LITMIR.BIZ

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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 with majestic grace; the quicker trot of the horses sounded noisily on the hard ground.

      The calash, on going the round to join the line, rocked in a way that filled Maxime with vague enjoyment. Then, yielding to his wish to crush Renée:

      “Look here,” he said, “you deserve to ride in a cab! That would serve you right!… Why, look at these people returning to Paris, people who are all at your feet. They hail you as their queen, and your sweetheart, M. de Mussy, can hardly refrain from blowing kisses to you.”

      A horseman was, in fact, bowing to Renée. Maxime had been talking in a hypocritical, mocking voice. But Renée barely turned round, and shrugged her shoulders. At last the young man made a gesture of despair.

      “Really,” he said; “have we come to that?… But, good God, you have everything: what do you want more?”

      Renée raised her head. In her eyes was a glow of light, the ardent desire of unsatisfied curiosity.

      “I want something different,” she replied, in a low voice.

      “But since you have everything,” resumed Maxime, laughing, “there is nothing different…. What is the ‘something different’?”

      “What?” she repeated.

      And she did not continue. She had turned right round, and was watching the strange picture fading behind her. It was almost night; twilight was falling slowly like fine ashes. The lake, seen from the front, in the pale daylight that still hovered over the water, became rounder, like a huge tin dish; on either side the plantations of evergreens, whose slim straight stems seemed to issue from its slumbering surface, assumed at this hour the appearance of purple colonnades, delineating with the evenness of their architecture the studied curves of the shores; and again, in the background, rose shrubberies, confused masses of foliage, whose large black patches closed up the horizon. Behind these patches shone the glow of the expiring sunset, that set fire to but a small portion of the gray immensity. Above this placid lake, these low copses, this singularly flat perspective, stretched the vault of heaven, infinite, deepened and widened. This great slice of sky hanging over this small morsel of nature caused a thrill, an undefinable sadness; and from these paling heights fell so deep an autumnal melancholy, so sweet and so heartbreaking a darkness, that the Bois, wound little by little in a shadowy shroud, lost its mundane graces, widened, full of the puissant charm that forests have. The trot of the carriages, whose bright colouring was swept away in the twilight, sounded like the distant voices of leaves and running water. All died away as it went. In the centre of the lake, in the general evanescence, the lateen sail of the great pleasure-boat stood out, strongly defined against the glow of the sunset. And it was no longer possible to distinguish anything but this sail, this triangle of yellow canvas, immeasurably enlarged.

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