Belle De Jour

by Joseph Kessel

  Séverine left Husson without a word. She didn’t even give him her hand. Their eyes didn’t meet.

  From that day on the innumerable shapeless desires that had tortured Séverine crystallized into one abiding obsession. She herself was not immediately conscious of this; but she knew that the wall behind which she had isolated that denizen of the subsoil of her soul, in which blind all-powerful motives moved, had collapsed. Already the ordered world in which she’d always lived was linked to the universe that opened to her by instincts whose power she was still afraid to measure. Already her ordinary self was united, bound together, with the other self that had wakened with all the vigor that follows a deep sleep.

  It took Séverine two days to understand what this side of herself required of her, two days in which she went through the motions and pronounced the words of her usual existence. No one, not even Pierre, noticed the state of shuddering expectation in which she lived. But she was aware of the burning, pitiless, poisonous thorn that transfixed her.

  For two days one single fantasy pulsed in her sacked mind. It was the same day-dream which had possessed her during the ambivalent happiness of her initial convalescence: a man with a face sodden with desire was following her through some slummy district. She ran to get away from him, but couldn’t lose him. Then she was in a blind alley. The man was on her, she could hear his creaking shoes, she breathed his panting breath. She was in agony, in expectation of some nameless sensual bliss. But he couldn’t find her in the little angle of the wall behind which she’d hidden. He went away. And with dreadful despair Séverine sought in vain for the brute who was carrying off her supremely important secret.

  Other darker, more muddled imaginings that she’d known after her illness now came back also, but that one was the deep theme in her soul round which the others grouped themselves. For two days and two nights Séverine begged for the man of the blind alley; then one morning when Pierre had gone off to the hospital as usual, she dressed herself as soberly as possible and went down and called a cab.

  “Take me to the rue Virène,” she told the driver, “and go up the street slowly. I’ve forgotten the number but I’ll remember the house when I see it.”

  The taxi drove along the quays. Séverine saw the great mass of the Louvre. Her throat felt caught in a knot so tight she once actually put up her hands as if to undo it. They were getting closer.

  “Rue Virène, lady.” The driver slowed.

  Séverine began scanning the odd-numbered side of the street. A brownstone … another … and suddenly before they’d reached it she saw what she was looking for. It was a house just like the others, but a man had just gone in; and though she’d seen only his back, Séverine knew him. Thick-set, a tired-looking suit, and those shoulders, that vulgar nape of the neck … he was going to a house of acquiescent women; a man like that couldn’t be going anywhere else. Séverine would have sworn to that on her life. Some murky intuition helped her understand the haste with which the man went in, the involuntary embarrassment about his arms, and still, the hard lust that drove him on.

  The taxi had reached the end of the short street. The driver told Séverine. She had him take her home.

  Now she had food for her obsession. The furtive character of the rue Virène and the man who’d lost her in the blind alley became one. A painful sense of weakness made her heart thud each time she thought of the silhouette sliding into that shameful entrance. She imagined his low forehead, his fat, hairy hands, his coarse clothing. He would walk up the stairs, ring the bell. Women would come. At this point Séverine’s fantasy stopped, for what took place in her mind then was a delirium of shadows, flesh, and gasping breath.

  Sometimes these images satisfied her, sometimes they exhausted themselves in their urgent intensity. She had to see that house again. The first time she had herself driven there; the next time she went on foot. She was so frightened she didn’t dare stop for a second, even to read the little sign stuck up by the door. Deeply disturbed, she brushed against the old walls as if they were impregnated with the sad brutal lust they concealed.

  The third time Séverine rapidly made out the discreet lettering on the sign:

  Madame Anaïs—first-floor left

  And the fourth time she went in.

  She never knew how she got up that staircase, nor exactly how she found herself in an open doorway confronting a big, pleasant-looking blonde, still young. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run away, but didn’t dare. She heard—“Can I help you, mademoiselle?”

  And she muttered: “You are … that is to say, you live here.”

  “I am Madame Anaïs.”

  “You see, I’d like.…”

  Séverine flung the look of a stricken beast at the salon into which she was ushered.

  “Relax,” said Madame Anaïs. “Come in and let’s talk.”

  She took Séverine through to a room with dark wallpaper and a huge bed covered with a red quilt.

  “Now then, honey,” Madame Anaïs began good-humoredly, “you want to put a little butter on your bread, right? Well, I’m willing to help. You’re very sweet and nice. That kind goes down well here, believe me. I take half. There’s the upkeep, you know.”

  Without finding the strength to reply Séverine nodded her head. Madame Anaïs kissed her.

  “I know, you’re a little nervous,” she said. “It’s the first time, isn’t it? Now you can see it’s not that awful. It’s still early, the other girls aren’t here yet, they’d tell you the same themselves. When can you start?”

  “I’m not sure … I’d like to see if.…”

  Suddenly Séverine cried out loudly, as if afraid that she would never be able to escape, “In any case I absolutely have to leave at five. Positively.”

  “As you like, dearie. Two to five, those are nice hours. You’ll be our Belle de Jour, hmm? Only, you’ll be on time, won’t you? Otherwise I’ll get angry. At five you’re free. You’ve got a boy friend waiting for you then, have you? Or a little husband some place.…”

  V

  A little husband … a little husband … a little husband.…

  Séverine stubbornly muttered the words with which she’d left Mme Anaïs. She could not understand them, but they utterly overwhelmed her. When she reached the Louvre she stared at the noble facade; its simplicity seemed to do her good for a second, but then she turned her head away. She had no right to such a sight.

  A traffic jam barred her way. One bus was going to Saint-Cloud and Versailles. Séverine remembered coming out of the Louvre once with Pierre, and his remarking with pleasure that there was a bus route connecting with the old dwellings of kings. Pierre … Pierre Les-cot’s Louvre … her little husband Pierre … The man who delighted in the gardens of palaces and faultless parks had a wife who.…

  Séverine’s head whirled in a confusion of bus-horns, noble perspectives, Mme Anaïs, herself. Blindly she crossed the road and leaned on the parapet over the Seine. Here she could breathe more easily. The river rolled along in its spring yellow. Séverine was fascinated by the dubious color and went down the incline to the lower level of the quay.

  The people and the scene she found there were so different from anything she had ever known that she had a feeling of having been forever cut off from her usual existence. Heaps of sand, mounds of coal, scrapiron, low sooty barges with silent men walking sluggishly about them, the walls far, far higher, far thicker than she’d ever realized; and most of all the muddy, rich, impenetrable water … Séverine went towards the water, knelt, and plunged her hands into it.

  She took them out instantly, repressing a cry. That fascinating flood was deadly cold. Séverine was appalled as she suddenly realized that she had desired to give herself to the river’s filth. After all, she’d done nothing yet to make her want to perish in that muddy ooze. Mme Anaïs … it was true she’d gone to see her, she’d listened to her. But Pierre himself, if she were to tell him of her frightful pain and the implacable, joyless obsession that had drag
ged her into the rue Virène, would pity her. She knew him, she loved him for that. He wouldn’t be angry, or contemptuous, he would simply pity her. How just! Séverine felt torn with compassion for herself.

  Did one punish an act of insanity? Was what she’d done anything else? She only had to cure the sickness that had suddenly taken hold of her, and then the whole horrible week would be forgotten. And moreover, she told herself, the cure was at hand, since she was just about fed up with her insane behavior, and the idea of ever going back to Mme Anaïs filled her with terror, and.…

  These thoughts, coursing with desperate urgency through Séverine’s mind, were abruptly replaced by a complete inability to think at all, a total void. It was as if every atom of energy had left her, sucked away by some insatiable mouth. She looked up.… A man was standing quite close—close enough to touch her. In her feverish state she hadn’t heard him come up. He had a powerful bare neck, broad quiet shoulders: probably a boatman from one of the barges moored near the Pont-Neuf, since his blue smock—and even his face—were stained with soot and oil. He stank of coarse tobacco, grease, and strength.

  He stared thickly at Séverine, perhaps not fully conscious of his own desire for her. He was on his way towards Rouen, Le Havre, and here he suddenly runs across a beautiful woman. Too well dressed for him, of course; but she attracted him and he watched her.

  Séverine had frequently felt the eyes of strangers covet her, and had merely been bored and uncomfortable. But this was a solid, cynical, pure desire she’d never before encountered, except in the man who had hunted her down her dreams and the other she’d watched going in to see Mme Anaïs. Now the same man—it was the same—stood beside her. He had only to reach out his hand and she’d know that contact she had so despairingly yearned for. But he wouldn’t dare to, he couldn’t.…

  And in the rue Virène, thought Séverine with a sudden dreadful clarity, for thirty francs.…

  Her eye registered the faces, the bodies, of this primitive universe enclosed between a rigid wall and the heavy river. The carter, gripping his shaft-horse by the nostrils in order to hobble his descent, who seemed to control with his huge fist both the horse and the rubble the animal dragged down with it; the man unloading that boat, with his low forehead and motionless loins; the laborers heavy with strong food and drink. These men, of whose very existence Séverine had been ignorant till then, were of another flesh than she; but for thirty francs, at Mme Anaïs, any one of them could have her.

  Séverine had no time to analyze the nature of the spasm that seized her at that moment. The boatman had taken a step back. Her fear, since it was not bound up with any real impression, became insufferable: it belonged to the world of dreams. This man was going to vanish like the other, like the man in the blind alley. And Séverine felt it beyond her power to face the agony of his disappearance a second time. She couldn’t do it.

  “Just a minute, wait,” she moaned.

  Then, her feverish eyes clinging to the boatman’s expressionless gaze, she said, “Three o’clock, rue Virène, 9b, Mme Arias.”

  Stupidly he shook his head, which was covered with coal-dust.

  Either he doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t want to, thought Séverine with the inhuman fright only nightmares can give. Or perhaps he hasn’t any money.

  Still staring at him, she dug into her bag and held out a hundred-franc note. In a besotted way the man took it, examined it closely. By the time he’d looked up Séverine was hurriedly climbing the ramp from the jetty to street level. The man shrugged, folded the note in his palm and walked toward a barge. He’d wasted too much time as it was. They were leaving sharp at noon.

  That same noon hour, when the old bells of ancient Paris had begun their carillons, decided the direction of Séverine’s steps. Pierre would be finishing up at the hospital. She had to meet him there before he left. Like all Séverine’s decisions in the past few days, this idea occurred to her quite casually, but immediately became an absolutely imperative notion.

  A pendulum given a sudden shove in one direction compensates at once by a swing to the other. It was the same with Séverine’s heart: it swung toward Pierre now with an ardor all the stronger for her having so completely and grossly forgotten him.

  No longer, however, did Séverine expect Pierre to protect her against her own actions. By now she was horrifiedly certain that nothing and nobody could stop her from being at the rue Virène at the appointed hour. She sought no excuse in the accident that had set the boatman beside her. Now that she had made up her mind she felt that everything had happened could be only a pretext for her decision: she’d have found the boatman at any street-corner of this city she once thought she knew but which now seemed to her peopled with gnarled, demanding animals to whom she was condemned to belong. She didn’t know whether the sacrifice she was making would bring her horror or happiness; but before it was accomplished she had to find Pierre and let him see her as the woman he loved for the last time. For the moment was upon her when this woman would be consumed.

  “Is Dr Sérizy still here?” Séverine asked the hospital receptionist with dread.

  “Just leaving. Look, there he is, going across to put on his things.”

