“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.
Renée, satiated as she was, experienced a singular sensation of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognizable, of this bit of nature, so worldly and artificial, which the great vibrating darkness transformed into a sacred grove, one of the ideal glades in whose recesses the gods of old concealed their Titanic loves, their adulteries, and their divine incests. And, as the calash drove away, it seemed to her that the twilight was carrying off behind her, in its tremulous veil, the land of her dream, the flagitious, celestial alcove in which her sick heart and weary flesh might at last have been assuaged.
When, fading into the shadow, the lake and the bushes showed only as a black bar against the sky, Renée turned round abruptly, and, in a voice that contained tears of vexation, resumed her interrupted phrase:
“What?… something different, of course; I want something different. How do I know what! If I did know…. But, look here, I am sick of balls, sick of suppers, sick of that sort of entertainment. It is so monotonous. It is deadly…. And the men are insufferable, ah! yes, insufferable.”
Maxime began to laugh. A certain eagerness became apparent under the aristocratic aspect of the woman of fashion. She no longer blinked her eyelids, the wrinkle on her forehead became more harshly accentuated; her lip, that was so like a sulky child’s, protruded in hot quest of the nameless enjoyments she pined for. She observed her companion’s laughter, but was too excited to stop; lying back, swayed by the rocking of the carriage, she continued in short, sharp sentences:
“Yes, certainly, you are insufferable…. I don’t include you, Maxime, you are too young…. But if I were to tell you how ponderous Aristide used to be in the early days! And the others! the men who have been my lovers…. You know, we are good friends, you and I: I don’t mind what I say to you; well then, there are really days when I am so tired of living this life of a rich woman, adored and worshipped, that I feel I should like to become a Laure d’Aurigny, one of those ladies who live like bachelors.”
And on Maxime laughing still lower, she insisted:
“Yes, a Laure d’Aurigny. It would surely be less insipid, less monotonous.”
She sat silent for a few minutes, as though picturing to herself the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, with a note of discouragement in her voice:
“After all,” she resumed, “those women must have their own annoyances too. There is nothing amusing in life. It is killing work…. As I said, one ought to have something different; you understand, I can’t guess what; but something else, something that would happen to nobody but one’s self, that would not be met with every day, that would give a rare, unknown enjoyment….
She spoke more slowly. She uttered these last words as though seeking something, giving way to absent reverie. The calash went up the avenue that leads to the entrance of the Bois. The darkness increased; the copses ran along on either side like gray walls; the yellow iron chairs upon which, on fine evenings, the middle-class loves to attitudinize in its Sunday best, filed away along the footways, all unoccupied, with the gloomy melancholy air common to garden furniture overtaken by the winter; and the rumbling, the dull rhythmical noise of the returning carriages passed down the deserted avenues like a sad refrain.
Maxime doubtless appreciated the bad form of thinking life amusing. Though young enough to give himself over to an outburst of contented admiration, his egoism was too great, his indifference too cynical, he already experienced too much real weariness, not to proclaim himself disgusted, sick, and played-out. And, as a rule, he took a certain pride in making the confession.
He threw himself back like Renée, and assumed a plaintive voice.
“Yes, you are right,” he said; “it is killing work. As for that, I amuse myself no more than you do; I, too, have often dreamt of something different…. There is nothing so stupid as travelling. Making money: I prefer to run through it, though even that is not always so amusing as one at first imagines. Loving and being loved: we soon get sick of that, don’t we?… Yes, we get sick of it!”
Renée made no reply, and he went on, desiring to astound her with a piece of gross blasphemy:
I should like to have a nun in love with me. Eh? that might be amusing…. Have you never dreamt of loving a man of whom you would not be able even to think without committing a crime?”
But her gloom continued, and Maxime, seeing that she remained silent, concluded that she was not listening. She seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open, the nape of her neck resting against the padded edge of the calash. She lay listlessly thinking, a prey to the dreams that kept her depressed, and at times a slight nervous movement passed over her lips. She was softly overcome by the shadow of the twilight; all that this shadow contained of sadness, of discreet pleasures, of hopes unacknowledged, penetrated her, covered her with an air of morbid languor. Doubtless, while staring at the round back of the footman on his box, she was thinking of those delights of yesterday, of those entertainments that had so palled upon her, that she was weary of; she contemplated her past life, the instantaneous satisfaction of her appetites, the fulsomeness of luxury, the appalling monotony of the same loves and the same betrayals. Then, with a ray of hope, there came to her, with shivers of longing, the idea of that “something different” which her mind could not strain itself to fix upon. There, her dream wandered. Constantly the word that she strove to find escaped into the falling night, became lost in the continuous rolling of the carriages. The soft vibration of the calash was an impediment the more that