The Kill

She laughed, drew him toward her, and was kissing him on the lips when a noise made both of them turn their heads. Saccard was standing in the doorway.

A terrible silence ensued. Slowly, Renée removed her arms from around Maxime’s neck. She did not lower her brow but continued to stare at her husband with big eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a corpse. Meanwhile, Maxime, his head bowed, looking stu

Then the husband moved forward into the room. A need for brutality mottled his face, and he clenched his fists to strike the guilty pair. Rage in this little dervish of a man exploded with the force of a pistol shot. As he continued to move toward them, he snickered: “You told her about your marriage, didn’t you?”

Maxime retreated until his back was to the wall.

“Listen,” he stammered, “She was the one—”

He was about to accuse her in the most cowardly way, to blame the crime on her, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself in the abject and quivering ma

The silence seemed to deepen, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz grew softer as the folds of the draperies wrapped themselves soothingly around it. Saccard gave an imperceptible flick of his shoulders. With a serious look he once again scrutinized his wife and son, as if to wring from their faces an explanation that was nowhere to be found. Then he slowly folded the document and put it in the pocket of his coat. All the color had gone out of his cheeks.

“You did well to sign, my dear,” he said quietly to his wife. “You’ve gained 100,000 francs. I shall give you the money tonight.”

He was almost smiling; only his hands were still trembling. He took a few steps, then added, “It’s stifling in here. Whatever possessed you to come and hatch one of your pranks in this steam bath!”

Then he turned to Maxime, who, surprised by the calmness of his father’s voice, had raised his head again. “Come down with me,” he continued. “I saw you go up and came after you so that you could say good-bye to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”

The two men went down together, chatting as they went. Renée was left standing alone in the middle of the dressing room, staring at the gaping void at the top of the small staircase into which she had just seen father and son vanish. She could not take her eyes off that void. To her astonishment, they had left quietly and amicably. They had not beaten each other to a pulp. She pricked up her ears and strained to hear whether some horrible struggle had broken out in the stairwell, sending bodies rolling down the stairs. In the tepid shadows nothing could be heard but the sound of dancing—a long lullaby. In the distance she thought she could make out the marquise’s laughter and the clear voice of M. de Saffré. So the drama was over? Her crime—the kisses in the big gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the conservatory, all the damnable love that had burned in her for months—had culminated in this insipid, ignoble end. Her husband now knew everything and had not even beaten her. And the silence that enveloped her—a silence in which the endless waltz dragged on—terrified her more than the sound of a murder. She was afraid of this peace, afraid of this soft, discreet dressing room redolent of the odor of love.

She caught sight of herself in the tall mirror of the armoire. She moved closer to it, surprised by her own image, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, wholly preoccupied by the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness was taking hold. Her yellow hair, pi

Then, her drowning mind obsessed with but a single thought, she tried to understand what she was doing there stark naked in front of that mirror, and suddenly she leapt back in time to her childhood and saw herself at the age of seven in the somber shadows of the Hôtel Béraud. She remembered a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed her and Christine in gray wool dresses with red checks. It was Christmas. How happy they were with those two identical dresses! Their aunt spoiled them and went so far as to give each of them a bracelet and necklace of coral. Their sleeves were long, their bodices reached all the way up to their chins, and the jewelry stood out against the fabric, which seemed to them quite pretty. Renée still remembered that her father had been there and that he’d smiled with his melancholy smile. That day, she and her sister had moved about their room like grown-ups, not playing so as to avoid soiling their clothes. But when she went back to school with the Sisters of the Visitation, her classmates had teased her about her “clown’s dress,” with sleeves that went all the way down to her fingertips and a collar that reached up above her ears. She had cried in class. At recess, to stop the others’ making fun of her, she had pushed up those sleeves and turned down that collar. And the coral necklace and bracelet had looked prettier to her against the skin of her neck and arm. Was that the day she had begun to strip herself naked?

Her life unfolded before her. She experienced the slow onset of panic as swirling eddies of gold and flesh rose within her, first to her knees, then to her belly, and on to her lips, and now she could feel the current passing over her head, striking sharp, rapid blows against her skull. It was like rotten sap; it had drained the energy from her limbs, deformed her heart with the cancer of shameful loves, and planted sick and bestial whims in her brain. That sap had been absorbed through the soles of her feet from the carpet of her calèche and other carpets too and from all the miles of silk and velvet she had walked on since her marriage. Other people must have left poisonous seeds in their footsteps, and now those seeds were sprouting in her blood and circulating through her veins. She remembered her childhood very well. When she was little, she had merely been inquisitive. Even later, after the rape that had plunged her into evil, she had not coveted shame to that degree. Of course she would have been better off if she’d stayed home and knitted with Aunt Elisabeth. And she could hear the regular ticking of her aunt’s knitting needles as she stared into the mirror in search of the peaceful future that had eluded her. But all she saw was her pink thighs, her pink hips, this strange woman of pink silk she beheld before her, whose skin of fine, closely woven fabric seemed made for the amours of puppets and dolls. This was what she had come to: she was a big doll, from whose torn chest stuffing leaked in a thin stream. Then, confronted with the enormities of her life, her father’s blood—that bourgeois blood that tormented her in times of crisis—cried out in her and rebelled. She who had always trembled at the thought of hell—she should have lived her life within the dark austerity of the Hôtel Béraud. Who, then, had stripped her naked?