Complete Works of Emile Zola (236 page)

One night, in an hour of anguish, Renée sent her lover for one of the black bearskin rugs. Then they lay down on this inky fur, at the edge of a tank, in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly in the limpid moonlight. Maxime arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers. The conservatory was heated to such a point that he swooned away on the bearskin. Coming from the dry, biting cold into so intense a heat, he felt a smarting as though he had been whipped with a birch-rod. When he came to himself, he saw Renée on her knees, leaning over him, with fixed eyes and an animal attitude that alarmed him. Her hair down, her shoulders bare, she leant upon her wrists, with her spine stretched out, like a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. The young man, lying on his back, perceived above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous beast that gazed upon him the marble sphinx, whose thighs gleamed in the moonlight. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the monster with the woman’s head, and, in her loosened petticoats, looked like the white sister of this black divinity.

Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating, a sultry heat that did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground like a poisonous effluvium, and its steam ascended like a storm-laden cloud. A warm dampness covered the lovers with dew, with burning sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple, nervous hams. From outside, through the little panes of the hot-house, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, clumps of trees with fine black outlines, lawns white as frozen lakes, a whole dead landscape, the exquisiteness and the light, even tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese prints. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely in the midst of the great, silent cold.

They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate, active will. Maxime submitted. Smooth-limbed, slim and graceful as a Roman stripling, fair-haired and pretty, stricken in his virility since childhood, this epicene being became a great girl in Renée’s inquisitive arms. He seemed born and bred for a perversion of sensual pleasure. Renée enjoyed her domination, and she bent under her passion this creature with the still indeterminate sex. For her it was a continual astonishment of lasciviousness, a surprise of the senses, a bizarre sensation of discomfort and of keen enjoyment. She was no longer certain: she felt doubts each time she returned to his delicate skin, his soft plump neck, his attitudes of abandonment, his fainting-fits. She then experienced an hour of repletion. By revealing to her a new ecstasy, Maxime crowned her mad toilettes, her prodigious luxury, her life of excess. He set in her flesh the top note that was already singing in her ears. He was the lover who matched the follies and fashions of the period. This pretty little fellow, whose frail figure was revealed by his clothes, this abortive girl, who strolled along the boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those debauching influences of the decadence which at certain periods among rotten nations exhaust a body and unhinge a brain.

And it was in the hot-house especially that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by many others. The hot-house loved and burned with them. In the heavy atmosphere, in the pale light of the moon, they saw the strange world of plants around them moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched across the pathway. At their feet the tank steamed full of a swarm, of a thick tangle, of plants, while the pink petals of the water-lilies opened out on the surface like virgin bodices, and the tornelias let fall their bushy tendrils like the hair of languishing water-nymphs. Around them the palm-trees and the tall Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, where they bent over and mingled their leaves with the staggering attitudes of exhausted lovers. Lower down the ferns, the pterides, the alsophilas, were like green ladies, with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, who stood mute and motionless at the edge of the pathway awaiting love. By their side the twisted red-streaked leaves of the begonias and the white spear-headed leaves of the caladiums furnished a vague series of bruises and pallors, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, though at times they discerned curves as of hips and knees, prone on the ground beneath the brutality of ensanguined kisses. And the plaintain-trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fecundity of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbias, of whose prickly, deformed, tapering stems, covered with loathly excrescences, they could catch glimpses in the shadow, seemed to sweat out sap, the overflowing flux of this fiery gestation. But, by degrees, as their glances penetrated into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness became filled with a more furious debauch of leaves and stalks; they were not able to distinguish on the stages between the marantas, soft as velvet, the gloxinias, purple-belled, the dracœnas resembling blades of old lacquer; it was one round dance of living plants pursuing one another with unsatiated fervour. At the four corners, there where the curtains of creepers closed in the arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder still, and the supple shoots of the vanilla-plants, of the Indian berries, the quisqualias and bauhinias were as the interminable arms of unseen lovers distractedly lengthening their embraces so as to collect all scattered delights. Those endless arms drooped with weariness, entwined in a spasm of love, sought each other, closed up together like a crowd bent on rut. It was the unbounded copulation of the hot-house, of this nook of virgin forest ablaze with tropical flora and foliage.

Maxime and Renée, their senses perverted, felt carried away in these mighty nuptials of the earth. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap that rose in the trunks of the trees penetrated them also, filling them with a mad longing for immediate increase, for gigantic procreation. They joined in the copulation of the hot-house. It was then, in the pale light, that they were stupefied by visions, by nightmares in which they watched at length the intrigues of the ferns and palm-trees; the foliage assumed a confused equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into sensual images; murmurs and whisperings reached them from the shrubberies, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was audible in their own embraces, and that was wafted back by the echo. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as though the very ground had burst forth into voluptuous sobs in a fit of satisfied desire.

If they had closed their eyes, if the stifling heat and the pale light had not imparted to them a vitiation of every sense, the aromas would have been sufficient to throw them into an extraordinary state of nervous irritation. The tank saturated them with a deep, pungent odour, through which passed the thousand perfumes of the flowers and plants. At times the vanilla-plant sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the stanhopeas, whose tigered throats have the strong and putrid breath of the convalescent sick. The orchids, in their baskets suspended by wire chains, emitted their exhalations like living censers. But the dominant scent, the scent in which all these vague breaths were intermingled, was a human scent, a scent of love which Maxime recognized when he kissed Renée in the neck, when he plunged his head into her flowing hair. And they lay intoxicated with this scent of an amorous woman which trailed through the hot-house, as through an alcove in which the earth was reproducing its kind.

