One night, in an hour of anguish, Renée sent her lover for one of the black bearskin rugs. Then they lay down on this inky fur, at the edge of a tank, in the large circular pathway. Out of doors it was freezing terribly in the limpid moonlight. Maxime arrived shivering, with frozen ears and fingers. The conservatory was heated to such a point that he swooned away on the bearskin. Coming from the dry, biting cold into so intense a heat, he felt a smarting as though he had been whipped with a birch-rod. When he came to himself, he saw Renée on her knees, leaning over him, with fixed eyes and an animal attitude that alarmed him. Her hair down, her shoulders bare, she leant upon her wrists, with her spine stretched out, like a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. The young man, lying on his back, perceived above the shoulders of this adorable, amorous beast that gazed upon him the marble sphinx, whose thighs gleamed in the moonlight. Renée had the attitude and the smile of the monster with the woman’s head, and, in her loosened petticoats, looked like the white sister of this black divinity.
Maxime remained supine. The heat was suffocating, a sultry heat that did not fall from the sky in a rain of fire, but trailed on the ground like a poisonous effluvium, and its steam ascended like a storm-laden cloud. A warm dampness covered the lovers with dew, with burning sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and speechless in this bath of flame, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists as on supple, nervous hams. From outside, through the little panes of the hothouse, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, clumps of trees with fine black outlines, lawns white as frozen lakes, a whole dead landscape, the exquisiteness and the light, even tints of which reminded one of bits of Japanese prints. And this spot of burning soil, this inflamed couch on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely in the midst of the great, silent cold.
They passed a night of mad love. Renée was the man, the passionate, active will. Maxime submitted. Smooth-limbed, slim and graceful as a Roman stripling, fair-haired and pretty, stricken in his virility since childhood, this epicene being became a great girl in Renée’s inquisitive arms. He seemed born and bred for a perversion of sensual pleasure. Renée enjoyed her domination, and she bent under her passion this creature with the still indeterminate sex. For her it was a continual astonishment of lasciviousness, a surprise of the senses, a bizarre sensation of discomfort and of keen enjoyment. She was no longer certain: she felt doubts each time she returned to his delicate skin, his soft plump neck, his attitudes of abandonment, his fainting-fits. She then experienced an hour of repletion. By revealing to her a new ecstasy, Maxime crowned her mad toilettes, her prodigious luxury, her life of excess. He set in her flesh the top note that was already singing in her ears. He was the lover who matched the follies and fashions of the period. This pretty little fellow, whose frail figure was revealed by his clothes, this abortive girl, who strolled along the boulevards, his hair parted in the middle, with little bursts of laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those debauching influences of the decadence which at certain periods among rotten nations exhaust a body and unhinge a brain.
And it was in the hothouse especially that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by many others. The hothouse loved and burned with them. In the heavy atmosphere, in the pale light of the moon, they saw the strange world of plants around them moving confusedly and exchanging embraces. The black bearskin stretched across the pathway. At their feet the tank steamed full of a swarm, of a thick tangle, of plants, while the pink petals of the water-lilies opened out on the surface like virgin bodices, and the tornelias let fall their bushy tendrils like the hair of languishing water-nymphs. Around them the palm-trees and the tall Indian bamboos rose up towards the arched roof, where they bent over and mingled their leaves with the staggering attitudes of exhausted lovers. Lower down the ferns, the pterides, the alsophilas, were like green ladies, with ample skirts trimmed with symmetrical flounces, who stood mute and motionless at the edge of the pathway awaiting love. By their side the twisted red-streaked leaves of the begonias and the white spear-headed leaves of the caladiums furnished a vague series of bruises and pallors, which the lovers could not explain to themselves, though at times they discerned curves as of hips and knees, prone on the ground beneath the brutality of ensanguined kisses. And the plaintain-trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fecundity of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbias, of whose prickly, deformed, tapering stems, covered with loathly excrescences, they could catch glimpses in the shadow, seemed to sweat out sap, the overflowing flux of this fiery gestation. But, by degrees, as their glances penetrated into the corners of the conservatory, the darkness became filled with a more furious debauch of leaves and stalks; they were not able to distinguish on the stages between the marantas, soft as velvet, the gloxinias, purple-belled, the dracœnas resembling blades of old lacquer; it was one round dance of living plants pursuing one another with unsatiated fervour. At the four corners, there where the curtains of creepers closed in the arbours, their carnal fancy grew madder still, and the supple shoots of the vanilla-plants, of the Indian berries, the quisqualias and bauhinias were as the interminable arms of unseen lovers distractedly lengthening their embraces so as to collect all scattered delights. Those endless arms drooped with weariness, entwined in a spasm of love, sought each other, closed up together like a crowd bent on rut. It was the unbounded copulation of the hothouse, of this nook of virgin forest ablaze with tropical flora and foliage.
Maxime and Renée, their senses perverted, felt carried away in these mighty nuptials of the earth. The soil burnt their backs through the bearskin, and drops of heat fell upon them from the lofty palms. The sap that rose in the trunks of the trees penetrated them also, filling them with a mad longing for immediate increase, for gigantic procreation. They joined in the copulation of the hothouse. It was then, in the pale light, that they were stupefied by visions, by nightmares in which they watched at length the intrigues of the ferns and palm-trees; the foliage assumed a confused equivocal aspect, which their desires transformed into sensual images; murmurs and whisperings reached them from the shrubberies, faint voices, sighs of ecstasy, stifled cries of pain, distant laughter, all that was audible in their own embraces, and that was wafted back by the echo. At times they thought themselves shaken by an earthquake, as though the very ground had burst forth into voluptuous sobs in a fit of satisfied desire.
If they had closed their eyes, if the stifling heat and the pale light had not imparted to them a vitiation of every sense, the aromas would have been sufficient to throw them into an extraordinary state of nervous irritation. The tank saturated them with a deep, pungent odour, through which passed the thousand perfumes of the flowers and plants. At times the vanilla-plant sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the stanhopeas, whose tigered throats have the strong and putrid breath of the convalescent sick. The orchids, in their baskets suspended by wire chains, emitted their exhalations like living censers. But the dominant scent, the scent in which all these vague breaths were intermingled, was a human scent, a scent of love which Maxime recognized when he kissed Renée in the neck, when he plunged his head into her flowing hair. And they lay intoxicated with this scent of an amorous woman which trailed through the hothouse, as through an alcove in which the earth was reproducing its kind.
As a rule the lovers lay down under the Madagascar tanghin-tree, under that poisoned shrub into one of whose leaves Renée had once bitten. Around them the white statues laughed as they gazed at the mighty copulation of foliage. The moon, as it turned, displaced the groups and gave life to the drama with its changing light. They were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the easy life of the Bois and official receptions, in a corner of an Indian forest, of some monstrous