One night, in an hour of anguish, the young woman asked her lover to fetch one of the black bearskins. They lay down on that inky fur alongside a pool adjacent to the big circular walkway. Outside, in the limpid moonlight, the air was terribly cold. Maxime arrived shivering, his ears and fingers frozen. The conservatory was so overheated that he fainted on the bearskin. Coming in from the sharp, stinging cold, he entered an oven so oppressive that he felt a burning sensation, as if he were being beaten with birch rods. When he came to, he saw Renée kneeling over him with a fixed stare and in a brutal posture that frightened him. With her hair tumbling down and her shoulders bare, she supported herself on her fists, arching her back as if she were a great cat with phosphorescent eyes. Lying on his back, the young man, peering over the shoulders of the lovely, amorous beast that held him in her gaze, caught sight of the marble sphinx, its legs gleaming in the moonlight. Renée had assumed the posture and the smile of that monster with a woman’s head, and with her petticoats undone she looked like that black god’s white sister.

Maxime continued to lie on his back. The heat was suffocating. It was a somber heat, which did not fall from heaven as a rain of fire but hung about the earth like an unhealthy exhalation, giving off a mist that rose like a storm-laden cloud. The humid heat covered the lovers with a kind of dew, a hot sweat. For a long time they remained motionless and silent in this bath of flames, Maxime prostrate and inert, Renée quivering on her wrists like an animal on supple and sinewy hocks. From outside, through the small panes of the conservatory windows, came glimpses of the Parc Monceau, of clumps of trees with fine black outlines and lawns as white as frozen lakes, a whole lifeless landscape whose delicate touches and smooth, pale colors were reminiscent of Japanese engravings. And this scorching bit of earth, this blazing bed on which the lovers lay, seethed strangely amid the deep silent chill.

They had a night of wild love. Renée was the man, the passionate and active will. Maxime submitted. With the plucked limbs and slender grace of a Roman ephebe, this pretty, fair-haired, neutered boy, stricken in his virility since youth, became a strapping girl in this young woman’s inquisitive arms. He seemed to have been born and raised for perverse sensual pleasure. Renée relished her dominance, bending this creature of still-dubious sexuality to her passion. From this her desire derived constant astonishment, her senses unending surprise, a bizarre sensation of uneasiness and acute pleasure. He bewildered her. Her doubts revived each time she returned to his fine skin, his plump neck, his sighs and swoons. She experienced an hour of completeness. Maxime, by revealing a new thrill to her, completed her extravagant outfits, her prodigious luxury, her unbridled existence. He invested her flesh with the note of excess that sounded in everything else in her life. He was a lover suited to the fashions and follies of the age. This pretty youth, whose jackets showed off his slender shape; this boy who ought to have been a girl and who strolled the boulevards with his hair parted in the middle, with chuckling laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those decadent deviants that can at times consume the flesh and derange the intelligence in nations gone rotten.

It was chiefly in the conservatory, moreover, that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by several others. The hothouse joined them in their lovemaking, burned with the heat of their passion. Through the oppressive air, by the white light of the moon, they took in the strangeness of the world around them, as the plants seemed vaguely to move about and embrace one another. The black bearskin filled the entire width of the path. At their feet mist rose from the root-choked pool as the pink stars of the water lilies opened on its surface as upon a virgin’s breast and the bushy tornelia drooped like the hair of swooning water nymphs. Around them, meanwhile, the palms and the giant bamboo of India rose toward the arched roof, where they bowed their heads and mingled their leaves like weary lovers unsteady on their feet. Lower down, the ferns, pterids, and alsophila were like sprightly ladies, their broad skirts trimmed with regular flounces, who stood silent and motionless along the path awaiting love. Beside them, the twisted, red-stained leaves of begonia and the spiky white leaves of caladium created a vague medley of hues ranging from the pallor of death to the color of a bruise, puzzling the lovers, who at times thought they could make out round shapes like hips and knees pressed hard against the earth by the brutality of sanguinary caresses. And the banana trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fertility of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbia, whose tapering stems—prickly, misshapen, and covered with horrid excrescences they glimpsed through the darkness—oozed sap, as if their procreative exuberance could not be contained. The deeper they peered into the recesses of the conservatory, the more the obscurity became charged with an ever more frenetic riot of stems and foliage. On the racks they could no longer distinguish the maranta, as soft as velvet, from the gloxinia, with its purple bells, or the dracaena, which resembled strips of polished old lacquer. The living plants danced in a circle, pursuing one another with unrequited tenderness. In the four corners, where curtains of vines created bowers, their carnal fantasies grew even wilder, and the supple shoots of vanilla, of Indian berries, of quisqualis and bauhinia turned into the interminable arms of lovers who remained out of sight while madly extending their embrace, drawing countless dispersed pleasures unto themselves. Those endless arms drooped wearily, knotted themselves in a spasm of love, sought one another out, and entwined each other like a pack of wild creatures in rut. The whole conservatory was in rut, the whole patch of virgin forest ablaze with the foliage and blossoms of the tropics.

Their senses warped, Maxime and Renée felt themselves caught up in the earth’s powerful nuptials. Through the bearskin the ground burned their backs, and hot droplets fell upon them from the tall palms. The sap rising in the trees’ flanks penetrated them as well, filling them with wild desire for immediate increase, for reproduction on a gigantic scale. They partook of the conservatory’s rut. There, in the pale glimmer, visions dazed them, long nightmares in which they witnessed the amours of the palms and the ferns. The foliage took on strange, weird shapes, which their desires transformed into sensual images. Murmurs and whispers came from the bushes, swooning voices, ecstatic sighs, muffled cries of pain, distant laughter— whatever was loquacious in their own kisses came echoing back at them. Sometimes they felt as if they’d been buffeted by an earthquake, as if the ground itself, in a climax of gratification, had erupted in sensuous sobs.

Had they closed their eyes, had the suffocating heat and pale light not been enough to plunge them into depravity of all the senses, the odors would have sufficed to rouse their nerves to an extraordinary degree of irritability. The pool enveloped them in a deep, pungent aroma compounded of the smells of a thousand blossoms and leaves. At times the vanilla cooed like wood pigeons. Then the stanhopea chimed in with harsh notes from their striped throats, whose exhalations were marked by a strong and bitter smell of convalescence. The orchids, in baskets suspended from small chains, were like living censers breathing out their distinctive scents. But the dominant odor, the odor responsible for all the muffled sighs, was a human odor, an odor of love, which Maxime recognized when he kissed the back of Renée’s neck and buried his head in her undone tresses. They were still intoxicated by that odor of amorous womanhood, which hung about the air of the conservatory as though this were the alcove where the earth gave birth.