Complete Works of Emile Zola (224 page)

“That’s it, that’s it,” she exclaimed…. “I had the great big cross on the tip of my tongue.”

She folded back the chemisette, left the room for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. And resuming her place in front of the mirror she murmured triumphantly:

“Oh, perfect, quite perfect…. But he’s no fool, that little shaveling! Used you to dress the girls in the country, then? You and I are sure to get on well together. But you will have to do as I tell you. In the first place, you must let your hair grow and never wear that horrid tunic again. Then you must faithfully follow my lessons in good manners. I want you to become a smart young man.”

“But, of course,” said the child naïvely; “since papa is rich now and you are his wife.”

She smiled, and with her customary vivacity:

“Then let us begin by dropping the plural. I have been saying thou and you anyhow. It’s too silly…. Will you love me very much?”

“I will love you with all my heart,” he replied, with the effusiveness of a boy towards his sweetheart.

Such was the first interview between Maxime and Renée. The child did not go to school till a month later. During the first few days his step-mother played with him as with a doll; she brushed off his country manners, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, newly arrayed from head to foot by his father’s tailor, she uttered a cry of joyous surprise: he looked as pretty as a daisy, she said. Only his hair took an unconscionable time in growing. Renée used always to say that all one’s face lay in one’s hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long time she had been maddened by the colour of it, that peculiar pale yellow colour which reminded one of good butter. But when yellow hair came into fashion she was delighted, and to make believe that she did not follow the fashion because she could not help herself, she swore she dyed it every month.

Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. He was one of those frail, precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he knew the meaning of desire. He had twice narrowly escaped being expelled from school. Had Renée’s eyes been accustomed to provincial graces, she would have perceived that, strangely got-up though he was, the little shaveling, as she called him, had a way of smiling, of turning his neck, of putting out his arms prettily, with the feminine air of the love-boys at school. He took great pains over his hands, which were long and slender; and though his hair was cropped short by order of the head-master, an ex-colonel of engineers, he owned a little looking-glass which he drew from his pocket during school-time and placed between the leaves of his book, looking at himself in it for hours, examining his eyes, his gums, pulling pretty faces, studying the art of coquetry. His school-fellows hung round his blouse as round a petticoat, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had the slim waist and undulating hips of a grown woman. True it was, he received as many kicks as kisses. And so the school at Plassans, a den of little miscreants like most provincial schools, was a hotbed of pollution in which were singularly developed that epicene temperament, that childhood fraught with evil from some mysterious hereditary cause. Fortunately, age was about to improve him. But the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effemination of his whole being what time he had played the girl, was destined to remain in him, and to strike a lasting blow at his virility.

Renée called him “Mademoiselle,” not knowing that six months earlier she would have hit the truth. He seemed to her very docile, very affectionate, and indeed his caresses often made her feel ill-at-ease. He had a way of kissing that heated the skin. But what delighted her was his roguishness; he was as entertaining as could be, and bold, already talking of women with a smile, holding his own against Renée’s friends, against dear Adeline who had just married M. d’Espanet, and the fat Suzanne, wedded quite recently to Haffner, the big manufacturer. When he was fourteen he fell in love with the latter. He confided his passion to his step-mother, who was intensely amused.

“For myself I should have preferred Adeline,” she said, “she is prettier.”

“Perhaps so,” replied the scapegrace, “but Suzanne is much stouter…. I like fine women…. If you were very good-natured, you would put in a word for me.”

