by Colette
I mused for a minute in silence, nestled against the warmth of my friend.
‘Renaud, does he love his wife?’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no. He treats her with a mixture of brutality and politeness that strikes me as sinister.’
‘Is she unfaithful to him?’
‘My darling bird, how on earth should I know?’
‘Why, she might have been your mistress.’
The tone of conviction in which I said this convulsed Renaud with untimely mirth.
‘Do keep still, or you’ll have me on the floor. I’ve said nothing outrageous. There’s nothing in the suggestion to shock either of you. Does she have women friends, do you know?’
‘But this is an inquest . . . Why, it’s worse, it’s a conquest! Claudine, I’ve never seen you so interested in a woman you’ve met only once.’
‘I admit it. Anyway, I’m getting myself into training. You accuse me of being unsociable, so I propose to make some acquaintances. And, as I’ve just met a pretty woman with an attractive voice and a hand that’s pleasant to touch, I ask about her, I . . .’
‘Claudine,’ broke in Renaud, half teasing, half serious. ‘Doesn’t Rézi remind you a little of Luce? A resemblance that’s more than . . . skin deep?’
The hateful man! Why deflower everything with a word? I turned over in one bound like a fish, and went off to seek sleep in the chaste and chilly regions of the far side of the great bed.
A big gap in my diary. I have not put down a daily account of my impressions and I am sure I should get them wrong in a general summing-up. Life goes on. It is cold. Renaud bustles about, in the highest spirits. He rushes me round from one first night to another, loudly proclaiming that the theatre bores him to tears, that the compulsory coarseness of the average play revolts him . . .
‘Then why on earth do you go, Renaud?’ asks the simple Claudine, genuinely puzzled.
‘Simply . . . you’ll despise me, my little judge . . . to see people. To see whether Annhine de Lys is still going with Miss Flossie; whether pretty Madame Mundoë’s hat is a success, whether the strange, seductive Polaire with those eyes like an amorous gazelle’s still holds the record in wasp-waists. To be there on the spot half an hour after midnight when Mendès is holding forth lyrically at a supper-table, talking his dazzling review. To blossom out myself in the presence of the grotesque old Barmann and her “cameleer”, as Maugis calls Gréveuille. To admire the Field-Marshal’s plume surmounting the face of that ferret run to fat, Madame de Saint-Niketês.’
No, I don’t despise him for all that frivolity. And, besides, it wouldn’t matter if I did, because I love him. I know that audiences at first nights never listen to the play. I do listen, I listen passionately . . . or else I say: ‘This revolts me.’ Renaud envies me such simple and emphatic convictions: ‘You’re young, my little girl . . .’ Not as young as he is! He makes love to me, works, visits people, gossips, dines out, gives a party at home at four every Friday, and finds time to choose a sealskin jacket for me. From time to time, when we are by ourselves, he relaxes his charming, tired face, holds me close against him and sighs, with profound unhappiness: ‘Claudine, my darling child, how old I am! I can feel the minutes adding wrinkles one by one, and that hurts, that hurts so much!’ If only he knew how I adored him like that, and how I hope that the years will calm his fever for showing-off! Only then, when he’ll be willing to stop parading and throwing out his chest, shall we at last come together completely. Only then shall I stop panting with the effort to keep up with his forty-five-year-old’s gallop.
Six
One day, with an amused memory of the Andalusian sculptor and his ‘You are a swine, Madame!’ I decided to discover the Louvre and to admire these new Rubenses without a guide. Wearing my sealskin bolero jacket and the matching toque that looks as if a little animal were curled up asleep on my head, I set off boldly on my own. Having not a scrap of sense of direction I kept getting lost at every turning of the gallery like a wedding-party in a Zola novel. For though, in a wood, I know by instinct where the east lies and what time it is, I go astray in a suite of rooms all on one floor.
I found the Rubenses. They disgusted me. Just that, they disgusted me! I tried loyally, for a good half-hour, to work myself up into a state of excitement about them, but no! That meat, all that meat; that heavy-jowled powdered Marie de’ Medici with her sweating breasts, that plump warrior, her husband, being carried away by a victorious and robust – Zephyr . . . no, no, no! I shall never understand. If Renaud and Renaud’s female friends knew that! . . . Well, it can’t be helped! If I’m pushed, I shall say what I think.
Depressed, I walked away, taking small steps to avoid the temptation of sliding on the polished parquet between the rows of masterpieces observing me.
Ah! here was something better, some Spanish and Italian fellows really worth looking at. All the same, it was cheek of them to put the label ‘St John the Baptist’ on that seductive painted face by Da Vinci, drooped forward and smiling like Mademoiselle Moreno.
Heavens, what a beautiful young man! I had discovered, quite by chance, the boy who could have made me commit sin. Luckily he was only on canvas! Who was he? ‘Portrait of a Sculptor’, by Bronzino. I wanted to touch that forehead, just where it swelled above the eyebrows under the thick black hair, and that ruthless, undulating lip; I wanted to kiss those eyes that looked like a cynical page’s. Did that white, naked hand really model statuettes? I imagined that the downless skin was of the kind that darkens to the colour of old ivory under the armpits and in the hollows behind the knees . . . A skin that would be warm all over, even on the calves . . . And the palms of the hands would be moist . . .
Whatever was I doing? Blushing, and only half-awake, I looked about me . . . What was I doing? I was being unfaithful to Renaud!
I shall have to tell Rézi about this aesthetic adultery. She will laugh, with that laugh that breaks out suddenly and dies away listlessly. For we are two good friends, Rézi and I. A fortnight has been enough to make us so; it is what Renaud would call ‘an agelong intimacy’.
Two good friends, yes indeed. I am enchanted by her. She is fascinated by me. Nevertheless, we do not really confide in each other. No doubt, it is still a little too soon for that. Too soon for me, very definitely. Rézi does not deserve Claudine’s inmost soul. I give her my physical presence, my short, curly hair that it amuses her to ‘do’ – vain effort! – and my face that she seems to love without any hint of jealousy when she takes it between her two soft hands to ‘watch my eyes dance’, as she says.
She treats me freely to her beauty and grace, with an insistent coquetry. For the past few days, I have been going to see her every morning at eleven.
The Lambrooks live in the avenue Kléber, in one of those modern flats where so much space has been sacrificed to the concierge and the staircase, the front and back drawing-rooms – rather fine panelling, a good copy of Van Loo’s portrait of Louis XV as a child – that the private rooms have to snatch air and daylight as best they can. Rézi sleeps in a long, dark bedroom and dresses in a gallery. But I like this inconvenient, perpetually overheated dressing-room. And Rézi dresses and undresses in it by a kind of magical process. Sitting very demurely in a low armchair, I watch her admiringly.
While still in her chemise, she does her hair. That marvellous hair, tinted pink by the blinding electric light, green by the low streak of blue daylight, shimmers when she tosses her head to shake it out. At all hours of the day, this false double light from the inadequate window and the over-bright bulbs illuminates Rézi with a theatrical glare.
She brushes her dancing cloud of hair . . . A wave of her wand and, in a flash, thanks to a magic comb, all that gold is gathered up into a shining twisted knot on the nape of her neck, with every ripple subdued. How on earth does it stay put? Wide-eyed, I am on the verge of imploring: ‘Do it again!’ Rézi does not wait for my request. Another wave of the wand and the pretty woman in the chemise rises up, sheathed in a da
rk cloth dress and wearing a hat, ready to go out. The straitlaced corsets, the impertinent knickers, the soft and silent petticoat, have flung themselves on her like eager birds. Then Rézi gives me a triumphant look and laughs.
Her undressing is just as magical. The garments drop all at once, as if they were stuck together, and this charming creature retains nothing but her chemise . . . and her hat. How that irritates me and amazes me! She pins it on her head before she puts on her corsets, she leaves it on till she has taken off her stockings. She wears a hat in her bath, she tells me.
‘But why this worship of headgear?’
‘I don’t know. Something to do with modesty, perhaps. If I had to escape in the middle of the night because the house was on fire, I wouldn’t mind running out in the street completely naked, but not without a hat.’
‘Honestly? The firemen would have a treat!’
She is prettier and not so tall as my first impression suggested; small, but perfectly proportioned, with a white skin that rarely flushes to pink. Her short-sightedness, the changeable grey of her eyes and her fluttering eyelashes dissemble her thoughts. In fact, I do not know her at all, in spite of the spontaneous sudden way she came out at our fourth meeting, with this:
‘I’m crazy about three things, Claudine: travelling, Paris . . . and you.’
She was born in Paris and loves it like a foreigner; she has a passion for its cold, dubious smell, for the hour when the gaslight reddens the blue dusk, for its theatres and its streets.
‘Nowhere else in the world, Claudine, are the women as pretty as they are in Paris! (Let’s leave Montigny out of it, darling . . .) It’s in Paris that you see the most fascinating faces whose beauty is waning – women of forty, frantically made-up and tight-laced, who have kept their delicate noses and eyes like a young girl’s. Women who let themselves be stared at with a mixture of pleasure and bitterness.’
A woman who thinks and talks like that is not a fool. That day, I seized hold of her pointed fingers that were drawing invisible spirals to illustrate what she was saying, as if to thank her for having charming thoughts. The next day she was in a flutter of ecstasy over Liberty’s window display, a facile colour harmony of pink and saffron satins!
I regularly stay later than I mean to at the avenue Kléber, and it is just noon when I reluctantly decide to leave the low armchair and return home to my husband and my lunch. I am in no hurry to get back to Renaud’s eager embraces and his appetite for red meat (for he doesn’t live as I do, on quails and bananas). Almost every day, just as I am about to go, the door of the dressing-room opens noiselessly and reveals the deceptively robust figure of Lambrook framed in the doorway. It happened again yesterday . . .
‘Wherever did you spring from?’ exclaimed Rézi irritably.
‘From the avenue des Champs Élysées,’ replied the phlegmatic man. Then he hung about, kissing my hand, inspecting my unfastened jacket, staring at Rézi in her corsets and finally said to his wife:
‘My dear, what a lot of time you waste dolling yourself up!’
Thinking of my friend’s fantastic speed in dressing, I burst out laughing. Lambrook did not blink, but his terracotta skin faintly darkened. He asked how Renaud was, hoped we should both come and dine with him soon, and went away.
‘Rézi, whatever’s the matter with him?’
‘Nothing. But don’t laugh at him, Claudine, when he’s talking to me; he thinks you’re making fun of him.’
‘Really? I don’t care if he does.’
‘But I do. It means I shall have a scene with him . . . His jealousy gets me down.’
‘Jealous of me! On what grounds? Is the man out of his senses?’
‘He doesn’t like me having a woman friend . . .’
Might he have his reasons, the husband?
Yet nothing in Rézi’s behaviour leads me to think so . . . Sometimes she looks at me for a long while without blinking her short-sighted eyes, whose eyelids are almost parallel – a detail that makes them seem longer – and her thin, tight-shut mouth half opens and becomes childish and tempting. A little shiver runs over her shoulders, she gives a nervous laugh and exclaims: ‘Someone’s walking over my grave!’ . . . and kisses me. That is all. It would show considerable vanity on my part if I imagined . . .
I encourage nothing. I let time slip by, I study every subtle shade and shimmer of this rainbow-like Rézi, and I wait for what will come. I wait, I wait . . . more out of laziness than virtue.
I saw Rézi this morning. That did not stop her from rushing around to me about five o’clock, all impatience. She sat down, just as Fanchette lies down, after turning right round twice. Her dark blue tailor-made gave her golden hair a reddish tinge; a complicated feather hat crowned her with embattled grey seagulls, so swirling with life that I should not have been greatly surprised to hear those entangled beaks twittering.
She installed herself, like someone taking refuge, and sighed.
‘What’s the matter, Rézi?’
‘Nothing. I’m bored at home. The people who come to see me there bore me. One admirer, two admirers, three admirers today . . . I’ve seen enough of them! The monotony of those men. I nearly hit the third one!’
‘Why the third?’
