He was for the time being in an extraordinarily virtuous mood. The success of the Charonne deal filled his heart with idyllic tenderness.

“I was born,” he continued, “to live in obscurity in some village, in the bosom of my family. . . . Nobody knows who I really am, my boy. . . . People take me for a fellow with his head in the clouds. Well, that’s nonsense. I’d love to stay at my wife’s side and would gladly give up business for a modest income that would allow me to retire to Plassans. . . . You’re going to be rich. Settle down with Louise and make yourself a nest you can live in like two turtledoves. What a fine thing! I’ll come visit you. It will do me good.”

He ended with tears in his voice. Meanwhile, they had reached the gate of the house and stood chatting on the curb outside. A north wind swept these Parisian heights. No sound rose in the frosty pallor of the night. Maxime, surprised by his father’s tender effusions, had remained a minute or two with a question on his lips.

“But you,” he came out with at last, “I had the impression—”

“What?”

“With your wife?”

Saccard shrugged. “Right, exactly! I was a fool. So I can speak to you from experience. . . . But we’ve patched it up, you know, absolutely. Almost six weeks ago. I go to her in the evening, when I don’t get home too late. Tonight, though, my poor darling will have to do without me. I have to work all night. She’s got an awfully nice figure, I must say.”

Maxime offered his hand, but his father held on to it long enough to add, in a confidential tone, “A shape like Blanche Muller’s, you know, but ten times more supple. And those hips! The curve, the elegance—”

Then, as Maxime started to walk off, he finished his thought: “You’re like me. You’ve got heart, your wife will be happy. . . . Good night, my boy!”

When Maxime was at last rid of his father, he quickly made his way around the park. What he had just heard surprised him so much that he felt an irresistible need to see Renée. He wanted to beg her pardon for his brutality, to find out why she had lied to him by naming M. de Saffré, and to learn the history of her husband’s amorous attentions. Yet all of these things he divined only vaguely, his one clear desire being to smoke a cigar in her room and renew their camaraderie. If she was in the right mood, he even intended to announce his marriage in order to make it clear to her that their affair was to remain dead and buried. As he opened the side gate, the key to which he had fortunately held on to, he convinced himself that after his father’s confidential revelations his visit was necessary and entirely proper.

In the conservatory, he whistled as he had the night before, but this time there was no waiting. Renée came and opened the glass doors of the small salon and went up ahead of him without speaking. She had just returned from a ball at the Hôtel de Ville. She was still wearing a white gown of puffed tulle covered with satin bows. The tails of the satin bodice were edged with a broad band of white lace, which the light from the candelabra tinged with blue and pink. Upstairs, when Maxime looked at her, he was touched by her pallor and by the deep emotion that choked her voice. She must not have been expecting him, for she was shivering all over at the sight of him arriving as he always did, with his calm, imploring air. Céleste returned from the closet, where she had gone in search of a nightgown, and the lovers remained silent while waiting for her to leave. They were not usually inhibited in her presence, but shame came over them because of what they sensed they were about to say. Renée wanted Céleste to undress her in the bedroom, where there was a big fire. The servant removed pins and articles of clothing one by one, without haste. Meanwhile, Maxime, feeling bored, mechanically took the nightgown that was lying on a chair next to him and warmed it by the fire, leaning forward with his arms stretched wide. In happier days this was a favor he had often done for Renée. She felt moved at the sight of him delicately holding her nightgown up to the fire. Then, as Céleste showed no sign of finishing her chores, he asked, “Did you enjoy yourself at the ball?”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “it’s always the same, you know. Far too many people, a real mob.”

He turned the nightgown, which was now warm on one side.

“What did Adeline wear?”

“A mauve gown, not very well thought out. . . . She’s short, and she’s wild about flounces.”

They talked about other women. By now Maxime was burning his fingers with the nightgown.

“Be careful, you’re going to scorch it,” Renée said in a voice full of maternal tenderness.

Céleste took the nightgown from the young man’s hands. He got up, went over to look at the big gray-and-pink bed, and let his eyes linger over one of the bouquets embroidered in the hanging so as to avoid looking at Renée’s naked breasts. This was instinctive. He no longer thought of himself as her lover, so he no longer had the right to see. Then he took a cigar from his pocket and lit it. Renée had always allowed him to smoke in her apartment. Céleste went out, leaving the young woman by the fire, all white in her bedtime attire.

Maxime continued his silent pacing a while longer, glancing out of the corner of his eye at Renée, who seemed to be shivering again. Then, stopping in front of the fireplace, with his cigar between his teeth, he asked abruptly, “Why didn’t you tell me that it was my father who was with you last night?”

She looked up, her eyes wide in an expression of supreme anguish. Then a rush of blood turned her complexion crimson, and, overcome by shame, she hid her face in her hands and stammered, “So you know? You know?”

Regaining her composure, she tried to lie. “It’s not true. . . . Who told you?”

Maxime shrugged. “Why, my father himself, who thinks you have an awfully nice figure and even discussed your hips with me.”

He had allowed himself to show a slight degree of annoyance. But he resumed his pacing, continuing between puffs on his cigar to speak to her in a chiding but friendly voice: “Really, I don’t understand you. You’re one of a kind. Yesterday it was your fault that I was so rude. You should have told me that it was my father, and I would have left quietly, you know. What right do I have? . . . But you went and told me it was M. de Saffré!”

She sobbed, her hands on her face. He approached, knelt in front of her, and forced her hands apart.

“So tell me why you said it was M. de Saffré.”

Then, averting her eyes once more, she answered, still crying, in a whisper: “I thought you would leave me if you knew that your father—”

He rose to his feet, took back the cigar that he had placed on the hearth, and contented himself with a murmured reply: “You’re really something, you know?”

She had stopped crying. The heat from the fireplace and in her cheeks dried her tears. Her astonishment at finding Maxime so calm in the face of a revelation that she had thought would crush him made her forget her shame. She watched him pace the room and listened to him speak as in a dream. Without taking his cigar out of his mouth he told her again that she was unreasonable, that it was perfectly natural for her to have relations with her husband, and that he couldn’t really think of getting angry about it. But to avow a lover when it wasn’t true! And he kept coming back to that, to the one thing he couldn’t understand, the one thing that seemed really monstrous to him. He spoke of the “wild imaginations” of women.

“You’re a bit cracked, my dear, you ought to have your head examined.”

In the end curiosity made him ask, “But why M. de Saffré rather than someone else?”

“He’s been after me,” Renée said.

Maxime checked himself as he was about to make an impertinent remark: he’d been on the point of saying that if she’d waited a month, she’d probably have been right in naming M. de Saffré as her lover. But he satisfied himself with a wicked smile at this nasty thought, tossed his cigar into the fire, and sat down at the other end of the hearth. He talked reason and hinted that they ought to remain good friends. The young woman’s fixed stare rather embarrassed him, though. He didn’t dare announce his marriage to her now. She contemplated him for a good long while through eyes still swollen from tears. Although she found him wretched, narrow, and contemptible, she loved him still, as tenderly as she loved her daintiest lace. He looked pretty in the light of the candelabra sitting on the edge of the hearth alongside him. When he threw back his head, the light from the candles gilded his hair and imparted to the soft down of his cheeks a charming auburn glow.