by Colette
Sometimes, when she’s too weak or loves too well, she can kill . . . She’ll be able to present to the astonishment of the whole world an example of that disconcerting feminine resistance. She’ll tire out her judges, she’ll tax their strength during the endless hearings, she’ll leave them behind worn out, just as a sly animal exhausts inexperienced hounds that are pursuing it . . . Rest assured that long patience and jealously concealed sorrows have shaped, refined, and hardened that woman who makes people exclaim:
“She’s made of steel!”
She’s simply “made of woman,” and that’s sufficient.
Loneliness . . . freedom . . . my pleasing and laborious work as a mime and dancer . . . my happy, tired muscles, the new concern (which relaxes me from the old one) of earning my own food, clothing, and rent . . . all this immediately became my lot in life, but I also acquired a wild mistrust, a distaste for the milieu in which I had lived and suffered, a stupid fear of man, of men, and of women, too . . . A morbid need to be unaware of what was going on around me, to have only very plain people near me, people who would scarcely have original ideas . . . And another peculiarity took hold of me very quickly: I feel isolated and protected from my fellow human beings only when onstage—the barrier of the footlights keeping me safe from everybody . . .
SUNDAY AGAIN! . . . And since the dark chill has given way to a bright chill, my dog and I took our exercise in the Bois de Boulogne between eleven and noon—I have a matinee after lunch. This animal is ruining me financially. Without her I could get to the Bois on the Métro, but she gives me enough pleasure to compensate for the three-franc cab fare. Black as a truffle, she gleams in the sunshine, groomed with a brush and a flannel rag, and the whole Boris belongs to her: she takes possession of it with a loud snorting noise, like a pig’s, and barks amid the dry leaves she scatters . . .
A lovely Sunday and this pretty Bois! It’s our forest, our park, Fossette’s and mine, urban vagabonds with hardly any familiarity with the countryside by this time . . . Fossette runs faster than I do, but I walk faster than she does, and when she isn’t playing at being “the city-perimeter train,” her eyes maddened and bulging and her tongue hanging out, she follows me at an ambling gait, a little disconnected trot-cum-gallop that makes people laugh.
The thin pink mist filters the light of a dulled sun which you can look right into, admiringly . . . From the laid-bare lawns rises a tremulous silvery incense smelling of mushrooms. My veil sticks to my nose, and my whole body, warmed by my walk, darts ahead . . . Really, have I changed all that much since turning twenty? On a winter morning like this, in the heyday of my youth, was I sturdier, suppler or physically happier? . . .
I can go on believing this for the duration of my walk through the Bois . . . Back home, my fatigue undeceives me. It’s no longer the same fatigue. At twenty, without a second thought, I would have enjoyed my temporary weariness in a calm, half-dreamy state. Today fatigue is starting to become bitter to me, like a sadness of my body . . .
Fossette was born a pedigreed dog and a little ham actress: she’s wild for the stage, and she’s hellbent on jumping into every fancy automobile . . . Yet it was Dancing Stéphane who sold her to me, and Fossette never lived with a wealthy actress. Dancing Stéphane is one of my colleagues. Just now he’s working in my “dump,” the Empyrée-Clichy. This blond Gaul, whom tuberculosis gnaws away at a little more each year, sees his biceps melting away, and his pink thighs with their iridescent golden down, and the fine pectorals he was justly proud of. He’s already had to give up boxing for dancing and roller skating . . . Here he skates on an inclined plane; meanwhile, he’s set himself up as a dancing teacher and also raises bulldogs for apartment owners. This winter he’s been coughing a lot. He frequently comes into my dressing room in the evening, coughs, sits down, and offers to sell me “a brindled gray bulldog bitch, a real beauty, who only failed to win the first prize this year because of jealousy . . . ”
As things will happen, today I get to the underground corridor, perforated with square cubicles, that leads to my dressing room just when Dancing Stéphane is coming off stage. Thin around the waist, broad in the shoulders, in his tight myrtle-green Polish dolman edged with fake chinchilla, his fur cap pulled down over one ear, that boy is still a magnet for women, with his blue eyes and his cheeks scumbled with pink . . . But he’s losing weight, losing weight slowly, and his scores with women are speeding up his deterioration . . .
“Hi!”
“Hi, Stéphane! Big crowd?”
“I should say! I wonder what those assholes are doing here when the weather’s so good in the country. . . . Say, could you use a schipperke bitch that weights twenty-odd ounces? . . . I could get her at a bargain from someone I know . . . ”
“Twenty-odd ounces! . . . No, thanks, my apartment’s too small!”
He laughs obligingly and doesn’t persist. I know the twenty-ounce schipperke bitches that Stéphane sells! They weigh about six pounds. It’s not that he’s dishonest; it’s a matter of business.
What will Dancing Stéphane do when he’s down to his last shred of lung, when he can no longer dance, when he can no longer sleep with little broads who pay for his cigars, ties, and drinks? . . . What hospital or “home” will take in his beautiful hollowed-out carcass? . . . Oh, how sad it all is, and how unbearable the wretchedness of so many people is, after all! . . .
”Hi, Bouty! Hi, Brague! . . . Any news of Jadin?”
Brague shrugs his shoulders without answering, as he concentrates on touching up his eyebrows, which he pencils a dark purple because “it looks fiercer.” He has a certain blue to depict wrinkles, a certain orange-red for the inside of his lips, a certain ocher for foundation, a certain syrupy carmine for flowing blood, and especially a certain white for making up as Pierrot, “the formula for which,” he assures me, “I wouldn’t give to my own brother!” Anyway, he makes a skillful use of his little obsession with polychromy, and I don’t know anything else laughable about this intelligent and almost too conscientious mime.
Bouty, very thin in his loose plaid suit, signals to me mysteriously.
“I’ve seen little Jadin. I saw her on the boulevard with some well-to-do guy. She was wearing enormous feathers and a huge muff, and looked as if she were bored stiff ‘at a hundred francs an hour!’”
“If she’s actually getting a hundred francs an hour, she has nothing to complain about!” Brague interrupted, logically.
“I’m with you there, buddy. But she won’t stay on the boulevard; she’s a girl who can’t understand money. I’ve been following Jadin’s doings for a long time; she and her mother used to live in my courtyard . . . ”
Through the open door of my dressing room, which is opposite Brague’s, I see little Bouty, who has suddenly fallen silent without finishing his sentence. He has placed his pint of bottled milk, to warm it up, on the radiator pipe that runs through the dressing rooms at floor level. His face, made up in brick red and chalk white, keeps you from guessing its real expression to any extent, but I feel that, since Jadin left, Bouty has been more depressed . . .
In order to whiten and powder my shoulders and knees, which are full of bruises—Brague uses his full strength when he throws me to the ground!—I shut my door; anyway, I’m sure Bouty will say no more. Like the rest, like me, he hardly ever mentions his private life. It’s that silence, that stubborn decency, which deceived me about my colleagues when I began in vaudeville. The most outgoing and vain ones talk about their success and their artistic ambitions with all the requisite bombast and gravity; the nastier ones go as far as bad-mouthing the “dump” and their comrades; the most talkative ones hash over jokes about stage and studio; one out of ten feels the need to say: “I have a wife, I have two kids, my mother is sick, I’m worried to death over my girlfriend . . . ”
The silence they maintain as to their personal life is like a polite way of telling you: “The rest is none of your business.” Once they’re removed the white greasepaint and h
ave put their scarf and hat back on, they part company and vanish with a speed that I believe reveals as much pride as discretion. They’re almost all proud, and poor: in vaudeville, a cadging colleague is an exception. My unspoken affection, which has become enlightened and informed during these three years, is for all of them, not singling out anybody.
