Claudine Married

by Colette

  ‘And you aren’t? Thanks, no!’

  ‘You shall give me . . . whatever you like.’

  ‘Whatever I like?’ She half-veiled her smoke-coloured eyes. ‘Well . . . perhaps you might amuse yourself with a little preliminary trifling.’

  ‘I should be only too delighted to trifle with you.’

  Enchanted at feeling a little outraged, Rézi arched her neck and tucked in her chin, exactly as Fanchette does when she finds an exceptionally large grasshopper or a stag-beetle in her path.

  ‘No, I tell you, benefactor of humanity! In any case, I haven’t got to that stage yet!’

  ‘And what stage have you got to . . . already?’

  ‘To compensations.’

  ‘Which particular ones? There are so many species – at least two.’

  She turned pink, overdid her short-sightedness, then, with a little twist, turned to me, imploring:

  ‘Claudine, protect me!’

  ‘I’ll protect you all right . . . by forbidding you to let Renaud console you.’

  ‘Why, I believe you’re really jealous! Are you?’

  She sparkled with a malicious delight that immensely enhanced her beauty. Poised on the edge of her chair, with one leg outstretched and the other bent back and clearly outlined under her skirt, she leant towards me in a tense attitude, as if about to run. Her cheek, close to mine, was gilded with a down paler than her hair, and her eyelashes fluttered incessantly, transparent as a wasp’s gauzy wings. Overcome with so much beauty, it was with the utmost sincerity that I replied:

  ‘Jealous? Oh, no, Rézi; you’re far too pretty! I’d never forgive Renaud for being unfaithful to me with an ugly woman.’

  Renaud caressed me with one of those intelligent looks that bring me back to him when my fierce unsociability or an unusual sharp attack of loneliness and abstraction have carried me rather far away . . . I was grateful to him for saying so many loving things to me like that, in silence, over Rézi’s head . . .

  However, Rézi-the-Golden (had she entirely understood me?) drew herself upright, gave a nervous stretch with her hands clasped inside her muff, made a face and said, with a little snort:

  ‘Oh dear . . . your complicated psychology has made me feel quite faint, and I’m awfully hungry.’

  ‘Oh, my poor dear! And here have I been letting you starve!’

  I leapt up and rushed to the bell.

  A little while later, peace and friendly understanding exhaled from steaming cups and slices of toast slowly soaking up butter. But personally I despised those smart people’s tea. With a basket in my lap, I was peeling withered apples and pricking and squeezing flabby medlars, winter fruits from home sent me by Mélie that smell of store-cupboards and over-ripeness.

  And because a piece of burnt and blackened toast was making the room smell of creosote and fresh coal, off I went on the wings of imagination to Montigny, to the big open fireplace with the canopy over it . . . I thought I could see Mélie throwing a damp faggot on it, and Fanchette sitting on the raised hearthstone, shift back a little, shocked by the boldness of the flames and the crackling of the green wood . . .

  ‘My own girl!’

  I had been dreaming aloud. And, at the sight of Renaud’s mirth and Rézi’s stupefaction, I flushed and gave a shame-faced laugh.

  Seven

  The mild winter drags on, warm and enervating. January is nearly over. The days go by, alternating between a feverish rush and incredible idleness. Theatres, dinners, matinées, and concerts, up to one o’clock in the morning, often two! Renaud struts, throws out his chest, and I sag and wilt.

  I wake up late, in a bed submerged under newspapers. Renaud divides his attention between ‘the attitude of England’ and that of Claudine, lying on her stomach and lost in hostile dreams, trying to catch up on the indispensable sleep of which artificial life deprives her. Luncheon is a brief affair of red meat for Renaud and various sugary horrors for myself. From two to five, the programme varies.

  What does not vary is the five o’clock visit to Rézi or from Rézi; she is becoming more and more attached to me without trying to hide it. And I am becoming attached to her, God knows, but I conceal it . . .

  Almost every evening, at seven o’clock, coming away from a tea-shop or a bar where Rézi revives herself with a cocktail and I nibble potato chips with too much salt on them, I think with silent fury that I have got to go home and dress and that Renaud is already waiting for me, adjusting his pearl studs. Thanks to my convenient short hair, I have to admit – my modesty blushes! – that men and women find me equally disturbing.

