by Colette
My friend Valentine did not add a novel lie of her own to this lot of modest verities. But her attitude, like theirs, is that of a prisoner who has just broken her chains. So I can assume myself—in the free coquetry of a head no longer weighed down by a pinned-up coil of hair, in the pride of a forehead on which the wind scatters a slightly masculine curliness—I can amuse myself by reading or imagining in it the joy of having shaken off an old fear that the war, the approach of the enemy, had roused from a long oblivion, and the barely conscious memory of the frantic flight of women before the barbarians when they ran naked and the flag of their hair, behind them, was suddenly knotted in the fist of their ravisher . . .
Grape Harvest
I had written to my friend Valentine: “Come, they’ll be harvesting the grapes.” She came, wearing flat-heeled canvas shoes and an autumn-colored skirt; one bright-green sweater, and another pink one; one hat made of twill and another made of velvet, and both, as she said, “invertebrate.” If she hadn’t called a slug a snail, and asked if bats were the female of the screech owl, she wouldn’t have been taken for ‘someone from Paris.”
“Harvesting the grapes?” she asked, astonished. “Really? Despite the war?”
And I understood that deep down she was finding fault with all that the pretty phrase “harvesting the grapes” seems to promise and call forth of rather licentious freedom, singing and dancing, risqué intentions, and overindulgence . . . Don’t people traditionally refer to it as “the festival of the grape”?
“Despite the war, Valentine,” I confessed. “What can you do? They haven’t found a way of gathering the grapes without harvesting them. There are a lot of grapes. With the full-flavored grapes we’ll make several casks of the wine that’s drunk young and doesn’t gain anything from aging, the wine that’s as rough on the mouth as a swear word, and which the peasants celebrate the way people praise a boxer: ‘Damn strong stuff,’ being unable to find any other virtues in it.”
The weather was so beautiful the day of the harvest, it was so enjoyable to dally along the way, that we didn’t reach the hillside until around ten o’clock, the time when the low hedges and the shady meadows are still drenched in the blue and the cold of dripping dew, while the busy Limousin sun is already stinging your cheeks and the back of your neck, warming the late peaches under their cottony plush, the firmly hanging pears, and the apples, too heavy this year, which are picked off by a gust of wind. My friend Valentine stopped at the blackberries, the fuzzy teasel, even at the forgotten ears of maize whose dry husks she forced back and whose kernels she gobbled down like a little hen.
Like the guide, in the desert, walking ahead and promising the lagging traveler the oasis and the spring, I cried out to her from a distance, “Come on, hurry up, the grapes are better, and you’ll drink the first juice from the vat, you’ll have bacon and chicken in the pot!”
Our entry into the vineyard caused no commotion. The work pressed on, and moreover, our attire warranted neither curiosity nor even consideration. My friend had agreed, in order to sacrifice herself to the blood of the grape, that I lend her an old checked skirt, which since 1914 had seen many other such sacrifices, and my personal adornments didn’t go beyond an apron-smock made of polka-dot sateen. A few weather-beaten heads were raised above the cordons of vines, hands held out two empty baskets toward us, and we set to work.
Since my friend Valentine was thinning her bunches of grapes like an embroideress, with delicate snips of her scissors, it pleased a jovial and mute old faun, popping up opposite her, to give her something of a fright, and then silently show her how the clusters of grapes come off the stock and drop into the basket, if one knows how to pinch a secret suspension point, revealed to the fingers by a little abscess, a swelling where the stem breaks like glass. A moment later, Valentine was gathering the grapes, sans scissors, as quickly as her instructor the faun, and I didn’t want her doing better or more than I, so the eleven o’clock sun wasted no time in moistening our skin and parching our tongues.
Whoever said grapes quench one’s thirst? These Limousin grapes, grafted from American stock, so ripe they had split, so sweet they were peppery, staining our skirts, and being crushed in our baskets, inflamed us with thirst and intoxicated the wasps. Was my friend Valentine searching, when she straightened up to rest from time to time, was she searching the hillside, amid the well-regulated comings and goings of the empty and full baskets, for the child cupbearer who might bring an earthen jar filled with cool water? But the children carried only bunch after bunch of grapes, and the men—three old caryatids with muscles bared—transported only purple-stained tubs toward the gaping storeroom of the farm at the bottom of the hill.
