Belle De Jour

by Joseph Kessel

  A bird perched nearby. It had a startlingly yellow stomach and gray wings streaked with black.

  “What a splended vest,” Séverine cried.

  “It’s a tit mouse, a male. The females are duller-looking.”

  “Like us, I guess.”

  “I don’t see.…”

  “Oh, darling, you know perfectly well you’re the handsome one. I love you so much when you scowl like that!”

  Pierre had turned his head and Séverine could see only his profile, made childish by irritation. Of all the moods of his bold face, this was the one that most touched her.

  “I want to kiss you,” she said.

  But Pierre had scrunched up a snowball.

  “I’ve a good mind to chuck this at you.”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when a handful of powdery snow hit him in the face. He replied in kind and for a few moments they were embroiled in a fierce battle. The old lady who kept the inn appeared in the doorway at the sound of their overturned chairs; the snow-fight came to a somewhat embarrassed halt. But the old woman gave them a motherly smile; and it was with a similar smile that Séverine brushed the snow off Pierre’s hair as he remounted.

  This time they galloped all the way, even through the village, shouting warnings at the top of their lungs from sheer happiness.

  Séverine and Pierre occupied adjoining rooms in their hotel. As soon as they got back, Séverine said, “Go and change, Pierre. And rub down well. It’s chilly out.”

  Since she was shivering a little, Pierre offered to help her undress.

  “No, no,” she cried. “Go and do as I say.”

  Pierre’s hurt look told her she’d put something too lively into her refusal, something beyond mere solicitude.

  “After two years of marriage!” His eyes said. Séverine felt her cheeks burning.

  “Hurry,” she said nervously. “Or we’ll both catch cold.”

  As he opened the door she went and pressed against him for a moment. “That was a beautiful drive, darling. You make life so full.”

  When Pierre came back he found his wife wearing a black dress which revealed her fine firm body. For several seconds neither of them moved. They stood still, enjoying the sight of each other. Then he went and kissed her neck where it softly joined her shoulder. Séverine stroked his forehead. There was something about this sisterly gesture that always intimidated Pierre. He quickly raised his head to break away and said, “Come on, let’s go down. We’re late already.”

  Renée Févret was waiting for them in the Viennese pastry shop. This woman, elegant, vivacious, always on the go and bursting with talk, had married a friend of Pierre’s, like him, a surgeon. She’d developed a deep, even extravagant affection for Séverine, which had eventually broken through that young woman’s reserve and forced her into intimacy.

  When she spotted the Sérizys coming in Renée waved at them and cried across the room, “Here, I’m over here. It’s no fun being stuck here with all these English men and Germans and Yugoslavs. They make me feel like a foreigner!”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Pierre said. “Our horse took us rather too far.”

  “I saw you coming back. You two really make a lovely couple. And Séverine looked so charming in blue.… What do you want to drink? Martini? Champagne cocktail? Oh, here comes Husson. He’ll make up our minds.”

  Séverine frowned slightly.

  “Don’t ask him over here,” she murmured.

  Renée answered—too quickly (at least in Séverine’s estimation): “No good, darling. I’ve already caught his eye.”

  Henri Husson slid between the tables with nonchalant agility. He kissed Renée’s hand and then Séverine’s—at length. Séverine found the touch of his lips deeply disagreeable. As Husson straightened she stared him full in his emaciated face; he met the attack without a change of expression.

  “I’ve been skating,” he informed them.

  “Did you let everyone admire you?” asked Renée.

  “No. I could only manage to do a few figures, there was such a mob. I preferred to watch the others. Pleasant enough when they’re good skaters. Makes me think of an angelic algebra.”

  His voice contrasted sharply with the worn immobility of his features. It was restless, richly inflected and endowed with a captivating musical quality. And he employed it discreetly, as though he weren’t aware of its power. Pierre, who seemed to enjoy listening to him, inquired: “Plenty of pretty girls, I suppose?”

