Renée ascended, and at each step she took her reflection in the mirror increased in size; she was asking herself, with that doubt entertained by the most popular actresses, whether she were really delicious, as every one told her. Then, when she had reached her apartment, which was on the first floor, and overlooked the Parc Monceaux, she rang for Céleste, her maid, and had herself dressed for dinner. This operation lasted a good three quarters of an hour. When the last pin had been fixed, she opened the window as the room was very close, and leaning out remained there wrapt in thought. Behind her, Céleste was moving discreetly about, tidying the room. Down below, the park was immersed in a sea of shadow. The inky coloured masses of the tall trees, shaken by sudden gusts of wind, swayed to and fro like the tide, with that rustling of dead leaves which recalls the breaking of the waves on a shingly strand. Piercing now and again this ebb and flow of darkness, the two yellow eyes of a carriage would appear and vanish between the shrubberies bordering the road which connects the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense with the Boulevard Malesherbes. In the face of all this autumnal melancholy Renée's sad thoughts returned. She fancied herself once more a child in her father's house, in that silent mansion of the Île Saint-Louis, where for two centuries past the Béraud Du Châtels had sheltered their gloomy magisterial gravity. Then her thoughts turned to her sudden marriage, to that widower who sold himself to become her husband, and who had trucked his name of Rougon for that of Saccard, the two sharp syllables of which had sounded in her ears, when first pronounced before her, with all the brutality of two rakes gathering up gold; he took her, and cast her into this life of turmoil amidst which her poor brain became a little more cracked every day. Then she set to dreaming with a childish joy of the happy games at battledore and shuttlecock she had played in the old times with her young sister Christine. And, some morning, she would awake from the dream of enjoyment she had been indulging for ten years past, crazy, and befouled by one of her husband's speculations, in which he himself would also sink. This passed before her like a rapid presentiment. The trees were lamenting in a louder tone. Troubled by these thoughts of shame and punishment, Renée yielded to the old and worthy middle-class instincts slumbering within her; she promised the black night she would reform, that she would no longer spend so much on her dress, and that she would seek some innocent occupation to amuse her, like in the happy school days, when she and her playmates sang beneath the plane-trees and danced in a ring. At this moment, Céleste, who had been downstairs, returned and murmured in her mistress's ear: "Master would be glad if madame would go down. There are already several persons in the drawing-room."