The exuberance of the pure morning had gone away. Noon, the austere hour when the birds are silent, when the shortened shadow crouches at the foot of the tree. A cope of heavy light crushed down on the slate roofs, flattened out the hillside, smoothed out the shady fold of the valley. I watched the sluggishness and melancholy of midday descend over my energetic friend. Was she looking around her, among the silent workers, for a gaiety she might find fault in perhaps? Some relief—which she didn’t wait for long.
A village clock was answered by a joyful murmuring, the sound of clogs on the hardened paths, and a distant cry:
“Soup’s on! soup’s on! soup’s on!”
Soup? Much more and much better than soup, in the shelter of a tent made of reed thatch draped with ecru sheets, pinned up by twigs with green acorns, blue convolvulus, and pumpkin flowers. Soup and all its vegetables, yes, but boiled chicken too, and short ribs of beef, and bacon as pink and white as a breast, and veal in its own juices. When the aroma of this feast reached my friend’s nose, she smiled that unconscious, expansive smile one sees on nurslings who have had their fill of milk and women who have had their fill of pleasure.
She sat down like a queen, in the place of honor, folded her purple-stained skirt under her, rolled back her sleeves, and cavalierly held out her glass to her neighbor to the right, for him to fill, with a saucy laugh. I saw by the look on her face that she was about to call him “my good man” . . . but she looked at him, kept quiet, and turned toward her neighbor to the left, then toward me as though in need of help and advice . . . As it was, country protocol had seated her between two harvesters who between them carried, slightly bent under such a weight, a hundred and sixty-six years. One was thin, dried up, pellucid, with bluish eyes and impalpable hair, who lived in the silence of an aged sprite. The other, still a giant, with bones fit for making clubs, singlehandedly cultivated a piece of land, boasting ahead of time, in defiance of death, about the asparagus he’d get out of it “in four or five years”!
I saw the moment when Valentine, between her two old men, began losing her cheerfulness, and I had a liter of cider taken to her by a page who was just the sort to distract her, one of those beaming boys a little ungainly for their sixteen years—with a submissive and deceitful forehead, brown eyes, and a nose like an Arab—and every bit as handsome as the hundred-times-praised shepherds of Italy. She smiled at him, without paying him much attention, for she was in the grip of a statistical preoccupation. She asked the wispy old man, then the powerful octogenarian, their ages. She leaned forward to learn that of another frizzy-haired and wrinkled laborer who only admitted to seventy-three years. She gathered still other figures known to all from the far ends of the table—sixty-eight and seventy-one—began muttering to herself, adding up lustra and centuries, and was laughed at by a strapping young wench five times a mother, who shouted to her from where she sat: “Say, then, you like ’em like wine, huh, with cobwebs on the cork!”—provoking cracked laughter and young laughter, remarks in dialect and in very clear French as well, which made my friend blush and renewed her appetite. She wanted some more bacon, and cut into the peasant bread, made of pure wheat, brown but succulent, and demanded from the gnarled giant an account of the war of 1870. It was brief.
“What’s to say? It wasn’t a
very pretty sight . . . I remember everybody falling all around me and dying in their own blood. Me, nothin’ . . . not a bullet, not a bayonet. I was left standing, and them on the ground . . . who knows why?”
He fell into an indifferent silence, and the faces of the women around us darkened. Until then, no mother deprived of her sons, no sister accustomed to double work without her brother, had spoken of the war or those missing, or groaned under the weariness of three years . . . The farmer’s wife, tight-lipped, busied herself by setting out thick glasses for the coffee, but she said nothing of her son, the artilleryman. One gray-haired farmer, very tired, his stomach cinched up with a truss, said nothing about his four sons: one was eating roots in Germany, two were fighting, the fourth was sleeping beneath a machine-gunned bit of earth . . .
From a very old woman, seated not far from the table on a bundle of straw, came this remark: “All this war, it’s the barons’ fault . . .”
“The barons?” inquired Valentine with great interest. “What barons?”
“The barons of France,” said the cracked voice. “And them of Germany! All the wars are the fault of the barons.”
“How’s that?”
My friend gazed at her avidly, as if hoping that the black rags would fall, and that the woman would rise up, a hennin on her head, her body in vair, croaking, “I, I am the fourteenth century!” But nothing of the kind happened, the old woman merely shook her head, and all that could be heard were the drunken and confident wasps, the puffing of a little train off in the distance, and the mawing gums of the pellucid old man . . .
Meantime, I had broken the maize galette with my hands, and the tepid coffee stood in the glasses, which the harvesters were already turning away from, back toward the blazing hillside . . .
“What,” said Valentine, astonished, “no siesta?”
“Yes, of course! But only for you and me. Come over under the hazelnut trees, we can let ourselves melt away, ever so gently, with heat and sleep. The grape harvest isn’t allowed the siesta that goes with the wheat harvest. There they are already back at work, look . . .”
But it wasn’t true, for the ascending column of men and women had just halted, attentive . . .
“What are they looking at?”
“Someone’s coming through the field . . . two ladies. They’re waving to the harvesters . . . They know them. Did you invite any of your country neighbors?”
“None. Wait, I think I know that blue dress. Why . . . Why, it’s . . .”
“They’re . . . Why, yes, certainly!”
Unhurried, coquettish, one beneath a straw hat, the other beneath a white parasol, our two maids moved toward us. Mine was swinging, above two little khaki-colored kid shoes, a blue serge skirt which set off the saffron-colored lawn of her blouse. My friend’s soubrette, all in mauve, was showing her bare arms through her openwork sleeves, and her belt, made of white suede like her shoes, gripped a waist which fashion might perhaps have preferred less frail . . .
From our hideaway in the shade, we saw ten men run up to them, and twenty hands hail them on the steep slope, while envious little girls carried their parasols for them. The aged giant, suddenly animated, sat one of the maids down on an empty tub and hoisted the whole thing onto his shoulder; a handsome, suntanned adolescent smelled the handkerchief he had snatched from one of the two young women. The heavy air seemed light to them, now that two women’s laughter, affected, deliberately prolonged, had set it in motion . . .
“They’ve gone to considerable expense, heavens!” murmured my friend Valentine. “That’s my mauve Dinard dress from three years ago. She’s redone the front of the bodice . . .”
“Really?” I said in a low voice. “Louise has on my serge skirt from two years ago. I would never have believed it could look so fresh. You could still find magnificent serge back then . . . The devil if I know why I ever gave her my yellow blouse! I could use it on Sundays this year . . .”
I glanced involuntarily at my polka-dot apron-smock, and I saw that Valentine was holding, between two contemptuous fingers, my old checked skirt, covered with purple stains. Above us, on the roasting hillside, the mauve young woman and the yellow one were walking amid flattering laughter and happy exclamations. The elegance, the Parisian touch, the chatelaine’s dignity, of which we had deprived the grape harvest, were no longer missing, thanks to them, and the rough workers once again became gallant, youthful, audacious, for them . . .
A hand, that of a man kneeling, invisible, between the vine stocks, raised a branch laden with blue grapes up to our maids, and both of them, rather than fill any basket, plucked off what pleased them.
Then they sat down on their unfolded handkerchiefs on the edge of a slope, parasols open, to watch the harvesting of the grapes, and each harvester rivaled the other in ardor before their benevolent idleness.
Our silence had lasted a long time, when my friend Valentine broke it with these words, unworthy, to be sure, of the great thought they expressed: “What I say is . . . bring back feudalism!”
In the Boudoir
In my friend Valentine’s Restoration boudoir—for her the “Restoration” embraces, generously and anachronistically, the fifteenth century, the Directorate, the Second Empire, and on to the Grévy style—there is a little painting by Velvet Brueghel. Snow turned to smoky gold, a little house with a pointed roof from which stream miraculous beams of light, and, converging on the little house, theories of bourgeois gnomes in fur bonnets; in short, a Nativity by Velvet Brueghel, what an antique dealer might call a “pretty curio” or a “little wonder,” depending on whether he’s easygoing or distinguished.