Vaudeville performers . . . how little known, put down, and misunderstood they are! Dreamers, proud folk full of an absurd and outmoded faith in Art, they alone are the last people who dare to state, with holy fervor:
“An ‘artist’ shouldn’t do that . . . an ‘artist’ can’t accept that . . . an ‘artist’ wouldn’t agree to that . . . ”
Proud, yes, because even if they often come out with a “What a lousy profession!” or a “What a rotten life!,” I’ve never heard one of them sigh, “How unhappy I am . . . ”
Proud, and resigned to exist for only one hour out of the twenty-four! Because the audience is unfair, and even if it applauds them, it forgets them later. A newspaper may keep watch, with indiscreet concern, over the doings of Mademoiselle X of the Comédie-Française, whose opinions on fashion, politics, food, and love will fill the idle hours of the whole world every week; but poor little intelligent and sensitive Bouty—who will stoop to wonder what you are doing, thinking, or keeping mum about, after the darkness has reclaimed you and you’re walking down the Boulevard Rochechouart around midnight, almost transparently thin in your long “English-style” overcoat that you bought at the Samaritaine department store?
For the twentieth time, all alone, I ruminate these depressing thoughts. Meanwhile, my fingers are alertly and unconsciously performing their customary task: white greasepaint, pink greasepaint, powder, dry pink, blue, brown, red, black . . . I have hardly finished when a hard claw scratches at the bottom of my door. I open it at once, because it’s the begging paw of a little female Brabançon terrier who performs in the first part of the show.
“There you are, Nelle!”
She comes in trustingly, as serious as a confidential clerk, and lets me pat her little back, burning hot from her performance, while her teeth, slightly yellowed by age, nibble at a cookie.
Nelle has ginger-red, shiny fur and a black face like a marmoset’s in which beautiful squirrel eyes gleam.
“Another cookie, Nelle?”
Well brought up, she accepts it unsmilingly. Behind her, in the corridor, her family is waiting for her. Her family is a tall, thin man, taciturn and unfathomable, who never talks to anyone, as well as two courteous white collies who resemble their master. Where is this man from? What roads have led him and his collies here, looking like three princes who have come down in the world? His way of tipping his hat, his body language, are like those of a socialite, as is his long, sharp face . . . My colleagues, perhaps guessing correctly, have dubbed him “the archduke.”
In the corridor he waits for Nelle to finish her cookie. There’s nothing sadder, more dignified, or more scornful than this man and his three animals, proudly resigned to their destiny as vagabonds.
“Goodbye, Nelle . . . ”
I shut the door, and the little dog’s collar bells move away . . . Will I see her again? Tonight is the end of a two-week period, and perhaps the end of a run for “Antoniev and his dogs” . . . Where will they go? Where will Nelle’s lovely brown eyes gleam?—those eyes which tell me so distinctly: “Yes, you pat me . . . yes, you love me . . . yes, you keep a box of cookies for me . . . but tomorrow, or the day after, we’ll part. Ask me for nothing more than the politeness of a nice little dog who can walk on her front paws and do a somersault. Like repose and a feeling of security, for us affection is an unattainable luxury . . .”
FROM EIGHT in the morning till two in the afternoon, when the weather is good, my ground-floor apartment, situated between two cliffs of new houses, enjoys a sliver of sunshine. First, a sparkling brush paints a stroke on my bed, where it widens into a square “napkin,” and my coverlet casts a pink reflection onto the ceiling . . .
I lazily wait for the sun to reach my face and dazzle me through my closed eyelids, and the shadow of people walking outside passes rapidly over me, like a dark, blue wing . . . Or else I jump out of bed, galvanized, and I begin some feverish scouring: Fossette’s ears undergo a delicate probing, and her fur shines beneath the firm brush . . . Or else, in the merciless bright light, I inspect every part of my body that is already growing feeble: the fragile silk of my eyelids; the corner of my mouth, which my smiles are beginning to mark with an unhappy fold; and those three lines around my neck, which an invisible hand is pushing a little more deeply into my flesh every day . . .
It’s that severe examination which is disturbed today by a visit from my partner Brague, who’s always lively, serious, and wide awake. I welcome him, as I do in my dressing room, loosely wrapped in a crepon kimono, to which, one rainy day, Fossette’s paws added little four-petaled grayish flowers . . .