  Pierre was crossing the courtyard surrounded by a knot of students. They were all wearing white coats. Séverine looked at her husband’s youthful face, toward which others still younger were turned. She knew little enough of the delights of the mind; but there was such a strong desire for knowledge, such intellectual vigor in this group—all of which converged visibly on Pierre —that she didn’t dare call out to him.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said softly.

  But warned, doubtless, by the instinct of his love Pierre turned his head toward his wife, and, though she was shaded by the porch, recognized her. She saw him say a few words to the young men around him and then walk toward her. As he drew near, Séverine hungrily examined those precious features, as if she were never to see them again. But this face of Pierre’s was one unknown to her, still marked by hours spent in a world of his own, a world of teachers and students. Séverine saw in his face the lines left by beloved work, the signs of patient good nature, the look of a leader and good workman together, the expression of a man surprised among his fellows and in his element; all this together with his white coat, so white she couldn’t help thinking of the sacred red of blood.

  “Please don’t be angry with me for disturbing you here,” Séverine said, giving him an affectionate and guilty smile, “but since we never lunch together, and as I happened to be in the neighborhood.…”

  “Be angry with you,” Pierre exclaimed. He felt both impatient and shy in a way quite unusual with him. “Be angry with you, darling, when you make me happy like this. Why, I’m so proud to be able to show you off to everyone here. Didn’t you see them all staring at you?”

  Séverine bent her head slightly to hide the pallor that had crept into her cheeks.

  Pierre went on: “Just wait for me a second. We have half an hour before lunch. If only the Director hadn’t invited me for lunch, how happy I’d have been to eat with you, darling.”

  The weather was good. Séverine felt drawn towards the most innocent spot she could find and took Pierre off into the garden next to Notre-Dame. Spring was always somehow more humble, there, than anywhere else in Paris. The unhealthy tenements near the Hotel de Ville produced the pallid children who were playing in the park. From time to time a ray of sunlight pierced the April clouds, struck against a gargoyle or lost itself in the mystery of some stained glass window. Old workmen chatted on benches. The Ile Saint-Louis was visible, a peaceful quay on the left bank.

  Their arms around each other, Séverine and Pierre strolled through the gardens. Pierre spoke of the humble lives sheltered under the cathedral, but Séverine heard only the timbre of his voice, which he had lowered without noticing. Something within her was slowly, fatally breaking. When it was time for Pierre to go she went with him only as far as the gate.
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br />   “I want to stay here a while. You go on, darling.”

  She kissed him vehemently, convulsively, and repeated dully, “Go, darling, go.”

  Then she managed to get to a bench where she burst into soundless tears between two women who were knitting.

  She didn’t think about eating lunch, or leaving the bench. She tried to collect herself; she listened to the secret voice within her. In this way she spent two hours. Without so much as a look at her watch she left the little Notre-Dame garden for the rue Virène.

  Mme Anaïs seemed glad to see her.

  “I was beginning to give you up, dearie,” she said. “You left so fast this morning I thought you’d gotten scared. There’s really nothing to worry about, you’ll see.”

  She gave a healthy affectionate laugh and took Séverine into a small room that overlooked a dark yard.

  “Put your things in here,” she ordered cheerfully, opening a cupboard in which Séverine could see two coats and hats.

  She obeyed without a word, since her jaws seemed soldered tight. But she was feverishly thinking, I have to tell her … the man who’s coming here for me … just him, no one else. But she found it impossible to utter a sound and went on listening to Mme Anaïs whose sincere kindnesses both comforted and terrified her.

  “You see, dearie, I’m generally in here unless someone wants me. There’s not much light but over by the window there’s enough for my work-table. The girls give me a hand when they have nothing else to do. Mathilde and Charlotte are both very nice. To start off with, I can’t stand anyone here who’s not decent and easy-going. We have to get our work done and no nonsense. That’s why I fired Huguette, she was my third, five days ago. She was a pretty girl all right, but her language was something. Now you, dearie, you look real elegant. What’s your name?”