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

by Émile Zola

Renée, however, was not cloistered. Taking Maxime in her train, like a fair-haired page in a dress-coat, she frequented society, where she tasted even more acute pleasures. The season was one long triumph for her. Never had her imagination been bolder as regards toilets and head-dresses. It was then that she risked wearing that famous bush-tinted robe, on which a complete stag hunt was embroidered with such attributes as powder flasks, hunting horns, and broad bladed knives. It was then, also, that she set the fashion of wearing the hair in the antique style; Maxime having to go and sketch patterns for her at the Campana Museum which had recently been opened. She grew younger, she was in all the plenitude of her turbulent beauty. Incest lent her a fire which glowed in the depths of her eyes and heated her laughter. Her eye-glasses looked superbly insolent on the tip of her nose, and she gazed at the other women, at the dear friends who basked in the enormity of some vice, with the air of a bragging hobbledehoy, and with a fixed smile which signified "I also have my crime."

Maxime, on his side, declared that society was wearisome. It was not merely for show that he pretended to be bored in it, for he really did not amuse himself anywhere. At the Tuileries, at the ministers' residences, he disappeared amid Renée's skirts. But he became the master again as soon as some freak was in question. Renée wished to see the private room on the Boulevard again, and the breadth of the divan made her smile. Then he took her a little bit everywhere, to harlots' houses, to the opera ball, to the stage boxes of petty theatres, to all the equivocal places where they could elbow brutal vice and taste the delights of remaining incognito. When they furtively returned to the house, worn out with fatigue, they fell asleep in each other's arms, sleeping off the drunkenness of obscene Paris, with snatches of smutty verses still ringing in their ears. On the morrow Maxime imitated the actors, and Renée, accompanying herself on the piano of the little drawing-room, tried to recall the hoarse voice and the wriggling of Blanche Müller in her part of the Belle Hélène. The music lessons she had taken at the convent now only served her to murder the verses of the new burlesques. She had a religious horror of serious airs. Maxime poked fun at German music with her, and he thought it his duty to go and hiss Tannhauser, both by conviction and to defend his stepmother's sprightly refrains.

RENÉE AND MAXIME SKATING IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE.

One of their great enjoyments was skating; it was fashionable that winter, the Emperor having been one of the first to try the ice on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Renée ordered a complete Polish costume, velvet and fur, of Worms; and insisted upon Maxime wearing high boots and a foxskin cap. They reached the Bois in the intense cold which made their noses and lips tingle as if the wind had blown fine sand into their faces. It amused them to feel cold. The Bois was quite grey, with threads of snow, like narrow lace, along the branches of the trees. And under the pale sky, above the congealed and bedimmed lake, only the pines of the islands still displayed on the edge of the horizon their theatrical drapery, on which the snow had also sewn broad bands of lace. The lovers darted along together in the frozen air, with the rapid flight of swallows skimming just above the ground. Setting one hand behind their backs, and placing one upon each other's shoulder, they went off, erect, smiling, side by side, and revolving round the broad space, marked out by thick ropes. Loungers looked on at them from the roadway. From time to time they came to warm themselves at the braziers lighted at the edge of the lake, and then they started off again. They enlarged the course of their flight, with their eyes watering both with pleasure and with cold.

