The Kill

“I shall love you with all my heart,” he answered with the effusive-ness of a lad addressing his sweetheart.

Such was the first conversation between Maxime and Renée. The boy did not return to school for a month. In their first days together, his stepmother played with him as she would have played with a doll. She knocked the rough edges of his provincial upbringing off him, and it must be said that he lent himself to her efforts with the utmost alacrity. When he appeared dressed from head to toe in spanking new clothes supplied by his father’s tailor, she gave a cry of joyful surprise. He was as “pretty as a picture,” as she put it. It took a desperately long time for his hair to grow out, however. Renée always said that the hair made the face. She took devoted care of her own. For quite some time the color of her hair drove her to despair—that soft yellow color reminiscent of the finest butter. But when blonde hair became fashionable, she was delighted, and in order to make people believe that she wasn’t just unconsciously following fashion, she swore that she dyed her hair every month.

For a boy of thirteen, Maxime was already terribly knowing. His was one of those frail and precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he had desires. On two occasions he nearly got himself expelled from school. Had Renée been attuned to provincial graces, she might have noticed that, as odd as his appearance was, the “little shaved skull,” as she called him, smiled, turned his head, and held out his arm in the dainty, effeminate ma

Renée called him “mademoiselle,” unaware that six months earlier her description would have been right on the mark. He struck her as very obedient and very loving, indeed so loving that she often felt embarrassed by his caresses. He had a way of kissing that made her skin feel warm. What delighted her, though, was his mischievous ma

“In your place I would have preferred Adeline,” she said. “She’s prettier.”

“Maybe,” the naughty boy replied, “but Suza

Renée laughed. Her doll—this tall boy with his girlish ways— seemed priceless now that he was in love. There came a point when Mme Haffner had to defend herself seriously. In any case, these three women encouraged the precocious child with their stifled laughs, their insinuations, and their flirtatious behavior. A very aristocratic touch of debauchery was part of it. All three led tumultuous lives and, having been burned by passion, they found the naughty child’s charming depravity diverting—a novel, unthreatening spice that reawakened their taste. They allowed him to touch their gowns and graze their shoulders with his fingers when he followed them into the vestibule to throw their evening wraps over them. They passed him from one to the other, laughing madly when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, where the skin is so soft. Then they turned maternal and instructed him at length in the art of being a fine gentleman and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little man of ingenious construction, who kissed, made love, and exhibited all the most charming vices of high society yet remained a toy, a little cardboard man of whom one did not have to be too afraid, just enough to tremble most pleasantly beneath his childish caresses.

When classes resumed, Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. This was the school to which all the best families sent their children, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The boy, listless and frivolous though he was at that point, had a very lively intelligence, but the classics were the last thing to which he applied himself. He was nevertheless a decent student, who never joined the dunces in their low bohemian ways but remained among the proper, well-dressed young gentlemen who never drew adverse comment. All that remained of his younger years was a veritable fetish about good grooming. Paris opened his eyes and made a handsome young man of him; following the latest fashions, he wore his clothes tight. He was the Beau Brummel1 of his class. He came to school turned out as if for a drawing room, elegantly shod, properly gloved, wearing fabulous ties and indescribable hats. There were twenty or so similar boys in his class, and they constituted an aristocracy, passing out Havana cigars after school from cases with gold clasps and having their books carried by liveried servants. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury2 and a small black horse that made him the envy of his classmates. He drove this rig himself, while a footman sat in the rear with arms crossed and Maxime’s books on his lap in a briefcase of textured brown leather worthy of a government minister. You had to see him to appreciate how effortlessly, cleverly, and skillfully he managed the ten-minute drive from the rue de Rivoli to the rue du Havre, stopping his horse in front of the lycée and tossing the reins to the footman with the reminder, “Jacques, until four-thirty, all right?” The neighborhood shopkeepers took delight in the grace of this fair-haired boy whose comings and goings they witnessed daily. After school, he would sometimes drive a friend home and drop him at his door. The two youths would smoke, look at women, and spatter pedestrians with mud as if returning from the races. It was an astonishing little world, a breeding ground for the snobs and imbeciles who could be seen every day on the rue du Havre, nattily dressed in their dandyish jackets, playing at being blasé men of means, while the school’s bohemians, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and pushing and pounding the pavement with their heavy boots while carrying their books slung over their backs at the end of a strap.

Renée, who took her role as mother and teacher seriously, was delighted with her pupil. Indeed, she left no stone unturned when it came to perfecting his education. She had been going through a period of bitterness and tears. A lover had left her in a scandalous way, obvious to all Paris, in order to be with Duchess von Sternich. She dreamt that Maxime would be her consolation; she made herself look older, contrived in all sorts of ways to be maternal, and became the most unusual mentor imaginable. On many days Maxime’s tilbury remained at the house, and Renée came to fetch the boy from school in her big calèche. They hid the brown briefcase under the seat and went to the Bois, then brand new. There she gave him a course in high elegance. She recited the most prominent names of imperial Paris— the names of fat, happy people still ecstatic about the stroke of the magic wand that had transformed them overnight from starving oafs into great lords breathing hard and fainting from the strain of lifting their cash boxes. But the child questioned her mainly about the women, and, being very free with him, she offered him precise details. Mme de Guende was stupid but admirably built; Countess Wanska, extremely wealthy, had been a street singer before marrying a Pole who was said to beat her; the marquise d’Espanet and Suza