In any event, he already held 200,000 francs of paper she had signed, which had cost him barely 110,000 francs. After having these notes endorsed by Larsonneau, in whose name they were drawn, he prudently placed them in circulation with the intention of using them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have gotten through that terrible winter, lending to his wife at usurious rates of interest and maintaining his lavish way of life, had he not sold his property on the boulevard Malesherbes, for which Mignon and Charrier paid cash, but at a significant discount.

For Renée that winter was one of endless joy. She suffered only from a shortage of cash. Maxime cost her an arm and a leg. He still treated her as his stepmother and allowed her to pay for everything. Yet her hidden poverty was for her merely one more source of pleasure. She schemed and racked her brain so that “her darling boy” would want for nothing, and when she persuaded her husband to come up with a few thousand francs for her, she and her lover devoured them in costly extravagances like two schoolmates let loose on their first escapade. When they hadn’t a cent to their name, they stayed home and enjoyed the huge, ugly mansion with its brand-new and impudently absurd luxury. Saccard was never there. The lovers sat by the hearth more often now than in the past, because Renée had at last succeeded in filling the glacial void under the mansion’s gilded ceilings with the heat of her ecstasy. This suspect house of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she practiced a new religion apart from the world. Maxime had done more for her than elicit a note of pleasure shrill enough to match her extravagant outfits; he was the lover this house required, with its storefront windows and its incrustation of sculpture from rooftop to cellar. He made all that plaster come alive, from the two chubby-cheeked cupids holding their dripping shell in the courtyard to the tall, naked women supporting the balconies and playing with apples and ears of corn in the pediments. He explained the all too sumptuous vestibule, the ridiculously constricted garden, and the splendid rooms crammed with armchairs but devoid of art. Renée, who had been bored to death there, suddenly brightened and began to use the house as if she had only just grasped its true purpose. And it was not only in her apartment that she paraded her love, not just in the buttercup salon or the conservatory, but throughout the house. Eventually she even found the divan in the smoking room to her liking. She enjoyed lying there, she said, because the room smelled vaguely of tobacco, which she found quite pleasant.

She took to receiving guests on two days instead of one. On Thursdays outsiders were welcome, but Mondays were reserved for close female friends. Men were not allowed. Only Maxime was admitted to these select gatherings, which were held in the small salon. One night Renée had the stupendous idea of dressing him as a woman and passing him off as one of her cousins. Adeline, Suzanne, Baroness von Meinhold, and other friends of hers rose to greet the newcomer, astonished by a face they vaguely recognized. When at last they realized what was going on, they laughed a lot and refused to let the young man change his clothes. They made him stay there in his skirt, teasing him and making off-color jokes. After seeing the ladies out through the main gate, he circled round the park and returned by way of the conservatory. Even Renée’s close friends never suspected a thing. The lovers could hardly have been more familiar than when they had been good comrades. And if a servant happened to catch them pressed rather too close together behind closed doors, there was no occasion for surprise, since the entire staff was used to these little jokes of Madame and the son of Monsieur.

Such utter freedom and impunity emboldened them still more. If they bolted their door at night, by day they kissed in every room in the house. They invented countless little games to while away the time on rainy days. But Renée’s greatest delight was still to make a roaring fire and nap in front of the fireplace. That winter she had a marvelous array of linen to choose from. Her chemises and peignoirs cost a king’s ransom, and their frilly lace and batiste barely covered her with a white cloud. She lay almost naked in the red glow of the fireplace, her lace and skin tinted pink, her flesh warmed through the thin fabric by the heat of the flames. Maxime, crouching at her feet, could kiss her knees without so much as feeling the garment, which shared the warmth and color of her beautiful body. When the sky was overcast, a dusky gloom enveloped the gray silk-lined bedroom, while Céleste quietly padded in and out behind the two lovers. She had of course become their accomplice. When they lingered in bed one morning, she found them there yet betrayed no emotion, as if her veins were filled with ice water. After that they cast all caution to the winds, and Céleste came in at all hours, never allowing the sound of their kisses to distract her from her work. They relied on her to warn them of any danger. They did not buy her silence. She was a very thrifty girl, very respectable, and if she had ever had a lover, no one knew about it.

In the meantime Renée did not cloister herself. She made the rounds of society with Maxime tagging along behind like a fair-haired page in a dark frock coat, and took greater pleasure in this ritual than ever before. Her season was one long triumph. Her outfits and hairdos had never been more boldly imagined. It was now that she dared to wear the famous tawny satin gown embroidered with images of a stag hunt, including such attributes as powder horn, bugles, and broad knives. And it was now that she set the fashion of wearing her hair in the style of the ancients, based on drawings that Maxime made for her at the recently opened Musée Campana. ² She seemed rejuvenated in the fullness of her restless beauty. Incest burned within her, and its glow could be seen in her eyes, its heat felt in her laughter. She wore her glasses with supreme insolence on the end of her nose and stared at other women, at good friends of hers set apart from the rest by the enormity of their vice, with the air of a boastful adolescent and a fixed smile that said, “I have a crime of my own.”

Maxime found society tedious. In fact he thought it chic to be bored, because he did not really enjoy himself anywhere. At the Tuileries and the ministries he hid behind Renée’s petticoats. He took charge again, however, whenever an escapade was in the offing. Renée asked to return to the private room on the boulevard, where the width of the divan made her smile. After that he took her all over, to visit prostitutes, to the Bal de l’Opéra,³ to the front rows of burlesque houses, wherever raw vice could be savored incognito. Dead tired, they would then sneak back into the house and fall asleep in each other’s arms, sleeping off the intoxication of gutter Paris with snatches of ribald tunes still ringing in their ears. The next day, Maxime would mimic the actors, and Renée, playing the piano in the small salon, would attempt to emulate Blanche Muller’s hoarse voice and bumps and grinds in the role of La Belle Hélène. ⁴ Her music lessons at the convent were of no use to her now except to murder the latest burlesque numbers. Serious music filled her with horror. Maxime jeered at German music right along with her, and he felt it his duty to go hiss at Tannhäuser⁵ partly out of conviction and partly to defend his stepmother’s bawdy refrains.

One of their great entertainments was skating. Skating was “in” that winter, the emperor having been one of the first to try the ice on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Renée ordered a complete Polish skating outfit of velvet and fur from Worms and insisted that Maxime wear soft boots and a cap of fox fur. They went to the Bois in weather so bitingly cold that it stung their noses and lips, as if the wind were blowing fine sand against their faces. They enjoyed the cold. The Bois was completely gray, with stripes of snow clinging to the branches like thin strips of lace. And above the dull frozen lake the colorless skies were empty but for the islands whose fir trees still fringed the horizon, except that now those theatrical curtains were trimmed with billows of lace stitched by the snow. Together the two lovers glided through the frigid air like swallows swooping just above the ground. With one hand behind the back and the other on the partner’s shoulder they skated straight ahead, smiling, side by side, then turned and skated back to where they had begun, all within an ample section of the lake marked out by heavy ropes. Spectators watched from the main path above. Occasionally the skaters paused to warm themselves at stoves set up along the shore before resuming their activity, extending their flight as far as possible while tears of pleasure and cold welled up in their eyes.