste to wait up for her, Renée, quivering with exquisite fear, made her way through the dark shadows of the Parc Monceau. Saccard had taken advantage of his connections at city hall to obtain a key to one of the park’s side gates, and Renée had asked to have one of them for herself. She nearly lost her way and only found the cab thanks to its two yellow eyes—the headlights. In those days the just-completed boulevard Malesherbes was still quite deserted at night. The young woman slipped into the carriage in a highly emotional state, her heart beating wildly as though she had just returned from a rendezvous with a lover. Maxime, half asleep in a corner of the cab, smoked philosophically. He tried to toss his cigar away, but she stopped him, and as she reached out to grab his arm in the darkness, her hand came right up against his face, to the great amusement of both.
“I tell you I like the smell of tobacco!” she exclaimed. “Keep your cigar. . . . Besides, we’re going to have a fling tonight. . . . I’m a man, see.”
The boulevard was not yet illuminated. As the cab proceeded toward the Madeleine, it was so dark in the carriage that they could not see. Each time the young man lifted the cigar to his lips, a spot of red pierced the thick darkness. That red spot drew Renée’s attention. Maxime, half covered by the flowing black satin domino1 that filled the cab’s interior, continued to smoke in bored silence. The truth was that his stepmother’s whim was preventing him from joining a group of women who planned to meet at the Café Anglais before Blanche Muller’s ball and return there afterward. He was grumpy, and Renée sensed his sulk through the gloom.
“Are you under the weather?” she asked.
“No, I’m cold,” he answered.
“Well, I’m on fire. It’s stifling in here. . . . Drape my skirt over your knees.”
“Oh, your skirts!” he muttered with annoyance. “I’m up to my eyes in your skirts.”
But this sally made him laugh, and little by little he grew more animated. She told him about the fear she had felt just now in crossing the Parc Monceau. Then she confessed another of her desires: some night she hoped to go rowing on the little lake in the park in the boat she could see from her window, which had been left lying next to one of the paths. He thought she was getting rather sentimental. The cab rolled on, the gloom remained thick, and the two passengers leaned toward each other in order to hear better over the sound of the wheels, so that occasionally, when they got too close, their hands touched and they could feel each other’s warm breath. At regular intervals, Maxime’s cigar would flare up again, tinting the shadows red and casting a pale pink light on Renée’s face. She looked lovely in that fleeting glimmer, so lovely that the young man was struck by it.
“Oh, my, we’re looking very pretty tonight, step-mama! . . . Let’s see a little.”
He brought his cigar close to her and quickly drew a few puffs. Renée, in her corner, was bathed in a warm and strangely pulsating light. She had raised her hood a little. Her bare head, covered by cascades of little curls and adorned with a simple blue ribbon, looked like the head of a true gamin, and below she wore a big black satin blouse buttoned up to her neck. She found it quite amusing to be examined and admired by the light of a cigar. She threw her head back and laughed quietly, while Maxime added with an air of comic gravity, “Damned if I won’t have to keep an eye on you if I want to bring you back to my father safe and sound.”
Meanwhile, the cab rounded the Madeleine and proceeded down one of the boulevards. Dancing light from blazing store windows now filled its interior. Blanche Muller lived nearby in one of the new houses built after the rue Basse-du-Rempart was filled in and brought up to grade. There were still only a few carriages at the door. It was just past ten. Maxime wanted to tour the boulevards for an hour before going in, but Renée, her curiosity aroused, told him flatly that she would go up herself if he didn’t go with her. He followed her and was pleased to find a bigger crowd than he had expected. The young woman had covered her face with a mask. She went about on Maxime’s arm, whispering peremptory orders that he docilely obeyed, and thereby managed to poke her nose into all the rooms, lift the edges of door-curtains, and examine the furniture, and she would have rummaged in the drawers as well had she not been afraid of being seen. The apartment, though quite sumptuous, had corners suggestive of a bohemian existence, reminders that the occupant had once acted in music halls. It was chiefly in these corners that Renée’s pink nostrils quivered, and she forced her companion to walk slowly so as to miss nothing and savor the smell. She was particularly fascinated by the dressing room, which the hostess had left wide open, for when Blanche Muller entertained, she allowed her guests access to everything, even her alcove, where the bed had been pushed aside to make room for gaming tables. The dressing room did not satisfy Renée, however. To her eye it seemed common and even a little dirty, with its carpet in which the butts of cigarettes had burned little round holes and its blue silk wall hangings stained with pomade and splattered with soap. Once she completed her careful inspection of the premises, every last detail of which she stored away in memory to describe later to her intimate friends, she turned her attention to the people. The men she already knew. They were mostly the same financiers, politicians, and young men about town who attended her “Thursdays.” At times, as she stood facing groups of smiling men in black suits, she could imagine that she was in her own drawing room, where only the night before the same men had stood with the same smiles talking to the marquise d’Espanet or blonde Mme Haffner. And when she looked at the women, the illusion was not completely dispelled. Laure d’Aurigny wore yellow, just as Suzanne Haffner had done, and Blanche Muller had on a white dress cut to the middle of her back like Adeline d’Espanet’s. After a while Maxime begged for mercy, and Renée was quite willing to sit with him on a love seat. They sat there for a while, the young man yawning, the young woman asking for the names of the ladies who passed before them, undressing them with her eyes, counting the yards of lace they had wrapped around their skirts. When he realized that she was deeply absorbed in these studies, he seized the opportunity to escape in obedience to a wave from Laure d’Aurigny, who teased him about the woman he had on his arm. Then she made him promise to join her party at around one o’clock at the Café Anglais.