by Jean Giono
“We came to the pass. We continued on the way to Diois. It had stopped raining. The clouds were like chopped hay. I said to myself, ‘It’s not the same anymore.’ And indeed, it wasn’t. We were going downhill. After an hour the mountains resumed their places in the air, and we threaded our way below them until we got to the village.
“He stops in front of the inn. Madame Tim and I would rather have died than utter a single word. We looked at each other with a wink and then we looked at him. We took hold of our little handbags at the same time, while he unbuckled the apron. And we stepped down to the ground.
“He was a fine-looking man, you know! Perhaps not the kind to appeal to young girls but the kind women think about. He wasn’t one to bow and scrape. The hand he held out was firm. And I liked the fact that he had more on his mind than just me—you could tell that from his eyes—but that in spite of everything, he was willing to give us his arm and shoulder to help us down from the carriage, which made that arm and that shoulder priceless. Madame Tim was of the same opinion.
“Strike me dead if that day it wasn’t me who thought first, ‘What a shame!’ But why? I didn’t know. I only knew it was a shame.
“And I’m sure I thought it first because, right as I was thinking it, Madame Tim asked if we were going to eat, so obviously she hadn’t thought it. Hers were the first words any of us had uttered since we’d left in the morning.
“I’m sure Madame Tim had to force herself to get them out and must have said to herself, ‘I’ll be the daring one.’
“I said nothing. I just thought, ‘What a shame!’
“Most of the time Madame Tim and I walked side by side, but on a few occasions, and on this one in particular, I went in front; I moved out of the rank and file, see?
“While we were eating I saw, for the first and last time in my life, Langlois with a needy look on his face. And do you know why? To ask us this idiotic thing: ‘Would you by any chance have any use for a good embroiderer?’ (And he continued, dumb as an ox) ‘She can make lace, too. In this village, there’s a woman, very good . . .’
“Poor Langlois! And Madame Tim and me! Who knew exactly how we were supposed to react! And we both immediately answered in the same thrilled, astonished voice, ‘Of course!’ You’d think that until now, without an embroiderer, our lives had been a circus sideshow.
“And I looked at Madame Tim. As innocent as a girl making her First Communion. I must have looked the same. Even more so, perhaps.
“That’s my Langlois! (He wasn’t my Langlois, it’s that cow Delphine who says that. He was never my Langlois. I was born twenty years too soon. If I had been born twenty years later, he would still be alive.) So there’s our Langlois, reassured and even a smooth talker (and I said to myself, ‘Go ahead, you’ll never try harder than me’), explaining to us: there was an embroiderer, a lacemaker, a fairy—that’s the word he used. He watched the effect he was having on us. Poor Langlois! Madame Tim and me! You can imagine that he had the effect of water on flowers. He must have mulled that word over and over. And where did he get it in the first place? This fairy was raising her little boy and had been recommended by the parish council even more for her exemplary behavior than for her manual dexterity.
“I’ve never been recommended by any parish council; true, I haven’t raised a little boy and my behavior has been far from exemplary but, all while soaking up my braised beef gravy with my bread, I found the right words and uttered them as naturally as possible so that Langlois wouldn’t get tangled up in more words that had nothing to do with us and so that he’d understand we were his friends there as much as when we were home. And that the fairies could go to hell! Don’t you agree? With friends you shouldn’t have to beat around the bush.
“Madame Tim gently stroked my gloved hand. I hadn’t raised my voice. I’d said what I had to say. He was getting on my nerves with his needy-looking face. It wasn’t a look for him. If we’d hitched the horses to the buggy, if Madame Tim had come to us on her own—and she was afraid of the Saint-Baudille horses—and if the three of us had come all that way through rain, over peaks, and through valleys, it wasn’t to see him acting timid. All he had to do was tell us frankly what he wanted, as usual. That’s how we liked him.
“And he told us. I don’t think anyone could ever challenge Langlois. Besides, he made us—especially me—understand straight out that it wasn’t to spare us that he’d stood on ceremony. It was because right until then he himself had been hesitating. Now he wasn’t—and so he told us what it was all about.
