by Jean Rhys
He fixed his monocle more firmly into his eye to look at a passing lady, with an expression like that of an amiable and cynical old fox.
‘And it is my opinion, Madame, that that is the fault of the woman. All the misunderstandings, all the quarrels! It is astonishing how gentle, how easily fooled most men are. Even an old Parisian like myself, Madame . . . I assure you that of all men the Parisians are the most sentimental. And it is astonishing how lacking in calm and balance is the most clever woman, how prone to weep at a wrong moment – in a word, how exhausting!
‘For instance: A few months ago I was obliged to break with a most charming little friend whom I passionately adored. Because she exaggerated her eccentricity. One must be in the movement, even though one may regret in one’s heart the more agreeable epoch that has vanished. A little eccentricity is permissible. It is indeed chic. Yes, it is now chic to be eccentric. But when it came to taking me to a chemist and forcing me to buy her ether, which she took at once in the restaurant where we dined: and then hanging her legs out of the taxi window in the middle of the Boulevard: you will understand that I was gêné: that I found that she exaggerated. In the middle of the Boulevard!
‘Most unfortunately one can count no longer on women, even Frenchwomen, to be dignified, to have a certain tenue. I remember the time when things were different. And more agreeable, I think.’
The Commandant gazed into the distance, and his expression became sentimental. His eyes were light blue. He even blushed.
‘Once I was happy with a woman. Only once. I will tell you about it. Her name was Madeleine, and she was a little dancer whom some sale individu had deserted when she was without money and ill. She was the most sweet and gentle woman I have ever met. I knew her for two years, and we never quarrelled once or even argued. Never. For Madeleine gave way in everything . . . And to think that my wife so often accused me of having a sale caractère . . .’
He mused for a while.
‘A sale caractère . . . Perhaps I have. But Madeleine was of a sweetness . . . ah, well, she died suddenly after two years. She was only twenty-eight.
‘When she died I was sad as never in my life before. The poor little one . . . Only twenty-eight!’
‘Three days after the funeral her mother, who was a very good woman, wrote to me saying that she wished to have the clothes and the effects, you understand, of her daughter. So in the afternoon I went to her little flat, Place de L’Odéon, fourth floor. I took my housekeeper with me, for a woman can be useful with her advice on these occasions.
‘I went straight into the bedroom and I began to open the cupboards and arrange her dresses. I wished to do that myself. I had the tears in my eyes, I assure you, for it is sad to see and to touch the dresses of a dead woman that one has loved. My housekeeper, Gertrude, she went into the kitchen to arrange the household utensils.
‘Well, suddenly, there came from the closed sitting-room a very loud, a terrible crash. The floor shook.
‘Gertrude and I both called out at the same time: What is that? And she ran to me from the kitchen saying that the noise had come from the salon. I said: Something has fallen down, and I opened quickly the sitting-room door.
‘You must understand that it was a flat on the fourth floor; all the windows of the sitting-room were tightly shut, naturally, and the blinds were drawn as I had left them on the day of the funeral. The door into the hall was locked, the other led into the bedroom where I was.
‘And, there, lying right in the middle of the floor was a block of white marble, perhaps fifty centimeters square.
‘Gertrude said: Mon Dieu, Monsieur, look at that. How did that get here? – Her face was pale as death. – It was not there, she said, when we came.
‘As for me, I just looked at the thing, stupefied.
‘Gertrude crossed herself and said: I am going. Not for anything: for nothing in the world would I stay here longer. There is something strange about this flat.
‘She ran. I – well, I did not run. I walked out, but very quickly. You understand, I have been a soldier for twenty-five years, and, God knows, I had nothing to reproach myself with with regard to the poor little one. But it shakes the nerves – something like that.’
The Commandant lowered his voice.
‘The fact was, I understood. I knew what she meant.
‘I had promised her a beautiful, white marble tombstone, and I had not yet ordered it. Not because I had not thought of it. Oh, no – but because I was too sad, too tired. But the little one doubtless thought that I had forgotten. It was her way of reminding me.’
