In the dim blue surface of the mirror she thought she saw the figures of Saccard and Maxime. Saccard, swarthy and sneering, had a color that resembled iron, a laugh that was torture to listen to, and skinny legs. What a will the man had! For ten years she had watched him at work in the forge, enveloped in sparks of red-hot metal, his flesh singed, breathing hard, tapping steadily, lifting hammers twenty times too heavy for him, heedless of the risk that he might be crushed. She understood him now. He seemed magnified by his superhuman effort, his scheming on a vast scale, his obsession with acquiring an immense fortune immediately. She remembered his jumping over obstacles, rolling in the mud, and not even taking the time to wipe himself off in order to arrive ahead of schedule, not even stopping to enjoy himself along the way, chewing on gold pieces as he ran. Then Maxime’s pretty blond head appeared behind his father’s stout shoulders. He wore the bright smile of a streetwalker and the blank stare of a whore who never lowered her eyes, and he parted his hair in the middle, revealing the whiteness of his cranium. He made fun of Saccard and deemed it “bourgeois” to go to so much trouble to earn the money that he consumed with such admirable indolence. He was kept. His long, soft hands told of his vices. His hairless body struck the weary pose of a satiated woman. Vice flowed as easily as lukewarm water through this soft, spineless creature, utterly devoid of curiosity about evil. He was passive. And Renée, as she watched these two apparitions emerge from the dim shadows of the mirror, took a step backward and saw that Saccard had tossed her out as a prize, an investment, and that Maxime had happened along to pick up the gold coin the speculator had let drop. She had always been an asset in her husband’s portfolio. He had encouraged her to wear gowns for a night and take lovers for a season. He had rotated her in the flames of his forge, used her as one might use a precious metal to gild the iron in his hands. Little by little, the father had thus made her mad enough and miserable enough to accept the son’s kisses. If Maxime was the impoverished blood of Saccard, she felt that she was the fruit these two worms had ruined, the vileness at which both had eaten away and in which both now lay coiled.
She knew now. These were the men who had stripped her naked. Saccard had unhooked her bodice, and Maxime had removed her skirt. Then, just now, both of them had ripped off her slip. Now she remained without a shred of clothing, with her gold ringlets, like a slave. When they had looked at her earlier, they hadn’t said, “You’re naked.” The son had quivered like a coward, trembling at the idea of seeing his crime through to the end, and had refused to follow her in her passion. The father, instead of killing her, had robbed her. He was a man who punished people by picking their pockets. A signature had appeared like a ray of sunlight in the midst of his wrath, and as vengeance he had carried that signature off with him. Then she had watched their shoulders disappear into the darkness. No blood on the carpet, not a single cry, not a whimper. These men were cowards. They had stripped her naked.
On one solitary occasion, she told herself, she had read the future: on that day when with burgeoning desires she had braved the murmuring shadows of the Parc Monceau and been terrified by the thought that her husband would someday defile her and plunge her into madness. Oh, but her poor head ached! How acutely she now felt the fallacy of the imagination that had led her to believe she was living in a blessed realm of divine ecstasy and impunity! She had lived in the land of shame, and she was punished by the surrender of her entire body and the annihilation of her being, now in its final agony. She wept that she had not listened to the resonant voices of the trees.
Her nakedness vexed her. She turned her head and looked around. The dressing room retained its heavy odor of musk, its overheated silence disturbed only by snatches of the never-ending waltz, like dying ripples on a sheet of water. Like attenuated laughter from some far-off sensual encounter, the music passed over her, and its mockery was more than she could bear. She stopped her ears so as to hear no more. Then her eyes took in the luxurious appointments of the dressing room. Her gaze followed the pink draperies all the way up to the silver crown, through which peered a cherub with plump cheeks readying his arrow. Her eyes lingered on the furniture, on the marble top of the dressing table crowded with jars and implements she no longer recognized. She went to the bathtub, still filled with stagnant water. With her foot she kicked away the fabrics left lying on the white satin armchairs: Echo’s costume, petticoats, towels she had tossed aside. And all these things spoke with the voices of shame: the nymph’s costume told of her having accepted the role of Echo for the novel thrill of offering herself to Maxime in public; the bathtub exhaled the fragrance of her body; the water in which she had soaked filled the room with a sick woman’s fever; the dressing table, with its soaps and oils, and the round curves of the furniture, so reminiscent of a bed, spoke brutally to her of her flesh, her loves, and all the filth she wanted to forget. She went back to the center of the room, her face crimson, because she had no idea how to escape from this bedroom scent, this luxury that revealed itself as brazenly as a prostitute, parading this abundance of pink. The room was as naked as she was. The pink tub, the pink skin of the tent, the pink marble of the two tables seemed to come alive, to stretch and curl and wrap themselves around her with such a living sensual embrace that she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and gave in to the crushing weight of the lace that adorned the ceilings and walls.
In the darkness, however, she again noticed the flesh-colored stain of the dressing room and imagined the gray softness of the bedroom, the tender gold of the small salon, the garish green of the conservatory—so many complicit riches. These were the places where her feet had soaked up the rotten sap. She would not have slept with Maxime on a pallet in some garret. That would have been too vile. Silk had made her crime stylish. And she dreamt of tearing down all this lace, of spitting on this silk, of kicking her big bed to pieces, and of trailing her luxury through some gutter from which it would emerge as worn and soiled as she was.
When she opened her eyes, she went over to the mirror and looked at herself again, examined herself closely. She was done for. She saw herself dead. Her whole face told her that her nervous breakdown was nearly complete. Maxime—the ultimate perversion of her senses— had finished his work, exhausted her flesh, unhinged her mind. She had no more joys to savor, no further hope of awakening. At this thought a savage rage was rekindled in her. And in one final paroxysm of desire, she dreamt of seizing her prey one more time, of dying in Maxime’s arms and taking him with her. Louise could not marry him. Louise knew full well that he did not belong to her, since she had seen them kissing each other on the lips. Then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders so as not to cross the dance floor naked. She went downstairs.
In the small salon she found herself face-to-face with Mme Sidonie, who had again stationed herself on the conservatory steps to relish the drama. But she no longer knew what to think when Saccard reappeared with Maxime and to her whispered questions brusquely replied that she was dreaming, that there was “nothing at all.” Then the truth dawned on her. Her yellow face turned white: this really was too much. Quietly, she went over and glued her ear to the door of the staircase, hoping that she would hear Renée sobbing upstairs. When the young woman opened the door, it nearly struck her sister-in-law in the face.