“A woman had settled in this village, for reasons he thought pointless to tell us. Suffice it to say that she wasn’t from there; she’d been forced to come and we didn’t need to know why. Not that he had any doubts at all about us but, on the contrary, this way we’d have the freedom of mind to do what he wanted us to do.
“He wanted to enter this woman’s home but to enter it as if he were, so to speak, invisible. Otherwise he wouldn’t have needed us. It would have been enough (he said) to knock on her door, say ‘Good day, madame,’ and ask her any old thing, after which he would have gone into the house and, if that had been all he’d wanted, well, that would have been that.
“But it wasn’t about that.
“He wanted to go in—he thought it would be enough for him to enter the room where she ordinarily received people. He didn’t think he needed to see the other rooms, the bedrooms or anything else. He just wanted to enter this woman’s house and be allowed to stay there, seated, ignored or forgotten as much as possible.
“He simply wanted to get a feel for the house, that is, to have some time to look around. Understand the house from the inside. He’d looked for a way to do it; he’d schemed; he’d been thinking about it for a long time; and this is what he came up with.
“This woman really was skillful. She earned her living and her son’s (well, at least since she’d settled in that village) by embroidering and tatting. The Minimes convent, and the ladies and gentleman in general, found her work making bridal trousseaus. So this was an introduction.
“He wanted the three of us—Madame Tim, him, and me—to knock on the woman’s door. We were supposed to be: Madame Tim, a lady with a daughter who was to be married; Langlois, for example, a friend of the family whom we would introduce briskly, though not as someone of much importance; I would be, let’s say, a friend as well, or an aunt, if Madame Tim agreed. We’d make him sit down somewhere and say to him, ‘Be patient; we’re going to talk about things of no interest to men’; and then Madame Tim and I would examine this woman’s handiwork and place an order. A real order; that is to say, it was very important that this woman not suspect any kind of trick in any way (‘It’s a serious question of compassion I care very much about,’ said Langlois, adding: ‘If I thought that one day she might come to suspect anything at all about our visit, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I’d constantly be imagining this distraught woman fleeing across the world, when all I want is what’s best for her’), so it was very important that we place an actual order with her, which we would pick up in due time (which would, in addition, afford him the possibility of a second visit in case he found it necessary), real work for which we would pay.
“It was up to Madame Tim and me, he said, to know if we really needed lace and embroidered things.
“ ‘One can always use lace and embroidered things,’ said Madame Tim.
“ ‘But up to the point of being able to stay, let’s say, a good hour at this woman’s?’
“ ‘To the point of staying a week,’ said Madame Tim.
“She took the words right out of my mouth; and she realized it because she continued gently to stroke my gloved hand.
“So, it was perfect. And I came to this conclusion: ‘With us, how couldn’t it be perfect?’ I asked. Langlois looked at me gratefully.
“The woman lived in the old part of the village. Below, near the inn, there were chic houses. The back alley we were going down wasn’t a
ll that appealing, I have to say. Two ocher quarrymen lived there and the red dust they dragged in on the soles of their shoes bloodied the water that seeped from their sinks.
“(These villages on the Diois slope are nothing like our villages. It’s like night and day. In our villages everything is made for the cows and the sawmill. Here, everything was for nobility and history. By history I mean the history of France, of course, but also, other people’s history: sticking your nose in what’s none of your business. There’s almost always an old castle in these villages with the houses squeezed up against it, even when it’s in ruins.)
“I said to myself, ‘Not even a halfway respectable woman could live in a place like this.’ The houses were in blackish shreds and through the little lanes we were climbing up a kind of hill where, in the gaps between the collapsing houses, we could see the ruins of something that must have once been quite grand.
“As we climbed, the place became, if not exactly respectable, a little bit friendlier. There was grass and, through the crumbling rubble of the houses, you could see a lovely little valley with a stream, alder trees, a road lined with poplars, a small marsh, brown reeds, a windmill, willows, a tiny white farmhouse, plane trees, and what was probably a mulberry tree. And the little valley stretched like that southward, with everything I just mentioned, and little by little all of that shrank in the distance, merging with the grass in a sort of omelet-with-herbs color.