Renée laughed. Her doll, this tall lad with the girl’s ways, seemed to her inimitable now that he had fallen in love. The time came when Mme. Haffner had seriously to defend herself. For the rest the ladies encouraged Maxime by their stifled laughter, their unfinished sentences, and the coquettish attitudes they assumed in presence of the precocious child. There was a touch of very aristocratic debauchery in this. All three, in the midst of their life of tumult, scorched by passion, lingered over the boy’s delicious depravity as over a novel and harmless spice that stimulated their palates. They allowed him to touch their dresses, to pass his fingers over their shoulders when he followed them into the ante-room to help them on with their wraps; they passed him from hand to hand, laughing like madwomen when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, on the place where the skin is so soft; and then they became motherly, and learnedly instructed him in the art of being a smart man and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little toy man of ingenious workmanship, that kissed, and made love, and had the sweetest vices in the world, but remained a plaything, a little cardboard man that one need not be too much afraid of, only just sufficiently to feel a very pleasant thrill at the touch of his childish hand.

After the holidays Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. It was the fashionable public school, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The child, soft and light-headed though he was, had by that time a very quick intelligence; but he applied himself to far other things than his classical studies. He was nevertheless a well-behaved pupil, who never descended to the Bohemian level of dunces, and who forgathered with the proper and well-dressed young gentlemen of whom nothing was ever said. All that remained to him of his boyhood was a veritable cult of dress. Paris opened his eyes, turned him into a smart young man, with tight-fitting clothes of the latest fashion. He was the Brummel of his form. He appeared there as he would in a drawing-room, daintily booted, correctly gloved, with prodigious neckties and unutterable hats. There were about twenty like him in all, who formed a sort of aristocracy, offering one another, as they left the school, Havannah cigars out of gold-clasped cigar-cases, and having servants in livery to carry their parcels of books. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury and a little black horse, which were the admiration of his school-fellows. He drove himself, while a footman sat with folded arms on the back seat, holding on his knees the schoolboy’s knapsack, a real ministerial portfolio in brown grained leather. And you should have seen how lightly, how cleverly, and with what excellent form Maxime drove in ten minutes from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue du Havre, drew up his horse before the school-door, threw the reins to the footman, and said:

“Jacques, at half-past four, see?”

The neighbouring shopkeepers were delighted with the fine grace of this fair-haired spark whom they saw regularly twice a day arriving and leaving in his trap. On returning home he sometimes gave a lift to a friend, whom he set down at his door. The two children smoked, looked at the women, splashed the passers-by, as though they were returning from the races. An astonishing little world, a foolish, foppish brood which you can see any day in the Rue du Havre, smartly dressed in their dandy jackets, aping the ways of rich and worn-out men, while the Bohemian contingent of the school, the real school-boys, come shouting and shoving, stamping on the pavement with their thick shoes, with their books hung over their backs by a strap.

Renée, who took herself seriously as a mother and as a governess, was delighted with her pupil. She left nothing undone, in fact, to complete his education. She was at that time passing through a period of mortification and tears; a lover had jilted her openly, before the eyes of all Paris, to attach himself to the Duchesse de Sternich. She dreamt of Maxime as her consolation, she made herself older, she racked her brains to appear maternal, and became the most eccentric mentor imaginable. Often would Maxime’s tilbury be left at home, and Renée come to fetch the schoolboy in her big calash. They hid the brown portfolio under the seat and drove to the Bois, then in all the freshness of novelty. There she put him through a course of tip-top elegance. She pointed everyone out to him in the fat and happy Paris of the Empire, still under the ecstasy of that stroke of the wand which had changed yesterday’s starvelings and swindlers into great lords and millionaires snorting and swooning under the weight of their cash-boxes. But the child questioned her above all about the women, and as she was very familiar with him, she gave him exact particulars: Madame du Guende was stupid but admirably made; the Comtesse Vanska, a very rich woman, had been a street-singer before marrying a Pole who beat her, so they said; as to the Marquise d’Espanet and Suzanne Haffner, they were inseparable, and though they were Renée’s intimate friends, she added, compressing her lips as if to prevent herself from saying more, that some very nasty stories were told about them; the beautiful Madame de Lauwerens also was a terribly compromising woman, but she had such fine eyes, and after all everybody knew that she herself was quite above reproach, although she was a little too much mixed up in the intrigues of the poor little women who frequented her, Madame Daste, Madame Teissière, and the Baronne de Meinhold. Maxime obtained the portraits of these ladies, and with them filled an album that lay on the table in the drawing-room. With that vicious artfulness which was the dominant note in his character, he tried to embarrass his stepmother by asking for particulars about the fast women, pretending to take them for ladies in society. Renée became serious and moral, and told him that they were horrid creatures and that he must be careful and keep away from them; and then forgetting herself, she spoke of them as of people whom she had known intimately. One of the youngster’s great delights, again, was to get her on to the subject of the Duchesse de Sternich. Each time her carriage passed theirs in the Bois, he never failed to mention the duchess’s name, with wicked slyness and an under-glance that showed that he knew of Renée’s last adventure. Whereupon in a harsh voice she tore her rival to pieces: how old she was growing! Poor woman! She made-up her face, she had lovers hidden in all her cupboards, she had sold herself to a chamberlain that she might procure admission to the imperial bed. And she ran on, while Maxime, to exasperate her, declared that he thought Madame de Sternich delicious. Such lessons as these singularly developed the school-boy’s intelligence, the more so as the young teacher repeated them wherever they went, in the Bois, at the theatre, at parties. The pupil became very proficient.

