“Your father will be with us,” she shouted after him just as he rejoined Renée.
His stepmother found herself surrounded by a group of women who were laughing quite loudly, while M. de Saffré had availed himself of the place left free by Maxime to slide in alongside her and lavish her with crude compliments. Then he and the women all began to shout and slap their thighs, to the point where Renée, deafened by the noise and by now yawning herself, got up and said to her companion, “Let’s go! They’re too idiotic.”
As they were leaving, M. de Mussy came in. He seemed delighted to run into Maxime, and, paying no attention to the masked woman with him, murmured with a lovesick air, “Ah, my friend, she’s killing me. I know she’s feeling better, but her door remains closed to me. Tell her that you’ve seen me with tears in my eyes.”
“Don’t worry, your message will be delivered,” the young man replied with a strange laugh.
On the stairs he asked, “So, step-mama, did the poor boy touch your heartstrings?”
She shrugged but gave no answer. Downstairs, on the sidewalk, she paused a moment before climbing into the cab, which had waited for them, looking hesitantly first toward the Madeleine and then toward the boulevard des Italiens. It was barely eleven-thirty, and the boulevard was still quite animated.
“So, we’re going home,” she murmured wistfully.
“Unless you’d like to drive along the boulevards for a while,” Maxime replied.
She agreed. The evening, intended to be a feast to feed a woman’s curiosity, was not going as planned, and she hated the idea of returning home shorn of one more illusion and with a migraine coming on. It had long been a fantasy of hers that an actress’s ball had to be the most amusing thing in the world. As sometimes happens in the final days of October, spring seemed to have returned. The night was as warm as an evening in May, and the occasional chill breeze only added to the gaiety in the air. Renée, lying with her head against the carriage door, remained silent, staring at the crowd, the cafés, and the restaurants, which stretched out before her in an endless line. She had become quite serious, absorbed in a typical woman’s daydream filled with vague longings. The dresses of the prostitutes swept over the wide sidewalk, and the men’s boots struck the pavement with distinct familiarity; easy pleasures and facile loves seemed to gallop along the gray asphalt. And that sidewalk, that asphalt, awakened dormant desires in her, made her forget the idiotic ball she had just left and allowed her to glimpse other, more savory enjoyments. In the windows of the private rooms at Brébant’s she saw women silhouetted against the whiteness of the curtains. Maxime told her a very naughty story about a deceived husband who had caught the silhouette of his wife on a curtain in the act of making love to the silhouette of a man. She was barely listening. He cheered up, however, and after a while took her hands and teased her by talking about poor M. de Mussy.
On the way back they again passed by Brébant’s. “Did you know,” she asked suddenly, “that M. de Saffré invited me to supper tonight?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have eaten very well,” he replied, laughing. “Saffré hasn’t the slightest culinary imagination. He hasn’t gotten beyond lobster salad.”
“No, no, he was talking about oysters and cold partridge. . . . But he used tu with me, and that bothered me.”
She fell silent, stared once more at the boulevard, and then, after an interval, added with a distraught look, “The worst of it is that I’m terribly hungry.”
“You’re hungry, you say?” the young man exclaimed. “Why, the solution’s quite simple. We’ll have supper together. . . . Would you like to?”
He said this in an even tone, but at first she refused, claiming that Céleste had prepared a snack for her at home. Meanwhile, Maxime, not wanting to go to the Café Anglais, had ordered the carriage to stop at the corner of rue le Peletier, in front of the Café Riche. He had even climbed down from the cab, and as his stepmother still couldn’t make up her mind, he added, “Afterwards, if you’re afraid I’m compromising you, just tell me. I’ll climb up beside the coachman and take you back to your husband.”
She smiled and climbed down from the cab with the look of a bird afraid to wet its feet. She was radiant. The sidewalk she felt beneath her feet warmed her heels and sent a delicious shiver of fear through her skin, a sense that her wish had been fulfilled. As long as the cab had been moving, she had experienced a mad desire to jump out. She crossed the pavement furtively, with short steps, as though the fear of being seen heightened her pleasure. Her escapade was definitely turning into an adventure. Of course she had no regrets about having refused M. de Saffré’s uncouth invitation. But she would have returned home in a terrible mood if Maxime hadn’t had the idea of taking her to taste the forbidden fruit. The young man climbed the stairs eagerly, as if he felt at home. She followed him, somewhat out of breath. A faint aroma of the sea and of wild game hung in the air, and the carpet, held fast against the stairs by brass rods, smelled of dust, which only heightened her emotion.
As they reached the landing, they encountered a dignified-looking waiter who pressed himself against the wall to allow them to pass.
“Charles,” said Maxime, “you’ll serve us, won’t you? . . . Give us the white room.”
Charles bowed, climbed back up a few steps, and opened the door of a private room. The gas was turned low, and to Renée the dimly lit room she was about to enter seemed as louche as it was charming.
A constant rumble of traffic could be heard through the wide-open window, and the play of light from the café below projected onto the ceiling shadows of pedestrians hurrying past. With a quick twist of the wrist, however, the waiter turned up the light from the gas jet. The shadows on the ceiling disappeared, and a harsh light filled the room, illuminating the young woman’s face. She had already pulled back her hood. Her little curls had been mussed a bit in the cab, but the blue ribbon had not budged. She began to move about, embarrassed by the way that Charles was looking at her. He blinked and squinted to get a better look at her in a way that clearly said, “Now here’s one I’ve never seen before.”
“What shall I serve you, sir?” he asked in a loud voice.
Maxime turned toward Renée.
“How about M. de Saffré’s supper?” he said. “Oysters, a partridge—”
And, seeing the young man smile, Charles imitated him discreetly. “In that case,” he murmured, “would you like the Wednesday supper?”
“The Wednesday supper … ,” Maxime repeated.
Then, remembering, he said, “Yes, it’s all the same to me. Give us the Wednesday supper.”
When the waiter left, Renée took out her spectacles and carefully inspected the small room. It was a square room, done in white and gold, and furnished with the affectations of a boudoir. In addition to the table and chairs, there was a low serving table and a large divan, a veritable bed, set between the fireplace and the window. A Louis XVI clock and twin candelabra graced the white marble mantelpiece. But the centerpiece of the room was the mirror, a handsome elongated looking-glass on which the ladies who came to this place had scrawled with their diamonds, leaving it covered with names, dates, lines of doggerel, prodigious thoughts, and astounding confessions. Renée fancied she saw something obscene but lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, felt embarrassed again, and, working hard to maintain her composure, looked up at the ceiling and the gilded brass chandelier with its five gaslights. There was something very pleasurable about her discomfort, however. While tilting her head upward as if to study the cornice, looking grave and holding her spectacles in her hand, she took deep pleasure in the equivocal furniture she sensed around her: the clear, cynical mirror, whose purity, barely touched by all that obscene fly-spotting, had facilitated the adjustment of so many false chignons; the divan, whose width shocked her; the table and even the carpet, which gave off the same smell she had detected on the stairs, a vague, penetrating, and somehow religious smell of dust.