As a rule the lovers lay down under the Madagascar tanghin-tree, under that poisoned shrub into one of whose leaves Renée had once bitten. Around them the white statues laughed as they gazed at the mighty copulation of foliage. The moon, as it turned, displaced the groups and gave life to the drama with its changing light. They were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the easy life of the Bois and official receptions, in a corner of an Indian forest, of some monstrous temple of which the black marble sphinx became the deity. They felt themselves rolling towards crime, towards accursed love, towards the caresses of wild beasts. All the germination that surrounded them, the swarming of the tank, the naked immodesty of the foliage, threw them into the innermost, dantesque inferno of passion. It was then, in the depths of this glass cage, all boiling in the summer heat, lost in the keen December cold, that they relished the flavour of incest, as though it were the criminal fruit of an overheated soil, feeling the while a secret dread of their terrifying couch.

And in the center of the black bearskin, Renée’s body seemed whiter, as she crouched like a great cat, her spine stretched out, her wrists tense like supple, nervous hams. She was all swollen with voluptuousness, and the clear outline of her shoulders and loins stood out with feline distinctness against the splash of ink with which the rug blackened the yellow sand of the pathway. She gloated over Maxime, this prey extended beneath her, abandoning itself, which she possessed entirely. And from time to time she leant forward abruptly and kissed him with her chafed mouth. Her mouth opened then with the hungry, bleeding brilliancy of the Chinese hibiscus, whose expanse covered the wall of the house. She became a sheer burning daughter of the hothouse. Her kisses bloomed and faded like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last scarcely a few hours and are unceasingly renewed, like the bruised, insatiable lips of a colossal Messalina.

CHAPTER V

Saccard was haunted by the thought of the kiss he had pressed upon his wife’s neck. He had long ceased to avail himself of his marital rights; the rupture had come naturally, neither one nor the other caring about a connection which inconvenienced them. Saccard would never think of returning to Renée’s chamber, if some good piece of business were not the ultimate aim of his conjugal devotion.

The lucky speculation at Charonne progressed favourably, although he was still anxious as to its termination. Larsonneau, with his dazzling shirt-front, had a way of smiling which he did not like. He was no more than an intermediary, a man of straw, whose assistance he paid for by allowing him a commission of ten per cent, on the ultimate profits. But although the expropriation-agent had not paid a sou into the enterprise, and Saccard had not only found the money for the music-hall but taken every precaution, a deed of retrocession, undated letters, antedated receipts, the latter none the less felt an inward fear, a presentiment of some treachery. He suspected his accomplice of an intention to blackmail him by means of the false inventory which he had preciously preserved and which alone he had to thank for his share in the business.

So the two fellows shook one another vigorously by the hand. Larsonneau addressed Saccard as “dear master.” At bottom he had a real admiration for this acrobat, and watched his performances on the tight-rope of speculation with the eye of a connoisseur. The idea of taking him in tickled him as a rare and pungent voluptuousness. He nursed a plan, as yet vague, not knowing how to make use of the weapon he possessed, lest he should do himself a damage with it. He felt beside that he was at his former colleague’s mercy. The ground and the buildings, which the cunningly-prepared inventories already estimated at closely two millions although not worth a quarter of that amount, must end by being swallowed up in a colossal smash, if the fairy of expropriation failed to touch them with her golden wand. According to the original plans which they had been able to consult, the new boulevard, opened to connect the artillery-park of Vincennes with the Prince-Eugène Barracks, and to bring the guns into the heart of Paris, while avoiding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, cut off a part of the ground; but there still remained the danger that this would be only just grazed, and that the ingenious speculation might fall through by reason of its very shamelessness. In that case Larsonneau would be left stranded with a delicate adventure on his hands. Still, despite the inferior part he was compelled to play, this danger did not prevent him from feeling disgusted when he thought of the paltry ten per cent, which he was to pocket in this colossal robbery of millions. And at these moments he could not resist a furious longing to stretch out his hand and carve out a slice for himself.

Saccard had not even permitted him to lend money to his wife; he took pleasure himself in this crass piece of theatrical trickery, which delighted his weakness for complicated transactions.

“No, no, my dear fellow,” he said, with his Provençal accent, which he exaggerated whenever he wished to add zest to a joke, “don’t let us mix up our accounts…. You are the only man in Paris whom I have sworn never to owe any money to.”

Larsonneau contented himself with telling him that his wife was a sink. He advised him not to give her another sou, so that she might be compelled to make over the property to them at once. He would have preferred to have had business with Saccard alone. He tried him occasionally, and carried things so far as to say to him, with his languid and indifferent man-about-town manner:

“All the same, I shall have to put my papers in order a bit…. Your wife frightens me, old man. I don’t want to have certain documents at my office attached.”

Saccard was not the man to submit patiently to hints of this kind, especially as he was well acquainted with the cold and fastidious orderliness that prevailed in this individual’s office. All his active, cunning little being revolted against the terror with which this great coxcomb of a yellow-gloved usurer sought to inspire him. The worst was that he felt seized with shudders when he thought of the possibility of a scandal; and he saw himself remorselessly exiled by his brother and living in Belgium by some shabby little trade. One day he grew angry and went so far as to address Larsonneau in the second person singular.

“Look here, my boy,” he said, “you’re a decent chap, but it would be just as well if you gave up the document you know of. You’ll see that bit of paper will end by making us quarrel.”