This bedroom possessed a gentle harmony, a muffled silence. No shrill note, no glint of metal or bright flash of gold, intruded upon the dreamy melody of pink and gray. Even the fireplace ornaments—the mirror frame, the clock, the small candelabra—were of old Sèvres ⁴ whose gilt copper mountings were barely visible. These were marvelous pieces, especially the clock, with its round of chubby-cheeked Cupids swooping down upon the dial and peering over its edge like a gang of naked scamps mocking the rapid passage of the hours. This subdued luxury, these colors, these objects reflected Renée’s taste for the soothing and pleasant and created a twilit setting, as in an alcove with curtains drawn. The bed seemed to go on and on, as if the entire room were one immense bed, with its carpets, its bearskins, its upholstered seats and padded wall-hangings, which carried the softness of the floor up along the walls and all the way to the ceiling. As in a bed, moreover, the young woman left the imprint, the warmth, the fragrance of her body on everything in the room. When you pulled back the double curtain of the boudoir it was as if you were lifting a silk counterpane to enter a big bed still warm and moist, covered with fine linen, upon which lay in dreamy slumber the lovely shape of a thirty-year-old Parisienne.

The adjoining wardrobe, a spacious closet hung with old chintz, was simply furnished all around with tall rosewood armoires containing an army of dresses. The very methodical Céleste lined up these dresses in order of seniority, labeled them, and brought arithmetic precision to her mistress’s whims for yellow or blue, making sure that the wardrobe was always as solemn as a sacristy and as clean as a royal stable. There was no furniture in this closet except for the armoires, and no article of clothing was ever left lying about. The panels of the cabinetry gleamed as cold and clean as the varnished panels of a coupé.

But the marvel of the apartment, the room that had all Paris talking, was the dressing room. People spoke of “beautiful Mme Saccard’s dressing room” the way they spoke of “the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles.” The room was located in one of the mansion’s towers, just above the buttercup salon. One’s first thought on entering was of a large round tent, an enchanted tent pitched in a dream by some amorous Amazon. In the center of the ceiling, a crown of chased silver held sections of tent that curved downward to the walls and then dropped straight to the floor. This sumptuous drapery consisted of a pink silk lining covered with very thin muslin gathered in broad pleats. A lace appliqué separated the pleats, and strands of silver chain ran down from the crown along the fabric on either side of each appliqué. The pinkish gray of the bedroom brightened here to a pinkish white, the color of naked flesh. And in this arbor of lace, beneath these curtains that hid the entire ceiling except for a small bluish aperture in the empty center of the crown, where Chaplin⁵ had painted a laughing cupid eyeing his arrow and preparing to shoot, it was easy to believe that you were at the bottom of a box of candy, or a precious jewel case enlarged to show off not the splendor of a diamond but the nakedness of a woman. The carpet, as white as snow, was unblemished by any sprinkling of flowers. The furniture included a mirrored armoire whose two panels were encrusted with silver; a chaise longue, two poufs, and some white satin stools; and a large dressing table with a pink marble top, its feet hidden by flounces of muslin and lace. The glassware on the dressing table—bottles, vases, and basin—was of old Bohemian crystal with streaks of pink and white. And on another table, encrusted with silver like the mirrored armoire, lay the paraphernalia and utensils of grooming, a bizarre collection including a number of small implements whose purpose was difficult to make out: backscratchers, nail buffers, files of all sizes and shapes, straight and curved scissors, and all manner of tweezers and pins. Each of these objects, in silver and ivory, bore Renée’s monogram.

The dressing room had one especially delightful corner, to which it owed its fame above all else. Opposite the window, the sections of drapery opened up to reveal, at the end of a long, shallow alcove, a bathtub, a sunken basin of pink marble set right into the floor so that its edges, fluted like those of a large shell, lay flush with the carpet. Marble steps led down into this tub. Above the swan-necked silver faucets, a scalloped Venetian mirror without a frame, with frosted patterns etched into the crystal, filled the end of the alcove. Every morning Renée took a short bath, which for the rest of the day left the dressing room suffused with moisture and a fragrance of moist young flesh. Occasionally a bottle of perfume left unstoppered or a cake of soap left out of its box injected a more violent note into this rather insipid languor, in which the young woman liked to lie almost naked until noon. The puffy draperies were also bare. The pink bathtub, tables, and basins, and the muslin covering the ceiling and walls beneath which one could imagine a reddish flow of blood, took on the roundness of flesh, of shoulders and breasts, and depending on the time of day it all resembled the snowy white skin of a child or the warm flesh of a woman. It was nakedness writ large. When Renée stepped out of her bath, her fair body added but a touch more pink to the abundant pink flesh of the room itself.

It was Maxime who undressed Renée. He was good at that sort of thing, and his agile hands divined pins and slipped around her waist with innate understanding. He undid her hair, removed her diamonds, and then redid her hair for the night. And since he combined his duties as lady’s maid and hairdresser with witty remarks and caresses, Renée had to choke back belly laughs as the silk of her bodice crinkled and her petticoats were unbuttoned one by one. When she saw that she was naked, she blew out the candles, took Maxime by the waist, and all but carried him into the bedroom. The ball had completed her intoxication, and in her fever she was aware of having spent the previous day by the corner of her fire in an ardent stupor of vague but pleasant dreams. She could still hear the dialogue between Saccard and Mme Sidonie as they called out numbers like bailiffs in their clipped voices and nasal twang. It was these people who bored her to death and drove her to crime. And now, as she searched the darkness of the huge bed for Maxime’s lips, she pictured him again as she had the night before, staring out at her from the middle of the fireplace with blazing eyes.

The young man stayed until six the next morning. She gave him the key to the side gate of the Parc Monceau and made him swear to return every night. The dressing room was connected to the buttercup salon by a service stairway hidden in the wall, which gave access to all the rooms in the tower. From the salon it was easy to slip into the conservatory and from there to reach the park.

In making his way out at dawn through a thick fog, Maxime was rather bewildered by his good fortune. He accepted it, moreover, with a smugness typical of his sexless nature.

“Too bad!” he thought. “She was the one who wanted it, after all. . . . She has an awfully fine body, and she’s right: she’s twice as much fun in bed as Sylvia.”

They had been drifting toward incest since the day when Maxime in his threadbare schoolboy’s tunic had flung himself at Renée’s neck and creased her French Guards jacket. Every minute that had passed between them since that moment had been a minute of perversion. The peculiar way in which the young woman had raised the child; the familiarities that had made comrades of them; and, later, the ribald audacity of their shared confidences—all that dangerous promiscuity had in the end formed a singular bond between them, turning the joys of friendship into almost carnal pleasures. They had been surrendering to each other for years. The brutal act was only the acute crisis of this unconscious malady of love. In the frenetic world in which they lived, their sin had grown as if fertilized by the impure secretions of a dung heap. It had developed with peculiar refinements, in conditions particularly conducive to debauchery.