When his wife handed him the note and asked him to take care of everything, he took it but continued to stare at her.

“You are ravishingly beautiful,” he murmured.

And as she bent forward to push the table away, he kissed her roughly on the neck. She uttered a little cry. Then she got up, shaking, attempting to laugh, and thinking invincibly of the other man’s kisses of the night before. Saccard, meanwhile, regretted having kissed her like a coachman. In leaving he gave her hand a friendly squeeze and promised that he would have 50,000 francs for her that night.

Renée slept all day in front of the fire. In critical moments she could be as listless as a Creole. All her restless energy turned to laziness, nervous agitation, and numbness. She shivered, she needed a roaring fire, a suffocating heat that raised little drops of sweat on her forehead and made her drowsy. In this scorching climate, this bath of flames, her suffering almost ended. Her pain became a weightless dream, a vague sense of oppression, whose very ambiguity ultimately came to seem voluptuous. In this way, until evening arrived, she assuaged her remorse of the night before in the red glow of the fireplace, before a raging fire that caused the furniture around her to crack and at times left her unconscious of her existence. She was able to think of Maxime as of a searing ecstasy whose rays scorched her. She had a nightmare of strange loves atop flaming pyres, on white-hot beds. Céleste came and went, wearing the calm face of a servant with ice water in her veins. She had orders to admit no one. She even turned away “the Inseparables,” Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, who stopped by on their way back from lunch in a country house they had rented together in Saint-Germain. Toward evening, however, when Céleste came to inform her mistress that Monsieur’s sister Mme Sidonie wished to see her, she received orders to show the lady in.

Mme Sidonie generally came only at night. Her brother had nevertheless prevailed upon her to wear silk dresses. Yet even when the silk she wore came straight from the store, it somehow never appeared to be new. It seemed crumpled and without luster and looked like a rag. She had also agreed not to bring her basket to the Saccard household, but as a result her pockets were crammed with papers. She took an interest in Renée, whom she had never been able to turn into a client with a realistic appreciation of life’s exigencies. She visited her regularly and smiled at her with the discreet smile of a physician who does not wish to frighten his patient by revealing the name of her illness. She commiserated with the younger woman in her minor misfortunes, as if they were aches and pains that could be cured at once if only Renée would give her consent. Renée, who was in one of those states in which a person needs to be pitied, received her sister-in-law only to say that she was suffering from an unbearable headache.

“Why, it’s stifling in here, my beauty!” Mme Sidonie murmured as she slipped into the dark room. “Is it your neuralgia again? It comes from worry. You take things too much to heart.”

“Yes, I have lots of worries,” Renée answered listlessly.

It was getting dark. Renée had asked Céleste not to light a lamp. The only light was the bright red glow from the fireplace, which illuminated her entire body as she lay stretched out in her white dressing gown, its lace tinged pink by the fire. At the edge of the shadow one could make out just a bit of Mme Sidonie’s black dress and her two hands, folded and covered with gray cotton gloves. Her tender voice emerged from the darkness.

“Money troubles again!” she said, as if she were speaking of troubles of the heart, in a tone full of sweetness and pity.

Renée lowered her eyelids and nodded.

“Ah! If only my brothers listened to me, we’d all be rich. But they shrug their shoulders whenever I bring up that debt of three billion francs, you know. . . . My hopes are nevertheless still high. For the past ten years I’ve longed to go to England. I have so little time for myself ! . . . I finally made up my mind to write to London, and I’m waiting for a response.”

When Renée smiled, Mme Sidonie went on: “I know, you don’t believe me either. But you’ll be happy enough if I make you a gift one of these days of a nice round million. . . . You know, the story is quite simple: a banker from Paris lent the money to the son of the king of England, and since the banker died without a legitimate heir, the government is now entitled to demand repayment of the debt with compound interest. I’ve done the calculation, and it comes to 2,943,210,000 francs. . . . Rest assured, it will come, it will come.”

“In the meantime,” Renée put in with a touch of irony in her voice, “you might get someone to lend me 100,000 francs so that I could pay my tailor, who’s been giving me a hard time.”

“A hundred thousand francs can be found,” Mme Sidonie replied evenly. “It’s simply a matter of paying the price.”

The fireplace glowed. Renée, more languid than ever, stretched out her legs and revealed the tips of her slippers at the bottom of her dressing gown. The businesswoman’s tone reverted to pity.

“Poor dear, you’re really not reasonable. . . . I know many women, but I’ve never seen one who takes as little care of her health. You know, that Michelin girl is one who knows how to manage! I can’t help thinking of you when I see her happy and doing so well. . . . Do you know that M. de Saffré is madly in love with her and has already given her gifts worth almost 10,000 francs? . . . I believe her dream is to have a house in the country.”

Growing animated, she fumbled in her pocket.

“I have here a letter from an unfortunate young woman. . . . If we had a little light, I’d let you read it. . . . You see, her husband doesn’t take care of her. She was forced to borrow from a man I know and signed some IOUs. I was the one who had to pry the notes from the sheriff ’s clutches, and it took some doing. . . . Do you think those poor children were naughty? I welcome them in my home as if they were my son and daughter.”

“You know someone who lends money?” Renée asked casually.

“I know ten people who do. . . . You’re too good. Between women, we can speak frankly, no? Just because your husband is my brother is no reason to excuse him for running after tramps and leaving a lovely woman like you moldering by the fire. . . . This Laure d’Aurigny costs him a king’s ransom. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he refused you the money. He did refuse it to you, didn’t he? . . . The wretch!”

Renée listened complacently to this soft voice, which emerged from the shadows like a still-vague echo of her own dreams. Her eyes half-closed, she was practically lying down in her armchair and had forgotten that Mme Sidonie was there. She fancied she had dreamed of evil thoughts coming to her and tempting her with gentle blandishments. The businesswoman spoke at length, like a monotonous flow of lukewarm water.

“It’s Mme de Lauwerens who ruined your life. You’ve never wanted to believe me. You wouldn’t be there crying by your fireplace if you’d been willing to trust me. . . . And I love you as I love my own eyes, my pretty. Your foot is ravishing. You’re going to laugh at me, but I have to tell you how mad I am about you: if I go three days without seeing you, I absolutely must come to pay my respects. Yes, I feel I’m missing something. I need to feast my eyes on your beautiful hair, your face so white and delicate, your slender waist. . . . Really, I’ve never seen another woman with a figure like yours.”

In the end Renée smiled. Not even her lovers displayed such warmth, such rapt ecstasy, when they spoke to her of her beauty. Mme Sidonie saw that smile.

“All right, then, it’s agreed,” she said, rising abruptly from her seat. “I rattle on and on and forget that I’m giving you a headache. . . . You’ll come tomorrow, won’t you? We’ll talk money and find you a lender. . . . Hear me, now: I want you to be happy.”