Claudine Married

by Colette

  I sat up, with a start, in my little four-poster. The first smiling welcome of the bedroom of my childhood made me burst into floods of tears. Tears as bright as the sunbeam that danced in golden coins on the windowpanes, as soothing to my eyes as the flowers on the grey wallpaper. So it was really true that I was here, in this bedroom! There was no other thought in my head till I came to wipe my eyes with a little pink handkerchief that had no connection with Montigny . . .

  My unhappiness dried my tears. I had been hurt. A salutary hurt? I could almost believe it was, for, after all, I could not be thoroughly unhappy in Montigny, in this house . . . Oh! there was my little ink-stained desk! It still contained all my school exercise-books: Arithmetic . . . Dictation. For in Mademoiselle’s day, we no longer put Sums or Spelling. Dictation, Arithmetic sounded more distinguished, more ‘Secondary School’ . . .

  Hard nails scratched on the door and scrabbled at the keyhole. An anguished, imperious ‘Meow!’ summoned me to open it . . . ‘O my darling girl, how beautiful you are! My ideas are in such a muddle that, for a moment, I’d forgotten you, Fanchette!’ I took her into my arms, into my bed, and she thrust her wet nose and her cold teeth against my chin, so excited to see me again that she kneaded my bare arm with all her claws out. ‘How old are you now? Five, six? I can’t remember. Your white fur looks so young. You’ll die young . . . like Renaud. Oh dear, that memory’s gone and spoilt everything for me. Stay under my cheek so that I can forget myself, listening to all your purring machinery vibrating at full blast . . . Whatever must you have thought of me, arriving suddenly like that without any luggage? Even Papa smelt a rat!’

  ‘Well? And where’s the other animal? Your husband?’ he had asked.

  ‘He’ll come as soon as he’s less busy, Papa.’

  I was pale and absent-minded; I was still there in the rue Goethe, between those two people who had hurt me. Though it was past ten o’clock, I refused to eat anything; all I craved for was a bed, a warm, solitary burrow where I could think and weep and hate . . . But the darkness of my old bedroom sheltered so many kindly little ghosts that they lulled me into deep, dreamless sleep.

  There was a slither of slipshod feet. Mélie entered without knocking. She had dropped back at once into all the old ways. In one hand she held the little tray that had lost most of its varnish – the very same one – in the other, her left breast. She was faded and slatternly, with a touch of the procuress in her make-up, but the mere sight of her warmed my heart. What that ugly servant was bringing me in the steaming cup on the scabbed little tray was ‘the philtre that annihilates the years! . . .’ It smelt of chocolate, that philtre. I was dying of hunger!

  ‘Mélie!’

  ‘What, my precious lammy?’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  She paused long enough to put down her tray before answering, with a shrug of her flabby shoulders:

  ‘You bet I do.’

  It was true: I could feel it was true. She remained standing, watching me eat. Fanchette watched me too, sitting on my feet. Both of them admire me unreservedly. Nevertheless, Mélie shook her head and weighed her left breast with a disapproving expression on her face.

  ‘Don’t look any too hearty, you don’t. What have they been doing to you?’

  ‘I’ve had influenza. I wrote and told Papa that. By the way, where is Papa?’

  ‘Messing about in his den, I’ll be bound. Leastways, you’ll see him soon enough. Be you wanting me to fetch you a porger? I’ll go get un.’

  A ‘porger’ in our parts is a big wooden basin.

  ‘Get un for what?’ I said, slipping back into the beloved dialect.

  ‘Why, to wash Lord Behind and Lady Titty for sure!’

  ‘Deedy, yes. A good big one too!’

  In the doorway, she turned round and asked point-blank:

  ‘When be he coming . . . Monsieur Renaud?’

  ‘Be I like to know? He’ll write and tell you. Now, trot along, do!’

  While waiting for the porger, I leant out of the window. There was nothing to be seen in the street but a tumble of roofs. On account of the very steep slope, each house has its first floor on the level of the ground floor of the one above it. I was quite certain that the slope had grown steeper in my absence! I could see the corner of the rue des Soeurs, which runs straight – I mean, crooked – to the School . . . Should I go and see Mademoiselle? No; I wasn’t looking pretty enough . . . Besides, I might find little Hélène there – that future Rézi . . . No, no, no more girls, no more women! Spreading out my fingers, I shook my hand with slightly disgusted irritation, as if a long, smooth hair had got caught in my nails . . .

