by Colette
[Translated by Herma Briffault]
“If I Had a Daughter . . .”
“In the first place, if I had a daughter . . .”
“But you don’t have a daughter!”
My friend Valentine shrugs her shoulders, vexed. I’ve broken one of the rules of her favorite game: the game of If I Had. I already know how this peremptory young woman would behave if she had an automobile, if she had a yacht, if her husband were Minister of War, if she inherited ten million francs, if she were a great actress . . .
When she enters my home, it’s as though the wind were rising, and I squint as I do at the seashore. She arrives, out of breath, and looks around her, sighing each time, “You can say what you like, my dear, but Passy is the middle of nowhere!”
Even if she asks me to, I won’t say anything about what I want . . . but I let her spout off anything that comes into her head.
Since the Ballets Russes, my friend Valentine has been stiffly wearing fashions that the softest Oriental grace would barely excuse. She perfumes herself with jasmine and rose, swears by Teheran and Isfahan, and—wrapped in a Byzantine dress set off with a Marie Antoinette fichu, with a Cossack bonnet on her head and American shoes sharpened into sabots on her feet—is quick to exclaim: “How can anyone not be Persian!”
She is earnest, fickle, and spirited. Once in the door, she showers me with streams of words, endless strings of contradictory axioms. I am dear to her because I don’t put up a struggle, and it pleases her to think I’m timid when I’m only flabbergasted. She talks while I read or write . . . Today, the warm and rainy autumn afternoon brings her to me very well behaved and stiff—she is playing the part of the bourgeoise and is despotically raising the children she doesn’t have.
“If I had a daughter . . . Oh, my dear, I’d show people what I think of modern education and this mania for sports, and these Americanized young girls! It all makes for some very sorry wives, I can tell you, and absolutely pitiful mothers! What are you looking at in the garden?”
“Nothing . . .”
Nothing . . . I am silently asking the russet trees and the softened earth where my friend Valentine could have gotten her facts about modern education. I am not looking at anything, except my neighbors’ narrow garden and their house, a brick and wooden chalet forgotten among the last gardens left in Passy.
“A return to family life, my dear, it’s the only way! And family life like our grandmothers understood it! They didn’t worry about baccalaureates for girls back then, and nobody was any the worse for it; on the contrary!”
I look up for a moment at my houri in the green caftan, searching in vain for the morbid trace of a poorly healed baccalaureate.
“Yes, you can be sure if I had a daughter, I’d make her a little provincial girl, healthy and quiet, the old-fashioned way. A little piano, not too much reading, but lots of sewing! She would know how to mend, embroider, and take care of the linen. My dear, I can see her as if she were right here—my daughter! Her smooth hair, with a flat collar . . . I swear to you, I can see her!”
I can see her, too. She has just sat down, as she does every afternoon, in the house next door, near the window: she is little more than a child, with sleek hair and a pale complexion, who lowers her eyes over some embroidery . . .
“I would dress her in those nice little fabrics, you know, with a somewhat subdued background and silly little patterns. Not to mention what a great hit she would be in them! And every day, every day, instead of classes at the Sorbonne or fashionable lectures, she would sit down by a window, or near a lamp—I have a little oil lamp, it’s just the thing, made of tinted porcelain, it’s gorgeous!—she would sit down with her embroidery or her crocheting. A young lady who plies her needle isn’t looking for trouble, believe me!”
What is she thinking of, this diligent child, of whom, at this moment, all I can see is her smooth dark hair, tied at the back with a black ribbon? Her hand rises and falls, pulling on a long silk thread, and flutters like a bird on the end of a string . . .
In the middle of her attack of Platonic motherhood, my friend Valentine delivers a peroration: “Needlework, woman’s work, oh, yes, my dear, needlework! People have joked about it enough, without realizing that, back then, it was responsible for the security of many a family, the moral well-being of many an adolescent!”