No need to powder my nose for Brague’s sake, or to lengthen my eyelids with a blue streak . . . Brague looks at me only when we rehearse; at such times he’ll tell me: “Don’t do that, it’s ugly . . . Don’t open your mouth upward, you look like a fish . . . Don’t blink your eyes, you look like a white rat . . . Don’t wiggle your behind when you walk, you look like a mare . . . ”
It was Brague who guided, if not my first steps, at least my first gestures, on the stage, and if I still show him a student’s trustingness, for his part he rarely forgets to call me “an intelligent amateur”; that is, he has little patience with my protests, and insists on having his own way . . .
This morning he comes in, plasters down the hair in back of his neck as if he were pushing down a wig, and, since his clean-shaven Catalan face always retains that alert gravity which makes it so distinctive, I wonder whether he’s bringing good or bad news . . . He surveys my sunbeam like a precious object and looks at my two windows:
“What do you pay for your ground floor?”
“I’ve already told you: seventeen hundred.”
“And it’s an elevator building, too! . . . Pretty sunshine, you’d think you were in Nice! . . . Oh, by the way: we’re booked for an evening performance.”
“When?”
“When? Why, tonight!”
“Oh!”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh!’ Does it disturb any plans?”
“No. Are we doing the pantomime?”
“No pantomime, it’s too serious. Your dances. And I’ll give them my Neurotic Pierrot.”
I stand up, sincerely frightened:
“My dances! But I can’t! And, besides, I lost my music at Aix! And, besides, the girl who accompanies me has moved . . . If we only had two days to get ready . . . ”
“No way!” says Brague, unruffled. “They had signed up Badet, and she’s sick.”
“That does it! That takes the cake! To go on as a stopgap! Play your Pierrot if you like, I’m not dancing!”
Brague lights a cigarette and drops two words:
“Five hundred.”
“For the two of us?”
“For you. I get the same.”
Five hundred! A fourth of my rent . . . Brague smokes, doesn’t look at me; he knows I’ll accept.
“Obviously, for five hundred . . . What time?”
“Midnight, of course . . . Hurry up getting your music and hurry with everything, right? So long. See you tonight . . . Oh yes, Jadin is back!”
I reopen the door he was already closing:
“You don’t tell me! When?”
“Lest midnight, right after you left . . . What a puss on her! . . . You’ll see her: she’s back singing at the dump . . . Seventeen hundred, you say? . . . Terrific. And dames on every floor!”
He departs, serious and raunchy.
An engagement . . . A private performance . . . Those few words have the power to discourage me. I don’t dare say so to Brague, but I admit it to myself as I look at my unhappy face in the mirror and feel the little shiver of cowardice runni
ng down my back . . .
To see them again . . . Those whom I left abruptly, those who once called me “Madame Renée,” with the affectation of never calling me by my husband’s surname . . . Those men—and those women! The women who betrayed me with my husband, the men who knew he was unfaithful to me . . .
The days are gone when I’d see in every woman a current or potential mistress of Adolphe’s, and men were never much of a threat to the enamored wife that I was. But I’ve retained a stupid, superstitious fear of the salons where I may meet witnesses or accomplices of my past misfortune . . .
First of all, this private engagement ruins my lunch alone with Hamond, a painter already out of fashion, an old, loyal, weak friend who comes to dine on my pasta dishes from time to time . . . We don’t talk much; he rests his head, that of a sick Don Quixote, on the back of an easy chair, and after lunch we play the game of awakening each other’s sorrow. He talks to me about Adolphe Taillandy, not to grieve me, but to recall a time when he, Hamond, was happy. And I speak to him about his young, malicious wife, whom he married in a moment of madness, and who went off with some man or other four months later . . .
We indulge in melancholy afternoons that leave us exhausted, with bitter faces that have grown old, with mouths dry from repeating so many distressing things; and we swear we won’t begin again . . . The following Saturday, we’re back together at my table, pleased to see each other again, and impenitent: Hamond has recalled an untold story about Adolphe Taillandy and, to see my best friend sniff back his tears, I have dug out of a drawer a snapshot in which I am holding the arm of a little blonde Madame Hamond, as aggressive and erect as a snake balancing on its tail . . .
But today our lunch isn’t a success. And yet Hamond, merry though cold, has brought me some fine, dark December grapes, blue as plums, each one of which is a little wineskin full of liquid with no taste but sweetness—that damned private engagement casts a cloud over my whole day.