Then the gentlemen passed by: M. de Chibray in a drag; Mr. Simpson in a dog cart; Mignon and Charrier, keener than ever about their work despite their dream of impending retirement, in a coupé that they left by the side of one of the paths while they stretched their legs a bit; M. de Mareuil, still in mourning for his daughter, seeking plaudits for his first intervention in the legislature the night before, showing off his political importance in the carriage of M. Toutin-Laroche, who had just saved the Crédit Viticole once again after having brought it to the brink of ruin and whose waistline had contracted even while his influence had expanded as never before following his nomination to the Senate.
And bringing up the rear as the ultimate majesty in this procession, Baron Gouraud, taking the sun in his open carriage, weighed heavily on the two extra pillows that had been placed on the seat. Renée felt surprise and disgust at the sight of Baptiste sitting next to the coachman, his face white and solemn. The tall butler had entered the baron’s service.
The woods were still racing by, the water of the lake had turned iridescent as the slant of the sun’s rays increased, and the dancing glimmers of the line of carriages now stretched over an even greater distance than before. And in the grip of a kind of ecstasy and carried away by it, the young woman was only vaguely aware of the many appetites out that day for a drive in the sun. To these people had gone the spoils. If she felt no indignation toward them on that account, she nevertheless hated them for their happiness, for the triumph that revealed them to her as if powdered by gold dust fallen from on high. They were splendid and radiant. The women displayed themselves, white and plump. The men had the glint in the eye and bemused demeanor of satisfied lovers. And she found nothing in her empty heart but weariness, but aching want. Was she therefore better than the others for having given way under the burden of pleasure? Or was it the others who deserved praise for being made of sterner stuff? She had no idea. She wanted new desires with which to start life over. But just then she turned her head and saw alongside her, on the sidewalk that ran along the edge of the wood, a sight that tore through her with one final blow.
Saccard and Maxime were strolling slowly arm in arm. The father must have called on the son, and together they must have walked down the avenue de l’Impératrice to the lake, chatting as they went.
“You heard me,” Saccard was repeating. “You’re a fool. . . . When a fellow has the kind of money you have, he doesn’t stick it away in the bottom of a drawer. There’s a hundred percent profit to be made in the deal I’ve been telling you about. It’s a sure thing. You know very well I wouldn’t pull a fast one on you.”
But the young man seemed bored by his father’s insistence. He smiled prettily and looked at the carriages.
“See that little woman over there, the woman in violet?” he asked abruptly. “She’s a laundress that ass Mussy has set up.”
They looked at the woman in violet. Then Saccard pulled a cigar out of his pocket and turned to Maxime, who was smoking. “Give me a light.”
They stopped for a moment, face-to-face, and brought their heads together. When the cigar was lit, Saccard took his son’s arm, squeezed it tightly under his own, and continued with what he had been saying: “You know, you’re an imbecile if you don’t listen to me. So, do we have a deal? Will you bring me the 100,000 francs tomorrow?”
“You know I don’t go to your house anymore,” Maxime replied with a pout.
“Bah! Nonsense! It’s time to put an end to all that!”
As they walked on a few more steps in silence, and Renée, feeling faint, buried her head in the coupé’s upholstery so as not to be seen, a growing buzz raced along the line of carriages. On the sidewalks, pedestrians stopped and turned, mouths agape, eyes fixed on something coming toward them. The wheels made a scraping sound as carriages drew aside respectfully, and two outriders appeared, dressed in green and wearing round caps trimmed with golden tassels that formed a dancing curtain around their heads. Leaning slightly forward, they trotted past on big bay horses. Behind them, they left a void, and in that void the Emperor appeared.
He was riding in the back of a landau, alone on the rear seat. Dressed in black, with his frock coat buttoned up to his chin, he wore a very high top hat, slightly tilted to one side and made of shiny silk. Opposite him, on the front seat, dressed with the punctilious elegance that was then in favor at the Tuileries, two gentlemen sat gravely with their hands in their laps—two taciturn wedding guests exposed to a gawking crowd.
Renée found that the Emperor had aged. Under his thick waxed mustache, his jaw hung more listlessly than before. His eyelids drooped to the point where they half covered his lifeless eyes, whose hazel irises now seemed clouded. Only his nose remained unchanged, still looking like a dry fish bone sticking out of a rather nondescript face.
In the meantime, while the ladies in the carriages smiled discreetly, the people on foot pointed out the sovereign to one another. One fat man maintained that the Emperor was the gentleman with his back to the coachman on the left. A few hands were raised in salute. But Saccard, who had doffed his hat even before the outriders had passed, waited until the imperial carriage had reached a point just opposite him before shouting in his gruff Provençal voice, “Vive l’empereur!”
The Emperor, surprised, turned, no doubt recognized his enthusiastic subject, and returned the salute with a smile. Then everything vanished into the sunset, the carriages pulled back into line, and all Renée could see above the manes of the horses and between the backs of the footmen were the green caps of the outriders with their dancing tassels.
She sat a moment with her eyes wide open, full of what she had just seen, which reminded her of another time in her life. To her it seemed that the Emperor, by inserting himself into the line of carriages, had just added the last essential radiance to this triumphal procession and given it meaning. Now it was a glory to behold. All those wheels, all those decorated men, all those women lounging listlessly in their carriages vanished with the flash and rumble of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and painful that the young woman felt an imperious need to escape from this triumph, from Saccard’s shout, still ringing in her ears, and from the sight of the father and the son, arms linked, chatting as they ambled along. Looking for a way out, she brought her hands up to her chest, as if seared by a flame within. And it was with a sudden hope of relief, of a salutary cooling of a raging fever, that she leaned forward and told the coachman, “To the Hôtel Béraud.”
The courtyard, as always, had the chill of a cloister. Renée made her way around the arcade, reveling in the drops of moisture that fell on her shoulders. She walked over to the trough, covered with green moss, its edges worn smooth. She examined the half-vanished lion’s head, from whose gaping jaws a stream of water spurted through an iron tube. How many times had she and Christine as little girls taken that head in their arms, leaning forward to reach the stream of water, whose icy pressure they liked to feel against their little hands? Then she climbed the big silent staircase and spotted her father at the far end of the series of vast rooms. He pulled himself up to his full height and slowly moved deeper into the gloom of the old house and of that proud solitude in which he had completely cloistered himself since the death of his sister, while Renée thought of the men in the Bois and of that other elderly man, Baron Gouraud, who had had his carcass set upon pillows and driven around in the sun. She climbed still higher, explored the corridors and the service stairway, and made the trip up to the children’s bedroom. When she reached the very top of the house, she found the key hanging on the usual nail—a big, rusty key encased in a spider’s web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad the children’s room looked! She felt a pang in her heart on finding it so empty, so gray, and so silent. She closed the door of the aviary, which had been left open, thinking that somehow this must be the door through which the joys of her childhood had flown away. In front of the planters, which were still filled with soil hardened and cracked like dried mud, she stopped and snapped the stem of a rhododendron with her fingers. This skeleton of a plant, withered and white with dust, was all that remained of their once-vibrant tubs of greenery. And the matting—the very matting—faded and gnawed by rats, beckoned with the melancholy of a winding sheet that had lain for years awaiting its intended corpse. Over in a corner, in the midst of this scene of silent desperation, this mournful abandonment that made silence itself seem to sob, she found one of her old dolls. All the stuffing had leaked out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with enameled lips above the wasted body, seemingly exhausted by the doll’s follies.