rose from the empty space, from the copses asleep in the shadow on either side of the avenue, from the noise of wheels and from the gentle oscillation that filled her with a delicious torpor. A thousand tremulous emotions passed over her flesh: dreams unrealized, nameless delights, confused longings, all the monstrous voluptuousness that a drive home from the Bois under a paling sky can infuse into a woman’s worn heart. She kept both her hands buried in the bearskin, she was quite warm in her white cloth coat with the mauve velvet facings. She put out her foot, as she stretched herself in her feeling of well-being, and with her ankle lightly touched Maxime’s warm leg; he took no notice of this contact. A jolt aroused her from her lethargy. She raised her head and with her gray eyes looked strangely at the young man, who sat lounging in an attitude of sheer elegance.
At this moment the calash left the Bois. The Avenue de l’Impératrice stretched out straight into the darkness, with the two green lines of its fences of painted wood, which met at the horizon. In the side-path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance cut out a bright patch in the gray horizon. Here and there, on the other side, along the roadway, were belated pedestrians, groups of black spots, making slowly for Paris. And right up above, at the end of the rumbling, confused procession of carriages, the Arc de Triomphe, seen from one side, displayed its whiteness against a vast expanse of sooty sky.
While the calash ascended at an increased pace, Maxime, charmed with the English appearance of the scene, looked out at the irregular architecture of the private houses on both sides of the avenue, with their lawns running down to the sidewalks. Renée, still dreaming, amused herself by watching the gaslights of the Place de l’Étoile being lit, one by one, on the edge of the horizon, and as each of these bright jets splashed the dying day with its little yellow flame, she seemed to hear a mysterious appeal; it seemed to her that Paris flaring in its winter’s night was being lighted up for her, and making ready for her the unknown gratification that her glutted senses yearned for.
The calash turned down the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense, and pulled up at the end of the Rue Monceau, a few steps from the Boulevard Malesherbes, in front of a large private house standing between a courtyard and a garden. The two gates, heavily ornamented with gilt enrichments, which opened into the courtyard were flanked by a pair of lamps, shaped like urns, and similarly covered with gilding, in which flared broad gasjets. Between the two gates, the concierge lived in a pretty lodge vaguely suggestive of a little Greek temple.
Maxime sprang lightly to the ground as the carriage was about to enter the courtyard.
“You know,” said Renée, detaining him by the hand, “we dine at half-past seven. You have more than an hour to dress in. Don’t keep us waiting.”
And she added, with a smile:
“The Mareuils are coming…. Your father wishes you to pay Louise every attention.” Maxime shrugged his shoulders.
“What a bore!” he murmured, peevishly. “I don’t mind marrying, but wooing is too silly…. Ah! how nice it would be of you, Renée, if you would rescue me from Louise this evening.”
He put on his comedy look, the accent and grimace which he borrowed from Lassouche whenever he was about to launch one of his constant conceits:
“Will you, stepmother dear?”
Renée shook hands with him in masculine fashion. And quickly, with nervous, jesting boldness:
“If I had not married your father, I believe you would have made love to me.”
The young man appeared to think the idea very funny, for he was still laughing when he turned the corner of the Boulevard Malesherbes.
The calash entered and drew up before the steps.
These steps, which were broad and shallow, were sheltered by a great glass awning, with a scalloped bordering of golden fringe and tassels. The two stories of the house rose up above the servants’ offices, whose square windows, glazed with frosted glass, appeared just above the level of the ground. At the top of the steps the hall-door projected, flanked by slender columns recessed into the wall, thus forming a slight break, marked at each story by a bay-window, and ascending to the roof, where it finished in a pediment. The stories had five windows on each side, placed at regular intervals along the façade, and simply framed in stone. The roof was cut off square above the attic windows, with broad and almost perpendicular sides.
But on the garden side the façade was far more sumptuous. A regal flight of steps led to a narrow terrace which skirted the whole length of the ground-floor; the balustrade of this terrace, designed to match the railings of the Parc Monceau, was even more heavily gilded than the awning or the lamps in the courtyard. Above this rose the mansion, having at either corner a pavilion, a sort of tower half enclosed in the body of the building, and containing rooms of a circular form. In the centre there bulged out slightly a third turret, more deeply contained in the building. The windows, tall and narrow in the turrets, wider apart and almost square on the flat portions of the façade, had on the ground-floor stone balustrades and on the upper stories gilded wrought-iron railings. The display of decoration was profuse to oppressiveness. The house was hidden under its sculpture. Around the windows and along the cornices ran swags of flowers and branches; there were balconies shaped like baskets full of blossoms, and supported by great naked women with straining hips, with breasts jutting out before them; then, here and there, were planted fanciful escutcheons, clusters of fruit, roses, every flower that it is possible for stone or marble to represent. The higher the eye ascended, the more the building burst into blossom. Around the roof ran a balustrade on which stood, at equal intervals, urns blazing with flames of stone. And there, between the bull’s-eye windows of the attics, which opened on to an incredible confusion of fruit and foliage, mantled the crowning portions of this stupendous scheme of decoration, the pediments of the turrets, amid which reappeared the great naked women, playing with apples, attitudinizing amidst sheaves of rushes. The roof, loaded with these ornaments, and surmounted besides with a cresting of embossed lead, with two lightning conductors, and with four huge symmetrical chimney-stacks, carved like all the rest, seemed the supreme effort of this architectural firework.
On the right was a vast conservatory, built on to the side of the house, and communicating with the ground-floor through the glass door of a drawingroom. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceau by a low railing concealed by a hedge, had a considerable slope. Too small for the house, so narrow that a grassplot and a few clumps of evergreens filled it up entirely, it was there simply as a mound, a green pedestal on which the house stood proudly planted in its gala dress. Seen from the gardens, across the well-trimmed grass and the glistening foliage of the shrubs, this great structure, still new and absolutely pallid, showed the wan face, the purse-proud, foolish importance of a female parvenu, with its heavy headdress of slates, its gilded flounces, and the rustling of its sculptured skirts. It was a reduced copy of the new Louvre, one of the most characteristic specimens of the Napoleon III style, that fecund bastard of every style. On summer evenings, when the rays of the setting sun lit up the gilt of the railings against its white façade, the strollers in the gardens would stop to look at the crimson silk curtains draped behind the ground-floor windows; and, through sheets of plate glass so wide and so clear that they seemed like the window-fronts of a big modern shop, arranged so as to display to the outer world the wealth within, the small middle-class could catch glimpses of the corners of chairs or tables, of portions of hangings, of patches of ceilings of a profuse richness, the sight of which would root them to the spot with envy and admiration, right in the middle of the pathways.
But at this moment the shades were falling from the trees, and the façade slept. On the other side, in the courtyard, the footman was respectfully assisting Renée to alight. At the further end of a glass covered-way on the right, the stables, banded with red brick, opened wide their doors of polished oak. On the left, as if for a balance, there was built into the wall of the adjacent house a highly-decorated niche, within which a sheet of water flowed unceasingly from a shell which two Cupids held in their outstretched arms. Renée stood for a moment at the foot of the steps, gently tapping her dress, which refused to fall properly. The courtyard, which had just been traversed by the noise of the equipage, resumed its solitude, its high-bred silence, broken by the continuous song of the flowing water. And as yet, in the black