  “Possibly half a dozen. Not too bad. But where do they get their clothes? You know,” he said, turning to Séverine, “Take that big Danish girl, the one who’s staying at your hotel … Well, she was wearing a pleated olive jersey with a pink and cream scarf.”

  “How awful!” screamed Renée.

  His eyes still on Séverine, Husson continued: “Besides, a girl with breasts and hips like that ought to go naked.”

  “You’re not asking much,” Pierre laughed. “Look at you.…”

  He touched the heavy coat Husson kept on despite the heat, so that only his fine, thin, chilly hands were exposed.

  “Clothes lend sensuality to women,” Husson answered. “It seems obscene to me to clothe a chaste woman.”

  Séverine had turned her head aside, but she felt his tenacious eyes on her. It wasn’t so much what he said, it was his determination to address his words to her that made Séverine so uncomfortable.

  “In other words, the angels of our skating-rink bore you?” Renée remarked.

  “I didn’t say that. Bad taste gets on my nerves, and that I always find stimulating.”

  “Oh, so to please you we have to dress badly!” Renée spoke gaily and yet, Séverine thought, she was more restrained than usual.

  “No, no, no,” interrupted Pierre. “I get the idea. It’s just that some combinations of colors are exciting. They make you think of whores—right Husson?”

  “These men are really very complex, aren’t they?” Renée said to Séverine.

  “Hear that, Pierre?”

  He laughed his virile, tender laugh. “I’m only trying to understand things,” he answered. “With a little alcohol, it’s easy.”

  “Do you realize,” Husson broke in suddenly, “that you two are still taken for honeymooners? After a couple of years of married life, that’s not bad.”

  “But a little ridiculous, I suppose,” said Séverine; her manner was now strangely aggressive.

  “Why? I’ve just said that sights that unnerve me aren’t necessarily unpleasant.”

  Pierre was frightened by the violence that contracted his wife’s face.

  “Tell me, Husson,” he interrupted, “you in shape for the race tomorrow? We absolutely have to beat this Oxford team.”

  They started talking about bobsleighs and rival teams. When the subject was exhausted Husson asked the Sérizys to have dinner with him that evening.

  “Sorry,” Séverine replied, “we’ve already got a date.”

  In the street, Pierre said: “So you dislike Husson so much you’ll tell a lie to avoid him. Why? He’s a good sport, he’s cultivated, and he isn’t malicious.”

  “I don’t now what it is, but I find him just insufferable. That voice of his … it always seems to be looking for something inside you you’d rather not … And then those eyes … have you noticed how they never move? That icy air … in any case, we’ve only really known the man a couple of weeks.” She paused. “Don’t tell me we’ve got to see him back in Paris? You don’t … ah, you’ve already invited him. Oh my poor Pierre, you’re really incorrigible. You’re so trusting, you make friends so easily. You needn’t make excuses; actually, it’s one of your charms. I’m not blaming you, my darling. Besides, Paris isn’t like this place. I’ll be able to avoid him there.”

  “Renée will doubtless avoid him less.”

  “Do you think …”

  “I don’t think anything, but she shuts up when Husson’s there. That’s a sure sign. By the way where are we g
oing to eat tonight? We can’t be caught.”

  “At the hotel.”

  “Baccarat afterwards?”

  “No, darling. You know it’s not that I care about how much money you’d lose; but you say yourself it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. And you have your race tomorrow. I want you to win.”

  “All right, sweetheart.”

  He added, as if despite himself, “I never thought it would be nice to take orders.”

  Because Séverine was watching him with the loving, slightly troubled eyes of a young girl.

  That evening they went to the theater. A London company was giving Hamlet. A famous young Jewish actor was playing the Prince of Elsinore.

  Though she had been schooled in England, Séverine didn’t care much for Shakespeare. Nevertheless, on the sleigh-ride back, under moon and snow, she respected Pierre’s silence. She sensed that the play had put him in a mood of nobility and sadness; and, though she didn’t share it, she loved the expression it lent to his handsome face.

