Claudine Married

by Colette

  Today, I wager that the people who appear regularly on my husband’s ‘day’ must have said to themselves as they left the house, ‘Why, she’s getting quite sociable, that little wife of Renaud’s! She’s becoming civilized!’

  No, good people, I am not becoming civilized. I was sociable simply because I was in a daze. That woolly affability, those feverish hands that were a menace to teacups, were not for you! It was not you, old gentleman addicted to Greek literature and Russian vodka, whom I waited on with the zeal of a young Hebe! That unconscious smile with which I greeted your proposal to visit me in my own home (like the manicurist) to read Pierre Leroux to me was not for you, novelist with socialist pretensions and a sharp eye to the main chance! Nor, Andalusian sculptor, was the earnest expression with which I followed your flood of Hispano-French invectives against contemporary art: my passionate attention was registering not only your aesthetic axioms (‘All men of talent, he is dead seence two centuries’), but listening to Rézi’s laugh – Rézi, in a close-fitting sheath of white cloth, the same dull, creamy white as her flowing crêpe-de-Chine négligé. Andalusian sculptor, you must have renounced all hope of my aversion when I said: ‘I’ve seen the Rubenses’ – Ah! And what do you think?’ – ‘They’re tripe!’ How feeble the word ‘swine’ seemed to you and how you wished I’d fall dead at your feet!

  Nevertheless, I am still alive, and I am living in the most revolting respectability. The violence of Rézi’s attraction, the vanity of my resistance, the sense that I am behaving ridiculously, all urge me to get it over and done with; to intoxicate myself with her till I have exhausted her charm. But, to make a wretched pun, I rézist! And I despise myself for my own stubborn obstinacy.

  Today again, she went off with the chattering throng of men who had been smoking and drinking and women who were a little tipsy from the extreme heat of the room, after the cold outside. She went off, kept well in sight by her husband without my having told her: ‘I love you . . . I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Went proudly, the wretch, as if she were sure of me in spite of myself; sure of herself, menacing and passionate . . .

  When Renaud and I were left alone at last, we gazed at each other dejectedly, like weary victors on a battlefield. He yawned, opened a window, and leant his elbow on the sill. I went and stood beside him to drink in the cool misty air, the clean wind, damp from a shower. The feel of his great arm round me soon turned my thoughts from the path they were pursuing, now racing in a confused rush, now trailing along, broken, like shreds of clouds.

  I wished that Renaud, who stands a head and shoulders higher than myself, were even taller still. I wanted to be the daughter, or the wife, of a giant Renaud so that I could nestle into the hollow of his elbow, inside the cavern of his sleeve . . . Snug in the shelter of his ear, he would carry me away over endless plains, through enormous forests and, when the storm raged, his hair would moan in the wind like a pine-tree . . .

  But Renaud (the real one not the giant) made a movement and, at that, my fairy-tale took fright and vanished . . .

  ‘Claudine,’ he said in his full voice, velvety as his eyes. ‘I rather think you’ve made it up, you and Rézi. Am I right?’

  ‘It depends on whether I’m willing to . . . I’m letting her do all the pleading.’

  ‘No harm in that, Claudine, no harm in that! And is she still crazy about you?’

  ‘She is. But I’m still keeping her languishing after . . . after my forgiveness. “The greater the labour.”’

  ‘“The greater the prize,”’ he chanted in an operatic baritone. ‘She looked very pretty today, your friend!’

  ‘I’ve never seen her look anything but pretty.’

  ‘I believe you. Is the small of her back attractive?’

  I was thoroughly startled.

  ‘The small of her back? Why, I haven’t the faintest idea! Do you imagine she receives me in her bath?’

  ‘Why, yes. I did imagine so.’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘It’s unworthy of you, setting little traps like that! You might believe that I’m sufficiently honest and sufficiently fond of you . . . Renaud, to own up to you frankly, when the day comes: “I’ve let Rézi go further than I meant to . . .”’

  The arm that encircled my shoulders turned me round to face the lighted room.

  ‘Will you, Claudine?’

  His face was bent down over mine; on it I could read curiosity and eagerness, but not a trace of anxiety.