  I slipped, barefooted, into the drawing-room . . . Those old armchairs, the very rents in them were like welcoming smiles! Here, everything was in its right place. Two penitential years in Paris had not eclipsed the gaiety of their round backs and their pretty Louis XVI feet, still whitened with a remnant of paint . . . That Mélie, what a dolt she was! The blue vase that, for fifteen years, I had always seen on the left of the green vase, she had gone and put it on the right! Quickly, I restored everything to its proper place till I had completely recreated the setting in which I had lived nearly all my life. Nothing, in fact, was missing except my former gaiety, my cheerful solitude . . .

  On the other side of the shutters, closed against the sun, lay the garden . . . No, garden, no, I would not go and look at you for another hour! The mere whisper of your foliage would move me too much, it was so long since I had eaten green leaves!

  Papa probably thought I was asleep. Or else he had forgotten that I had arrived. No matter. In a little while, I would go into his lair and bring down a few maledictions on my head. Fanchette followed me step by step, terrified I might escape again. ‘My swee-ee-eet! Have no fear! I tell you, my telegram said: clothes and linen . . . for indefinite stay . . .’ Indefinite. What did that mean? I was no longer any too sure. But it certainly seemed to me that I was here for a long, long time . . . Ah! how good it was to give one’s misery a change of scene!

  My brief morning drifted by in the enchanted garden. It had grown. The temporary tenant had touched nothing, not even the grass on the paths, I believe . . .

  The enormous walnut-tree bore thousands and thousands of full nuts. Just breathing in the strong, funereal smell of one of its crumpled leaves made me close my eyes. I leant against it, the protector of the garden, but its destroyer too, for the chill of its shade kills the roses. What does it matter? Nothing is lovelier than a tree – than that particular tree. At the far end, against old Madame Adolphe’s wall, the twin fir-trees nodded an unsmiling greeting, stiff in their sombre raiment that serves for every season . . .

  The wistaria that climbs up to the roof had lost all its charming flowers . . . So much the better! I found it hard to forgive wistaria blossom for having adorned Rézi’s hair . . .

  Inert at the foot of the walnut-tree, I felt myself becoming a plant again. Over there, Quail Mountain looked blue and far away; it would be fine tomorrow, if Moustiers was not covered with cloud.

  ‘My lammykin! Look – see, a letter!’

  . . . A letter . . . Already! How brief the respite had been! Couldn’t he have left me a little time, a little more of sunshine and animal life? I felt very small and frightened, faced with the pain about to assault me . . . Oh, to wipe out everything that had been, wipe it out and start again quite fresh! . . .

  My darling child . . .

  He might just as well have stopped there. I knew everything he was going to say. Yes, I was his child! Why had he deceived me?

  My darling child, I cannot console myself for the pain I have caused you. You have done what you had every right to do and I am nothing but a wretched man who loves you and is desolate. You know, Claudine, you must surely know that nothing but imbecile curiosity impelled me to that, also that it isn’t about that I feel guilty: I tell you this at the risk of making you feel even harsher towards me. But I have hurt you and I can’t get a
moment’s peace. I’m sending you everything you asked for. I entrust you to the country you love. Remember that, in spite of everything, you are my one and only love, my one and only source of life. My ‘youth’ as you used to call it when you still used to look up into my eyes and laugh – that dismal youth of a man already old – has vanished at one stroke with you . . .

  How it hurt, how it hurt! I sobbed, sitting there on the ground with my head against the rough flank of the walnut-tree. My own pain tormented me; so, alas, did his . . . I had never before known what a ‘broken heart’ was, and now I was enduring the anguish of two, and suffering even more for his than mine . . . Renaud, Renaud! . . .

  Sitting there, I gradually became numb; my sorrow slowly congealed. My burning eyes followed the flight of a wasp, the ‘frrt’ of a bird, the complicated journey of a ground-beetle . . . How blue the blue of those aconites was! a fine full-bodied colour, strong and plebeian . . . Where did that honeyed breath come from, smelling of attar of roses and spiced cake? . . . It was the great nymph’s-thigh rose-bush wafting me its incense . . . That bush brought me to my feet, that were swarming all over with ants, to go over and greet it.