At my friend Valentine’s, I often drink tea I don’t like, while looking at the Brueghel, which I do like. Yesterday, I asked my friend distractedly, “Valentine, how is it you came by this little painting?”
She blushed. “Why do you ask that?”
“I didn’t think I was being indiscreet.”
She blushed more. “What an idea! . . . It wasn’t the least bit indiscreet, really . . . It’s a family memento. It was given to me in 1913, by my Aunt Poittier.”
“Your Aunt Poittier? Which one? You have as many aunts and uncles named Poittier as there are seeds in a watermelon!”
She fidgeted uneasily.
“Well, yes . . . it’s quite true . . . Do you really have to remind me of that story, in which the role I played was . . . was . . .”
“Doubtful?”
“Almost. You won’t leave me in peace until I’ve told you the story, will you? It was in 1913 that my Aunt Poittier . . .”
“Which one?”
“Aunt Olga. You don’t know her. In 1913 my Aunt Olga lost her only son.”
“A little boy, if I remember correctly?”
“Yes, a little boy of about forty-eight. So, since there was nothing keeping her at Chartres anymore, she came to live in Paris, with Uncle Poittier. They settled in the rue Raynouard, but since they felt very lonely, they spent almost all their time at my other Uncle Poittier’s . . .”
“Which one?”
“The one in the Place d’Iéna, Paul Poittier, the brother . . . I’m telling you, you don’t know him! And since at that time Aunt Marie was living in the Boulevard Delessert . . .”
“Who? Aunt Marie?”
“Oh! . . . Aunt Marie Poittier, really now, the wife of the third brother, you don’t know her! If you insist on interrupting me all the time . . .”
“I’ll shut up.”
“. . . So they were quite content to visit as they liked; it was convenient for me when I was making my monthly round of family visits. In 1913 I had gone to spend Easter vacation with Charles’s family . . .”
“Charles who? Charles Poittier’s family?”
“No, the Charles Loisillons.”
“Oh, good, I like that better.”
“Why?”
“I like having those Loisillons in there among all those nondescript Poittiers, like a poplar on a barren plain. Go
on, please.”
“What was I saying? Oh, yes . . . ! So, while I was at Charles’s, I received a wire from Mama! UNCLE DIED YESTERDAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. MEET PLACE D’IÉNA, TOMORROW MORNING, TEN O’CLOCK PRECISELY. So I borrow my cousin’s crepe veil, black cape, and black gloves, and jump on the train, where I spend the night. I arrive at the house of the deceased, at my poor Aunt Olga’s, half an hour late. A night on the rails, an empty stomach, my crepe veil . . . I could hardly see through it and I couldn’t stand up, and then that odor of mortuary flowers as soon as I reached the staircase . . . In Aunt Olga’s big drawing room there was a wall of seated women, veiled down to their feet in thick crepe. I started kissing all of them and was mumbling, ‘Oh, poor uncle . . . Can you believe it . . .’ You act so silly when you don’t feel any grief, don’t you . . .
“All the same, I recognized Mama’s good, firm hand, and her violet perfume, and I clung to her skirt as I did when I was little. I said to her very softly, ‘Well, how did it happen?’ She didn’t have time to answer, because another black wall, taller than the other, the men in full mourning, started moving toward us, and we stood up. Uncle Edme . . .”
“Who’s Uncle Edme?”
“A distant uncle—you don’t know him—came over to kiss me, and then another cousin, and then two schoolboys wearing woolen gloves, and other relatives, and finally a tall, dried-up old man, with red eyes, who kissed my hand and said to me: ‘My dear niece, how good of you to have come back . . .’
“He straightened up: I let out a loud scream and fell back into I don’t know whose arms.”
“Why?”
“The dead man was standing in front of me, in a white tie, and was thanking me for having come back . . . Come back! And there he was! I was carried off, in a dead faint, and I only pulled myself together when I learned that I had gotten my uncles mixed up, that the real dead man had died of an embolism, at his brother’s, he hadn’t been brought to the rue Raynouard and . . .”