The child embroidering there in the little house has raised her head. She is looking out at the damp garden, where wet leaves are raining down, as if she doesn’t even see it. She has deep-set and serious eyes, dark eyes, which are all that move in her motionless face . . .
“Don’t you agree, deep down?”
. . . Big velvety eyes, which scan the garden, searching between the trees for a corner of sky, and turn back distrustfully toward the room drowned in shadow . . .
“Oh, when you’re having one of your absentminded days, nobody can come near you! Well, I’m sorry, very sorry indeed! Good night!”
. . . and return to the embroidery she had begun, sheltered under the heavy eyelids. Every day this dark-haired little girl sits and embroiders until it is time to light the lamps.
If the weather’s nice, her window is open, and as night falls, I can hear someone calling her.
“Lucy, come here now, you’ll ruin your eyes!”
Reluctantly, she leaves her chair, and her light work—and I wait till the next day for the reappearance, against the obscure background of an old-fashioned room, of this pretty phantom from my own far-off adolescence . . .
A provincial girl with long, smooth hair, plying the needle . . . Very good, isn’t she? and willingly silent, and not very curious . . . Do they call this girl “little dreamer” too? Does this girl go to her low chair, as to the threshold of the forbidden garden which she enters alone, each day, under the blind eyes of those around her? Between them and the dangerous lands she wanders through, does she spread out the handkerchief she is scalloping or the stiff toile, as if to bar all access?
Needlework, woman’s work, the safety of confident mothers . . . For a solitary little girl, what immoral book can equal the long silence, the unbridled reverie over the openwork muslin or the rosewood loom? Overly precise, a bad book might frighten, or disappoint. But the bold daydream soars up, sly, impudent, varied, to the rhythm of the needle as it bites the silk; it grows, beats the silence with burning wings, inflames the pale little hand, the cheek where the shadow of the eyelashes flutters. It fades away, draws back, seems to dissolve when a word is spoken out loud, when a thread breaks, or a ball of thread rolls away—it becomes diaphanous in order to let the familiar furnishings, the passerby who brushes against the window, show through from time—but the newly threatened needle, the virgin canvas, the task resumed, assures its return, and it is that which always bends the necks of so many diligent girls, that which secretly dwells in so many “waking dreamers”—that which I recognize in the gaze of my little neighbor, the little girl-child leaning forward, the beautiful feminine gaze, astray, moving in a motionless face . . .
Rites
“You don’t mind if I dress in front of you?”
“Not at all.”
“You’re so nice . . . I’m so glad to see you,” adds my friend Valentine.
But I can see her reflection in the slanted mirror, her reflection with which she has just exchanged an anxious glance, an exasperated movement of her eyebrows . . . I’m annoying her . . . I’ve come at a bad time . . . She’s telling me to go to the devil . . . Even farther: to the depths of Passy, where I live! She’s wishing me there, she’s getting me settled and locking me in, with a book on my knees, in front of a good summer fire.
“You see,” she concludes aloud, not without ingenuity, “I’m dining out and our whole party will be going to the dress rehearsal of The Wisteria Vine, so . . .”
“Don’t jabber, just get dressed as if I weren’t here.”
In fact, she tosses off her dress and her little underpants, her Valencia-lace brassiere, scratches her b
are arms, and runs the palm of her hand over her rumpled chemise, with the shocking immodesty of a woman undressing in front of another woman. But she slips into the mystery of the shadows, to take off her shoes with her back turned. She recovers her self-assurance with a pair of purple tulle stockings and two glittering gold shoes, so beautiful that my friend smiles at them tenderly, as she walks around the room, graceful and lightly clad. A shooting pain pulls down the corners of her mouth and she lets out a very sincere and common “Ouch! my feet,” as she collapses in front of the dressing table.
The work which is about to follow is quite familiar to me: it is the skillful, almost theatrical application of makeup, which completes and banalizes fashion-conscious young women-about-town. I say young women, because the others apply it with more discretion, leaving to their younger sisters the feverish taste for heavy makeup, the dabbling joy of children fingering the white, red, and blue paints, staining themselves with it up to the ears.