I looked hard at the Commandant. His eyes were clear and as naïve as a child’s: a little dim with emotion . . . Silence . . . He lit a cigarette.
‘Well, to show how strange women are: I recounted this to a lady I knew, not long ago. And she laughed. Laughed! You understand . . . Un fou rire . . . And do you know what she said:
‘She said: How furious that poor Madeleine must have been that she missed you!
‘Now can you imagine the droll ideas that women can have!’
From a French Prison
The old man and the little boy were the last of the queue of people waiting to show their permits and to be admitted to the parloir – a row of little boxes where on certain days prisoners may speak to their friends through a grating for a quarter of an hour.
The old man elbowed his way weakly, but with persistence, to the front, and when the warder shouted at him brutally to go back to his place he still advanced.
The warder yelled: ‘Go back, I tell you. Don’t you understand me? You are not French?’ The old man shook his head. ‘One sees that,’ the warder said sarcastically. He gave him a push and the old man, puzzled, backed a few steps and leaned against the wall, waiting.
He had gentle, regular features, and a grey cropped moustache. He was miserably clothed, hatless, with a red scarf knotted round his neck. His eyes were clouded with a white film, the film one sees over the eyes of those threatened with blindness.
The little boy was very little; his arms and legs matchlike. He held tightly on to the old man’s hand and looked up at the warder with enormous brown eyes. There were several children in the queue.
One woman had brought two – a baby in her arms and another hanging on to her skirt. All the crowd was silent and overawed. The women stood with bent heads, glancing furtively at each other, not with the antagonism usual in women, but as if at companions.
From the foot of the staircase leading down from the room in which they waited ran a very long whitewashed corridor, incredibly grim, and dark in spite of the whitewash. Here and there a warder sat close against the wall looking in its shadow like a huge spider – a bloated, hairy insect born of the darkness and of the dank smell.
There were very few men waiting, and nearly all the women were of the sort that trouble has whipped into a becoming meekness, but two girls near the staircase were painted and dressed smartly in bright colours. They laughed and talked, their eyes dark and defiant. One of them muttered: ‘Sale flic, va’ – as who should say: ‘Let him be, you dirty cop!’ when the warder had pushed the old man.
The queue looked frightened but pleased: an old woman like a rat huddled against the wall and chuckled. The warder balanced himself backwards and forwards from heel to toe, important and full of authority, like some petty god. There he was, the representative of honesty, of the law, of the stern forces of Good that punishes Evil. His forehead was low and barred by a perpetual frown, his jaw was heavy and protruding. A tall man, well set up. He looked with interest at the girl who had spoken, twirled his moustache and stuck his chest out. The queue waited patiently.
The parloir was like a row of telephone boxes without tops.
Along the platform overhead one saw the legs of yet another warder, marching backwards and forwards, listening to the conversations beneath him. The voices all sounded on one note – a monotonous and never-ending buzz.
The first warder looked at his watch and began to
fling all the doors open with ferocious bangs. A stream of rather startled-looking people poured out, their visits over. He beckoned to the queue for others to come forward and take their places. He called the dark-eyed girl who had spoken, staring hard at her as she passed, but she was busy, looking into her mirror, powdering her face, preparing for her interview.
To the opposite door of each box came a prisoner, gripping on to the bars, straining forward to see his visitor and starting at every sound. For the quarter of an hour would seem terribly short to him and always he listened for the shout of the warder to summon him away and always he feared not being on the alert to answer it.
The monotonous buzz of conversation began again. The warder on the roof sighed and then yawned; the warder outside twirled his moustache and stared at the wall. Then a fresh stream with permits came up the stairs and he tramped forward weightily to marshal them into line.
When the quarter of an hour was over the doors were flung open again.
As the dark-eyed girl passed out the warder stared hard at her and she stared back, not giving an inch, defiant and provocative. He half smiled and actually drew back to let her pass.
The old man came last, shuffling along, more bewildered than ever. At the gate of the prison all the permits must be given up, but he trailed out unheeding. The important person who was taking those documents shouted: ‘Hé! your permit!’ and added: ‘Monsieur’, with cynicism. The old man looked frightened, his eyes filled with tears, and when his permit was snatched from him he burst into a flood of words, waving his arms.
A woman stopped to explain to him that if he asked for it next visiting day it would be given back to him, but he did not understand.
‘Allons, Allons,’ said the warder at the gate authoritatively. ‘Get along. Get along.’
Outside the people hurried to catch the tram back to Paris.
The two girls stepped out jauntily, with animated gestures and voices, but the old man walked sadly, his head bent, muttering to himself. By his side the little boy took tiny little trotting steps – three to the old man’s one. His mouth drooped, his huge brown eyes stared solemnly at an incomprehensible world.
In a Café
The five musicians played every evening in the café from nine to twelve. ‘Concert! The best music in the Quarter,’ the placard outside announced. They sat near the door, and at every woman who came in the violinist, who was small and sentimental, would glance quickly and as it were hopefully. A comprehensive glance, running from the ankles upwards. But the pianist usually spent the intervals turning over his music morosely or sounding melancholy chords. When he played all the life seemed to leave his white indifferent face and find its home in his flying hands. The cellist was a fat, jolly, fair person who took life as it came; the remaining two were nondescripts, or perhaps merely seemed so, because they sat in the background. The five played everything from ‘La Belotte’ upwards and onwards into the serene classic heights of Beethoven and Massenet! Competent musicians; middle-aged, staid; they went wonderfully well with the café.
It was respectably full that evening. Stout business men drank beer and were accompanied by neat women in neat hats; temperamental gentlemen in shabby hats drank fines à l’eau beside temperamental ladies who wore turbans and drank menthes of striking emerald. There were as many foreigners as is usual. The peaceful atmosphere of the room conduced to quiet and philosophic conversations, the atmosphere of a place that always had been and always would be, the dark leather benches symbols of something perpetual and unchanging, the waiters, who were all old, ambling round with drinks or blotters, as if they had done nothing else since the beginnings of time and would be content so to do till the day of Judgment. The only vividnesses in the café, the only spots of unrest, were the pictures exposed for sale, and the rows of liqueur bottles in tiers above the counter of the bar, traditional bottles of bright colours and disturbingly graceful shapes.
Into the midst of this peace stepped suddenly a dark-haired, stoutish gentleman in evening dress. He announced that the Management had engaged him to sing. He stood smiling mechanically, waiting for silence, gracefully poised on one foot like the flying Hermes. His chest well out, his stomach well in, one hand raised with the thumb and middle finger meeting, he looked self-confident, eager and extraordinarily vulgar.
Silence was long in coming; when it did he cleared his throat and announced: ‘Chanson: Les Grues de Paris!’ in a high tenor voice, ‘Les Grues!’ The pianist began the accompaniment with its banal, moving imitation of passion.
The grues are the sellers of illusion of Paris, the frail and sometimes pretty ladies, and Paris is sentimental and indulgent towards them. That, in the mass and theoretically of course, not always practically or to individuals. The song had three verses. The first told the pathetic story of the making of a grue; the second told of her virtues, her charity, her warm-heartedness, her practical sympathy; the third, of the abominable ingratitude that was her requital. The hero of the song, having married and begun to found a family, passes the heroine, reduced to the uttermost misery and, turning his head aside, remarks virtuously to his wife: ‘What matter, it is only a gru . . . u . . . er!’
The canaille, as the third verse points out, to forget the numberless times on which she had ministered to his necessities!
All the women there looked into their mirrors during the progress of the song: most of them rouged their lips. The men stopped reading their newspapers, drank up their beers thirstily and looked sideways. There was a subtle change in the café, and when the song finished the applause was tumultuous.
The singer came forward with his dancing, tiptoe step to sell copies of his song . . . ‘Les Grue . . . Les Grues de Paris! . . . One franc!’
