The young fellow only went off at six o'clock in the morning. She gave him the key of the little gate of the Parc Monceaux and made him swear to come back every night. The dressing-room communicated with the buttercup drawing-room by a little staircase hidden in the wall, and connecting all the apartments of the tower. From the buttercup room it was easy to pass into the conservatory and thence reach the park.
On going out at dawn, amid a thick fog, Maxime was somewhat stupefied by his good fortune. He accepted it, however, with his usual complaisance as a neutral being.
"So much the worse!" thought he, "it's she who wishes it, after all. She's deucedly well formed; and she was quite right, she's twice as funny in bed as Sylvia is."
They had glided to incest from the day when Maxime, in his threadbare collegian's tunic, had hung on Renée's neck, creasing her _garde française_ habit. From that time forward there had been a prolonged perversion of every minute between them. The strange education which the young woman gave the child; the familiarities which made them boon comrades; later on the smiling audacity of their confidential chats; all this perilous promiscuity had ended by linking them together with a strange bond, the joys of friendship almost becoming carnal satisfactions. They had surrendered themselves to each other for years; the brutish act was but the acute crisis of this unconscionable malady of passion. Amid the maddened society in which they lived, their crime had sprouted as upon a rich dung-heap full of impure juices; it had developed itself with a strange refinement amid a particular kind of debauchery.
When the roomy carriage conveyed them to the Bois, and rolled them gently along the pathways, whispering smutty things into each other's ears, diving back into their childhood in search of the dirty practices of instinct--it was but a deviation, but an unconfessed mode of satisfying their desires. They felt themselves to be vaguely guilty, as if they had just slightly touched one another; and this original sin, this languor born of dirty conversation, though it wearied them with voluptuous fatigue, titillated them even more softly than plain positive kisses. Their familiarity was thus a slow lover's march which was fatally destined to lead them some day or other to the private room at the Café Riche and to Renée's large grey and pink bed. When they found themselves in each other's arms they did not even feel the shock of sin. One would have said that they were lovers of long standing whose kisses were full of recollections. And they had spent so much time in a contact of their whole beings, that despite themselves they talked of the past which was so full of their ignorant tenderness.