  Because of my shorn mane and my coldness towards them, men say to themselves: ‘She only goes in for women.’ For it is obvious to the meanest understanding that, if I don’t like men, I must be pursuing women; such is the simplicity of the masculine mind!

  Moreover, the women – on account of my shorn mane and my coldness towards their husbands and lovers – seem inclined to think as they do. I have caught charming glances in my direction; curious, shamed, fugitive glances and even blushes if I let my eyes rest for a moment on the grace of a bare shoulder or a perfect neck. I have also sustained the shock of extremely explicit approaches; but these drawing-room professionals – the square lady of fifty or more; the thin, dark little girl with the flat behind; the monocled Jewess who plunges her sharp nose into décolletages as if she expected to find a lost ring in them – these temptresses found Claudine so lacking in response that they were obviously shocked. And that nearly ruined my promising reputation. To make up for it, the night before last, I saw one of my ‘women friends’ (i.e. a young literary lady I had met five times) give such a malicious smile when she mentioned Rézi’s name that I understood the implication only too well. And I thought that Rézi’s husband might ‘cut up rough’ the day rumours began to reach his brick-red ear.

  A letter from Papa arrived for me, grandiloquent and heartbroken. In spite of the active bee that buzzes incessantly in his bonnet and keeps him happy, Papa is getting upset by my absence. In Paris, it didn’t worry him in the least. But down there he has found the old house empty, empty of Claudine. No more silent little girl curled up, with a book on her knees, in the hollow of a big armchair bursting at the seams – or perched in the fork of the walnut-tree, shelling nuts with a noise like a squirrel – or stretched full length on the top of a wall with a predatory eye on the next-door neighbour’s plums and old Madame Adolphe’s dahlias . . . Papa doesn’t say all this; his dignity forbids it, as does the nobility of his style which does not condescend to such puerilities. But he thinks it. So do I.

  Thoroughly upset, brimming over with memories and regrets, I rushed to Renaud to hide myself in the hollow of his shoulder and find oblivion there. My dear giant, whom I was distracting (without his grumbling) from virtuous industry, does not always understand the causes of what he calls ‘my shipwrecks’. But as usual, he sheltered me generously, without asking too many questions. In his warmth, the mirage of Fresnois melted into a mist and vanished. And when, swiftly excited by holding me close, he tightened his embrace and bent down his gold-streaked moustache that smelt of Egyptian tobacco, I was able to look up at him and laugh.

  ‘You smell like a blonde who smokes!’ I told him.

  This time he retorted, teasingly:

  ‘And Rézi, what does she smell of?’

  ‘Rézi?’ . . . (I thought for a moment.) ‘She smells of untruthfulness.’

  ‘Untruthfulness! Are you trying to make out that she doesn’t love you and is pretending to have a crush on you?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I said more than I meant to. Rézi doesn’t lie; she dissimulates. She shuts things away at the back of her mind. She isn’t like the pretty Van Langendonck, who informs you, with a wealth of detail, “I’ve just come from the Galeries Lafayette” at the beginning of a sentence that ends up: “Five minutes ago I was at Saint-Pierre de Montrouge.” Rézi doesn’t gush, and I’m thankful that she doesn’t. But I feel that she hides thin
gs, that she decently buries any number of little horrors, pawing away as scrupulously as Fanchette in her tray. Commonplace little horrors, if you like, but symmetrically neat.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Nothing, of course, if you need proofs! I’m going by my instincts. There’s another thing – her maid often has a way of coming in the morning, giving her a crumpled piece of paper and saying: “Madame left this in yesterday’s pocket . . .” By chance, I happened one day to glance at the crushed-up contents of “yesterday’s pocket” and I can assure you that the envelope was still unopened. What do you think of that as a postal system? The suspicious Lambrook himself would think it was nothing but an old bit of paper.’

  ‘It’s ingenious,’ mused Renaud aloud.

  ‘So you realize, my dear giant, that this secretive Rézi who turns up here all white and gold, with eyes so clear you can see right to the bottom of them, who envelops me with a pastoral scent of fern and iris . . .’

  ‘Oho! Claudine!’

  ‘Whatever’s come over you?’

  ‘Come over me, indeed? What about you? Am I dreaming? What, my remote, disdainful Claudine getting interested in someone, in Rézi, to the point of studying her, to the point of thinking deeply about her and making deductions! Now then, Mademoiselle’ (he was scolding me in jest, with his arms folded, like Papa). ‘Now then, isn’t it a fact that we are in love?’

  I drew sharply away from him and glared at him from under such frowning eyebrows that he was startled.

  ‘What? Angry again? Really, you do take everything tragically!’

  ‘And you don’t take anything seriously!’

  ‘Only one thing: you . . .’

  He waited expectantly, but I did not budge.

  ‘Come here, my little silly! Come here, then! What a lot of trouble I have with this child! Claudine,’ he asked (I was sitting on his knee again, silent and still a little tense), ‘tell me one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why, when it comes to admitting one of your secret thoughts, even to your old husband-papa, do you jib so fiercely? You couldn’t show more outraged modesty if you were asked to display your behind at an imposing gathering of Paris celebrities. In fact, I believe you’d show less.’

  ‘Dear, simple man, that’s because I know my behind, which is firm, pleasantly coloured and agreeable to touch. I am not so confident about my thoughts, about their clarity and the welcome they’ll receive . . . My modesty is very clear-sighted; its job is to hide anything in me that I’m afraid might be ugly and weak.’

  I surprised Renaud this morning in a fierce and gloomy rage. In silence I watched him throwing balls of screwed-up paper on the fire, then suddenly sweep a whole pile of pamphlets off his desk and toss the lot on the spluttering coke. A little ashtray, hurled with a deadly aim, buried itself in the waste-paper basket. Next to it was the priestlike Ernest who came in for his wrath and, because he had not appeared the moment the bell rang, heard himself threatened with instant dismissal like a mere layman. Things were hotting up!

  I sat down, with my hands folded, looking on and waiting. Renaud’s eyes discovered me and softened:

  ‘Why, you’re back, my sweet. I didn’t see you. Where have you been?’

  ‘At Rézi’s.’

  ‘I ought to have known that! . . . But forgive me for being absent-minded, darling. I’m annoyed.’

  ‘Lucky you hide it so well!’

  ‘Don’t laugh . . . Come over here, close to me. Soothe me. I’ve had some infuriating, quite odious news about Marcel . . .’

  ‘Oh?’

  I thought of my stepson’s last visit. He really is going too far. An incredible desire to swagger drove him to tell me a hundred things I had not asked him, among others a fairly detailed account of an encounter in the rue de la Pompe, at the time when the Lycée Janson releases a convey of boys in blue berets into the street . . . That particular day, Marcel’s Odyssey was interrupted by Rézi, who, for a good three-quarters of an hour, wasted all her wiles on him, vainly trying the whole armoury of her glances and a series of her most alluring swirls. Finding all her weapons blunt, she finally wearied of the fight and gave it up. She turned to me with a pretty gesture of discouragement that so plainly said: ‘Ouf! I’ve had enough!’ that I began to laugh and Marcel (that pervert is far from being a fool) smiled with infinite disdain.

  This disdain quickly changed to undisguised curiosity when he saw the eclectic Rézi bring all the same battery of allurements to bear on me . . . At that, with an ill-timed pretence of being tactful, he left.

  What new prank had that boy been up to?

  With my head resting on Renaud’s knees, I waited to be enlightened.

  ‘Always the same story, my poor darling. My charming son is bombarding some brat of good family with neo-Greek literature . . . You don’t say anything, my little girl? I ought to be used to it by now, alas! But these affairs make my gorge rise. I find them utterly revolting.’

  ‘Why?’

  Renaud started at my quietly asked question.

  ‘What do you mean? Why?’

  ‘What I meant, my dear man, was why do you smile excitedly, almost approvingly, at the idea that Luce was too loving a friend to me? . . . And at the hope . . . I repeat, the hope! . . . that Rézi might become a luckier Luce?’

  How very odd my husband’s face looked at that moment! Extreme surprise, a kind of shocked prudery, a shamefaced, ingratiating smile passed over it in waves like cloud-shadows running over a meadow . . . Finally, he exclaimed triumphantly:

  ‘That’s not the same thing!’