‘Give me two,’ she said with calm self-assurance.
The pianist chalked on a little black-board and hung up for all the world to see the next number of the orchestra.
‘Mommer loves Popper. Popper loves Mommer. Chanson Américaine. Demandé.’
Peace descended again on the café.
Tout Montparnasse and a Lady
At ten o’clock of a Saturday evening the ordinary clients of the little Bal Musette in the rue St Jacques – the men in caps and the hatless girls – begin to drift out one by one. Those who are inclined to linger are tactfully pressed to leave by the proprietor, a thin anxious little man with a stout placid wife. The place is now hired and reserved, for every Saturday evening the Anglo-Saxon section of Tout Montparnasse comes to dance here.
In half an hour’s time the fenced-off dancing floor is filled by couples dancing with the slightly strained expressions characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon who, though wishing to enjoy himself, is not yet sufficiently primed to let himself become animated. So even the best dancers look tense and grim though they sway and glide with great skill and have the concentrated air of people engaged in some difficult but extremely important gymnastic exercise.
Most of the men are young, thin, willowy; carefully picturesque and temperamental, they wear jerseys or shirts open at the neck. Most of the women are not so young, with that tendency to be thick about the ankles and incongruous about the shoes, which is nearly always to be found in the really intelligent woman.
For they are very intelligent, all these people. They paint, they write, they express themselves in innumerable ways. It is Chelsea, London, with a large dash of Greenwich Village, New York, to liven it, and a slight sprinkling of Moscow, Christiania and even of Paris to give incongruous local colourings. The musicians are in a tiny gallery, a concertina, a banjo and a violin – the concertina, a gay soul who winks and smiles violently at every woman whose eye he can catch. At the door sit watchfully two little French policemen with enormous moustaches. After each dance tout Montparnasse sits at the little tables in the body of the hall or stands at the pewter covered bar and drinks fine à l’eau – a surprisingly weak fine. Nevertheless, as the evening progresses they grow gayer and gayer . . . And more outspoken . . .
Thus one evening a very romantic lady, an American fashion artist, who was there to be thrilled, after having read the Trilby of du Maurier, and the novels of Francis Carco, which tell of the lives of the apaches of to-day, expressed her candid opinion of a supposed Dope Fiend who sat in a corner, glassy eyed, his head against the wall, his face of an extreme pallor. He was as a matter of fact a very hard-working and on the whole abstemious portrait-painter, who, having been struck with an inspiration for his next picture, was merely gazing into infinity with the happy intenseness of one about to grasp a beautiful vision.
‘Why bring people like that?’ she inquired hotly. ‘Why?’ She went on to explain how easy it is to be broad-minded and perfectly respectable, to combine art, passion, cleanliness, efficiency and an eye to the main chance. ‘But one must know where to draw the line. That is an instance of how not to do it!’
Sipping her third artificial lemonade she gazed with an intense reproof at the pallid gentleman. Suddenly he glared back. He was suspecting her of taking mental notes of him for journalistic purposes or perhaps, oh horror, of having designs upon his peace of mind. He rose, shook himself, and thus disturbed in his musings, lamented:
‘Oh, God! How I hate women who write! How I hate them!’ in an agreeable voice.
Someone now enlightened the romantic lady as to the distinction and sobriety of her late victim, and thus robbed of her thrill, over her fourth lemonade she began to yearn for the free life of the Apache and to wish that some of the original clients of the Bal Musette had stayed . . . There had been a dark man in a red muffler, his cap well down over his eyes . . . Or a girl in a check dress with something about the way her hair grew. And the air with which she wore her shabby frock and walked had been graceful . . . exciting . . . Provocative! . . . The brain groped vaguely for the word. Melancholy descended upon that romantic fashion artist, and discontent with her milieu. In her youth she had considered herself meant for higher things! . . . Artificial lemonade of the sort supplied at the Bal Musette is greatly conducive to melancholy.