‘Because he told me, half an hour after the second – and in exactly the same terms, the tiresome creature – that he loved me! And the second had already been a repetition of the first. That trio will be seeing precious little of me in future. Oh Lord, all those men, all exactly alike!’
‘Only take one of them; you’d get more variety.’
‘I’d get more exhausted too.’
‘But . . . your husband . . . doesn’t he make a fuss?’
‘He doesn’t turn a hair. What makes you think he would?’
Honestly, did she take me for an utter fool? What about all those precautions the other morning, those warnings full of dark hints? Yet she was looking at me with her clearest, most candid gaze, her eyes shot with gleams of moonstones and grey pearls.
‘Now, come, Rézi! The day before yesterday, I mustn’t even laugh at what he said . . .’
‘Ah!’ (Her hand twirled gracefully in the air, as if she were whipping up an invisible mayonnaise.) ‘But, Claudine, that’s not at all the same thing . . . these men who buzz round me . . . and you.’
‘I should hope not! And since your reasons for liking me can’t be the same as theirs . . .’
She gave me a sudden swift glance, then promptly looked away.
‘. . . you might at least tell me, Rézi, why you don’t dislike seeing me.’
Reassured, she put down her muff, so as to be freer to use her hands, her neck and her whole torso to emphasize what she wanted to tell me; she settled herself deeper in the big armchair and gave me an affectionate, mysterious smile.
‘Why do I like you, Claudine? I could simply tell you: “Because I think you’re pretty,” and that would be enough for me, but it wouldn’t be enough for your pride . . . Why am I fond of you? Because your eyes and your hair are made of the same metal, and they’re all that remain of a little light bronze statue; the rest has turned into flesh. Because your harsh gestures make a good accompaniment to your soft voice; because you tone down your fierceness for me; because, whenever one guesses one of your secret thoughts or you let one out, you blush as if someone had slipped a rude hand under your skirt . . .’
I interrupted her with a gesture – yes, it was a harsh one. I was irritated and disturbed that so much of myself should show through without my knowledge . . . Was I going to be angry? To leave her altogether? She forestalled any hostile resolve by kissing me impetuously, close to my ear. Drowned in fur, brushed by pointed wings, I hardly had time to be conscious of Rézi’s own smell and the deceptive simplicity of her scent – when Renaud came in.
I leant back, embarrassed,, in the chair. Embarrassed, not by Rézi’s swift kiss, but by Renaud’s keen look and the amused, almost encouraging indulgence I read in it. He kissed my friend’s hand,
saying:
‘Please don’t let me disturb anything.’
‘But you’re not disturbing anything at all,’ she cried. ‘Anything or anyone! On the contrary, you can help me make Claudine stop frowning. She’s angry because I’ve just paid her a very sincere compliment.’
‘Very sincere, I’m sure, but did you put enough conviction into your tone? My Claudine is a very serious and very passionate little girl, who’s incapable of accepting . . .’ (here, because he belonged to a generation that still read Musset, he hummed the accompaniment to the serenade from Don Juan) . . . ‘who’s incapable of accepting certain words if they’re underlined by certain smiles.’
‘Renaud, I implore you, no marital revelations!’
In spite of myself, I had raised my voice in exasperation, but Rézi turned her most disarming smile on me.
‘Oh, yes, oh yes, Claudine! Do let him tell. I take a very real interest in them and it’s an act of charity to let my ears have a little dissipation! They’re getting to the point of forgetting what the word “love” means.’
Hmm! This excited eagerness of a sex-starved wife struck me as coming rather oddly after her recent assurance that she was sick and tired of men wanting to make love to her. However, Renaud knew nothing of that. Moved with generous compassion, he studied Rézi from her chignon to her ankles and it was impossible for me not to laugh when he exclaimed:
‘Poor child! So young, and already deprived of what gives beauty and colour to life! Come to me. Consolation awaits you on the couch in my study, I am prepared to sacrifice myself – and it’ll cost you less than going to a specialist!’
‘Cost me less? I’m suspicious of reduced fees to the profession.’
‘You’re not a professional. Besides, either one’s a man of honour or one isn’t . . .’