After the holidays, Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the college of fashionable society, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. However soft and light headed the little fellow might be, he still had a keen intelligence; but he applied it to something very different to classical studies. However he was a tolerably efficient pupil who never fell to the Bohemian level of dunces, but remained among the well dressed and properly conducted young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his early youth was a perfect worship for dress. Paris opened his eyes, made him a swell young man, tightly buttoned up in his clothes and following the fashions. He was the Brummel of his class. He presented himself there as he would have presented himself in a drawing-room, daintily booted, tightly gloved, with prodigious neckties and ineffable hats. There were some twenty pupils of the kind who formed a sort of aristocracy, who in leaving school for the day offered each other Havannah cigars contained in cases with gold mountings, and who were followed by servants in livery carrying their packets of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse which were the admiration of his school fellows. He himself drove, while on the seat behind sat a footman with folded arms, who carried on his knees the collegian's copy book case, a perfect ministerial portfolio in brown leather. And you should have seen how lightly, scientifically and correctly Maxime came in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew his horse up sharp before the college door and said to the footman, "At half past four, Jacques, eh?" The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the grace of this fair haired youngster whom twice a day at regular hours they saw arrive and start off in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women and splashed the passers-by as if they were returning from the races. 'Twas an astonishing little world, a conceited foolish brood, that could be seen each day in the Rue du Havre, correctly attired in masher's jackets, aping rich and wearied men, whilst the Bohemian contingent of the college, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their heavy shoes, and with their hooks hanging at the end of a strap over their backs.
Renée, who wished to consider the part she played as a mother and a schoolmistress a serious one, was delighted with her pupil. It is true that she neglected nothing to perfect his education. She was then passing through a period full of mortification and tears; a lover had abandoned her, in scandalous style in sight of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchess de Sternich. She dreamt that Maxime would be her consolation, she made herself older, she endeavoured to be maternal, and became the most eccentric mentor that can be imagined. Maxime's tilbury often remained at home; it was Renée who came to fetch the collegian with her roomy carriage. They hid the brown portfolio under the cushion, and went to the Bois de Boulogne then in its freshness. She there gave him a course of lectures on high elegance. She pointed out to him the upper ten of imperial Paris, fat and happy, still ecstasied by the warm touch which changed the starvelings and pigs of the day before into great lords and millionaires puffing and fainting under the weight of their cash boxes. But the youngster particularly questioned her about women, and as she was very familiar with him, she gave him precise particulars: Madame de Guende was stupid but admirably formed; the wealthy Countess Vanska had been a street singer before she married a Pole who was said to beat her; as for the Marchioness d'Espanet and Suzanne Haffner they were inseparable; and although they were Renée's intimate friends, she added—compressing her lips as if to prevent herself from saying any more—that some very nasty stories were told about them; beautiful Madame de Lauwerens was also a very compromising woman, but she had such pretty eyes, and after all everyone knew that she herself was irreproachable, although somewhat too much mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who frequented her, Madame Daste, Madame Teissière and the Baroness de Meinhold. Maxime wished to have the ladies' portraits; and with them he adorned an album which remained on the drawing-room table. With that vicious artfulness which was his predominant characteristic he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking her for particulars concerning the fast women, at the same time pretending to take them for women of society. Renée, becoming moral and serious, said that they were frightful creatures and that he ought to carefully avoid them; then forgetting herself she talked about them as if they were people whom she had known intimately. One of the youngster's great delights was to set her talking about the Duchess de Sternich. Each time that her carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never missed naming the duchess with cruel artfulness and an under glance which proved that he was acquainted with Renée's last adventure. Then she in a harsh voice tore her rival to pieces; how old she was looking, poor woman, she painted her face, she had lovers hidden in all her cupboards, she had given herself to a chamberlain so as to be in the imperial bed. And Renée ran on and on, while Maxime, to exasperate her, declared that he thought Madame de Sternich charming. Such lessons singularly developed the collegian's intelligence, and this, all the more, as his young teacher repeated them every where, in the Bois, at the theatre, and in the drawing-rooms. The pupil thus became very proficient.
Maxime adored living amid women's skirts, finery and rice powder. He always remained somewhat girlish with his tapering hands, his beardless face, and his white, fleshy neck. Renée gravely consulted him about her dresses. He knew the good costumiers of Paris and pronounced judgment upon each of them in a word, he talked about the "savour" of such a one's bonnets and the "logic" of such a one's dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not proved, not a bootmaker whose heart he had not penetrated and studied. This strange abortion who during the English lessons at college, read the prospectuses that his perfumer sent him every Friday, would have delivered a complete discourse on Parisian society, customers and tradespeople included, at an age when country youngsters don't dare look a housemaid in the face. On his way home he often brought a bonnet, a box of soap or an article of jewellery that his stepmother had ordered the day before. Some strip of musk-scented lace always lingered in his pockets.
However his great affair was to accompany Renée when she called on the illustrious Worms, the tailor of genius, before whom the queens of the Second Empire fell on their knees. The great man's waiting room was vast, square and furnished with roomy divans. Maxime entered it with a feeling of religious emotion. Dresses certainly have a special perfume; silk, satin, velvet, lace had there mingled their light aroma with that of women's hair and amber-shaded shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained an oderiferous warmth, an incense of flesh and luxury which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to dance attendance during hours; a series of feminine solicitors were there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, taking a snack on the large central table covered with bottles and plates full of little cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked freely, and when they ensconced themselves around the room you would have thought that a flight of Lesbian nymphs had alighted on the divans of a Parisian drawing-room. Maxime, whom they put up with and even liked on account of his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted divine delight: he glided along the divans like a supple snake; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, or between two dresses, where he made himself as small as possible and kept very quiet, inhaling the perfumed warmth of his feminine neighbours.
"That youngster pokes himself everywhere," said the Baroness de Meinhold tapping him on the cheeks.
He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by intoxicating him with the illustrious Worms's Madeira, whereupon he said some astounding things which made them laugh till they cried. However it was the Marchioness d'Espanet who hit upon the right remark for the circumstance. As Maxime was discovered one day, in a corner of the divan, behind her back—
"That boy ought to have been a girl," she murmured, seeing him so rosy and blushing, so penetrated with the delight he had experienced at being close to her.
Then when the great Worms finally received Renée, Maxime followed her into the study. He had ventured to speak two or three times whilst the master became absorbed in contemplating his customer, just like Leonardo da Vinci in presence of the Joconde, according to the pontiffs of art. The master had deigned to smile at the appropriateness of Maxime's remarks; he made Renée stand upright before a mirror, rising from the parquetry to the ceiling, and he pondered with a contraction of the eyebrows, whilst the young woman, affected, caught her breath so as not to stir. And after a few minutes the master, as if seized and shaken by inspiration, roughly and jerkily described the work of art he had just conceived, exclaiming in curt phrases:
"Montespan dress in ash tinted silk—the train describing a rounded skirt in front—large bow of grey satin catching it up on the hips—finally an apron composed of puffs of pearl grey tulle, the puffs separated by bands of grey satin."
He again reflected, seemed to dive to the very depths of his genius, and with the triumphant grimace of a python seated upon the tripod he concluded: