She received this impertinent remark with a feeble smile, as though dealing with a spoilt child to whom everything is permitted.
"You're a nice one to complain," continued Maxime; "you spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your dress, you live in a splendid mansion, you possess some superb horses, your caprices become law, and the newspapers mention every new dress you wear as though they were relating something of the highest importance; all the women are jealous of you, every man would give ten years of his life just to kiss the tips of your fingers. Is it not so?"
She nodded her head affirmatively, but did not otherwise answer. With eyes cast down, she was again curling the hairs of the bearskin.
"Ah! do not be modest," resumed Maxime; "admit at once that you are one of the pillars of the Second Empire. Between ourselves, we can speak of these things. Everywhere, at the Tuileries, at the ministries, at the mansions of the mere millionaires, over the highest and the lowest, you reign with sovereign power. There is not a pleasure you have not partaken of, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not restrain me, I would say—"
He paused for a few seconds, laughing the while; then he cavalierly finished his sentence.
"I would say that you have tasted of every apple."
She did not wince.
"And yet you feel bored!" continued the young man with ludicrous vivacity. "But it's downright suicide! What is it you want? whatever is it you are dreaming of?"
She shrugged her shoulders, by way of saying she did not know. Though she held her head down, Maxime saw such a serious, such a gloomy look on her face, that he left off speaking. He watched the line of vehicles which, on reaching the end of the lake, spread out, and filled the vast carrefour. The carriages, no longer being so closely packed together, turned round with a superb grace; whilst the accelerated trot of the horses resounded loudly on the hard ground.
On going the round to rejoin the line, the carriage oscillated in a way which filled Maxime with a vague voluptuousness. Then, yielding to a desire to overwhelm Renée, he resumed: