Accustomed to the contrived graces of these vistas, Renée, sinking back into lassitude, had closed her eyes almost completely, until all she could see was the way the long hair of the bearskin wound around the spindles of her slender fingers. But when something disrupted the regular trot of the line of carriages, she raised her head and nodded to two young women lying side by side in amorous languor in an eight-spring that had noisily turned off onto a side path leading away from the lakeshore. Mme la marquise d’Espanet, whose husband, to the great scandal of the recalcitrant old nobility, had recently embraced the imperial cause and accepted a position as aide-de-camp to the Emperor, was one of the most illustrious socialites of the Second Empire.⁵ The other woman, Mme Haffner, had married a well-known industrialist from Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was turning into a politician. Renée had known both women since boarding school, where others had referred to them with a knowing air as “the two Inseparables.” She called them by their first names, Adeline and Suzanne. After smiling at them, she curled up once more, but a laugh from Maxime made her turn around.

“No, really, I’m sad. Don’t laugh, this is serious,” she said on seeing that the young man was contemplating her with a mocking eye, making fun of her reclining posture.

Maxime replied in a queer tone.

“So we’re really hurt, are we? Really jealous?”

She seemed taken aback.

“Me! Why would I be jealous?”

Then, as if remembering, she added with her disdainful pout, “Oh, yes, of course, that fat cow Laure! As if I cared. If what everybody wants me to believe is true, and Aristide really paid that whore’s debts and spared her a trip abroad, he must be less in love with his money than I thought. That will put him back in the good graces of the ladies. . . . The dear man: I leave him perfectly free to do exactly what he wants.”

She was smiling as she said this, and pronounced the words “the dear man” in a tone of amicable indifference. Then, suddenly plunged again into deep sadness and darting her eyes about with the desperate look of a woman who can’t decide how to amuse herself, she muttered, “Oh, what I’d really like to do—but no, I’m not jealous, not jealous at all.”

She stopped, unsure of herself.

“Don’t you see? I’m bored,” was what she finally came out with, in an offhand voice.

Then, lips pinched, she fell silent. The line of carriages continued to move along the lake at a steady pace, sounding remarkably like a distant waterfall. Looming up on the left, between the water and the path, were small clumps of green trees with straight, slender trunks that oddly resembled a series of colonnades. The bushes and trees on the right had vanished, and the Bois now opened out into vast expanses of green, immense carpets of lawn punctuated here and there by clusters of tall trees. Gently undulating sheets of green stretched all the way to the Porte de la Muette,⁶ whose low gate, visible from quite a distance, resembled a piece of taut black lace stretched along the ground, and on the slopes, in the places where the undulations dipped down low, the grass had taken on a bluish tint. Renée stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed, as though this magnification of the horizon, these soft meadows moistened by the night air, had made her more acutely aware of the emptiness of her existence.

At length she broke her silence with these words, repeated in a tone of muffled anger: “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.”

“You’re not in good spirits, to be sure,” Maxime said quietly. “You’re on edge. No doubt about it.”

The young woman pushed back deeper into her seat.

“Yes, I’m on edge,” she responded curtly.

Then she took a maternal tone. “I’m getting old, my dear child. I’ll be thirty soon. It’s horrible. Nothing gives me pleasure. At twenty you can’t possibly have any idea—”

“Was it to hear your confession that you brought me along?” the young man interrupted. “That could take a devil of a long time.”

She met this impertinence with a feeble smile, as the gibe of a spoiled child who is allowed to do as he pleases.

“I advise you to feel sorry for yourself,” Maxime continued. “You spend more than a hundred thousand francs a year on your wardrobe, you live in a splendid house, you have the finest horses, your every whim is received as holy writ, and the newspapers discuss each of your gowns as if dealing with an event of the utmost gravity. Women are jealous of you, and men would give ten years of their lives to kiss the tips of your fingers. . . . Am I right?”

She assented with a nod, without answering. With eyes cast down, she went back to curling the fur of the bearskin around her finger.

“Don’t be modest,” Maxime went on. “Come right out and admit that you’re one of the pillars of the Second Empire. You and I can say such things to each other. You’re the queen wherever you go: in the Tuileries,⁷ in the homes of ministers, or merely among millionaires, everywhere, from top to bottom, you’re in command. There is no pleasure you haven’t jumped into with both feet, and if I dared, if the respect I owe you did not hold me back, I would say—”

He paused for a few seconds, laughing, then finished his sentence in a cavalier manner: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple.”

She did not flinch.

“And you’re bored!” the young man resumed with comic passion. “You slay me! . . . But what do you want? What do you dream of ?”

She shrugged to indicate that she had no idea. Despite the tilt of her head, Maxime saw her at that moment as so serious, so somber, that he held his tongue. He gazed at the line of carriages, which, upon reaching the end of the lake, had spread out to fill the wide circle. Less bunched up now, the vehicles turned with magnificent grace. The volume of sound increased as the hooves of the horses struck the hard earth at a more rapid pace.

The calèche, making the wide turn to rejoin the queue, swung back and forth in a way that filled Maxime with a vaguely pleasurable sensation. With that he gave in to his desire to add insult to Renée’s injury. “You deserve to ride in a fiacre, you know. That would serve you right! . . . Just look at all these people heading back to Paris, people who are at your feet. They bow to you as though you were a queen, and your good friend M. de Mussy is all but blowing you kisses.”

Indeed, a man on horseback had been making signs in her direction. Maxime had spoken in a tone of hypocritical sarcasm. But Renée barely turned and shrugged her shoulders. This time the young man responded with a gesture of despair. “So, then, it’s as bad as that, is it? . . . But good God, you have everything, what more do you want?”

Renée raised her head. Her eyes were aglow with unslaked curiosity. “I want something different,” she muttered.

“But since you have everything,” Maxime laughed, “something different is nothing. . . . What do you mean, something different?”

“What do I mean?” she repeated.

But her voice trailed off. She had turned all the way round and was contemplating the strange tableau fading from view to her rear. Dusk came slowly, like a shower of fine ash. The lake, when viewed steadily in the pale light still lingering on the water, seemed to grow rounder, so that it resembled a huge slab of pewter. The trees lining both shores—evergreens whose straight, thin trunks seemed to surge up from the slumbering surface of the lake—at this hour took on the appearance of purplish colonnades whose regular architecture limned the studied curves of the water’s edge. Masses of foliage loomed in the distance, obscuring the horizon with broad dark patches. From behind those patches emanated a glow of embers, the light from a dying sun that set only a portion of the gray immensity aflame. Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature. The fading heights, slumbering sadly in mellow darkness, gave off such an autumnal melancholy that the Bois, gradually enveloped in a shroud of shadow and magnified by the potent magic dwelling in the wood, shed its worldly graces. As the vivid colors of the equipages were swallowed up by darkness, the sound of hooves could be heard more distinctly, like the whisper of distant leaves or the hiss of a faraway stream. Everything was receding and dying away. Amid this universal obliteration, the lateen sail of the big excursion boat stood out clearly and vigorously against the sunset’s amber. This sail, this inordinately enlarged triangle of yellow canvas, was all that could still be seen.