“Fifty steps up, facing this soothing view, was a house, intact, well preserved, and very clean. Its ground-floor windows were protected by strong, beautiful wrought-iron grilles with the kind of curves I like.
“I’ve always wanted window grilles like those. I’ve always dreamed of living in a house with windows protected by curved grilles. Who knows why. No doubt for the same reasons as that woman. Because she was the one who lived there. It’s the idea of a woman who lives alone; the idea of a woman with responsibilities, for a little boy, for example, or for herself; sometimes that’s enough of a responsibility.
“Naturally I was prepared to find the fairy abominable. Some pale little church mouse. But no. She was a woman of a certain age, entirely gray except for her clothing, which was black, and her eyes, which were the bluest blue. But even though they were blue, they didn’t give that impression of youth that blue eyes can give to old faces, or wrinkled faces, or tired faces. What did her face look like? I think I can say that it looked worried, with a worry that exhausts you, that wears you out and ages you, if you know what I mean.
“We knocked, she opened her door, and at first she saw only Madame Tim and me; very nicely she asked us to come in. Then Langlois, who’d been standing off to the side, showed himself and the woman wavered, it seemed, and stopped in the doorway, but finally she stepped aside and invited all three of us to proceed through the open door in the hallway.
“Madame Tim had taken the initiative and was already saying a few words about our business as we went down the hall. The woman led us into a room that seemed both dark and immense. The window—one of those with a curved grille—could hardly illuminate the whole of it.
“All we could see was this window filled with the little valley I mentioned. The woman apologized for the lack of light and steered us toward that window where the sky that looked like chopped hay was laughing.
“The window lit a few square meters in which we could make out a beautiful armchair, newly upholstered; an amazing game table lavishly inlaid with ivory and ebony; a chair with legs as polished as violin scrolls; and, in the middle of the lit space, a ‘worktable’ laden with canvases in progress on which rested a pair of eyeglasses with thick lenses and steel frames.
“I could hear Madame Tim speaking. I couldn’t possibly repeat what she said. I was wondering what Langlois expected to find there. And I was looking around, trying not to be indiscreet. Curiosity was making my head spin a little.
“I imagine it was making Madame Tim’s head spin as well; she didn’t stop talking for a second, like a drunk who wants get up and go and won’t stop walking for fear of falling and even sometimes starts to run. And that’s when he falls; and, all the while my head was spinning, I was terrified that Madame Tim would fall; and I said to myself, ‘She’s talking too fast and saying too much.’
“Langlois must have shared my opinion, because he coughed.
“The woman must also have been of the same opinion. She kept looking from Madame Tim to me, from me to Langlois, from Langlois to Madame Tim.
“At last I heard Madame Tim’s voice a little less. ‘That’s it,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ve blown it.’ I stubbornly fixed my eyes on a darkened corner. I didn’t want to face that blue gaze when it understood that those curved grilles didn’t protect a thing.
“And I heard the woman’s voice calmly answering the detailed questions that Madame Tim continued to ask.
“And I realized that Madame Tim had pulled off the tour de force of perfectly imitating a grand bourgeois lady from a small town or even a little village. The woman was reassured. She was talking about the excellent quality of her thread. She put on her glasses and, in the light from the window, she demonstrated to Madame Tim that her thread was practically indestructible. We were saved.
“I looked at Langlois: he was as white as a sheet.
“It was Madame Tim who said to us very drily, ‘Why don’t the two of you just sit down.’
“Just how a big bourgeois moneybags would have said it, just as if she was at home wherever she went and most of all in the home of the linen maid she was thinking of hiring.
“Oh, Madame Tim was stunningly beautiful!
“What else could that little gray woman do except painstakingly demonstrate that her silks were of the finest quality and that her needlework was free of even the slightest mistake? And she did it like a determined little ant, asking Madame Tim to be so kind as to go with her right up to the window to examine her stitch work in the light. Which Madame Tim did, all the while producing rather grotesque little growls, grotesque, that is, to anyone who knew her soul was filled with ponds and verbena, and her head with wild birds.