  ‘So in fact you can see it coming, the day when you’ll have to own up?’

  ‘That isn’t what I’ve got to tell you tonight,’ I said, averting my eyes.

  I was being evasive, because I felt more tremulously agitated than a little moth, one of those little reddish moths with phosphorescent eyes that flutter over asters and flowering laurels. When you hold one in your hand, you can feel its velvet body breathing and suffocating as you linger over its poignant warmth . . .

  Tonight, all my self-possession has gone. If my husband wants me – and he will – I shall be the Claudine who terrifies him and wildly excites him, the one who flings herself into love-making as if it were for the last time, and who clings, trembling, to Renaud’s arm, with no resource against herself . . .

  ‘Renaud, do you think Rézi may be a vicious woman?’

  It was nearly two in the morning. In the total darkness, I lay resting huddled close against Renaud’s side. He was still in a state of rapture, perfectly ready to plunge me back into the dizzy vortex from which I had just surfaced; I could hear his hurried, irregular heartbeats beneath my head . . . Querulous and shattered, with my bones turned to water, I was enjoying the convalescence that follows moments of too fierce intensity . . . but, along with sanity, I had recovered the obsession that never leaves me, and, with it, the image of Rézi.

  Whether I see her – a white figure with outstretched arms swathed in her long dress – lighting up the darkness where coloured specks dance before my exhausted eyes; whether she is sitting, absorbed, at her dressing-table, her arms raised and her face hidden, so that all I see is the nape whose amber melts into the pale gold of the hairline, it is Rézi, always Rézi. Now that she is no longer there, I am not sure that she loves me. My faith in her is limited to an exasperated desire for her presence.

  ‘Renaud, do you think she may be vicious?’

  ‘My sweet lunatic child, I’ve told you that, as far as I know, Madame Lambrook hasn’t any lovers.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m asking you. Having lovers doesn’t mean a person’s vicious.’

  ‘No? Then what do you understand by vice? Homosexuality?’

  ‘Yes and no. It depends how it’s practised. But that still isn’t vice.’

  ‘I’m longing to hear your definition! It must be something quite out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Because, after all, it’s self-evident. I take a lover . . .’

  ‘Do you, indeed?’

  ‘It’s a supposition.’

  ‘A supposition for which you’ll get your bottom smacked if you don’t look out!’

  ‘I take a lover, without loving him, simply because I know it’s wrong: that’s vice. I take a lover . . .’

  ‘That makes two.’

  ‘. . . a lover whom I love or whom I simply desire – keep still, Renaud, will you? – that’s just obeying the law of nature and I consider myself the most innocent of creatures. To sum up, vice is doing wrong without enjoying it . . .’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else, shall we? All these lovers you’ve taken . . . I need to purify you . . .’

  ‘All right, purify me, then.’

  All the same, if I had talked of taking ‘a girl-friend’ instead of ‘a lover’ he would have thought my little bit of reasoning eminently sound. For Renaud, adultery is a question of sex.

  She makes me uneasy. In her artful gentleness, her shrewd avoidance of anything that might arouse my mistrust, I can no longer recognize the
pale, passionate Rézi who beseeched me in a fever of tears . . . But a glance, bright with mischief and loving defiance, has revealed the secret of all this discretion: she knows that I . . . love her – I wish there were a less crude word, a word that conveyed subtler shades of meaning. She has noticed my confusion at being left alone with her; when we exchange a brief kiss at meeting and parting (I daren’t avoid kissing her altogether!), she must feel me tremble, as she does herself. She knows now, and she is waiting. Commonplace tactics, if you like. A lover’s trap, as old as love itself, yet, forewarned as I am, I dread falling into it. Oh, calculating Rézi! I was able to resist your desire, but can I resist my own?

  ‘Giving oneself up to the intoxication of cherishing and desiring, forgetting everything one has loved before, beginning to love all over again, being rejuvenated by the freshness of a new conquest – that’s what makes life supremely worth living! . . .’

  It was not Rézi who spoke thus. It was not myself. It was Marcel! His perversity has attained a certain grandeur now that the excitement of a new passion is heightening his tired beauty and his flowering romanticism.