But I’m not going to open my mouth. There is a time for everything, and I know that one does not gossip while “doing” one’s face. I have to settle for impatient little sounds and the tail ends of sentences which my friend Valentine drops, dry, in a heap, like the little wads of cotton she rubs over her cheeks and eyelids, and then throws away afterward . . .
“Everything’s all right with you? . . . That’s good . . . It really is very strange that I can’t get my maid to fill my pot of cold cream when it’s empty . . . Please, darling, tell me it isn’t eight o’clock or I’ll scream! . . . So, everything’s all right with you? . . . Naturally, when I want to hurry, I mess up the tip of my nose . . . Why no, I don’t have too much rouge on . . . Please, darling, don’t talk to me right now, I’ll end up with mascara in my eye . . .”
The activity and chatter of the theater, the nervousness of an actress about to miss her entrance . . . Except for the elegant boudoir, you couldn’t tell the difference. I answer just enough so that my friend almost forgets my presence, so that she’ll let me follow and record the transformations of her tilting reflection.
First there is her real face, completely naked, cleansed with Vaseline, the face her mother gave her. She shows it to her husband, to her maid, and to me, since I’m not important either. It’s a little, fair-skinned face, with bright blue eyes and tired-looking eyelids, a little red in the cheekbones and the wings of the nose. The eyelashes are very blond and must shine in the sun like crushed glass—but when do they see the sun? They’re just about to regain their artificial blackness and starch. A comb, which she has just stuck in place with a firm hand, holds my friend’s delicately tinted, almost pink hair both up and back. Within the silver frame of the mirror, the whole effect is luminous, with a pretty neatness to it, anemic and distinguished. A neck that slender would need a white collar of fairly stiff, fresh-looking lace. The comb, stuck in sideways for this hasty toilette, would have to bite further into her beautiful hair, so as to draw it tighter, to smooth it back into a bold upsweep, high above the long graceful neck. I would like to see my friend Valentine keep the acid charm of a gleaming, genuine blonde, keen, sharp, and cambered like a vermeil fork. I would like . . .
But that is neither here nor there! Before my eyes, with imbecilic fervor, she is performing the rites ordained by Fashion. Her hair hangs down, lowering her forehead, hiding her little childish ears and the silvery nape of her neck. If it makes her chin look heavier, and her neck shorter, it’s none of my business . . . A skillful “shading” of color, from white to crimson, covers her cheeks so richly that I feel the urge to write my name, with the tip of my fingernail, right in the powder.
Over the long elastic corset the maid slips the evening dress—a kind of complicated zaïmph, embroidered and re-embroidered, painted, slashed, torn to luxurious shreds, one of which restrains the breasts, another the knees, and a third which comes up the front of the skirt to fasten it, halfway up, in the most ludicrous and most indiscreetly precise manner.
A colorist’s heated and barbaric imagination lavished this fabric with orange and purple, the green of Venetian necklaces, and the blue-black of sapphires, intermingled with gold; but a “master of fashion” tore it all up with the freakish imagination of an evil and illiterate gnome. Then a woman came along—my friend Valentine came along—and cried out, “I’m Scheherazade, too—like everybody else!”
She struts around in front of me, in knock-kneed rhythm. She has loaded down her light, blond beauty with everything befitting a sultana as pale and round as the moon. A precious and tear-shaped jewel from the Orient sparkles between her eyebrows, astonished that with its glimmering fires it should extinguish two Western eyes of a modest blue. What’s more, my friend has just fixed a long aigrette sprinkled with stardust on her head . . .
The peris, in the Persian paradise, had both this star on their foreheads and this wispy cloud. But my friend’s feet disappear under a very Greek petticoat, with regular and supple pleats, tightened at the knees by a Hindu drapery. Her hand teases and tucks the squared-off Byzantine sash with beaded Egyptian designs.
Satisfied and serious, she admires herself, without suspecting that something is happening to her . . . Well, for heaven’s sake, it’s the same thing that happens to so many young Parisiennes with light complexions, pointed noses and chins, poor skin, and thin eyelashes, as soon as they disguise themselves as Asian princesses: she looks like a little maid.
Newly Shorn
My friend Valentine sat down, powdered the wings of her nose, the hollow of her chin and, after a friendly exchange of compliments, was silent. I viewed this with some surprise, for on days when we have nothing to say to each other, my friend Valentine embroiders with ease on the theme “Ah, subjects of conversation are becoming so rare!”—a good three-quarters of an hour of scintillating palaver . . .
She was quiet and I saw that she had changed something about the carriage of her head. With a slightly timid air, she had lowered her head and was looking at me from under her jutting brow.
“I’ve cut my hair,” she confessed suddenly, and took off her hat.
The beautiful blond hair on the nape of her neck showed its fresh cut, still rebelling against the metal, and from a part on the left a big Chateaubriand-style wave swept down across her forehead.
“It doesn’t look too bad on me, does it?” my friend asked with false daring.
“Surely not.”
“I was just at the Hickses’, they gave me hundreds of compliments, Monsieur Hicks told me I look like . . . guess.”
“Like someone convalescing from typhoid fever?”
“Very funny, really . . . but that’s not it.”
“Like Dujardin-Beaumetz, only more shorn? Like Drummont, without his glasses?”
“Wrong again. Like an English peeress, my dear!”
“The Hickses know some English peeresses, do they?”
“You’re sidestepping the question, as usual. Does it look good or bad on me?”
“Good. Very good, in fact. But I’m thinking about that long hair which is nothing but dead, golden grass now. Tell me, why did you have your hair cut too, like everybody else?”
My friend Valentine shrugged her shoulders. “How do I know? . . . Just an idea, that’s all. I couldn’t stand myself in long hair anymore . . . And then, it’s the fashion. In England, it seems that . . .”
“Yes, yes, but why else?”
“Well, Charlotte Lysès cut hers,” she says evasively. “And even Sorel. I haven’t seen her, but I heard that she’s wearing her hair ‘like a Roman gladiator.’ And Annie de Pène, and hundreds of other women of taste whose names I could mention, and . . .”
“And Polaire.”
My friend paused in astonishment. “Polaire? She hasn’t had her hair cut.”
“I thought she had.”
“She has very long short hair. That doesn’t have anything to do with the current fashion. Polaire wears her hair like Polaire. I didn’t think of Polaire for a minute when I was having my ha
ir cut.”
“What did you think of? I would like to try and understand, through you, why women are contagiously clipping their hair, level with the ear, so much hair which until now was pampered, waved, perfumed . . .”
She stood up impatiently, and walked around, tossing her romantic forelock.
“You’re funny . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t stand my long hair anymore, I’m telling you. And besides it’s hot. And at night that long braid would pull at the back of my neck, and it would get rolled up around my arm . . .”
“Thirty years wasn’t long enough for you to get used to that thick, beautiful cable?”
“It seems that way. You question me, and I answer you, only because I’m so nice. Oh, yes, the other morning, my braid got caught in a dresser drawer I’d pushed shut. I hate that. And when we were having those air-raid alerts, it became a scourge; no one enjoys looking grotesque even in a cellar, now do they, with a chignon that’s collapsing on one side and unraveling on the other. I could have died a thousand deaths because of that hair . . . And then, in the end, it can’t be reasoned about. I cut my hair because I cut my hair.”
In front of the mirror, she subdued her curls, and aired her 1830s wave, with newly acquired gestures. How many newly shorn women have already invoked, in order to excuse the same vandalism, reasons of coquetry, herd instinct, anglophilia—and even economy—before arriving at: “How do I know?”
One came up with “My neuralgia . . .”
“You understand, I had had it with bleaching, I just had to do something new with my hair . . .” explained another.
“It’s cleaner,” imagined a third. “You can wash your hair at the same time as the rest, in the bath . . .”