The Kill

In any case, she had as yet gone no further than anyone else. She liked to whisper laughingly about such extraordinary cases as the tender friendship between Suza

Despite this banal socialite’s existence, Renée had had one romance in her life. She had gone out one day at dusk to visit her father, walking to his house because he did not like the sound of carriages at his door, and on her way back via the Quai Saint-Paul she noticed that she was being followed by a young man. It was hot; the day was dying with amorous softness. Used to being followed only by men on horseback on the bridle paths of the Bois, she found the adventure stimulating and was flattered by this new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very crudeness she found appealing. Rather than return directly home, she took the rue du Temple, leading her admirer along the boulevards. Emboldened, the man became so importunate, however, that Renée, rather taken aback, lost her head, turned down the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, and took refuge in her husband’s sister’s shop. The man followed her in. Mme Sidonie smiled, signaled her comprehension of the situation, and left the couple alone. When Renée made as if to follow her out of the room, the stranger called her back, spoke to her in a respectfully admiring way, and won her pardon. He was a clerk by the name of Georges, whose last name she never asked. She came to meet him twice, entering through the shop, while he used the entrance on rue Papillon. This chance love affair, which began with an encounter on the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame but also a singular smile of regret. Mme Sidonie’s profit from the adventure was to have become the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a role she had aspired to play from the day of the wedding.

Poor Mme Sidonie had suffered a setback. In brokering the marriage, she had hoped in a sense to marry Renée herself, to turn her into a client and reap from her a variety of rewards. She judged women at a glance, as co

Among Mme Sidonie’s faithful allies, moreover, was Maxime. By the age of fifteen he was prowling around his aunt’s house, sniffing at gloves he found lying forgotten on the furniture. Although she detested any situation that was unambiguous and never admitted doing favors, eventually she agreed to lend him the keys to her apartment on certain days, saying that she would be off to the country overnight. Maxime had mentioned to her that there were friends he wished to entertain but did not dare bring to his father’s house. It was in his aunt’s apartment above the shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière that he had spent several nights with the poor girl who had had to be sent away to the country. Mme Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew and swooned at the sight of him, whispering sweetly in his ear that he was “as smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Meanwhile, Maxime had grown. He was now a slender, good-looking young man who still had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a child. His curly locks completed the “girlish look” that the ladies found so enchanting. He took after poor Angèle, with her gentle gaze and blond pallor. Yet he was even more worthless than that lazy, empty-headed woman. The Rougon blood ran thin in his veins and became tenuous and susceptible to vice. Born to a woman too young to be a mother, he was a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s capitulations and weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out. When Maxime went riding in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman and swaying slightly in the saddle to the rhythm of his horse’s canter, he was the god of the age, with his well-developed hips, his long, slender hands, his sickly, leering appearance, his punctilious elegance, and his music-hall slang. At twenty he considered himself beyond all possibility of surprise or disgust. He had certainly dreamt some unusually filthy dreams. Vice for him was not an abyss, as it is for some old men, but a natural and outward flowering. It lived in his wavy blond hair, smiled on his lips, cloaked him in its robes. What was most typical of him, however, were his eyes, two blue apertures, radiant and smiling, mirrors of vanity that could not hide the emptiness of the brain behind. Those harlot eyes were never lowered. They never tired in their search for pleasure, which they summoned forth and drank in.