  Sitting opposite me, slumped in a big armchair, he was talking like someone in delirium, his eyes lowered, his knees together. And all the time he kept making a compulsive maniacal little gesture, stroking his eyebrows that were pencilled to lengthen their curve.

  He certainly has no love for me, but I have never jeered at his peculiar affairs, and perhaps that is why he confides in me.

  I listened to him seriously, and not unperturbed. ‘Giving oneself up to the intoxication of cherishing and desiring, forgetting everything that one loved . . .’

  ‘Marcel, why must one forget?’

  He raised his chin in token of ignorance.

  ‘Why? I don’t know. I forget, in spite of myself. Yesterday turns pale and misty behind today.’

  ‘Personally, I’d prefer to bury Yesterday and its withered flowers in the fragment casket of my memory.’

  Almost unconsciously, I was imitating his metaphorical redundancy.

  ‘I can’t argue about it,’ he said, dismissing it with a careless gesture. ‘Anyway, give me news of your Today and her rather sensual Viennese charm.’

  I frowned and lowered my head in a threatening way.

  ‘Gossip busy already, Marcel?’

  ‘No. Only intuition. After all, I’ve had so much practice! . . . Besides, you so definitely prefer blondes!’

  ‘Why the plural?’

  ‘Aha! Rézi’s got you on a string now, but there was a time when you didn’t find me unattractive!’

  What cheek! His spoilt vanity is mistaken. Ten months ago, I would have slapped him; but at this moment I wonder whether I am any better than he. All the same! I stared at him from quite close to, fastening my eyes on his frail temples that would soon shrivel, on the tired crease that already marked his lower lid. And, having ruthlessly scrutinized him, I announced spitefully:

  ‘Marcel, when you’re thirty, you’ll look like a little old woman.’

  So he had noticed it! So it was visible, then? I dared not reassure myself by admitting that Marcel had a special flair. The lazy and fatalistic passion that guided me whispered this advice: ‘Since people believe it so, it might just as well be so!’

  It was easy enough to say! If Rézi continues to woo me silently with her presence and her glances, at least she seems to have renounced any effective attack. She adorns her beauty in front of me like someone polishing a weapon, incenses me with her fragrance and mockingly flaunts all her perfections at me. She puts an audacious childish mischievousness into the game, but plays fair as regards her gestures so that I cannot complain.

  ‘Claudine, look at my toe-nails! I’ve got a marvellous new nail-powder. My nails are little convex mirrors . . .’

  The slender foot kicked off the mule and rose up, brazen and naked, displaying the gleaming, deliciously artificial pink of the nails that tipped the pale toes . . . then at the very moment when I might have been about to seize it and kiss it, it vanished.

  There is also the temptation of the hair; Rézi lazily entrusts me with the task of combing it. I acquit myself brilliantly, especially at the beginning. But prolonged contact with this golden stuff that I unravel and that is so electric that it clings to my dress and crackles under the tortoiseshell comb, like burning bracken, is too much for me. The magic of that intoxicating hair penetrates all through me and makes me torpid . . . Weakly, I let fall the loosened sheaf and Rézi becomes impatient – or pretends to.

  Yesterday night at dinner – a dinner for fifteen at the Lambrooks’ – while everyone was busy coping with lobster à l’américaine, she even dared to look me full in the face and make the adorable mime of a kiss – a silent, complete kiss, with her lips first pursed, then parted, and her sea-grey eyes open and imperious, then veiled.

  I was terrified that someone might see her and even more shaken by seeing her myself.

  Sometimes this nerve-racking game embarrasses Rézi herself. This happened this morning, in her flat.

  Wearing a straw-coloured petticoat and corsets, she was twisting and undulating in front of the mirrors, trying to do the back-bends like a ‘Spanish’ dancer in Montmartre and get the nape of her neck on a level with her hips.

  ‘Claudine, can you do that?’

  ‘Yes, and better than you can.’

  ‘I’m sure, dear. You’re like a well-tempered foil, hard and supple . . . Ah!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Are there mosquitoes at this time of year? Quick, quick. Look at my precious skin I love so much . . . and I’ve got to wear a low neck tonight!’

