In the reception room, if I darted a glance at the other groups, I saw all gazes turned in my mother’s direction, and I blushed crimson.
Since we had been in Paris she had released the bridle on her worldly and vainglorious instincts; in the beginning, whenever she came to see me, I observed that her attire was enriched by a more pronounce charter of coquetry. She did not stop until she was on a level with the flashiest elegant ladies. Her language, even the timbre of her voice, also changed gradually. I had never really recognized a mother in her; I ended up fining her a stranger who deigned to honor me with her protection.
The worst thing was that she sought to inspire me with her taste for frivolous luxury. She never talked to me about anything but fashion; she wanted me to arrange my hair in a certain pretentious fashion, and that I wear make-up. I listened to her without making much response. Irritated, angered, perhaps mortified, she claimed that I would never be anything but a simpleton. That was the clearest of our conversations.
After my mother’s visits it often happened that I thought about my poor father and mourned him again. Life with her seemed to me, in any case, to be scarcely enviable, since, from my first year at school, I manifested the desire not to take vacations. She was I think, piqued that the idea came to me, but delighted not to have me on her back for a month and a half. What would she have done with a little girl already growing up in Monaco or Luchon? Or how could she have consented not to travel?
In the following years it went without saying that I would remain at the school. One year, however, when I was sixteen, my mother, having decided to spend the summer in the vicinity of Paris, insisted that I accompany her. It was in a little cottage at Chalou. We lived there, quite secluded, not receiving anyone, but my mother went to Paris twice a week where she spent the day. The other days she employed either lying asleep on a sofa or getting dressed in from of her mirror.
As for me, I occupied myself with the housework, reading and going for walks; most of all I walked, as I had once done in La Puisaye, not with poor Tom any longer, my first canine amour, but with a pretty little white griffon belonging to my mother, who testified to it all the affection of which she was capable, of a certain cold and disdainful variety.
One afternoon, my mother was in Paris, the chambermaid was tidying the drawing room and I was strolling in the garden in front of the house. I was stripping the rose-bushes of their dead flowers, and in order to tease Bibi, my mother’s dog, who was lying on the sand of the pathway, I threw them at him as I went along.
Suddenly, Bibi got up, bounding with an incredible joy, and at the same time an elegantly clad young man cried: “Bonjour, Bibi, bonjour, bonjour! Oh my God, what caresses! You’ll devour my legs.”
During the brief times that I had spent with my mother, either in Paris or in the country, I had never seen that visitor. However, the manner in which he spoke to the dog, and in which he had been welcomed by him, immediately designated him to me as an habitué of the household.
He came toward me, bowed to me gracefully, was momentarily nonplussed—I was exceedingly nonplussed myself—and then, having stammered a few words about what I was doing, he said: “In Madame de Framée here, Mademoiselle?”
“No, Monsieur, my mother is in Paris.”
“You mother?”
“Of course, my mother,” I relied, blushing. “You didn’t guess on seeing me that Madame de Framée is my mother? People say, however, that I resemble her.”
“Certainly, Mademoiselle, certainly—but I thought...” He added, rather awkwardly: “I’m the son of one of Madame’s friends, the Marquise d’Ingrande.”
I bowed. How is it, I said to myself, that this young man is the son of one of my mother’s friends, but has never heard mention of me? And I was very confused to discover that my mother surrounded my existence with such mystery, without my being able to penetrate her reasons.
In any case, I knew no more about my mother’s friends than they knew about me. The name of the Marquise d’Ingrande awakened no memory in me.”
Monsieur d’Ingrande was looking at me with astonished eyes, as if I were the eighth wonder of the world.
I knew nothing about the usages of society. I did not know how to receive a young man, and he was, so to speak, the first one to whom I had ever talked. He addressed the compliments to me that one addresses habitually...
He told me, I believe, that my mother must be happy to see a young person as gracious and as amiable as I was...
And that, although I had not said or done anything gracious, and had not been amiable at all.
“Mademoiselle has left boarding-school?”
“No, I’m still there. I’m only taking a short vacation.
“Still at school!”
“Yes, Monsieur,” I said, blushing. “I’m only sixteen.”
“At the Oiseaux, perhaps?”
“No, in a smaller school, with Mademoiselle Berthelot.”
“Oh, I know it…Rue Blanche.”
“No, Monsieur, Rue de Vaugirard.”
All those questions, I discovered later why he was asking them. At the time, I didn’t suspect any motive, and I imagined that he was only making conversation. Soon, he asked me whether Joséphine, my mother’s chambermaid, had accompanied her mistress to Paris. I said no, that she was tidying the drawing room. He saluted me and, to my great astonishment, went to find Mademoiselle Joséphine. I went up to my room in order not to be in his passage when he went, but to be able to see him go nevertheless.
Alone in my room, I became bolder, and I examined Monsieur d’Ingrande mentally, as I would never have dared to do with my own eyes. His face, his attire and is manners appeared to be those of a very respectable young man.