  “Movelski’s a real genius,” he murmured. “It’s almost frightening. He even manages to put sensual desire into madness and death. And there’s no more infectious form of art than that of the flesh, is there?”

  She was slow to answer, and he said thoughtfully, “True, you wouldn’t really know.…”

  II

  During their last days in Switzerland Séverine felt feverish and depressed. They had scarcely reached Paris when she came down with pneumonia.

  It was a severe case. For an entire week, at the mercy of surgical cupping-glasses, sucked at by leeches, she was on the verge of death. When she was conscious, she saw her mother’s bony silhouette at her bedside and heard some vaguely reassuring, but unrecognizable, step in her room. Then she would plunge back into the hot deaf stupor of a greenhouse plant.

  One morning, as dawn crept up to her bed like a hesitant animal, she awoke from this vegetable condition. Her back hurt frightfully but she could breathe without much difficulty. A shape was sitting at her bedside. It must be Pierre, she thought. The name, which came back to her automatically, recalled only a vague feeling of security. Her husband’s hand touched her forehead, stroking it softly; Séverine turned her head aside. Pierre thought she had moved unconsciously —but Séverine wanted to avoid his touch. She felt so whole, so momentarily self-sufficient, that she wished to forget everything outside herself.

  A desire for isolation, an exclusive egoism, left her only gradually. She spent hours watching her wasted wrists with their soft blue veins, looking at her nails, still deathly pale. When Pierre spoke to her she didn’t answer. How small her husband’s love seemed, compared to what she felt for her own body. Her body was so precious to her, so great and abundant! Séverine even imagined she could feel the gentle stream of blood nourishing it. Daily, with a profound sensuality, she measured the revival of her strength.

  At times her face closed as if over some secret; she seemed to follow odd images. And when Pierre talked to her then she looked at him with a mixture of impatience, weakness and confusion.

  But when she thought she discovered in her husband’s expression a wave of desire, she felt a wave of revulsion and weariness pass through her.

  Pierre loved the look that appeared on Séverine’s face at those moments. The sickness seemed to have stripped her face, reducing it to a state of tender adolescence. It seemed to express nothing but youth and chastity.

  Séverine’s strength returned quickly, but without giving her much joy. As the fever left her, so did her indefinable voluptuousness. She recovered dispossessed. She walked from room to room, as if to learn how to live again.

  Séverine was resonsible for everything in the apartment except Pierre’s desk. Until her illness she had enjoyed establishing order, because by doing so she created comfort and space and left her own stamp on things. Now, though she still felt a certain pride in this, it was abstract and colorless. Her whole life appeared before her in the same monotone—well-to-do, measured, assured. Parents seen always through a shield of governesses, years at that English school where she’d been taught fair-play and discipline … Oh well, now she had Pierre; he was, in fact, all she had in the world … Thinking of his beloved face, Séverine smiled softly and pushed her reveries no further. But something within her, something dim, tenacious and demanding, was silently waiting to evade Pierre’s image and to reach beyond its intangible shape to an unknown horizon. That something troubled her, though she refused to acknowledge its existence.

  “I’ll feel better once I’ve played a few sets of tennis,” she told herself, as if answering some vague reproach. Pierre thought the same, when he caught sight of her, pensive, or asleep.

  One day in this queer convalescence was vivid for Séverine—the day when she received flowers from Husson for the first time. She was startled when she read the card. She’d forgotten the man’s existence, and now here she was with this feeling of having been expecting him to come into her life again. She thought of him all day long with a discomfort that amounted to hostility. But such irritable tension suited her state of mind so well that it positively pleased her.

  More gifts came.

  “He knows perfectly well I can’t bear him,” she thought. “I’m not thanking him, I’ve forbidden Pierre to thank him. And he still goes on.…”

  She pictured Husson’s motionless eyes, his cold lips; and she shuddered with a dull repulsion.