  She made an effort to see a bite (imaginary?) behind her bare shoulder. I bent forward.

  ‘There, there, a little above the shoulder-blade, higher, yes, that’s it . . . something stung me . . . What can you see?’

  I could see, close enough to touch, the perfectly curved shoulder, Rézi’s anxious profile, and, lower down, two bared young breasts round and far apart, like the ones gallants toy with in naughty eighteenth-century engravings. I saw all this, stupefied, and did not say a word. I was unaware, at first, of the intense gaze she had fixed on me. That gaze attracted mine at last, but I averted it to dwell on the peerless whiteness of that flawless, even-tinted skin where the breasts broke abruptly into pink at the tips, the same pink as her nail-varnish . . .

  Triumphant, Rézi followed my wandering eyes. But because they had become fixed and urgent, she weakened herself and her eyelashes fluttered like wasp-wings . . . Her eyes turned bluer and rolled upwards and it was she who whispered, ‘No, no . . . please . . .’ as palpably shaken as I was myself.

  ‘Please . . .’ That word, breathed on a sigh, with a mixture of sensuality and childishness, has done more to precipitate my defeat than the most searching caress.

  Nine

  ‘My darling child, whatever time’s this you’re coming in? When for once we’re dining alone at home! . . . Come along, quick; you look perfectly all right as you are; don’t rush off to your bedroom on the excuse of tidying up your curls – or we’ll be here till midnight! Come along, sit down, sweet! I’ve ordered something special for you tonight – those revolting aubergines with parmesan that you adore.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  I heard what he said without taking it in. Leaving Renaud holding my hat, I dug my fists into my hair and rubbed my overheated head, then collapsed on to the leather chair opposite my husband, under the kindly, shaded light.

  ‘No soup?’

  I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

  ‘Tell me where you’ve come from, with that sleep-walking expression and those eyes burning holes in your face. From Rézi’s, eh?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Claudine, my girl, you must admit I’m not a jealous husband!’

  Not jealous enough, alas! That was what I ought to have answered, instead of merely being content to think it. But he thrust a swarthy face towards me,
barred by a moustache lighter than the skin and softened by a feminine smile. He looked so radiant with amorous fatherliness that I did not dare.

  To occupy my restless hands, I broke off some golden crumbs to convey them to my mouth, but my hand dropped again; the obstinate perfume that clung to it made me go suddenly pale.

  ‘Are you ill, my little one?’ Renaud asked anxiously, flinging away his table-napkin . . .

  ‘No, no! Tired, that’s all. Please, I’m awfully thirsty . . .’

  He rang the bell and asked for the sparkling wine I like, the musty Asti I can never drink without a smile . . . But this time, I was tipsy before I had drunk a drop.

  All right, yes, I had come from Rézi’s! I wanted to scream, to stretch my arms till the sinews crackled so as to melt the maddening stiffness in the nape of my neck.

  I had gone to see her, as I do every day, about five o’clock. Without ever making an appointment, she always faithfully waits in for me then; without having made any promise, I faithfully arrive at that hour.

  I go to her on foot, walking fast. I watch the days drawing out and the March showers washing the pavements; the daffodils from Nice, heaped on the little barrows, fill the rainy air with their precocious, intoxicating, vulgar spring.

  It is on that short road that I study the march of the seasons now, I who used to watch as alertly as an animal for the first pointed leaf in the wood, the first wild anemone like a glimmer of mauve-streaked white flame, for the first willow catkins, whose little furry tails smelt like honey. Wild creature of the forest, you are caged now and you do not want to escape.

  Today, as always, Rézi was waiting for me in her green-and-white bedroom. The bed is painted dull white and the late Louis XV armchairs are upholstered in almond-green silk, scattered with little white bows and big white bunches of flowers. Against this tender green, her skin and her hair look dazzling.

  But today . . .

  ‘How dark it is in here, Rézi! And there’s no light in the hall! Say something. I can’t even see you.’

  Her voice answered me sulkily, coming from a deep armchair, one of those wicked chairs that are too wide for one person and a little too narrow for two . . .