The hall was fitted up most luxuriously. On entering, one experienced a slightly suffocating sensation. The thick carpets, which covered the floor and the stairs, the broad red velvet hangings which hid the walls and the doors, made the atmosphere heavy with the silence and the warm fragrance of a chapel. The draperies hung from on high, and the lofty ceiling was ornamented with salient arabesques on a golden trellis. The staircase, with its double balustrade of white marble and handrail covered with red velvet, opened out into two slightly winding branches between which was placed the entrance to the grand drawing-room right at the back. An immense mirror covered the whole of the wall on the first landing. Down below, at the foot of the branching staircase, two bronze gilt female figures, on marble pedestals and nude down to the waist, supported gigantic lamp-posts carrying five burners, the brilliant light from which was softened by ground glass globes. And on either side was a row of splendid vases in majolica ware in which blossomed the rarest plants.
Renée ascended, and at each step she took her reflection in the mirror increased in size; she was asking herself, with that doubt entertained by the most popular actresses, whether she were really delicious, as every one told her.
Then, when she had reached her apartment, which was on the first floor, and overlooked the Parc Monceaux, she rang for Céleste, her maid, and had herself dressed for dinner. This operation lasted a good three quarters of an hour. When the last pin had been fixed, she opened the window as the room was very close, and leaning out remained there wrapt in thought. Behind her, Céleste was moving discreetly about, tidying the room.
Down below, the park was immersed in a sea of shadow. The inky coloured masses of the tall trees, shaken by sudden gusts of wind, swayed to and fro like the tide, with that rustling of dead leaves which recalls the breaking of the waves on a shingly strand. Piercing now and again this ebb and flow of darkness, the two yellow eyes of a carriage would appear and vanish between the shrubberies bordering the road which connects the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense with the Boulevard Malesherbes. In the face of all this autumnal melancholy Renée's sad thoughts returned. She fancied herself once more a child in her father's house, in that silent mansion of the Île Saint-Louis, where for two centuries past the Béraud Du Châtels had sheltered their gloomy magisterial gravity. Then her thoughts turned to her sudden marriage, to that widower who sold himself to become her husband, and who had trucked his name of Rougon for that of Saccard, the two sharp syllables of which had sounded in her ears, when first pronounced before her, with all the brutality of two rakes gathering up gold; he took her, and cast her into this life of turmoil amidst which her poor brain became a little more cracked every day. Then she set to dreaming with a childish joy of the happy games at battledore and shuttlecock she had played in the old times with her young sister Christine. And, some morning, she would awake from the dream of enjoyment she had been indulging for ten years past, crazy, and befouled by one of her husband's speculations, in which he himself would also sink. This passed before her like a rapid presentiment. The trees were lamenting in a louder tone. Troubled by these thoughts of shame and punishment, Renée yielded to the old and worthy middle-class instincts slumbering within her; she promised the black night she would reform, that she would no longer spend so much on her dress, and that she would seek some innocent occupation to amuse her, like in the happy school days, when she and her playmates sang beneath the plane-trees and danced in a ring.
At this moment, Céleste, who had been downstairs, returned and murmured in her mistress's ear:
"Master would be glad if madame would go down. There are already several persons in the drawing-room."
Renée started. She had not felt the chilly air which was freezing her shoulders. As she passed before her looking-glass, she stopped and glanced at herself mechanically. With an involuntary smile she went down.
And, indeed, most of the guests had arrived. There were her sister Christine, a young lady of twenty, very simply dressed in white muslin; her aunt Élisabeth, the widow of the notary Aubertot, in black satin, a little old woman of sixty, of most exquisite amiability; her husband's sister, Sidonie Rougon, a gentle, scraggy woman, of no particular age, with a face like soft wax, and whose dull-coloured dress effaced still further; then the Mareuils, the father, Monsieur de Mareuil, who had just gone out of mourning for his wife, a tall handsome man, empty-headed and serious, bearing a striking resemblance to the valet Baptiste; and the daughter, that poor Louise as people called her, a young girl of seventeen, puny and slightly hump-backed, who wore with a sickly grace a soft white silk dress with red spots; then quite a group of serious men, gentlemen wearing many decorations, official personages with pale and solemn faces; and, farther off, another group, young men with an air of vice about them, and wearing low cut waistcoats, surrounding five or six ladies of the greatest elegance, amongst whom throned the inseparables, the little Marchioness d'Espanet, in yellow, and the fair Madame Haffner, in violet. Monsieur de Mussy, the cavalier whose bow Renée had ignored, was also there, with the uneasy look of a lover expecting to receive his dismissal. And, in the midst of the long trains spread out over the carpet, two contractors, masons who had made their fortunes, named Mignon and Charrier, with whom Saccard had some business to settle on the morrow, were moving heavily about on their big feet, holding their hands behind their backs and feeling most uncomfortable in their dress suits.
Standing near the door, Aristide Saccard managed to greet each new arrival, whilst holding forth to the group of serious men with all his southern animation and snuffling. He shook the guest's hand and spoke a few amiable words. Short, and pitiful-looking, he bobbed up and down like a puppet; and of all his puny, dark and crafty person, the most prominent object was the red bow of his ribbon of the Legion of Honour which he wore very large.
When Renée entered, there rose a murmur of admiration. She was truly divine. Over a lower skirt of tulle, trimmed behind with a mass of flounces, she wore a tunic of pale green satin, edged with a broad border of English lace, and gathered up and fastened by large bunches of violets; a single flounce adorned the front of the skirt over which was a light muslin drapery kept in its place by more bunches of violets joined together by garlands of ivy. The gracefulness of the head and bust were adorable, above this skirt of royal amplitude and slightly overdone richness. Uncovered at the neck as low as the breast, her arms bare with tufts of violets on her shoulders, the young woman seemed to be emerging all naked from her sheath of tulle and satin, similar to one of those nymphs whose busts issue from the sacred oaks; and her white neck, her supple frame, appeared so delighted with this semi-freedom, that one expected at every moment to see the bodice and the skirts slip down like the costume of a bather in love with her flesh. Her tall head-dress, her fine yellow hair gathered up in the form of a helmet, and amidst which twined a sprig of ivy held in its place by a bunch of violets, increased still more her air of nudity by displaying the nape of her neck, slightly shaded by little downy hairs resembling threads of gold. Round her neck she wore a diamond necklace with pendants of the first water, and on her brow an aigrette formed of stems of silver set with the same precious stones. And she stood thus for a few seconds on the threshold of the room, erect in this magnificent costume, her shoulders shining in the warm glow. As she had come down quickly she was rather out of breath. Her eyes, which the darkness of the Parc Monceaux had filled with shadow, blinked in that sudden flood of light, and gave her that hesitating air of short-sighted people, which with her was full of gracefulness.