Young women have a prompt glance, and their little mind is an objective lens in which the image of a handsome young man has the custom of being fixed instantaneously. Without that marvelous photographic procedure their situation would be truly too cruel; thanks to it, they have a compensation. It is forbidden for them to look a man in the face, especially and above all one that is dear to them, so be it! They will gaze at him internally, and he will still be there, perhaps flattered, for they operate marvelously, and with a brand new apparatus.
When Monsieur d’Ingrande passed through the garden again—and that did not take long—surprised not to see me, he looked for me everywhere with an anxious gaze; I watched him through my Venetian blinds and laughed. Finally, he bent down, picked up a couple of the dead roses I had thrown from the ground, and slipped them into his wallet.
Immediately, I was no longer laughing, and without knowing why. I felt my cheeks turning crimson and my brow darkening.
Scarcely had Monsieur d’Ingrande gone that Mademoiselle Joséphine ran into my room.
“Well, Mademoiselle?” she said to me, with a smile that appeared to me to be quite new on her rather pinched lips, a trifle dry and inexpressive.
“Well, Joséphine?” I said, a trifle embarrassed.
“You weren’t expecting, were you, to see a handsome young Monsieur today?”
“That’s true. He knows Maman, then, that Monsieur?”
“Yes, yes…and how do you find him?”
“Pleasant.”
“He finds you charming…”
“Oh.”
“He’d like to be able to come back here.
“What’s preventing him, since he knows Maman?”
“In fact, Madame doesn’t want him to come.”
“Why not?”
“Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of you.”
“That’s singular...”
“And in fact, it would be a good idea not to tell Madame that he came today.”
“What an idea! Didn’t he come to see her?”
“Of course, but she’ll be annoyed that he encountered you alone.”
“Joséphine, I don’t like hiding things, and besides, I have no reason to do so in that matter.
I’ll tell my mother what happened.”
“You’re making a mistake. Madame will be very discontented.”
Mademoiselle Joséphine’s prediction was accurate. My mother listened to me with an affected indifference, beneath which I read the greatest annoyance. She usually went to Paris twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. Unusually, she returned the day after Monsieur d’Ingrande’s visit. And from that moment on she treated me even more coldly than before.
As for me, I did not see Monsieur d’Ingrande at Chatou again…but I thought a great deal more about him…far too much.
Eventually, my vacation finished, and I went back to the Berthelot school. I had been there for about a week when I was told that a lady was asking to see me in the reception room. It was a woman of about fifty, although she looked scarcely forty, tall and robust, with an aristocratic manner.
“I recognized you immediately as Madame de Framée’s daughter,” she said coming toward me and embracing me in the most affable manner. “Léon was right; you’re the living portrait of your mother...dear child! And even prettier. Do you know what my name is? I’m the Marquise d’Ingrande. But you saw my son at Chatou, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Madame,” I said, blushing to my ears.
“Oh, you’ve bewitched him! He thinks of nothing but you; he talks about nothing but you. Can you imagine that he keeps dead roses clipped by your scissors? One can’t be any crazier, or any more amorous.”
She continued to talk to me like that about her son, which was very embarrassing for me, and made me feel awkward as a young woman can. Then, judging that the conversation was putting me to the torture, she said: “Oh, the dear little angel, now she’s all troubled! Let’s not talk any more about that nasty boy who frightens young women. Let’s talk about your mother. It’s necessary to admit that it’s strange of your mother not to introduce to her acquaintances a child who does her so much honor. But I said to myself: I’ll go to the school. I’ll see her anyway, and her mother won’t know anything about it—or if she does, too bad.”
Madame d’Ingrande pleased me a great deal, by virtue of her sympathetic appearance, the gracious things she said to me, by the interest she seemed to be taking in me, and most of all, I think, because she was Monsieur d’Ingrande’s mother. I will add that when she left, she gave me a little box full on excellent bonbons.
When my mother came to see me, I did not say anything about the visit I had had, for fear that she would be unjustly irritated. In any case, if Madame d’Ingrande, with whom she must be in continual communication, had kept silent with regard to it, it was because she must have her reasons and, sadly, she inspired more confidence in me than my mother.
Meanwhile, her son was never out of my mind. I had scolded myself for that in vain; there was no means of correcting myself. The less I wanted to think about him, the more I thought about him. Unless one has been a young woman oneself, one cannot suspect the naïve and foolish dreams that constitute amour in a young woman.
The name of Léon seemed incomparable to me, and I practiced pronouncing it in twenty different ways mentally, and sometimes aloud, if there was no one within earshot. I looked at it in the calendar beside the date of 10 April, or I wrote it spontaneously, without noticing, in the margin of my notebooks when I was roughing out my impositions—but I erased it immediately in order not to betray my secret to the junior mistress, who might perhaps have scolded me roundly for mingling my work with entirely heterogeneous matters.
For Madame Berthelot’s birthday we put on a play in the school. One of my companions, a tall brunette named Clémence, whom I contemplated, to put it precisely, because she resembled him slightly, had the role of a young man, not at all amorous—Madame Berthelot did not permit amorousness even on stage—but a brother who protected his orphan sister in a touching manner. I was that orphan sister. A masculine costume had been found for Clémence, which only lacked a small beard. She wanted a simple moustache. I insisted that she that she take the entire beard. Why? Because Monsieur d’Ingrande wore his like that. She gave in, and I filled my role of younger sister with a verve and brio that earned me a great deal of applause.
