"By heavens," thought Renée as she again entered her brougham, "I prefer my husband to that."
She returned straight home. In the evening she told Maxime not to come; she was poorly, she needed repose. And, on the morrow, when she handed him the fifteen thousand francs for Sylvia's jeweller, she remained embarrassed in presence of his surprise and his questions. Her husband, she said, had done a good stroke of business. From that day forth, however, she became more capricious, she often changed the hour of the appointments which she gave the young fellow, and even she frequently watched for him in the conservatory to send him away. He did not worry himself much about these changes of humour; it pleased him to be an obedient thing in women's hands. What bored him a great deal more was the moral turn which their lovers' meetings took at times. She became quite sad; and it even happened that she had big tears in her eyes. She left off singing the refrain about the "handsome young man" in the Belle Hélène, she played the hymns she had learnt at school and asked her lover if he did not think that sin was always punished, sooner or later.
"She's decidedly growing old," he thought. "It will be the utmost if she's funny for another year or two."
The truth was that she suffered cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with Monsieur de Saffré. She had revolted at Madame Sidonie's, she had given way to instinctive pride, to disgust for such a low bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything in her foundered; and she felt herself so despicable that she would have surrendered herself to the first man who pushed open the door of the room containing the pianos. The thought of her husband had, at times, formerly passed before her, amid her incest, like a touch of voluptuous horror; but henceforth the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that transformed her most delicate sensations into intolerable sufferings. She, who had enjoyed the refinement of her sin, and had willingly dreamt of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods partook of their amours together, was now descending to vulgar debauchery, to being shared by two men. In vain did she try to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard's kisses when she offered them to Maxime's. Her inquisitiveness descended to the depths of these accursed pleasures. She went as far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son amid the father's hugs. And she emerged yet more alarmed and more bruised from this journey into unknown evil, from this ardent darkness in which she confounded the person of her double lover, with a terror which was like the death-rattle of her enjoyment.
She kept this drama to herself alone, and increased the suffering it occasioned by the feverishness of her imagination. She would have preferred to die rather than own the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear that the young man might revolt and leave her; she had such an absolute belief in the monstrosity of her sin and in eternal damnation, that she would have more willingly crossed the Parc Monceaux naked than have confessed her shame aloud. On the other hand, she still remained the madcap who astonished Paris by her extravagant conduct. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices which the newspapers talked about, designating her by her initials. It was at this period that she seriously wished to fight a duel with pistols with the Duchess de Sternich who had, intentionally, so she said, upset a glass of punch over her dress. To calm her, it was necessary for her brother-in-law, the minister, to get angry. On another occasion she bet with Madame de Lauwerens that she would make the round of the Longchamps racecourse in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her from doing so. Maxime himself began to feel afraid of this head, in which madness lurked; and on the pillow at night-time he thought he could hear all the hubbub of a city bent on enjoying itself.
One evening they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. They had not even looked at the bill. They wished to see the great Italian tragedian, Ristori, who then attracted all Paris, and in whom, by the command of fashion, they were bound to interest themselves. The play was Phèdre. Maxime remembered his classical repertory sufficiently, and Renée knew enough Italian to follow the performance. And indeed they derived an especial emotion from this drama, performed in a foreign language, the sonority of which seemed to them at times to be a simple orchestral accompaniment supporting the pantomime of the actors. Hippolytos was a tall, pale fellow, a very poor actor, who whimpered his part.
"What a ninny!" muttered Maxime.
However, Ristori, with her broad shoulders shaken by her sobs, with her tragical face and fat arms, moved Renée deeply. Phædra was of Pasiphae's blood, and she asked herself of what blood she was, the incestuous stepmother of modern times. She saw nought of the piece save this tall woman drawing the ancient crime over the stage. When Phædra confides her criminal tenderness to Œnone in the first act; when, all on fire, she declares herself to Hippolytos in the second; and later on, in the fourth act, when the return of Theseus overwhelms her and she curses herself, in a crisis of gloomy fury, she filled the house with such a cry of savage passion, with such a yearning for superhuman voluptuousness, that the young woman felt every shudder of her desire and remorse pass through her own flesh.
"Wait," murmured Maxime in her ears, "you are going to hear Theramene's narrative. The old fellow has a funny head!"
And he muttered in a hollow voice: