a moment Renée remained huddled in the warmth of her corner, giving way to the pleasurable lullaby of wheels turning before her. Then, raising her head towards Maxime, whose eyes were calmly undressing the women spread out in the adjacent broughams and landaus:
“Tell me,” she said, “do you really think that Laure d’Aurigny handsome? How you sang her praises the other day, when they were discussing the sale of her diamonds!… By the way, did you not see the necklace and the aigrette your father bought me at the sale?”
“Yes, he does things well,” said Maxime, without answering, laughing mischievously. “He finds means to pay Laure’s debts and to give diamonds to his wife.”
Renée made a slight movement with her shoulders.
“Wretch!” she murmured, with a smile.
But Maxime was leaning forward, following with his gaze a lady whose green dress interested him. Renée had thrown back her head, and with half-closed eyes glanced listlessly at the two sides of the avenue, seeing nothing. On the right, copses and low-cut plantations with reddened leaves and slender branches passed slowly by; at intervals, on the track reserved for riders, slim-waisted gentlemen galloped past, their steeds raising little clouds of fine dust behind them. On the left, at the foot of the narrow grassplots that run down intersected by flowerbeds and shrubs, the lake, clear as crystal, without a ripple, lay as though neatly trimmed along its edges by the gardeners’ spades; and on the further side of this translucent mirror, the two islands, with between them the gray bar formed by the connecting bridge, displayed their smiling slopes and the theatrical outlines of fir-trees and evergreens, whose black foliage, resembling the fringe of curtains cunningly draped along the edge of the horizon, was reflected in the water. This scrap of nature, that seemed like a newly-painted piece of scenery, lay bathed in a faint shadow, in a pale blue vapour which succeeded in lending to the background an exquisite charm, an air of entrancing artificiality. On the other bank, the Châlet des Îles, as though newly varnished, shone like an unused toy; and the paths of yellow sand, the narrow garden walks that wind among the lawns and run along the lake, edged with iron hoops in imitation of rustic woodwork, stood out more curiously, in this last hour of daylight, against the softened green of grass and water.
Accustomed to the ingenious charms of this perspective, Renée, once more yielding to her languor, had lowered her eyelids altogether, and looked only at her slender fingers twisting the long hairs of the bearskin. But there came a jolt in the even trot of the line of carriages. And, raising her head, she nodded to two ladies lolling languidly, amorously, side by side, in a chariot which was nosily leaving the road that skirts the lake, in order to go down one of the side avenues. The Marquise d’Espanet, whose husband, lately an aide-de-camp to the Emperor, had just created a great scandal by allying himself with the discontented members of the old nobility, was one of the most prominent leaders of society of the Second Empire; her companion, Mme. Haffner, was the wife of a celebrated manufacturer of Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was transforming into a politician. Renée, a schoolfellow of the two inseparables, as people nicknamed them with a knowing air, called them by their Christian names, Adeline and Suzanne.
As, after smiling to them, she was about to sink afresh into her corner, a laugh from Maxime made her turn round.
“No, really, I feel too sad: don’t laugh, I mean what I say,” she said, seeing that the young man was watching her ironically, making merry over her huddled attitude.
Maxime put on a comedy voice:
“How unhappy we are: how jealous!”
She seemed quite amazed.
“I!” she said. “Jealous of what?”
And then added, with a pout of contempt, as though remembering:
“Ah, to be sure, that fat Laure! I had not given her a thought, believe me. If Aristide has, as you say, paid that woman’s debts and saved her from having to pack up her trunks, it only proves that he is less fond of money than I thought. This will restore him to the ladies’ good graces…. The dear man, I leave him every liberty.”
She smiled, and pronounced the words “the dear man” in a voice full of friendly indifference. And suddenly, becoming very sad again, casting around her the despairing glance of women who do not know in what form of amusement to take refuge, she murmured:
“Oh, I should like to…. But no, I am not jealous, not at all jealous.”
She stopped, doubtfully:
“You see, I am bored,” she said at last, abruptly.
Then she sat silent, with her lips pressed together. The line of carriages still rolled along the lake with its even trot and a noise singularly resembling a distant waterfall. Now, on the left, there rose, between the water and the roadway, little bushes of evergreens with thin straight stems, forming curious little clusters of pillars. On the right, the copses and plantations had come to an end; the Bois opened out into broad lawns, into vast expanses of grass, with here and there a clump of tall trees; the greensward ran on, with gentle undulations, to the Porte de la Muette, whose low gates, that seemed like a piece of black lace stretched on the level of the ground, could be distinguished at a very great distance; and on the slopes, at the places where the undulations sank in, the grass seemed quite blue. Renée stared fixedly before her, as though this widening of the horizon, these gentle meadows, soaked in the evening air, had caused her to feel more keenly the void in her existence.
After a pause she repeated, querulously:
“Oh, I am bored, bored to death.”
“This is not amusing, you know,” said Maxime, calmly. “Your nerves are out of order, undoubtedly.”
Renée threw herself back in the carriage.
“Yes, my nerves are out of order,” she replied, dryly.
Then she became motherly:
“I am growing old, my dear child; I shall soon be thirty. It’s terrible. Nothing gives me pleasure…. You, who are twenty, cannot know….”
“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me out?” interrupted the young man. “It would take the devil of a long time.”
She received this impertinence with a faint smile, as though it were the outburst of a spoilt child that knows no restraint.
“I should recommend you to complain,” continued Maxime. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your dress, you live in a sumptuous house, you have splendid horses, your caprices are law, and the papers discuss each of your new gowns as an event of the most serious importance; the women envy you, the men would give ten years of their lives for leave to kiss the tips of your fingers…. Is what I say true?”
She nodded affirmatively, without replying. Her eyes cast down, she had resumed her task of curling the hairs of the bearskin.
“Come, don’t be modest,” Maxime continued; “confess roundly that you are one of the pillars of the Second Empire. We need not hide these things from one another. Wherever you go, at the Tuileries, at the houses of ministers, at the houses of mere millionaires, high or low, you reign a queen. There is not a pleasure of which you have not had your fill, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not restrain me, I should say….”
He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence cavalierly:
I should say you had bitten at every apple.”
She moved no muscle.
“And you are bored!” resumed the young man, with droll vivacity. “But it’s scandalous!… What is it you want? What on earth do you dream of?”
She shrugged her shoulders to imply that she did not know. Though she kept her head down, Maxime was able to see that she looked so serious, so melancholy, that he thought it best to hold his tongue. He watched the line of carriages, which, when they reached the end of the lake, spread out, filling the whole of the open space. The carriages, packed less closely, swept round