  Renée Févret, meanwhile, visited daily. She would arrive in a rush, refuse to take off her hat, announce she could only stay a second, and remain for hours. Her chatter chained her there. Her frivolity dizzied Séverine but it did her good. It put her back in that easy world where all that mattered was make-up, clothes, love-affairs and divorces.… Still, it seemed to Séverine that there were moments when a bitter weariness ravaged her friend’s face, when her vivacity was merely mechanical.

  One afternoon while they were together a card was brought in for Séverine. She twisted it in her fingers for a moment, then told Renée, “Henri Husson.”

  There was a pause.

  “You’re not going to receive him, are you?” Renée cried out suddenly.

  Her tense sharpness contrasted so strongly with her ordinary tone that Séverine almost acquiesced automatically. Once over her surprise, however, she asked, “Why not”?

  “I don’t know … I remember you didn’t like him … and then there’s still so much I have to tell you.”

  If it hadn’t been for her friend’s peculiar attitude Séverine would probably have avoided seeing Husson; but Renée’s desire to prevent the meeting piqued Séverine’s curiosity, and her pride.

  “Maybe I’ve changed my opinion of him,” she said. “And also … look at all these flowers he’s been sending me.”

  “Ah … he sent you them, did he?”

  Renée had risen to take flight but had barely put on her gloves when Séverine, moved by Renée’s agitation, said, “Darling, what’s wrong? You can speak freely to me. Surely you’re not jealous?”

  “It’s not that. I should have explained right away, you’re so uncomplicated you’d have understood. No, I’m scared. He plays with me. I know this man well by now; he’s utterly perverse. He gets his fun out of weird psychological manipulations. He’s nicely managed to make me despise myself … only too easily. With you it’s the opposite: he wants to cultivate the loathing you feel for him. For him that would be just wonderful. Watch out, Séverine, this one’s dangerous.”

  These words, more than any others, decided Séverine.

  “You must stay and see him,” she said.

  “No, really. I can’t.”

  Left alone, Séverine got out of bed and had Husson shown in. He found her seated behind a table, and defended by a vase of irises that made it difficult to see her. He smiled. This steady smile, accentuated by a determined silence, broke Séverine’s poise. And she was even less at ease after Husson, sitting opposite her, shifted the flowers to one side.
<
br />   “Sérizy’s not in?” he asked.

  “Obviously not, or you’d have seen him.”

  “Yes, I imagine he seldom leaves you alone when he’s at home. And—you miss him?”

  “Very much.”

  “I can understand that. As a matter of fact I myself enjoy seeing him very much. He’s handsome, happy, considerate, loyal: an invaluable companion, I’m sure.”

  Séverine abruptly changed the subject. Each word of praise uttered by this man diminished and cloyed Pierre’s image.

  “Thanks to a friend who comes to see me every day,” Séverine said, “I don’t get too bored.”

  “Mme. Févret?”

  “You saw her go out?”

  “No. I can smell her perfume. It’s rather like her, a little whining.”

  He gave a laugh which Séverine found odious.

  “For a second there,” he said, “you were exactly as you used to be.”

  “Have I changed so much?” she asked with a start. Instantly she regretted the irrational anxiety which, she felt sure, had shown through her question.

  Husson said: “It seems to me you’ve lost something of your girlishness.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Usually you’re more honest with yourself.…”

  Séverine waited for an explanation. It didn’t come. To show her irritation she rose and pretended to arrange the flowers beside her.

  “Sitting up tires you,” Husson said. “You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me. Go lie down.”

  “I assure you, I’m quite used.…”

  “No, no, Sérizy would be angry with me. Lie down.”

  He rose and pushed his chair aside so she could get by. Séverine sought for some neat, tart retort, the kind she could so easily have found before her illness; but nothing came. In order to keep the battle between them from becoming ridiculous, she went and lay down, highly annoyed and embarrassed.

  “If you only knew how much better you look like that,” Husson remarked softly. “I’m sure you’ve often been told you were made for movement. Well, let me tell you that’s a superficial judgment. From the moment I first set eyes on you I’ve always thought of you lying down. And how right I was! Look how you’ve softened … what relaxed grace …”