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

by Émile Zola

But Renée brought with her, in sinning, all the ardour of a heart which has lost caste. She also had slided down the slope. Only she had not rolled as far as the bottom like a mass of inert flesh. Desire had been kindled within her when it was too late to resist it and when the fall had become inevitable. This fall abruptly appeared to her as one of the necessities of her boredom, as a rare extreme enjoyment which alone could rouse her tired senses, her wounded heart. It was during that autumnal promenade, in the twilight, when the Bois was falling asleep, that the vague idea of incest came to her, like a titillation which lent an unknown quiver to her skin; and in the evening, in the semi-intoxication of the dinner, this idea, lashed by jealousy, became precise, rose up ardently before her, amid the flames of the conservatory, as she watched Maxime and Louise. At that hour she desired sin, the sin which no one commits, the sin which would fill her empty life, and finally set her in that hell of which she was still afraid, just as she had been when she was a little girl. Then on the morrow, by a strange sentiment of remorse and lassitude, she no longer wished it. It seemed to her as if she had already sinned, that it was not so nice as she had fancied, and that it would really be too dirty. The crisis was bound to be fatal, to come from herself, apart from those two beings, those comrades who were destined to deceive each other one fine evening, and to couple themselves, thinking they were merely exchanging a hand-shake. However, after this stupid fall, she returned to her dream of a nameless pleasure, and then she took Maxime in her arms again, inquisitive about him, inquisitive as to the cruel delights of a love which she regarded as a crime. Her volition accepted incest, required it, decided upon tasting it to the end, even to remorse should that ever come. She was active, and conscious of her doings. She loved with the fury of a great fashionable lady, with the nervous prejudices she possessed as an offspring of the middle classes, with all the struggles, joys, and disgusts of a woman who drowns herself in self-disdain.

Maxime returned every night. He came by way of the garden at about one o'clock. Renée usually awaited him in the conservatory, which he had to cross to reach the little drawing-room. They, moreover, displayed perfect audacity, barely concealing themselves, and forgetting the most classical precautions of adultery. It is true that this corner of the house belonged to them. Baptiste, the husband's valet, alone had a right to enter it; and Baptiste, like a serious man, took himself off as soon as his duties were over. Maxime even pretended with a laugh that he withdrew to go and write his memoirs. One night, however, when the young fellow had just arrived, Renée shewed him Baptiste, who was solemnly crossing the drawing-room with a candlestick in his hand. The tall valet, with his minister-like figure, lighted by the yellow glow of the wax, had a more dignified and severe physiognomy than usual. As the lovers leaned forward, they saw him blow out his candle and go towards the stables, where the horses and ostlers were asleep.

"He is going his round," said Maxime.

Renée remained quivering. Baptiste usually alarmed her. It often happened to her to say that, with his coldness and his clear glances which never fell upon women's shoulders, he was the only honest man in the house.

They then evinced some prudence in seeing each other. They closed the doors of the little drawing-room, and were able to dispose of this room, with the conservatory and Renée's apartments, in all tranquillity. It was a little world. And during the earlier months they there tasted the most refined, the most delicately sought-for delights. They promenaded their amours from the large grey and pink bed of the sleeping-room, to the white and rosy nudity of the dressing-room, and to the pale yellow symphony of the little drawing-room. Each chamber, with its particular scent, its hangings, its special life, lent them a different form of tenderness, and made Renée a different lover. She was delicate and pretty on her padded great lady's couch, in the warm aristocratic bedroom where love underwent a tasteful attenuation; she showed herself a capricious, carnal female under the flesh-coloured tent, amid the perfume and damp languor of the bath, on leaving which she surrendered herself to Maxime, who preferred her thus; then downstairs, in the bright sunrise of the little drawing-room, amid the yellow aurora which gilded her hair, she became a goddess with her fair Diana-like head, her bare arms which assumed chaste postures, her beauteous form which reclined on the couches in attitudes revealing noble outlines of antique gracefulness. But there was a spot which Maxime was almost frightened of, and where Renée only led him on evil days, the days when she felt the need of more bitter intoxication. Then they loved in the conservatory. It was there that they tasted incest.

One night, in an hour of anguish, the young woman had compelled her lover to go and fetch one of the black bearskins. Then they had stretched themselves on this inky fur, at the edge of an ornamental basin in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly amid the limpid moonlight. Maxime had arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers, and the conservatory was heated to such a point that he fainted on the bearskin. Coming from the dry biting cold, he entered into so heavy a flame that he felt a smarting as if he had been whipped with a rod. When he recovered himself, he saw Renée kneeling, leaning over him with fixed eyes and a brutish attitude which frightened him. With her hair down and her shoulders bare, she was resting herself on her fists, with her figure stretched out, and looking like a huge cat with phosphorescent eyes. Above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous animal gazing at him, the young fellow, lying on his back, perceived the marble sphinx, with her glistening hips lighted by the moon. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the feminine-headed monster, and in her loosened skirts, she looked like the white sister of this black deity.

Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating; it was a dull heat, which did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground, like some unhealthy exhalation, and its steam ascended like a storm-charged cloud. A warm humidity covered the lovers with a kind of dew, an ardent sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime flat and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple nervous hams. Outside, through the little panes of the conservatory, one caught glimpses of the Parc Monceaux, of the clumps of trees with fine black outlines, of the grass lawns as white as frozen lakes—quite a dead landscape, the delicate light tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese engravings. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers were stretched, boiled strangely amid the great mute cold.

They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate acting will. Maxime submitted. What with his lank limbs, his graceful slimness, like that of a Roman youth, this neutral, fair-haired pretty being, stricken in his virility since childhood, became a big girl in the young woman's inquisitive arms. He seemed to have been born and to have grown up for a perversion of love. Renée enjoyed her domination, and with her passion she bent this creature, whose sexuality always seemed indeterminate. For her it was a constant astonishment of desire, a surprise of the senses, a strange sensation of uncomfortableness and acute pleasure. She no longer knew what he was; and she thought doubtingly of his fine skin, his fleshy neck, his abandonment and fainting fits. She then enjoyed an hour of repletion. By revealing to her an unknown ecstasy, Maxime completed her foolish toilets, her prodigious luxury, her mad life. He set in her flesh the high note which she already heard singing around her. He was the lover who matched the fashions and follies of the period. This pretty young fellow whose puny figure was revealed by his attire, this man who ought to have been a girl, who strolled on the Boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée's hands the instrument of one of those debaucheries suited to days of decline, and which among rotten nations, at certain periods, use up flesh and unsettle intelligence.

And it was especially in the conservatory that Renée was the man. That ardent night they spent there was followed by several others. The conservatory loved and burnt with them. Amid the heavy atmosphere, in the whitish moonlight, they saw the strange world of plants around them, moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched right across the pathway. At their feet the basin steamed full of a swarming, a thick entanglement, of roots, while the rosy stars of the Nymphæa opened on the surface of the water like virgin bodices, and the bushy Tornelias drooped like the hair of languishing water nymphs. Then around them, the palms and the lofty Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, near which they leaned and mingled their leaves together, assuming the unsteady attitudes of tired lovers. Lower down the ferns, the Pteris, the Alsophilas looked like green ladies with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, and who, mute and motionless at the edge, of the pathway, awaited love. Beside them the twisted red-spotted foliage of the Begonias, and the white leaves shaped like lance heads of the Caladiums, furnished a vague suite of bruises and pallidities, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, but amid which they at times discerned roundnesses like those of hips and knees wallowing on the ground, beneath the brutality of bleeding caresses. And the Bananas, bending with the weight of their bunches of fruit, spoke to them of the rich fertility of the soil, while the Abyssinian Euphorbia, the prickly, deformed, tapering stems of which—covered with horrid excrescences—they could espy in the darkness, seemed to perspire with sap, with the overflowing flux of their fiery growth. But by degrees as the lovers' glances dived into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness was filled with a more furious debauchery of leaves and stems; they could not distinguish on the stages the Marantas, soft like velvet, the Gloxinias with violet bells, the Dracænas resembling blades of old varnished lacquer; it was a round dance of living plants pursuing each other with unquenched tenderness. At the four corners, at the point where the curtains of tropical creepers formed arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder again, and the supple shoots of the Vanillas, the Indian berries, the Quisqualis and the Bauhinias seemed to be the interminable arms of lovers who could not be seen, but who distractedly lengthened their embrace to draw all scattered delights towards them. These endless arms drooped with lassitude, locked together in a spasm of love, sought for each other, entwined together like a crowd bent on copulation. It was, indeed, the immense copulation of the conservatory, of this bit of virgin forest ablaze with the foliage and the flowers of the tropics.

Maxime and Renée, with their senses perverted, felt themselves carried away amid these mighty nuptials of nature. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap which arose in the tree trunks penetrated them as well, and imparted to them mad desires of immediate growth, of gigantic procreation. They took part in the copulation of the conservatory. It was then, in the pale glimmer, that visions stupefied them, nightmares amid which, during long intervals, they beheld the amours of the palms and ferns; the foliage assumed a confused, equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into something sensual; murmurs, whispers were wafted to them from the clumps of shrubs, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was noisy in their own kisses and that echo sent them back. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as if the earth itself, in a crisis of satisfied desire, had burst forth into voluptuous sobs.