The Rush for the Spoil (La Curée): A Realistic Novel

by Émile Zola

And she leant towards Renée's ear, and made her blush, though she herself retained all her honest placidity.

"When the new stable boy," she continued, "told everything to master, master preferred to dismiss Baptiste rather than send him to jail. It seems that these disgusting things had been going on for years in the stables. And to think that the big scamp pretended he was fond of horses! It was the grooms that he liked!"

The bell interrupted her. She hastily took up the eight or ten packages which she had not wished to part with. She let herself be kissed; and then she went off, without looking round.

Renée remained in the station until the engine whistled. And when the train had gone off, she was overcome with despair, she no longer knew what to do; her days seemed to stretch before her as empty as the vast waiting hall where she had been left alone. She again entered her brougham and told the coachman to drive her home. But on the way she changed her mind, she was afraid of her room, of the boredom awaiting her there. She no longer felt the necessary courage to return home and change her dress for her usual drive round the lake. She felt a longing for sunlight, a longing to mingle with the crowd.

She ordered the coachman to drive to the Bois.

It was four o'clock. The Bois was awakening from the drowsiness of a warm afternoon. Clouds of dust flew along the Avenue de l'Impératrice, and one could see, spread out afar, the expanse of verdure which the slopes of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes, crowned by the grey walls of Mont Valérien, limited. High above the horizon the sun shed its rays, filling the recesses of the foliage with golden dust, lighting up the tall branches, and changing the ocean of leaves into an ocean of light. Past the fortifications, in the avenue of the Bois leading to the lake, the ground had just been watered; and the vehicles rolled over the brown soil as over a carpet, amid a rising freshness and an odour of damp earth. Mingled with the low bushes on either side, the little trees of the copses reared their crowd of young trunks, growing indistinct in the greenish dimness which flashes of light pierced here and there with yellow glades; and, by degrees, as one approached the lake, the chairs on the side-walks became more numerous, families sat, gazing with quiet silent faces at the interminable procession of wheels. Then, on reaching the open space in front of the lake, there was a dazzlement, the oblique sun transformed the round expanse of water into a huge mirror of polished silver reflecting the brilliant disk of the planet. All eyes blinked, one could only distinguish the dark form of the pleasure boat on the left hand side near the bank. The parasols in the vehicles were inclined with a gentle and uniform movement towards this splendour, and only rose erect again on reaching the roadway skirting the sheet of water, which, from the summit of the bank, now assumed a metallic blackness, streaked with golden burnishings. On the right hand side the clumps of fir trees lined the road with their colonnades of straight slender stems, the soft violet tinge of which was reddened by the flames of the sky; on the left the lawns, bathed in light and similar to fields of emeralds, stretched away as far as the distant lace-like ironwork of the gate of La Muette. And on approaching the cascade, while the dimness of the copses again presented itself on one side, the islands at the end of the lake rose up into the blue air, with the sunshine playing over their banks, and bold shadows darting from their pines, at the feet of which the chalet looked like some child's plaything lost in a corner of a virgin forest. The whole wood laughed and quivered in the sunshine.

The weather was so magnificent that Renée felt ashamed of her closed brougham and her costume of flea-tinted silk. She drew back a little, and, with the windows open, looked at this flow of light stretching over the water and the verdure. At the bends of the avenues she perceived the line of wheels revolving like golden stars amid a long train of blinding gleams. The varnished panels, the flashing steel and brass mountings, the bright colours of the dresses passed on, at the even trot of the horses, and set against the background of the wood a long moving bar, a ray fallen from the sky, stretching out and following the bends of the roadway. And in this ray, as the young woman blinked her eyes, she saw every now and then the light chignon of a woman, the black back of a footman, the white mane of a horse, stand out. The arched parasols of watered silk shone like moons of metal.

Then, in presence of this broad daylight, this expanse of sunshine, Renée thought of the fine dust of twilight which she had seen one evening falling on the tawny foliage. Maxime had been with her. It was at the period when her desires for that child were dawning in her. And she again saw the lawns dampened by the evening air, the darkened underwood, the deserted pathways. The line of vehicles had gone by with a sad sound past the unoccupied chairs, whilst now the rumble of the wheels, the trot of the horses, resounded with the joyfulness of a flourish of trumpets. Then the recollection of all her drives in the Bois returned to her. She had lived there. Maxime had grown up there, at her side, on the cushion of her carriage. It had been their garden. Rain had surprised them there, sunshine had brought them back, the fall of night had not always driven them away. They had been there in every kind of weather, they had there tasted the worries and the joy of their life. Amid the emptiness of her being, the melancholy imparted by Celeste's departure, these memories gave Renée bitter joy. Her heart said: "Never again! never again!" and she was like frozen when she evoked the image of the winter landscape, the congealed, dull-tinted lake on which they had skated; the sky then was of a sooty colour, the snow had set white lace on the trees, the wind had thrown fine sand in their eyes and on their lips.

However, on the left hand side, on the side reserved to equestrians, she had already recognised the Duke de Rozan, Monsieur de Mussy, and Monsieur de Saffré. Larsonneau had killed the duke's mother by presenting her the hundred and fifty thousand francs' worth of bills accepted by her son, and the duke was devouring his second half million with Blanche Müller, after leaving the first five hundred thousand francs in the hands of Laure d'Aurigny. Monsieur de Mussy, who had left the embassy in England for the embassy in Italy, had become gallant again; and he led cotillons with newly acquired gracefulness. As for Monsieur de Saffré, he remained the most amiable sceptic and fast-liver in the world. Renée saw him urging his horse towards the carriage of the Countess Vanska, with whom he was said to be madly in love since the evening when he had seen her as Coral at the Saccards'.

All the ladies were there, moreover; the Duchess de Sternich, in her sempiternal eight-springed carriage; Madame de Lauwerens in a landau, with the Baroness de Meinhold and little Madame Daste seated in front of her; Madame de Teissière and Madame de Guende in a victoria. Amid these ladies, Sylvia and Laure d'Aurigny displayed themselves on the cushions of a magnificent calash. Madame Michelin even passed by in the depths of a brougham; the pretty brunette had been to visit the chief town of Monsieur Hupel de la Noue's department; and on her return she had made her appearance in the Bois in this brougham, to which she hoped to soon add an open carriage. Renée also perceived the Marchioness d'Espanet and Madame Haffner, the inseparables hidden under their parasols, stretched out side by side, laughing tenderly, and gazing into each other's eyes.