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.