“ ‘May I, my dear?’ said Madame Tim, seating herself by the work-table, without a ‘pretty please.’ Her position as a bourgeois was all the permission she needed.
“ ‘Come look at this, will you?’ she then said to me.
“Later she admitted she hadn’t needed me at all—she was perfectly capable of keeping up the act, which, by that time, was no longer an act. She’d seen this woman’s work and it was absolutely remarkable. She’d also seen that her embroiderer’s fingers had been eaten away as if by acid and that, through the lenses of her eyeglasses, her blue eyes were rimmed with red.
“ ‘And,’ she added, ‘I’m not sentimental, not like some grisette in any case; my sentiments, even if they can be haughty, have a rather wild cast to them; I could have seen worn fingers and red eyes and still remained perfectly indifferent. I know how easy it is to have worn fingers and red eyes and still not be worth a cent. And sometimes it’s because you aren’t worth a cent that you have worn fingers and red eyes. But in this woman what I saw was the panting of a hunted doe who became calmer and calmer as I spoke, as I took an interest in her work and gradually persuaded her that I really was there to order some needlework from her.’
“ ‘I confess,’ Madame Tim went on, ‘that I could easily sacrifice my life to comfort a doe or a leopard. I like comforting others. So it wasn’t an act anymore. I was reassuring the doe quite openly and I put my whole heart into it. In fact, that’s why I pulled it off so well. No, I called you over to me because at bottom you had no more right than I to find out what Langlois had come there to do. As soon as you didn’t have that woman to bother with, you could bother with Langlois. In fact, you didn’t deprive yourself of that opportunity; I could see you out of the corner of my eye. And if you did discover something, you wouldn’t have told me.’
“Well, that was true. But she was mistaken. I was watch
ing Langlois and my eyes were open wide on that big shadowy room whose depths hid vague shapes and glimmers of gold, but I was thinking of something else entirely.
“Do you know what? I was jealous! Oh! That often happens to me. Jealous of Madame Tim, who was making herself so useful, doing Langlois such a great favor. I wanted it to be me, or at least to have a part in the thing. So, on the contrary, when she said, ‘Come look at this, will you?’ I was happy to go over to her.
“Langlois, who’d been so pale, had turned his head away ever so slightly to conceal his face in shadow and hide his satisfaction. He couldn’t hide anything from me. I could still see the corner of his mouth and the crow’s-feet around his left eye. That was enough for me. I was sentimental as well. That’s what made me jealous. He found an armchair and sat down.
“My role was simple. I’m not stupid either. All I had to do was to agree with Madame Tim, even overdo it a little bit every now and again. Then, in a roundabout way (as if I knew I didn’t have the standing to disagree straight-out with Madame Tim), but so cleverly roundabout that the embroiderer could realize what I was up to (as if, subordinate though I was, I still had enough taste not to be able to restrain my admiration for such beautiful work) (which is always true of subordinate positions—poor cousins, disinherited youngest daughters), I would gently strengthen the woman’s case. You can see I also knew what was what. I handled it very well. I told you: It was easy.
“So easy it was automatic. Meanwhile, I could keep an eye on Langlois and on the large room now emerging from the shadows.
“At first I saw nothing but the gilding.
“Golden threads and golden leaves—here the glinting curve of a piece of furniture, there some reeds on huge portrait frames, till finally I could make out the room’s three missing walls. Across from the window, at least twenty steps away (later we learned that this house had been the former guesthouse of the old convent whose ruins overlooked the hillside), I could now discern a very big bergère armchair with a large cloverleaf back. Next to it was a potbellied hope chest and when, some time later, the evening sun shone through the chopped-hay sky, its legs with feet like lion paws and the huge carved leaves on its side began to appear. Above it hung an oval portrait and inside the gleaming frame, supple as wickerwork, was the pink, pale green, and blue shape of a young woman. Perpendicular to the wall with the window and door through which we’d entered stood a tall peasant wardrobe, not set out in plain sight as is customary but crammed into a corner so as to squeeze in a buffet and a credenza next to it, like at an auction. The whole room resembled a furniture warehouse.