What Maxime loved was to live among women’s skirts, in the midst of their finery, in their rice-powder. He always remained more or less of a girl, with his slim hands, his beardless face, his plump white neck. Renée consulted him seriously about her gowns. He knew the good makers of Paris, summed each of them up in a word, talked about the cunningness of such an one’s bonnets and the logic of such another’s dresses. At seventeen there was not a milliner whom he had not probed, not a bootmaker whom he had not studied through and through. This quaint abortion, who during his English lessons read the prospectuses which his perfumer sent him every Friday, could have delivered a brilliant lecture on the fashionable Paris world, customers and purveyors included, at an age when country urchins dare not look their housemaid in the face. Frequently, on his way home from school, he would bring back in his tilbury a bonnet, a box of soap, or a piece of jewellery which his stepmother had ordered the preceding day. He had always some strip of musk-scented lace hanging about in his pockets.

But his great treat was to go with Renée to the illustrious Worms, the tailor genius to whom the queens of the Second Empire bowed the knee. The great man’s show-room was wide and square, and furnished with huge divans. Maxime entered it with religious emotion. Dresses undoubtedly have a perfume of their own; silk, satin, velvet and lace had mingled their faint aromas with those of hair and of amber-scented shoulders; and the atmosphere of the room retained that sweet-smelling warmth, that fragrance of flesh and of luxury, which transformed the apartment into a chapel consecrated to some secret divinity. It was often necessary for Renée and Maxime to wait for hours; a series of anxious women sat there, waiting their turn, dipping biscuits into glasses of Madeira, helping themselves from the great table in the middle, which was covered with bottles and plates full of cakes. The ladies were at home, they talked without restraint, and when they ensconced themselves around the room, it was as though a flight of white Lesbian doves had alighted on the sofas of a Parisian drawing-room. Maxime, whom they endured and loved for his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted delights divine; he glided along the sofas like a supple adder; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, between two dresses, where he made himself quite small and kept very quiet, inhaling the warm fragrance of his neighbours with the demeanour of a choir-boy partaking of the sacrament.

“That child pokes his nose in everywhere,” said the Baronne de Meinhold, tapping his cheeks.

He was so slightly built that the ladies did not think him more than fourteen. They amused themselves by making him tipsy with the illustrious Worms’s Madeira. He made astounding speeches to them, which made them laugh till they cried. However, it was the Marquise d’Espanet who found the right word to describe the position. One day when Maxime was discovered behind her back in a corner of the divan:

“That boy ought to have been born a girl,” she murmured, on seeing him so pink, blushing, penetrated with the satisfaction he had enjoyed from her proximity.