from the glass roof, between the sombre tops of the tall palm-trees. And all around was massed in darkness; the arbours, with their hangings of creepers, were drowned in tenebrous gloom, like the lairs of slumbering serpents.
Renée stood musing beneath the bright light, watching Louise and Maxime in the distance. She no longer felt the fleeting fancies, the gray, twilight temptations of the chilly avenues of the Bois. Her thoughts were no longer lulled to sleep by the trot of her horses along the mundane turf, the glades in which middle-class families take their Sunday repasts. This time she was permeated with a keen and definite desire.
Unbridled love and voluptuous appetite haunted this stifling nave in which seethed the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapt in the puissant bridals of the earth which gave birth to those dark growths, those colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hot-bed, of this forest expansion, of this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia full of intoxication. At her feet steamed the tank, the mass of tepid water thickened by the saps from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours; a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with concupiscence. Overhead she could smell the palm-trees whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat of the air, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours, above all, that overpowered her. An indescribable perfume, potent, provocative, composed of a thousand perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and swooningly faint were blended with zephyrs coarse, pestilential, laden with poison. But, amid this rare music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids’ stridency, was that penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, that smell of love escaping in the morning hour from the close chamber of a bridegroom and bride.
Renée sank back slowly, leaning against the granite pedestal. In her dress of green satin, her head and breast flushed and bedewed with the bright scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled a great flower, green and pink, one of the water-lilies from the tank, swooning with heat. In this moment of enlightenment, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of dinner returned to her head, arrogant, triumphant, redoubled in force by the flames of the hothouse. She thought no longer of the freshness of the night, that had calmed her, of the murmuring shadows of the gardens, whose voices had whispered in her ear the bliss of serenity. In her were aroused the senses of a woman who desires, the caprices of a woman who is satiated. And above her head, the great black marble sphinx laughed its mystic laugh, as if it had read the longing, formulated at last, that galvanized that dead heart, the fugitive longing, the “something different” vainly sought for by Renée in the rocking of her calash, in the fine ashes of the falling night, and now suddenly revealed to her beneath the dazzling light of this blazing garden by the sight of Maxime and Louise, laughing and playing, their hands interlocked.
Now a sound of voices issued from an adjacent arbour into which Aristide Saccard had led the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier.
“No, Monsieur Saccard,” said the latter’s fat voice, “we really cannot take that back at more than two hundred francs the metre.”
And Saccard’s shrill tones retorted:
“But in my share you valued each metre of frontage at two hundred and fifty francs.”
“Well, listen, we will make it two hundred and twenty-five francs.”
And the voices went on, coarse, sounding strangely under the clumps of drooping palm-trees. But they passed like an empty noise through Renée’s dream, as there rose before her, with the fatal summons experienced by one looking over a precipice, an unknown joyance, hot with crime, more violent than all those which she had already drained, the last that remained in her cup. She felt weary no longer.
The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascar tanghin-tree with broad box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. And at a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the yellow refraction, in the sunset of the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth parched and stung, took between her lips a sprig of the tanghin-tree which came to the level of her teeth, and closed them on one of its bitter leaves.
CHAPTER II
Aristide Rougon swept down upon Paris on the morrow of the 2 December, like a carrion bird that scents the field of battle from afar. He came from Plassans, a sous-préfecture in the south, where his father had at length, in the troubled waters of events, netted a long-coveted appointment as receiver of taxes. He himself, still young, had compromised himself like a fool, without fame or profit, and could consider himself fortunate to have emerged safe and sound from the scrimmage. He came with a rush, furious at having taken a false step, cursing the country, talking of Paris with the ravenous hunger of a wolf, swearing “that he would never be such an ass again;” and the bitter smile which accompanied these words assumed a terrible significance on his thin lips.
He arrived in the early days of 1852. He brought with him his wife Angèle, a fair-haired, insipid person, whom he installed in a cramped lodging in the Rue Saint-Jacques, like an inconvenient piece of furniture that he was eager to get out of the way. The young wife had refused to be separated from her daughter, little Clotilde, a child of four, whom the father would gladly have left behind in the care of his family. But he had only yielded to Angèle’s desire on the stipulation that the college at Plassans should remain the home of their son Maxime, a scapegrace of eleven, whom his grandmother had promised to look after. Aristide wanted to have his hands free: a wife and a child already seemed to him a crushing burden for a man decided to surmount every obstacle, not caring whether he got rolled in the mud or broke his back in the attempt.
On the very night of his arrival, while Angèle was unpacking the trunks, he felt a keen desire to explore Paris, to tread with his clodhopping shoes the burning stones from which he hoped to extract millions of money. He simply took possession of the city. He walked for the sake of walking, going along the pavements as though he were in a conquered country. He saw before him clearly the battle he had come to fight, and he felt no repugnance in comparing himself to a skilful picklock who was about, by ruse or violence to seize his share of the common wealth which so far had been malignantly denied him. Had he felt the need of an excuse, he would have invoked his desires, which had for ten years been stifled, his wretched provincial existence, and above all his mistakes, for which he held society at large responsible. But at this moment, amid this emotion of the gambler who at last places his eager hands on the green cloth, he felt nothing but joy, a joy all his own, in which were mingled the gratification of covetousness and the expectations of unpunished roguery. The Paris air intoxicated him; he thought he could hear in the rumbling of the carriages the voices from Macbeth calling to him: “Thou shalt be rich!” For close upon two hours he thus walked from street to street, tasting the delights of a man who gives play to his vices. He had not been back in Paris since the happy year which he had spent there as a student. The night fell: his dream grew in the bright light thrown on the pavement by the shops and cafes; he lost himself.
When he raised his eyes, he found he was in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the middle. One of his brothers, Eugène Rougon, lived in an adjacent street, the Rue Penthièvre. When coming to Paris, Aristide had reckoned particularly upon Eugène, who, after having been one of the most active participators in the Coup d’État, was now an occult force, a lawyer of small account about to develop into a politician of great importance. But with the superstition of a gambler, Aristide decided not to knock at his brother’s door that evening. He returned slowly to the Rue Saint-Jacques, thinking of Eugène with a dull feeling of jealousy, contemplating his shabby clothes still covered with the dust of the journey, and seeking consolation in the resumption of his dream of wealth. But even this dream had turned to bitterness. After starting out for the sake of expansion, and being exhilarated by the bustling activity of the Paris shops, he returned home irritated by the happiness that seemed to