"Why, of course," said the child naively, "as papa is rich at present and as you are his wife."
She smiled and with her usual vivacity:
"Then let us begin by thee-and-thouing one another. I say thou and you in the same breath. It's stupid. You will love me a great deal?"
"I will love thee with all my heart," he answered with the effusive manner of an urchin towards his sweetheart.
Such was Maxime and Renée's first interview. The lad did not go to school till a month later. During the earlier days his stepmother played with him as with a doll. She polished off his countryfied air, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, dressed from head to foot in new clothes supplied by his father's tailor, she gave a cry of joyous surprise. He was as pretty as a heart, such was her expression. The only thing was that his hair grew with most annoying sluggishness. The young woman frequently said that all one's face was in one's hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long while she had been greatly worried by its colour, that particular pale yellow tint, which reminded one of the best butter. But when the fashion of wearing yellow hair set in she was delighted, and to make people believe that she did not follow the fashion by compulsion she declared that she dyed her hair every month.
Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. His was one of those frail precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He practised vice even before he knew desire. On two occasions he had all but been expelled from the college. Had Renée's eyes been accustomed to provincial graces she would have noticed that, despite his ill-fitting clothes, the little shearling, as she called him, smiled, turned his neck and extended his arms in a pretty way, with the feminine air of those who serve as schoolboys' girls. He was very careful about his hands, which were slight and long; and although his hair remained cropped short by order of the principal, an ex-colonel of engineers, he possessed a little looking-glass which he pulled out of his pocket during lesson time, which he placed between the pages of his book, and into which he gazed for whole hours, examining his eyes, his gums, making pretty faces at himself, and learning various kinds of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a skirt, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had a grown woman's slim waist and undulation of the hips. To tell the truth, he received as many blows as caresses. The college of Plassans, a den of little bandits, like most provincial colleges, thus proved to be a hotbed of contamination in which Maxime's neutral temperament and childhood fraught with evil owing to some mysterious hereditary cause, were singularly developed. Fortunately age was about to alter him. But the trace of his childish abandonments, the effemination of his whole being, the time when he had thought himself a girl, were destined to remain in him and strike him for ever in his virility.
Renée called him "Mademoiselle," without knowing that six months earlier she would have spoken the truth. To her he seemed very obedient, very loving, and indeed his caresses often made her ill-at-ease. He had a manner of kissing that heated her skin. But what delighted her was his artfulness; he was exceedingly funny and bold, already speaking of women with a smile and holding his own against Renée's friends, dear Adeline who had just married M. d'Espanet, and fat Suzanne, married quite recently to the great manufacturer Haffner. When he was fourteen he had a passion for the latter. He had taken his stepmother into his confidence and she was greatly amused.
"For myself I should have preferred Adeline," she said, "she's prettier."
"Perhaps so," replied the urchin, "but Suzanne is ever so much fatter. I like fine women. It would be very kind of you to speak to her for me."
Renée laughed. Her doll—this tall urchin with a girl's manners—seemed to her more amusing than ever since he was in love. The time came when Madame Haffner seriously had to defend herself. Moreover the ladies encouraged Maxime with their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes which they assumed in his presence. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in all this. The three of them, scorched by passion amid their tumultuous life, lingered over the urchin's delightful depravity as over a novel harmless spice which tickled their palates. They let him touch their dresses, and pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the ante-room to help them on with their wrappers; they passed him along from hand to hand, laughing like lunatics when he kissed their wrists near the veins, on the spot where the skin is so soft; then they became maternal and learnedly taught him the art of being a fine gentleman and pleasing women. He was their toy, a little fellow of ingenious mechanism who kissed and courted, who had the most delightful vices in the world, but who remained a plaything, a little cardboard puppet whom they did not much fear, though just enough to quiver very agreeably at the touch of his childish hand.