  So many roses, so many roses! I wanted to say to it: ‘Rest. You have flowered enough, worked enough, exhausted enough of your strength and your fragrance . . .’ It wouldn’t have listened to me. It wanted to beat the rose record in number and in scent. It had stamina, it had speed, it gave everything it had. Its innumerable daughters were pretty little roses, like the ones on Holy Pictures, barely tinted at the edges of the petals, with little hearts of vivid carmine. Taken singly, they might seem slightly insipid, but who would dream of criticizing the mantle, murmurous with bees, they had thrown over this wall?

  ‘Swine of a donkey! Will someone flay the skin of that infamous beast vomited up by the jaws of hell? . . .’

  No possible doubt that was Papa giving signs of life. Delighted at the thought of seeing him, of distracting myself with his extravagant absurdity, I ran. I saw him leaning out of a window on the first floor, the library one. His beard had whitened a little, but it still poured in a tricoloured flood over his vast chest. His nostrils snorted fire and his gesture struck consternation into the universe.

  ‘What’s the matter, Papa?’

  ‘That filthy cat has walked all over my beautiful wash-drawing with her dirty paws, ruined it for ever! She bloody well deserves to be chucked out of the window!’

  So he was perpetrating wash-drawings now? I trembled a little for my darling Fanchette.

  ‘Oh, Papa, you haven’t hurt her?’

  ‘No, of course not! But I might have done and I ought to have done, d’you hear, you daughter of a wheezy horse?’

  I breathed again. Seeing him so rarely now, I had forgotten how harmless his thunderbolts were.

  ‘And you, my Dine, are you well?’

  His infinitely tender voice, that pet name of my very earliest childhood, reopened fountains of youth in me; I listened to bright, fleeting memories plashing drop by drop. Thank goodness, he had started thundering again!

  ‘Well, she-ass, I’m talking to you, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, Papa dear, I’m well. Are you working?’

  ‘It’s insulting to me even to doubt it. Here, read this; it appeared last week; it produced an earthquake. All my oafs of colleagues pulled long faces . . .’

  He threw me down the number of Reports that included his precious contribution.

  Malacology, malacology! To thy faithful devotees thou dispensest happiness and oblivion of humanity and all its woes . . . Flicking through the little magazine (its cover was a cheerful pink), I came across the authentic slug in this word that trailed its slimy length of fifty-four letters right across the page. Tetramethylmonophenilsulfotriparaamidotriphenylmethane . . . Alas! I could hear Renaud’s laugh at the discovery of such a gem.

  ‘Would you let me keep this, Papa? Or is it your only copy?’

  ‘No,’ he replied from his window, like Jupiter from Olympus. ‘I’ve ordered ten thousand private reprints of it from Gauthier-Villars.’

  ‘That was wise. What time do we have lunch?’

  ‘Ask the domestic staff. I am nothing but a brain. I don’t eat. I think!’

  With a noise like thunder, he slammed his window shut and the sunlight glittered on the panes.

  I knew him; this man who was nothing but a brain would shortly be ‘thinking’ a large beef steak.

  My entire day drifted by in searching step by step, crumb by crumb, for all the fragments of my childhood scattered in the corners of the old house; in staring, through the bars of the gate that the powerful wistaria had wrenched out of shape, at Quail Mountain changing and growing paler, then turning purple in the distance. The thick woods whose rich, dense green took on a blue tinge towards evening, those I would leave till tomorrow. I was not ready to love them yet . . . Today, I dressed my wound, and nursed my hurt in a sheltered place. Too much light, too much clean wind and the green briars blossoming with wild roses might rip off the light cotton-wool of healing that swathed my sorrow.

  In the reddening evening, I listened to the kindly garden settling down to sleep. Above my head, the black shape of a little bat zigzagged in silent flight . . . A Saint-Jean pear-tree, lavish and hurried, dropped its round fruits one by one – those pears that are sleepy as soon as they are ripe and bring tenacious wasps down with them as they fall . . . Five, six, ten wasps in the hole of one little pear . . . They go on eating as they fall, merely beating the air with their light wings . . . That was just how Rézi’s golden lashes used to flutter under my lips.

  This reminder of my treacherous mistress did not make me double up inwardly with the pain I dreaded. Ah, I had been right in my surprise that I had not loved her.

