When the big calèche carried them off to the Bois and gently along its carriageways as they whispered smutty stories in each other’s ears and searched their memories of childhood for dirty jokes, it was merely a diversion of their desires, an unavowed gratification of their wants. They felt vaguely guilty, as if they had grazed each other’s flesh. Indeed, that original sin, that languor born of filthy conversations that had left them weary with voluptuous fatigue, had stimulated them more gently than frank and unmistakable kisses would have done. Their camaraderie was thus the slow progress of two lovers fated to end one day in the private room at the Café Riche and finally in Renée’s large pink-and-gray bed. When they found themselves in each other’s arms, they did not feel the shock of sin. They were like old lovers, whose kisses were steeped in nostalgia. Their two beings had been in intimate contact for so long that despite themselves they spoke of a past that had been suffused with a tenderness of which they had been unaware.

“Do you remember the day I arrived in Paris?” Maxime asked. “You were wearing an odd outfit, and with my finger, I traced an angle on your breast and advised you to alter your neckline to a V.... I felt your skin under your blouse, and my finger went in a little. . . . It was very nice.”

Renée laughed and kissed him. “You were already an awfully naughty boy,” she murmured. “You had us in stitches at Worms’s, remember? We called you ‘our little man.’ I always thought Suzanne would have let you have your way with her if the marquise hadn’t kept shooting her such furious looks.”

“Yes, indeed, we laughed quite a lot,” the young man whispered. “The photo album, you know? And all the rest—our errands in Paris, our snacks at the pastry shop on the boulevard—you know, those little strawberry cakes you adore? . . . I’ll always remember that afternoon when you told me about Adeline’s little adventure in the convent, when she wrote letters to Suzanne and signed them with a man’s name, Arthur d’Espanet, and asked him to come carry her off.”

The lovers laughed at this story yet again, and then Maxime went on in his flirtatious voice. “When you came in your carriage to pick me up at school, we must have made quite an unusual pair. . . . I was so small I vanished under your skirts.”

“Yes, yes,” she stammered, shivering and drawing the young man toward her. “That was so nice, as you say. . . . We loved each other without knowing it, didn’t we? I knew before you did. The other day, on the way home from the Bois, my leg brushed against yours, and I jumped. . . . But you didn’t notice anything, did you? You weren’t thinking about me?”

“Oh, yes I was!” he replied, a bit embarrassed. “Only I didn’t know, you understand. . . . I didn’t dare.”

He was lying. The idea of possessing Renée had never occurred to him in any clear way. He had allowed his dissolute habits to rub off on her but had never really desired her. He was too lackadaisical for such effort. He had accepted Renée because she pressed herself on him, and he had slipped into her bed without wanting to or realizing in advance what he was doing. Having once rolled in her sheets, he stayed because it was warm and because it was typical of him to abandon himself whenever he fell into a hole. At first his ego was gratified. She was the first married woman he had had. He gave no thought to the fact that her husband was his father.

Renée, however, sinned with all the ardor of a heart that seeks love beneath its station. She, too, had slid down a slippery slope, yet she had not remained passive the whole way down. Desire had awakened in her too late to combat it, after the fall had become ineluctable. All at once she saw that fall as a necessary consequence of her boredom, a rare and extreme pleasure that alone could rouse her weary senses, her ravaged heart. It was during that autumn drive, as slumber descended on the Bois at dusk, that vague thoughts of incest had first come to her, like a tickling that sent a strange new shiver through her flesh. That same night those thoughts had taken on a more definite shape, had risen up ardently before her in the flames of the conservatory as she stood, half-intoxicated by the dinner and lashed by jealousy, spying on Maxime and Louise. At that moment she craved sin, the sin that no one commits, the sin that would fill her empty life and plunge her at last into the hell of which she had been frightened ever since she was a little girl. By the next day she craved it no more, overcome by a strange feeling of remorse and lassitude. It seemed to her that she had already sinned, that it wasn’t as good as she had expected, and that it really would be too sordid to go through with it in reality. The crisis had had to come as a caprice of fate, of its own accord, independent of the will of the two individuals involved—two comrades who were destined one fine night to make a mistake, to end up making love rather than shaking hands. After that mindless fall, however, her dreams of unknown pleasures had revived, and she had taken Maxime into her arms again because she was curious about him and about the cruel pleasures of a love she regarded as a crime. Her will accepted the incest, demanded it, and intended to savor it to the end, to the point of remorse—if remorse ever came. She was active and conscious of what she was doing. She loved with all the fervor of a celebrated socialite, with all the anxious prejudices of a lady of the bourgeoisie, and with all the conflicts, joys, and antipathies of a woman drowning in self-contempt.

Maxime returned night after night. He entered by way of the garden around one o’clock. Usually Renée was waiting for him in the conservatory, which he had to cross to reach the small salon. They were in any case supremely impudent, barely troubling to hide themselves and neglecting the commonest precautions of adulterers. Of course this corner of the mansion was theirs. Only Baptiste, the husband’s valet, was allowed to enter, and Baptiste, a serious sort of man, vanished the moment his duties were discharged. Maxime joked that he probably went off to write his memoirs. One night, however, shortly after Maxime arrived, Renée pointed out the valet solemnly making his way across the salon, candlestick in hand. With his ministerial bearing, and his face illuminated by the yellow light of burning wax, the tall servant looked even more proper and austere than usual. Leaning forward, the lovers watched him blow out his candle and head for the stables, where the horses and grooms lay sleeping.

“He’s making his rounds,” Maxime said.

Renée stood shivering. Baptiste generally made her anxious. She sometimes said that with his chilly demeanor and frank stare, which never came to rest on a woman’s shoulders, he was the only decent man in the house.

Thereafter they became more cautious in their meetings. They shut the doors to the small salon, which allowed them to enjoy that room, the conservatory, and Renée’s apartment in complete tranquillity. It was a whole world unto itself. There for the first few months they savored the most refined and exquisitely exotic pleasures. They moved the scene of their lovemaking from the big pink-and-gray bed in the bedroom to the pink-and-white nudity of the dressing room and the symphony in yellow minor of the small salon. Each room, with its own peculiar fragrance, its own hangings, its own special life, yielded a different sort of tenderness and made Renée a different kind of lover. In the plush bed of the grande dame in the warm aristocratic bedroom, where lovemaking took on the discreet accents required by good taste, she was delicate and pretty. Under the flesh-colored tent, amid the fragrances and humid languor of the bath, she displayed herself as a capricious and carnal whore, surrendering her body as it emerged from the bath, which was where Maxime preferred to take her. And finally, downstairs, in the morning sunlight of the small salon, bathed in an auroral yellow that gilded her hair, she became a goddess, with the head of a blonde Diana, her naked arms in chaste poses and her unblemished body positioned on the love seats in postures that revealed noble lines and an antique grace. Maxime was almost afraid of this place, however, and Renée enticed him there only on foul days, when her intoxication required a more pungent note. Then they made love in the conservatory. That was where they savored incest.