It was suddenly clear to Renée. A comb was undoubtedly part of the room’s regular equipment, along with the curtains, the lock on the door, and the divan. Without waiting for an explanation that was not forthcoming, she plunged into the darkness of the park, walking rapidly as she imagined herself pursued by tortoiseshell teeth in which Laure d’Aurigny and Sylvia had probably left strands of blond and black hair. She felt quite feverish. Céleste had to put her to bed and watch over her until morning. Maxime, standing on the sidewalk on the boulevard Malesherbes, briefly pondered whether he ought to go join the revelers at the Café Anglais. But then, with the idea that he was punishing himself, he decided that he should go to bed instead.

The next day, Renée woke late from a deep and dreamless sleep. She had a big fire laid in the fireplace and announced that she would spend the day in her room. That was her refuge in times of distress. Around noon, her husband, on learning that she would not be coming down for lunch, asked permission to speak to her for a moment. She was on the point of refusing, with a twinge of anxiety, when she thought better of it. The evening before she had given Saccard a bill from Worms in the amount of 136,000 francs, a rather large sum, and no doubt he hoped to please her by handing her the receipt in person.

She thought of yesterday’s little curls. Mechanically, she looked at the mirror and saw her hair, which Céleste had done up in big braids. Then she curled up by the corner of the fire, wrapping herself in a lace dressing-gown. Saccard, whose apartment was also on the second floor, symmetrical with his wife’s, came into her room as a husband would, wearing slippers. He set foot there little more than once a month, always in connection with some delicate financial matter. This morning he had the red eyes and pallid complexion of a man who has not slept. He gallantly kissed his young wife’s hand.

“You’re feeling sick, my dear?” he said as he sat down next to the other corner of the fireplace. “A little migraine, I suppose? . . . Forgive me for adding to your headaches with a lot of financial gibberish, but the situation is rather serious.”

From the pocket of his dressing gown he withdrew Worms’s bill, which Renée recognized by the glossy paper.

“I found this bill on my desk yesterday,” he continued, “and I’m sorry, but I absolutely cannot pay it at the present time.”

Out of the corner of his eye he studied the effect that these words had on his wife. She seemed completely stunned. Smiling, he resumed his speech: “You know, my dear, I’m not in the habit of going over your expenses, but I must say I was rather taken aback by certain items in this bill. For instance, here on page two, I see: ‘Ball gown: fabric, 70 fr.; tailoring, 600 fr.; money lent, 5,000 fr.; eau du Dr. Pierre, 6 fr.’ That’s quite a lot for a seventy-franc dress. . . . But you know I understand all these foibles. Your bill comes to 136,000 francs, and you’ve restrained yourself, almost, relatively speaking, I mean. . . . But I repeat, I cannot pay, I’m strapped at the moment.”

She reached out in a gesture of restrained spite.

“So be it,” she said curtly. “Give me back the bill. I’ll take care of it.”

“I see that you don’t believe me,” Saccard muttered, savoring as a triumph his wife’s incredulousness in regard to his financial difficulties. “I’m not saying that my position is in jeopardy, but business is in something of a turmoil right now. . . . I know I’m disturbing you, but allow me, if you will, to explain our situation. You have entrusted your dowry to me, and I owe it to you to be completely frank.”

He laid the bill on the mantelpiece, took up the tongs, and began to poke the fire. This mania for raking ashes while talking business had begun with him as a calculated stratagem but had become a habit. Whenever he came to a figure or statement that would have been difficult to pronounce forthrightly, he would knock a few logs off the pile and then laboriously repair it by pushing the logs back together and collecting smaller pieces to add to the heap. Sometimes he would almost disappear into the fireplace to go after a stray ember. His voice would become muffled, and the person to whom he was talking would become impatient or fascinated by the clever constructions he made with the hot coals and stop listening; and as a general rule they left him defeated but happy. Even when he called on other people in their homes, he would tyrannically take up the tongs. During the summer he toyed with a quill, a letter opener, or a penknife.

“My dear,” he said, just as he gave the fire a hard poke that sent the logs flying, “I beg your pardon once again for going into these details. . . . I’ve been punctual in paying you the interest on the money you placed in my hands. Without wishing to hurt your feelings, I can even say that I simply regarded that interest as your pocket money, paying your expenses and never asking you to contribute your half of the common household expenditures.”

He paused. Renée was in agony as she watched him clear a space in the ashes for a log. He was about to broach a delicate matter.

“I’ve been obliged, you understand, to make your money yield a substantial rate of interest. Rest assured that the capital is in good hands. . . . As for the money received for your Sologne properties, part of it went to pay for the house we are living in. The rest is invested in an excellent company, the Société Générale des Ports du Maroc. . . . We’re not going to count every penny, are we? But I wanted to make it clear to you that we poor husbands are sometimes sadly misjudged.”

He must have had a powerful reason for lying less than usual. The truth was that Renée’s dowry had long since ceased to exist. It had become one of the phony assets in Saccard’s safe. Although he was paying out interest on his wife’s money at an annual rate of two or three hundred percent or more, he wouldn’t have been able to produce a single bond or the smallest shred of the original capital. As he had half confessed, moreover, the 500,000 francs from the Sologne properties had gone into the down payment on the house and furniture, the total cost of which was nearly two million. He still owed a million to the decorator and the contractor.

“I make no demands of you,” Renée said at last. “I know that I’m very much in your debt.”

“Oh, my dear!” he exclaimed, taking his wife’s hand without putting down the tongs. “What an unpleasant thought! . . . Look, this is the situation in a nutshell. I’ve been unlucky on the Bourse, Toutin-Laroche has done some foolish things, and Mignon and Charrier are louts who’ve pulled a fast one on me. And that’s why I can’t pay your bill. You forgive me, don’t you?”

He seemed genuinely wrought up. He poked the tongs into the pile of logs, sending sparks shooting out like fireworks. Renée remembered the worried look he had worn for some time, but she had no way of divining the astonishing truth. Saccard had reached the point where he had to pull off a miracle every day. He lived in a house worth two million francs, on a princely allowance, yet some mornings he didn’t have a thousand francs in his safe. His expenses did not appear to be diminishing. He survived on debt, surrounded by a horde of creditors who from one day to the next devoured the scandalous profits he realized on certain of his dealings. Meanwhile, companies were collapsing under him, and deeper holes were opening up beneath his feet—holes that he leapt over because he could not fill them. Thus he was threading his way through a minefield in a state of continual crisis, redeeming notes of 50,000 francs yet not paying his coachman’s wages, affecting an ever more regal self-assurance, and whipping himself into an ever more furious rage as he drew upon mythical sources to make his empty cash box pour forth unending rivers of cash, with which he inundated Paris.