“No doubt about it, she’s getting old,” he thought. “She’s got a year or two more of fun in her at most.”
The truth was that she suffered cruelly. Now she wished she had betrayed Maxime with M. de Saffré. At Mme Sidonie’s she had recoiled in horror, she had given in to her instinctive pride, her disgust at the sordid bargain that had been proposed to her. In subsequent days, however, as she endured the anguish of adultery, she collapsed within and felt so contemptible that she would have given herself to the first man who had walked through the door from the room with the pianos. Previously, thoughts of her husband in the midst of incest had triggered shudders of voluptuous horror, but now her husband—the man himself—had thrust himself on her with a brutality that turned her most delicate feelings into intolerable tortures. She, who had taken delight in the refinements of sin and liked to dream of a heroic paradise in which the gods made love with their own kind, now found herself mired in vulgar debauchery, shared by two men. She tried to take pleasure in her infamy, but in vain. Her lips were still warm from Saccard’s kisses when she offered them to Maxime. The depths of forbidden love fascinated her. She even combined the two loves, seeking the son in the father’s embraces. Yet from this journey into the unknown realm of evil, from this ardent darkness in which her two lovers melded into one, she emerged more frightened and bruised than ever, plagued by terrors that were like the death rattle of her pleasures.
She kept this drama to herself, her suffering redoubled by the fevers of her imagination. She would rather have died than confess the truth to Maxime. Inwardly she feared that the young man might rebel and leave her. Above all, she had such an absolute belief in the monstrousness of her sin and the prospect of eternal damnation that she would have crossed the Parc Monceau naked sooner than confess her shame in a whisper. Yet all the while she remained the madcap whose extravagance astonished Paris. She fell into the grip of a nervous gaiety, and the newspapers, designating her by her initials, spoke of her astounding caprices. It was during this period that she seriously proposed a duel, with pistols, with Duchess von Sternich, who she claimed had deliberately spilled a glass of punch on her dress. It took the ire of her brother-in-law the minister to put an end to this idea. On another occasion she bet Mme de Lauwerens that she could run a lap around Longchamp in less than ten minutes, and she would have done so had her costume allowed. Even Maxime began to be frightened by Renée’s increasingly insane behavior, and when he stared at her head on the pillow at night, it seemed to him filled with the crazed fury of a city bent on pleasure.
One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. 6 They had not even looked at the poster and went only because they wanted to see the great Italian tragedienne Ristori,7 who was drawing large crowds, so that fashion dictated they must see her. The play was Phèdre.8 Maxime remembered the classical repertory fairly well, and Renée knew enough Italian to follow the performance. And indeed, they responded to the drama with particular emotion, even though it was performed in a foreign tongue whose sonorities struck them at times as a mere orchestral accompaniment to the actors’ pantomime. Hippolyte was played by a tall, pale youth, a mediocre actor who wept his part.
“What a simpleton!” Maxime murmured.
But Ristori, whose broad shoulders shook with sobs and who had a tragic face and plump arms, moved Renée profoundly. Phèdre was of the blood of Pasiphaé, and Renée asked herself whose blood might flow in her veins as an incestuous stepmother of modern times. She saw nothing of the play but this tall woman trailing the ancient crime with her across the stage. In the first act, when Phèdre confesses her guilty love to Œnone; in the second, when, burning with ardor, she declares her love to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when she is crushed by the return of Thésée and curses herself in an access of dark fury; the actress filled the hall with such cries of wild passion and superhuman sensual need that the young woman felt every shudder of her desire and remorse in her own flesh.
“Wait,” Maxime whispered in her ear. “Now you’ll hear Théramène tell his story. The old fool!” And in a hollow voice he whispered:
Scarcely had we issued from Troezen’s gates, He on his chariot mounted . . .
But Renée was no longer watching or listening when the old man spoke. She found the light blinding and the heat from all those faces staring at the stage stifling. The monologue went on interminably. She was in the conservatory, beneath its ardent foliage, and she dreamt that her husband came in and surprised her in the arms of his son. She was suffering dreadfully and had lost consciousness when a repentant Phèdre, in convulsions from the poison, made her open her eyes again with her final agony. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself someday? How paltry and shameful her drama seemed alongside the ancient epic! And while Maxime fastened her evening wrap underneath her chin, she could still hear Ristori’s gruff voice growling behind her and Œnone’s indulgent murmur in reply.
In the coupé the young man prattled on all by himself, saying that on the whole he found tragedy “deadly” and preferred the plays at the Bouffes.9 Still, Phèdre was “pretty strong stuff.” It interested him because. . . . And to complete his thought he squeezed Renée’s hand. Then a strange idea occurred to him, and he yielded to the urge to say something witty. “I was right,” he whispered, “not to go too close to the ocean in Trouville.”
Renée, distracted by painful dreams, said nothing. He had to repeat what he had said.
“Why?” she asked with surprise, not understanding what he meant.
“Why, the monster . . .”
And then he snickered. At this Renée froze. Her mind went completely awry. Ristori was now just a big puppet who lifted her apron and stuck out her tongue at the audience like Blanche Muller in the third act of La Belle Hélène. Théramène danced the cancan, and Hippolyte ate toast with jelly and stuck his fingers up his nose.
When more searing pangs of remorse left her quivering, her pride sometimes rebelled. What crime had she committed, after all, and what reason did she have to blush? Did she not stumble upon greater infamies every day? Did she not rub elbows at the ministries and in the Tuileries—everywhere, in fact—with wretches like herself who draped their flesh with millions and whom men worshiped on their knees? And she thought of the shameful friendship of Adeline d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, about which people sometimes smiled at the Empress’s Mondays. She remembered the mercenary business of Mme de Lauwerens, whom husbands celebrated for her good conduct, her orderliness, and her punctiliousness in paying her suppliers. She pronounced the names of Mme Daste, Mme Teissière, and Baroness von Meinhold, ladies whose luxurious lifestyles were paid for by their lovers and whose prices were quoted in high society the way shares of stock are quoted on the Bourse. Mme de Guende had such an empty head and such a beautiful figure that she had three high-ranking officers as lovers at the same time and could not tell them apart because all of them wore the same uniform: that little devil Louise said she forced them all to strip down to their shirts so that she could tell which one she was talking to. Countess Wanska remembered the courtyards she had sung in and the sidewalks where people said they had seen her prowling like a wolf in calico. Those women wore their shame in triumph, displayed their wounds as trophies. And lording it over them all was the wasted, old, and ugly Duchess von Sternich, who gloried in having spent a night in the imperial bed. She was vice made official, and from this past she retained something of a majesty in debauchery, a sovereign power over this illustrious band of harlots.