  ‘Thank heavens, no, not quite . . .’

  ‘No, it isn’t at all the same thing! You women can do anything. It’s charming and it’s of no consequence whatever . . .’

  ‘No consequence?. . . I don’t agree with you.’

  ‘I mean what I say and I’m right! Between you pretty little animals it’s a . . . how can I put it? . . . a consolation for us, a restful change . . .’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘. . . or, at least, a kind of compensation. It’s the logical search for a more perfect partner, for a beauty more like your own, which reflects your own sensitiveness and your own weaknesses . . . If I dared (but I shouldn’t dare), I would say that certain women need women in order to preserve their taste for men.’

  Frankly, no, I did not understand! How singularly painful it is to love each other as much as we do and to feel so differently! . . . I could only see what my husband had just said as a paradox that flattered and disguised the touch of the voyeur in his sexual make-up.

  Rézi has turned herself into my shadow. She is there at all hours of the day, lassoing me with her harmonious gestures whose line prolongs itself into the void, throwing a spell over me with her words, her looks, her stormy thoughts that I expect to see bursting out in sparks from the tips of her tapering fingers . . . I am getting uneasy, I am conscious of a will in her more consistent, more obstinate than my own which goes by leaps and bounds and then turns sluggish.

  Sometimes, irritated and enervated by her soft persistence, by her beauty that she flourishes under my nose like a bouquet and adorns, barely veiled, before my eyes, I feel like asking her abruptly: ‘What are you driving at?’ But I am frightened that she might tell me. And I prefer to keep a cowardly silence, so as to be able to stay with her with a clear conscience, for, during the last three months, she has become my cherished habit.

  Indeed, apart from the insistence of her soft grey eyes and the ‘Heavens! how I love you!’ she often lets out as innocently and spontaneously as a little girl, there is nothing I need to be scared about.

  In actual fact, what is it she loves in me? I am perfectly aware of the genuineness, if not of her affection, at least of her desire. And I am afraid, yes, afraid already – that this desire is the only thing that animates her.

  Yesterday, blinded by a migraine and oppressed by the twilight, I let Rézi lay her hands over my eyes. With my lids
closed, I could imagine the supple curve of her body leaning over me, slim in a clinging dress of a leaden grey that made one uncertain of the exact colour of her eyes.

  A dangerous silence descended on us both. Nevertheless, she did not risk a gesture and she did not kiss me. After some minutes, she just said: ‘Oh my dear, my dear . . .’ and fell silent again.

  When the clock struck seven, I shook myself sharply and rushed to the switch to turn on the light. Rézi’s smile, revealed pale and enchanting in the sudden glare, encountered my harshest, most forbidding face. Repressing a little sigh, she picked up her gloves with a supple movement, straightened her irremovable hat, murmured ‘Good-bye’ and ‘Till tomorrow’ into my neck, and I found myself alone in front of a mirror, listening to her light escaping footsteps.

  Don’t lie to yourself, Claudine! That meditation of yours, leaning on your elbows in front of that glass, with that air of suppressing remorse, was it anything else but the pleasure of verifying that your face was still intact – that face with the Havana-brown eyes, that face Rézi loves?

  Eight

  ‘My darling little girl, what are you thinking about?’ His darling little girl was squatting, tailor-fashion, on the big bed she had not yet quitted . . . Enveloped in a vast pink nightdress, she was thoughtfully cutting the toe-nails of her right foot with a pretty pair of ivory-handled clippers and not breathing a word.

  ‘My darling little girl, what are you thinking about?’

  I raised my head, adorned with snaky curls, and I stared at Renaud – who, already dressed, was knotting his tie – as if I had never set eyes on him before.

  ‘Yes, what are you thinking about? Ever since we woke up, you haven’t said a word to me. You let me prove my affection without even noticing it.’

  I raised a protesting hand.

  ‘Obviously, I’m exaggerating. But you were decidedly absent-minded, Claudine . . .’

  ‘You amaze me!’

  ‘Not as much as you amaze me! I’m used to your showing more consciousness during these diversions.’