One day, Madame d’Ingrande came and took a few treats for me out of a handbag that I had not seen before.
“Oh, what a pretty bag!” I exclaimed.
“It’s a gift that my son gave me yesterday,” she said. “It’s Russian leather and has a very nice odor—smell it.”
I didn’t have to be asked twice. I took it in my hands; I put my nose over it and found an odor there ten times better than it had.
Those are examples of the anxious and novel tenderness that attaches itself like a down to everything it encounters.
I had, of course, only seen Monsieur d’Ingrande once—but at sixteen, it is amply sufficient to render you amorous to have seen a young man once, as long as he is genteel. And that amour is more solid than one might think. It can last a long time; it can last forever if the man who inspires it is worthy of it, and if he takes care to cultivate it.
Toward the end of the school year my mother gave me a great surprise. She brought to the reception room…who? Monsieur d’Ingrande. When I went in and found him with her, I almost fainted; it was impossible for me to dissimulate my emotion.
Him, smiling in the most detached manner. Oh, men! I wanted to turn around in order to compose a new face, but my mother, who had seen me, called: “Well, Julie?” It was necessary to present myself as I was. I stammered that I had forgotten my handkerchief, which determined between my mother and Monsieur d’Ingrande a knowing smile, and rendered me crimson.
My mother told me that I would be spending the next vacation with her, and that I would, in consequence, have every opportunity to see Madame d’Ingrande, that I would see her much more comfortably than in the school.
“How do you know, Maman?”
“Ah, little mystery-maker! Madame d’Ingrande has confessed everything to me…not long ago, only yesterday.”
“My mother has a very great affection for you,” said Monsieur d’Ingrande.
“She knows too, I think, how much I like her,” I replied, with sufficient aplomb. For aplomb had returned to me on seeing that unexpected understanding between Madame d’Ingrande, Monsieur d’Ingrande, my mother and myself.
My mother was no longer recognizable. Only a week ago, she had still been stiff and cold in my regard. Now she was almost affectionate, and almost tender.
Foolish hopes of happiness immediately traversed my mind. I sensed that I was about to commence a new life, and I was delighted by it. One of my companions, however, to whom I had the habit of making confidences, threw disturbance into my soul and awakened a horrible doubt there.
“You mother is still young,” she said to me, “And above all, she appears so. It wouldn’t be impossible for it to be her that marries Monsieur d’Ingrande. And if she came here today with him, perhaps it’s to prepare you for that eventuality; and if she was so amiable, it must be because she feels the need to have herself forgiven.”
“You’re right!” I exclaimed, right away. “That must be it. I’m nothing but a fool.”
And tears escaped me, and then more tears. Afterwards, by dint of reflection, I ended up in despair. My mother, who was scarcely thirty-seven, only looked thirty. She was very pretty, assuredly more seductive than me, a little schoolgirl, and more capable of pleasing Monsieur d’Ingrande.
Vacation time arrived without any explanation being given to me. I would gladly have gone back to school rather than witness a marriage that would break my heart, but when I said that I did not want to take the vacation and my mother and Madame d’Ingrande asked me why I was very embarrassed.
It was necessary to yield, and it did not take me long to see that my fears were chimerical. Three days after my arrival in Chatou, in the vicinity of the same cottage to which he had come the previous year, a charming scene took place between him and me, which all the subsequent disappointments have not been able to effac
e from my memory.
He and his mother had had lunch with us. After lunch, at which Madame d’Ingrande had been the life and soul of the party, my mother proposed a walk. We left the house. I was taking a position alongside Madame d’Ingrande when my mother said to Monsieur d’Ingrande: “My dear friend, offer your arm to my daughter; Madame d’Ingrande and I have to talk.”
His arm to me—what a joy! Too much joy; I was trembling like a leaf as I rested my arm on his.
At first the conversation was banal, but so banal that it promised a more serious explanation, which was not long delayed.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to me, “Madame de Framée has authorized me to talk to you in all frankness, and it is pleasant for me finally to reveal to you the secret that I have kept locked in my heart for an entire year. I love you and I have no desire greater than to marry you. Your mother consents to our marriage, but only if you consent yourself, and I would be the first to make the same condition. Would you like to be my wife?”
Would I like to? Each of his words sang in my ears the sweetest melody I had ever heard. However, I did not know how to respond, so overcome was I by emotion. That emotion must have been evident, and Monsieur d’Ingrande could not have been mistaken in that regard. But men are singular beings; they push conceit to the ultimate limits. They delight in forcing a young woman to say what she would prefer them to divine.
Monsieur d’Ingrande said: “You aren’t responding...”
“What do you want me to say, Monsieur?” I said very emotional.
“That you would like to.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“What?”
“Well, yes, yes, yes,” I said, smiling.
“Yes what?”
“Oh, that’s too much! Will you understand if I go and kiss your mother?”
“You’re an angel,” he said.
Singular Amours Page 14