Renée, for all her jadedness, experienced a singular sensation of unavowable desire at the sight of this landscape, which she no longer recognized, this tastefully fashionable piece of nature turned by the dark chill of night into a sacred wood, into one of those mythical glades in which the ancient gods hid their outsized loves, their divine adulteries and incests. As the calèche drove on, it struck her that the twilight behind her had wrapped the land of her dreams in its shimmering veils and was making off with it, snatching away the bower of illicit but superhuman love in which she might at last have assuaged her ailing heart, her weary flesh.

When the lake and the little woods, vanished into darkness, were reduced to no more than a black streak on the face of heaven, the young woman turned abruptly and in a voice marked by tears of spite took up where she had left off. “What do I mean? I mean something different, for heaven’s sake. I want something different. How would I know what? If only I did. But can’t you see, I’ve had enough of balls, of late suppers, of parties and all the rest. Always the same thing. It’s deadly. . . . Men are so tiresome! So unspeakably tiresome.”

Maxime began to laugh. Signs of passion were showing through the socialite’s aristocratic surface. She had stopped batting her eyelids. The furrow in her brow deepened. Her lower lip, which had protruded in a sulky child’s pout, pushed further forward in pursuit of pleasures she coveted but could not name. Although she noticed her companion’s laugh, she was trembling too much to stop. Half-reclining, yielding to the rocking of the carriage, she continued her thought with a series of short, sharp sentences: “Yes, no doubt about it, you’re all tiresome. . . . I don’t include you, Maxime. You’re too young. . . . But if I were to tell you how Aristide suffocated me at the beginning. And as for the rest of them—the men who have loved me. . . . You know, we’re good friends, I’m not inhibited with you. So listen to this: there are days when I’m so tired of living the life of the rich woman, worshiped and adored, that I’d rather be someone like Laure d’Aurigny, one of those women who live as men do.”

Because this only made Maxime laugh harder, she insisted. “Yes, someone like Laure d’Aurigny. It must be less insipid to live that way, less always the same thing.”

For a few instants she fell silent, as if to imagine the life she would lead if she were Laure. Then, in a discouraged tone, she resumed. “But you know, women like that must have their troubles too. Life is certainly no barrel of laughs. It’s deadly. . . . As I was saying, what I need is something different. I have no idea what that might be, you understand. But something different, something that’s never happened to anyone else, something out of the ordinary, a pleasure of some rare, unfamiliar kind.”

Her speech had slowed. As she uttered those last words, she seemed to be searching for something, yielding to some profound reverie. The calèche was just then climbing the avenue leading to the exit of the Bois. The shadows grew deeper. The woods sped past on either side, like two gray walls. Dashing down the sidewalks went the yellow-painted cast-iron chairs on which, in the evening when the weather was fine, the bourgeoisie sat and showed off its Sunday best. Empty, these benches had the dark, melancholy look of lawn furniture surprised by winter, and the dull, rhythmic sound of the returning carriages wafted over the deserted path like a sad lament.

Maxime was of course fully aware that it was quite bad form to think that life was a barrel of laughs. Though still young enough to succumb to bursts of enthusiasm, he had a selfish streak too deep, an indifference too scornful, and had already experienced too much genuine lassitude not to pronounce himself disgusted, blasé, and at the end of his tether. Ordinarily he would have taken a certain pride in such a confession.

He stretched out like Renée and affected a doleful tone. “Of course you’re right,” he said. “It is tedious. I’m not enjoying myself much more than you are. I’ve often dreamed of something different. . . . Nothing is as stupid as traveling. As for making money, I’d rather run through it, though that isn’t always as amusing as one first imagines. Loving, being loved—one soon gets sick of it, no? . . . Yes indeed. One gets sick of it.”

As the young woman did not answer, he continued, hoping to shock her with blatant sacrilege. “I’d like to be loved by a nun, you know. Now that might be amusing. . . . Have you ever dreamed of loving a man you couldn’t think about without committing a crime?”

She remained somber, however, and Maxime, seeing that she stayed silent, concluded that she wasn’t listening. With the back of her neck resting on the padded sill of the carriage, she seemed to be asleep with her eyes wide open. She lay inert, in the grip of her dreams, while now and then her lips twitched nervously. The shadow of twilight softly invaded her. All that that shadow contained of vague sadness, of discreet pleasure, of unavowed hope, penetrated her, bathing her in a sort of languid and morbid atmosphere. While staring at the round back of the footman perched on his bench, she was no doubt thinking about her pleasures of the past, of the parties she now found so dreary and no longer cared for. She looked back on her former life: the immediate gratification of her appetites, the loathsome luxury, and the oppressive monotony of the same caresses and the same betrayals repeated time and time again. Then there dawned in her something like a ray of hope, along with shudders of desire: the idea of that “something else” that her feverish mind had failed to discover. At this point her reverie went awry. Despite her efforts, the word she was looking for eluded her in the gathering darkness, was swallowed up by the steady rumble of the carriages. The soft swaying of the calèche was yet another obstacle that prevented her from formulating what it was she wanted. A tremendous temptation welled up from all that emptiness, from the shrubbery slumbering in the darkness on either side of the path, from the sound of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the carriage, which filled her with a delicious drowsiness. A thousand tiny breaths blew across her flesh: unfinished dreams, unnamed pleasures, vague wants—all the exquisite and monstrous things that a drive home from the Bois at the hour when the sky turns pale can put into a woman’s weary heart. She kept her two hands buried in the bearskin and felt very warm in her white cloth jacket with its mauve velvet lining. As she stretched her leg, relaxing in snug comfort, her ankle brushed the warmth of Maxime’s leg. He took no particular notice of this touch. A jolt wrenched her from her half-sleep. Lifting her head, she turned her gray eyes on the young man sprawled in all his elegance and stared at him oddly.

At that moment the calèche left the Bois. The avenue de l’Impératrice stretched straight ahead into the dusk, lined on both sides by green-painted wooden fences converging to a point on the horizon. On the side path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance pierced a bright hole in the gray shadow. Scattered along the path on the other side of the avenue, tardy strollers formed groups of black dots slowly moving in the direction of Paris. At the very top of the scene, at the end of the chaotic, crawling train of carriages, the Arc de Triomphe, set at an angle, grew whiter against a vast expanse of soot-colored sky.

As the calèche proceeded on its way at a brisker pace than before, Maxime, charmed by the English allure of the landscape, took in the hôtels on both sides of the avenue, town houses of fanciful design whose lawns stretched all the way down to the bridle paths. Renée, still lost in her daydream, was delighted to see the gaslights on the place de l’Etoile illuminated on the horizon one by one, and as those dancing lights stained the dying daylight with small yellow flames, she thought she heard secret calls and was convinced that the flamboyant Paris of winter nights was being kindled for her benefit, lighting the way to that unknown ecstasy for which her jaded senses longed.