Maxime however was one of Madame Sidonie's boon friends. When only fifteen years old he went on the prowl to his aunt's, smelling the forgotten gloves which he found lying on the furniture. She, who hated clear situations and never owned her little services, ended by lending him the keys of her rooms, on certain days, saying that she would remain in the country until the morrow. Maxime talked about some friends whom he wished to entertain and whom he did not like to take to his father's. It was in the rooms of the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière that he spent several nights with the poor girl whom one was afterwards obliged to send into the country. Madame Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew, and went into ecstacies before him, murmuring in a soft voice that he was "without a hair, as rosy as a Cupid."
Maxime had grown however. He was now a pretty, slightly built young man who had retained the rosy cheeks and blue eyes of childhood. His curly hair completed that girlish appearance, which so delighted the ladies. He resembled poor Angèle with his soft eyes and blonde pallor. But he was not even the equal of that indolent shallow woman. In him the race of the Rougons had a tendency to refinement and became delicate and vicious. The offspring of too young a mother, constituting a strange, jumbled, and so to say unmingled combination of his father's furious appetites and his mother's self-abandonment and weakness, he was a defective offspring in whom the parental failings were completed and aggravated. This family of the Rougons lived too fast; it was dying out already in the person of this frail creature whose sex must have remained in suspense during formation, and who no longer represented a will, eager for gain and enjoyment like Saccard, but a species of cowardice, devouring fortunes already made; a strange hermaphrodite ushered at the right time into a society that was rottening. When Maxime went to the Bois de Boulogne, with his waist tightly compressed like a woman's, lightly dancing in the saddle on which he was swayed by the canter of his horse, he was the god of the age, with his strongly developed hips, his long slender hands, his sickly lascivious air, his correct elegance, and his slang learnt at petty theatres. At twenty years of age he placed himself above all surprises and all disgusts. He had certainly dreamt of the most unusual beastliness. But with him vice was not an abyss, as it is with certain old men, but a natural external bloom. It curled upon his fair hair, smiled upon his lips, and dressed him like his clothes. However his great characteristic was especially his eyes, two clear and smiling blue apertures, true mirrors for a coquette, but behind which one perceived all the emptiness of his brain. Those harlot eyes were never lowered; they courted pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue which one summons and receives.