And Renée stood musing in the bright light, as she watched Louise and Maxime in the distance. It was no longer the floating fancies, the vague temptation of twilight, in the chilly avenues of the Bois. Her thoughts were no longer lulled and sent to sleep by the trot of her horses along the fashionable walks, and the glades in which middle-class families pic-nic on a Sunday. Now it was a definite, a keen desire which filled her whole being.
An immense love, a need of voluptuousness, floated about this close nave, full of the ardent sap of the tropics. The young woman was enveloped in these mighty bridals of the earth, engendering around her this dark verdure, these colossal stems; and the acrid confinement of this candent mother, this forest-like growth, this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails which nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia of most intoxicating power. At her feet, the tank, the mass of warm water, thickened by the juices of the floating roots, steamed and wrapt her shoulders in a mantle of heavy vapour, a mist which heated her skin like the contact of a hand moist with voluptuousness. On her head she felt a breath from the palms as the tall leaves sprinkled their aroma. And more than the close warmth of the atmosphere, than the bright lights, than the large dazzling flowers resembling faces laughing or grimacing amongst the foliage, the odours especially overpowered her. An undefinable perfume, powerful and exciting, hung about, composed of a thousand others: human perspiration, women's breaths, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and insipid almost to faintness, were blended with coarse and pestilential smells loaded with poison. But amidst this strange amalgamation of odours, the one which dominated all, stifling the delicateness of the vanilla and the sharpness of the orchids, was that penetrating, sensual, human odour, that odour of love which escapes of a morning from the closed chamber of a young married couple.
Renée had slowly leant against the granite pedestal. In her green satin dress, with her face and shoulders of a rosy hue and sparkling with the pure scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled some great pink and green flower, one of the Nymphæa of the tank, swooning from the heat. At this hour of clear vision, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of the dinner regained possession of her faculties, imperious, triumphant, and rendered mightier than before by the flames of the conservatory. She no longer remembered the chill night air which had calmed her, nor those murmuring shadows of the park, the voices of which had counselled a happy peacefulness. Her ardent woman's senses, her satiated woman's capriciousness, were aroused. And, above her, the great black marble sphinx laughed a mysterious laugh, as though it had read the at length expressed desired which was galvanizing this dead heart, the desire which had remained so long elusive, the "something else" so vainly sought by Renée amidst the oscillating motion of her carriage, in the ashy gloom of the gathering night, and which had been so abruptly revealed to her beneath the glaring light of this garden of fire by the sight of Louise and Maxime, laughing and playing together, hand in hand.
At this moment a sound of voices issued from a neighbouring arbour, where Aristide Saccard had led the Messieurs Mignon and Charrier.
"No, really, Monsieur Saccard," the latter was saying in a thick voice, "we cannot take it back from you at more than two hundred francs the metre."
And Saccard retorted in his shrill tones:
"But in my share you valued it at two hundred and fifty francs."
"Well, listen! we will make it two hundred and twenty-five francs."
And the voices continued, harsh, and ringing strangely beneath the drooping palms. But they merely traversed Renée's dream like some vain noise, as there rose before her, conjured up by her delirium, an unknown enjoyment, hot with crime, and more vehement than all those she had already exhausted, the last that remained to her to partake of. She no longer felt weary.
The shrub behind which she remained half hidden was an accursed plant, a Tanghinia from Madagascar, with broad box-like leaves and whitish stems, the smallest veins of which distil a poisonous juice. And, at one moment, as Louise's and Maxime's mirth became louder, in the yellow reflection, in the sunset of the little drawing-room, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth parched and irritated, took between her teeth a sprig of the Tanghinia, which was on a level with her lips, and closed them on one of the bitter leaves.