Then when the spring came Renée remembered her old elegiac fancy. She insisted upon Maxime strolling with her in the Parc Monceaux at night time by moonlight. They went into the grotto and sat down on the grass, in front of the colonnade. But when she expressed a desire to row on the little lake they found that there were no oars in the boat, which could be seen from the house, moored at the edge of a pathway. They were evidently removed every evening. This was a disappointment. Besides the vast shadows of the park made the lovers nervous. They would have liked to have had a Venetian fête given there, with red lanterns and an orchestra. They preferred it during the day-time, of an afternoon, and they then often stationed themselves at one of the windows of the mansion to watch the equipages following the graceful curve of the main avenue. They enjoyed themselves in gazing upon this charming corner of new Paris, this clean smiling bit of nature, these lawns looking like stripes of velvet, dotted with flower beds and choice shrubs, and edged with magnificent white roses. Carriages passed by each other, as numerous as on the Boulevard; lady promenaders carelessly trailed their skirts as if they had not ceased treading the carpets of their drawing-rooms. And athwart the foliage, Renée and Maxime criticised the dresses and pointed out the equipages to each other, deriving real enjoyment from the soft tints of this large garden. A scrap of gilded railing shone between two trees, a party of ducks passed over the lake, the little renaissance bridge looked white and new amid the green stuff, whilst on either side of the main avenue, mammas seated on yellow chairs forgot, in their chatter, the little boys and girls who looked at one another with a pretty air, and pouted like precocious children.

The lovers had a great liking for new Paris. They often rambled through the city in their carriage, going out of their way so as to pass along certain Boulevards for which they had a personal affection. The lofty houses adorned with large carved doors, loaded with balconies, whereon names and callings glittered in large gold letters, delighted them. While the brougham darted along, they followed with a friendly glance the grey bands of interminable footways, with their seats, their variegated columns and their scrubby trees. This bright gap which extended to the limits of the horizon, growing narrower, and opening upon a bluey parallelogram of space, the uninterrupted double row of large shops, where shopmen smiled at female customers, the currents of the stamping swarming crowd, filled them little by little with a feeling of absolute and complete satisfaction, they realised that they beheld the perfection of street life. They were enamoured even of the jets of the watering hose, which passed like white smoke before their houses and then spread out and fell in a fine rain under the wheels of the brougham, darkening the ground and raising a slight cloud of dust. They still went on, and it seemed to them that the vehicle was rolling over carpets along the straight endless highway, which had been pierced solely so that they might not have to pass through dark alleys. Each Boulevard became some passage of their mansion. The gay sunshine smiled upon the house fronts, lit up the window panes, fell upon the verandahs of the shops and cafés and heated the asphalt under the busy tread of the crowd. And when they returned home, somewhat dazed by the bright confusion of these long bazaars, they found enjoyment in the Parc Monceaux, which was like the complementary plat-band of the new Paris which displayed its luxury amid the first warmth of spring.

When the exigencies of fashionable life absolutely compelled them to leave Paris, they went to the seaside, regretfully however, and thinking of the Boulevardian side-walks while on the shores of the ocean. Then love itself grew dull there. It was a hot-house flower which needed the spacious grey and pink bed; the naked fleshy aspect of the dressing-room and the gilded dawn of the little drawing-room. Alone of an evening, in front of the sea, they no longer found anything to say to each other. Renée tried to sing the airs she had heard at the Variety Theatre, accompanying herself on an old piano which was agonising in a corner of her room at the hotel, but the instrument, damp with the breezes from the open, had the dreary voice of the great waters. La Belle Hélène seemed lugubrious and fantastic. To console herself Renée astonished the people on the sands by her prodigious costumes. The whole band of fashionable women there was yawning while waiting for the advent of winter, and trying despairingly to invent some bathing dress which would not make them look too ugly. Renée was never able to prevail upon Maxime to bathe. He had an atrocious fear of water, he turned quite pale when the tide reached his boots, and for nothing in the world would he have approached the edge of a cliff; he kept away from all pits, and made a long circuit to avoid any steep part of the shore.

Saccard came to see "the children" on two or three occasions. He was overwhelmed with worry, he said. It was only about October, when they all three found themselves again in Paris, that he seriously thought of drawing nearer his wife. The Charonne affair was ripening. His plan was a simple and brutal one. He relied upon capturing Renée by the same devices that he would have employed with a harlot. She lived on amid an increasing need of money, and out of pride she only applied to her husband at the last extremity. The latter resolved to profit by her first request to shew his gallantry, and, in the delight occasioned by the payment of some heavy debt, to resume relations which had so long been severed.