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At Parc Monceau it was a time of delirium and spectacular triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses. They had an army of servants, whom they dressed in dark blue livery with putty-colored breeches and black-and-yellow-striped waistcoats—rather severe colors that the financier chose in order to give himself a sober appearance, this being one of his fondest wishes. They displayed their luxury on the façade of their house and opened the curtains when they gave great di
It was at about the time they moved to Parc Monceau that an apparition entered Renée’s life, leaving an indelible impression. The minister had previously resisted the pleas of his sister-in-law, who was enviously longing to be invited to the court balls. Believing that his brother’s fortune was at last assured, he finally gave in. Renée did not sleep for a month thinking about it. When the great night arrived, she sat trembling in the carriage that took her to the Tuileries.
She wore an outfit of prodigious grace and originality, a real find that had come to her in a bout of insomnia and had been put together by three of Worms’s employees, who came to her home to do their work under her supervision. It was a simple gown of white gauze, but trimmed with a multitude of little flounces scalloped out and edged with black velvet. The black velvet tunic featured a square neckline cut very low and framed by narrow lace, barely the width of a finger. Not one flower or piece of ribbon. On her wrists she wore bracelets without engraving, and on her head a thin diadem of gold, a plain circlet that fitted her like a halo.
When she reached the reception rooms and her husband deserted her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a moment of embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she could see that she looked lovely, quickly reassured her, and she was just getting used to the hot air, the murmur of voices, the crush of black evening dress and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who wheezed as if suffering from a problem of digestion. The shoulders aligned themselves in two rows, while the black tailcoats instinctively and discreetly fell back a step. Renée found herself shoved to the end of the line of shoulders, near the second door, toward which the Emperor was moving with a laborious, faltering step. She thus saw him come toward her from one door to the other.
He was wearing a tailcoat with the red sash of the Grand Cordon. 11 Renée, once more in the grip of emotion, had difficulty seeing clearly, and to her this bloody stain seemed to splatter the prince’s entire chest. She found him small, with legs that were too short and jiggling flesh around his waist. But she was charmed and thought him handsome, with his pale face, and heavy, leaden lids that drooped over lifeless eyes. Underneath his mustache his mouth opened languidly, while the boniness of his nose was the only feature that stood out from his puffy face.
Appearing to support each other, the Emperor and the elderly general continued to move forward in a lethargic ma
They had reached the middle of the reception room when Renée felt their eyes upon her. The general stared at her in astonishment, while the Emperor, raising his lids slightly, revealed a predatory gleam in the otherwise hesitant gray of his bleary gaze. Renée, taken aback, looked down and bowed until she could see nothing but the rose pattern in the carpet. But she followed their shadows and realized that they had paused for several seconds in front of her. And she thought she heard the Emperor, that lascivious dreamer, murmur as he gazed at her tightly wrapped in her skirt of muslin striped with velvet, “Now there, general, is a flower worth picking, a mysterious pink carnation with white and black streaks.”
To which the general replied in a more brutal tone, “Sire, that carnation there would look damned good in our buttonholes!”
Renée raised her head. The apparition had disappeared, and a throng was clogging the doorway. Since that evening, she had been back to the Tuileries many times and had even had the honor of being complimented out loud by His Majesty and becoming something of a friend of his. But she always remembered the sovereign’s slow, ponderous march through the reception room, between the two rows of shoulders. And as her husband’s fortune grew, whenever she experienced some new joy, she recalled the image of the Emperor towering over the bowed bosoms, coming toward her, and comparing her to a carnation, which the old general advised him to put in his buttonhole. This was the high point of her life.
4
The clear, burning desire that had risen in Renée’s heart as she breathed in the unsettling fragrances of the conservatory while Maxime and Louise laughed on a love seat in the little buttercup salon seemed to vanish like a nightmare, leaving behind only a vague shudder. The bitter taste of tanghin had lingered on the young woman’s lips throughout the night. The infernal leaf caused a burning sensation that made her feel as though a mouth of flame had pressed itself to hers, breathing into her a devouring love. Then that mouth fled from her, and great waves of darkness rolled over her, drowning her dream.