  Whereas there was something else I could not conjure up without a torturing pang, without clasping my hands in anguish – Renaud’s tall figure in the dimness of that flowered bedroom, watching my face for my decision, his sad eyes fearing the irrevocable . . .

  ‘My pettikins, a telegram for you!’

  Honestly, it was too much! I turned round, menacing and furious, ready to tear the paper to shreds.

  ‘It’s reply paid.’

  I read: Urgently request news of health.

  . . . He had not dared say more. He had been conscious of Papa, of Mélie, of Mademoiselle Mathieu, the post-mistress.

  I was conscious of them too, in my reply: Comfortable journey. Father very well.

  I cried in my sleep but I cannot remember what I dreamt. Yet it was a dream. Day was just breaking; it was only three o’clock. The hens were still asleep, only the sparrows were twittering, making a noise like gravel being shifted. It was going to be fine; the dawn was blue . . .

  I wanted, as I used to do as a little girl, to get up before the sun and go to the wood of Fredonnes to catch the nocturnal taste of the cold spring and the last shreds of the night that retreats into the undergrowth before the first rays and buries itself there . . .

  I jumped out of bed. Fanchette, asleep and deprived of the hollow between my knees, coiled herself round like a snail without so much as opening an eye. She gave a little moan, then pressed her white paw more firmly over her closed eyes. She is not interested in dewy dawns. She only cares for clear, bright nights when, sitting upright and austere as an Egyptian cat-goddess, she stares interminably at the white moon moving across the sky.

  My hasty dressing and that uncertain early half-light took me back to winter mornings when I used to get up shivering and set off to school, through the cold and the unswept snow. A skimpy little urchin, brave under my red hood, I would crack boiled chestnuts with my teeth as I slid along on my small pointed sabots.

  I passed through the garden and climbed over the spikes of the gate. I wrote on the kitchen floor, with a piece of charcoal: ‘Claudine has gone out. She’ll be back for lunch.’ Before climbing over the gate, with my skirt hitched up, I smiled at my house, for nothing is more my very own than
that big granite dwelling with its peeling shutters open day and night over unsuspicious windows. The mauve slate of the roof was adorned with close-shaven little yellow lichens and, on the flag of the weathercock, two swallows were puffing out their white chests, offering them to be scratched by the first sharp rays of sunlight.

  My unwonted appearance in the street disturbed dogs who were doing duty as scavengers, and grey cats fled silently, their backs arched. Safe on a window-sill, they gazed after me with yellow eyes . . . In a minute or two, they would come down again, when the noise of my footsteps had decreased round the turning . . .

  These Paris boots were no good at all for Montigny. I would get some other, less elegant ones, with little nails in the soles . . .

  The exquisite cold of the blue dusk struck my skin, so long unused to it, and pinched my ears. But up there on the heights, lilac mists drifted like gauzy sails and the edges of the roofs had suddenly turned a violent orange-pink . . . I almost ran towards the light till I reached the Saint-Jean gate, half-way up the hill, where a cheerful tumble-down house, stuck there all by itself at the edge of the town, guards the entrance to the fields. There I stopped, heaving a great sigh . . .

  Had I reached the end of my troubles? Up here, would I feel the last impact of the cruel blow die away? In that valley, narrow as a candle, I had laid all the dreams of sixteen years of solitary childhood . . . I seemed to see them sleeping there still, veiled in a milky mist that rippled and flowed like a sea . . .

  The clatter of a shutter being thrown open chased me away from the heap of stones where I had been day-dreaming in the wind that almost froze my lips . . . It was not the people of Montigny I had come out to see. What I wanted was to descend the hill, go through that bed of mist, climb the sandy yellow path on the other side up to the woods whose crests were tipped with fiery rose . . . Onwards!

  I walked on and on, in anxious haste, keeping my eyes on the ground all along the hedgerows, as if I were searching for the herb that would heal me . . .

  I returned home half an hour after midday, more exhausted and dishevelled than if three poachers had set upon me in the woods. But while Mélie moaned and lamented, I stared at my reflection with a passive smile. My tired face was striped with a pink scratch near my lip, my hair was matted with burrs, my soaking skirt was embroidered with little, green hairy beads of wild millet. My blue linen skirt was split under the arms, and a warm, damp smell rose up in my nostrils, that smell that so madly excited Ren . . . No, I never wanted to think of him again!