Saccard and Maxime were walking along with short steps, arm-in-arm. The father must have been to see the son, and together they had come down from the Avenue de l’Impératrice to the lake, chatting as they went.
“Listen to me,” said Saccard, “you’re a simpleton…. A man like you, with money, doesn’t let it lie idle at the bottom of his drawers. There is a hundred per cent, to be made in the business I am telling you of. It’s a safe investment. You know very well I wouldn’t let you be done.”
But the young man seemed wearied by this persistence. He smiled in his pretty way, he looked at the carriages.
“Do you see that little woman over there, the woman in violet?” he said suddenly. “That’s a washer-girl whom that ass of a Mussy has brought out.”
They looked at the woman in violet. Then Saccard took a cigar from his pocket, and turning to Maxime, who was smoking:
“Give me a light.”
Then they stopped for a moment, facing each other, bringing their faces close together. When the cigar was alight:
“Look here,” continued the father, once more taking his son’s arm, pressing it tightly under his own, “you’re a fool if you don’t take my advice. Well! is it agreed? Will you bring me the hundred thousand francs tomorrow?”
“You know I no longer go to your house,” replied Maxime, compressing his lifts.
“Bah! rubbish! it’s time at last there was end to all that!”
And as they took a few steps in silence, at the moment when Renée, feeling about to faint away, pressed back her head against the padding of the brougham so as not to be seen, a growing rumour ran along the line of carriages. The pedestrians on the side-paths halted, turned round, openmouthed, following with their eyes something that approached. There was a quicker sound of wheels, carriages drew aside respectfully, and two outriders appeared, clad in green, with round caps on which danced golden tassels with their cords outspread all round; leaning slightly forward, they trotted on upon the backs of their large bay horses. Behind them they left an empty space. Then, in this empty space, the Emperor appeared.
He occupied alone the back seat of a landau. Dressed in black, with his frockcoat buttoned up to his chin, he wore, a little on one side, a very tall hat, whose silk glistened. In front of him, on the other seat, sat two gentlemen, dressed with that correct elegance which was in favour at the Tuileries, serious, their hands upon their knees, with the silent air of two wedding-guests taken for a drive amid the curiosity of the crowd.
Renée thought the Emperor aged. His mouth opened more feebly under his thick waxed moustache. His eyelids fell more heavily to the point of half covering his lifeless eyes, the yellow grayness of which was yet more bleared. And his nose alone retained its look of a dry fish-bone set in the vagueness of his face.
Meantime, while the ladies in the carriage smiled discreetly, the people on foot pointed the sovereign out to one another.
A fat man asserted that the Emperor was the gentleman with his back to the coachman on the left. A few hands were raised to salute. But Saccard, who had taken off his hat even before the outriders had passed, waited till the imperial carriage was exactly in front of him; and then shouted in his thick Provençal voice:
“Long live the Emperor!”
The Emperor, surprised, turned round, seemed to recognize the enthusiast, returned the bow with a smile. And everything disappeared in the sunlight, the carriages closed up, Renée could only perceive, above the manes of the horses, between the backs of the lackeys, the outriders’ green caps dancing with their golden tassels.
She remained for a moment with wide-open eyes, full of this vision, which reminded her of another moment in her life. It seemed to her as if the Emperor, by mingling with the line of carriages, had just set in it the last necessary ray, and given an intention to this triumphal procession. Now it was a glorification. All these wheels, all these men with decorations, all these women languidly reclining disappeared among the flash and the rumbling of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and so painful that Renée felt an imperious need to escape from this triumph, from that cry of Saccard’s, still ringing in her ears, from that sight of the father and son walking along with short steps, chatting arm-in-arm. She sought about, her hands folded on her breast, as though burnt with an internal fire; and it was with a sudden hope of relief, of healing coolness, that she leant forward and said to the coachman:
“To the Hotel Béraud.”
The courtyard retained its cloistral coldness; Renée went round the colonnades, happy in the dampness which fell upon her shoulders. She approached the basin, green with moss, its edges polished by wear; she looked at the lion’s head half worn away, with gaping jaws, discharging a stream of water through an iron pipe. How often had she and Christine taken this head in their childish arms to lean forward and reach the stream of water which they loved to feel flowing cold as ice over their little, hands. Then she climbed the great silent staircase, she saw her father at the end of the string of wide rooms; he drew up his tall figure, he slowly passed deeper into the shade of this old house, of this proud solitude in which he had absolutely cloistered himself since his sister’s death; and she thought of the men in the Bois, of that other old man, the Baron Gouraud, rolling his flesh in the sun, on pillows. She climbed higher, she followed the passages, the servants’ stairs, she made the journey towards the children’s room. When she reached the very top, she found the key on its usual nail, a big, rusty key, on to which spiders had spun their web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad was the children’s room! She felt a pang at her heart on finding it so deserted, so gray, so silent. She closed the open door of the aviary, with the vague idea that it must have been by that door that the joys of her childhood had flown away. She stopped before the flower-boxes, still full of soil hardened and cracked like dry mud, she broke off with her fingers a rhododendron-stalk: this skeleton of a plant, shrivelled and white with dust, was all that remained of their living clusters of verdure. And the matting, the very matting, discoloured, rat-gnawed, displayed itself with the melancholy of a shroud that has for years been awaiting the promised corpse. In a corner, amid this mute despair, this silent weeping abandonment, she found one of her old dolls; all the bran had flowed out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with its enamelled lips, above the wasted body, which seemed as though exhausted by puppet follies.
Renée was stifled amid this tainted atmosphere of her childhood. She opened the window, she looked out upon the boundless landscape. There nothing was soiled. She found again the eternal joys, the eternal youth of the open air. The sun must be sinking behind her; she saw only the rays of the setting luminary gilding with infinite softness this bit of town which she knew so well. It was a last song of daylight, a refrain of gaiety which was subsiding slowly over all things. Below, ruddy flames lit up the boom, while the lacework of the iron chains of the Pont de Constantine stood out against the whiteness of its supports. Then, more to the right, the dark foliage of the Halle aux Vins and of the Jardin des Plantes gave the impression of a great pool of stagnant, moss-covered water, whose green surface blended in the distance with the mist of the sky. On the left, the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended the same row of houses, the houses which the little girls used to see there twenty years ago, together with the same brown patches of sheds, the same red factory-chimneys. And above the trees, the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière, made blue by the suns leave-taking, appeared to her suddenly like an old friend. But what calmed her, what brought coolness to her breast, was the long gray banks, was above all the Seine, the giant, which she watched coming from the edge of the horizon, straight down to her, as in those happy days when they had been afraid lest they should see it swelling and surging up to their window. She remembered their fondness for the river, their love for its colossal flux, for this quivering of murmuring water,