by Colette
Seated in the orchestra stalls on a strip of gray dust sheet, I am waiting in the darkened auditorium till the revue rehearsal is over. It is now a quarter to six, my comrades have held the stage since twelve-thirty. There’ll only be three-quarters of an hour left to rehearse our mimodrama piece. But I long for Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Marquise de Pompadour to blunder again: I do so hate the thought of having to move.
The niggard gleam of a two-way “service lamp” acts as substitute for the footlights. These two points of light, hanging in the blackness, prick my eyes and induce sleep. Beside me, invisible, a fellow mime staves off his craving to smoke by chewing an unlit cigarette. “Another day’s work ruined for the rest of us! I should like to see all revue promoters deep in a hundred feet of . . . Just take a look at those ‘Great Concubines,’ I ask you! And to think that they’re toiling away there for the price of air . . . The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!”
The word arouses me. Is the strike, then, a reality? We’ve been talking about it so much among ourselves. There’s been some change of atmosphere in this hard-worked café concert of ours, one of the happiest establishments in the district, always warm and packed to capacity, where, every night, the stormy laughter of the crowd rollicks around the house amid catcalls, whistling, and stamping of feet.
“The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!”
It’s in the thoughts of all, it’s mooted in corners. The chorus girls of the forthcoming revue, the little singing girls on tour, have this word only on their lips, each in her own manner. Some there are who shout in a whisper, “The strike—for paid matinees, and paid rehearsals!” their faces afire, brandishing a muff like a flag and a reticule like a sling.
Once again the “Great Concubines” have gone agley. Splendid, a further ten good minutes in my seat! My Ladies de Pompadour and d’Estrées are “getting it in the neck”! Bending over them, the ballet master lets fly a string of not very strong oaths which the Vert-Galant’s mistress, a short, well-rounded brunette, receives with impatience, facing in our direction, her eyes on the exit.
The other, the Marquise, hangs her head like a child who has broken a vase. She stares at the floor, without saying a word; her breath lifts the heavy lock of blond hair that falls across her cheek. The dismal light beating down from above sculpts her head into that of a thin, hollow-checked boy-martyr, and this Pompadour, in her black knickers with bare knees showing above her rolled stockings, bears a strange resemblance to a young drummer boy of the Revolution. Her whole stubborn little hurt person spells rebellion and seems to cry aloud, “Long live the strike!”
At a standstill for the moment, the Pavane has regrouped around her twenty silent young women at the end of their tether. In the dark their eyes try to pick out the seat from which the manager supervises their movements, while they wait eagerly for the liberating words “That will be all for today” to surge up from some dim spot in the stalls. But they also appear tonight to be waiting for something else: “The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!” Tonight there is something aggressive about their fatigue.
In direct contrast to the men—singers and mimes, dancers and acrobats—who strive to preserve a serious man-to-man tone, courteous and calm in discussion, when they further their claims, the little “caf’ cone’” girls, my comrades, have caught fire immediately. Being emotional Parisiennes, the mention of the single word “strike” makes them imagine confusedly mobs out in the streets, riots, barricades.
The girls don’t make a practice of it. The strict and simple discipline by which we are ruled brooks no infringement. Under the bluish sun of two projectors has been evolved, up till these troubled days, the most rigorous and hard-worked routine for small communities, alleviated in a trice by a word from the manager, “Take it easy, ladies. Do you think you’re in a theater?” or “I don’t like people who bawl at me.” Yes, they don’t make a habit of “refractoriness” or going on strike. That Agnes Sorel over yonder, who stands so tall on her long legs, yawning with hunger, will soon be off and away to her pigeon house, at the back of beyond on the other side of the Butte de Montmartre. She never has the time for a hot meal, she lives too far away, she’s always on the trot.
“It’s not per performance she earns her monthly hundred and eighty francs, but per mile!” says Diane de Poitiers, who wears thin summer blouses in mid-December.
As for the handsome Montespan of the heavy bosom, is it for a moment likely that she acquired her habitual complaints from her husband, a consumptive bookbinder! She has more than enough on her hands looking after her man and two kids far out near the Châteaud’Eau district.
They are so easily regimented, these poor honeyless bees! Any milliner’s apprentice in the rue de la Paix could put them wise on the question of claims. They said in the past, “Great! We strike!” as they would have said, “We’re going to win the big lottery!”—without any conviction. Now that they do believe in it, they are beginning to tremble, with hope.
Will they receive full pay for those terrible twice-nightly performances on Sunday and Thursday, and for the fête days sprinkled throughout the calendar? Even better: will they be compensated for the long prison hours, midday to six, while a revue is in production? Would the snack of croissants, bock, and banana they bolt in rehearsal time be buckshee? And Old Mother Louis, our rheumaticky duenna, who plays comic mothers-in-law and Negresses, will her bus fare on Sundays and Thursdays be drawn from some other source than the miserable pin money she earns by her knitting, she who knits, everywhere and every minute, for a knitted garment shop?
As for those rush-hour nights, dreaded above all when the full-dress rehearsal for a revue goes on till dawn, would it no longer be solely “for the honor of the house” that fifty or so “walkers” from the chorus have to go back home in the freezing early hours . . . swollen feet and weak ankles, yawning themselves to death?
It sounds good. It is disquieting. Our little community is at fever pitch. At night, in the wings, someone seizes me by the sleeves, and questions me.
“You’re for the strike, aren’t you?” and someone else adds, in a voice of assurance but with fluttering gestures, “In the first place, it’s only fair.”
Not everybody shares the bitter skepticism of this blond, hollow-cheeked child, Madame de Pompadour, a philosopher of nineteen, whom I have nicknamed Cassandra and who resents it without exactly knowing why. “If we strike, where will it get us? It will only help to fatten the cinema crowd. And while it lasts, what are the two of us going to feed on, Moman and me?”
It must be at least a quarter past six. I am almost asleep, my arms pushed deep in my muff, my chin in my fur. I feel warm on the shoulders and cold in the feet, due to the fact that the central heating is not lit for rehearsals. What am I doing here? It is too late for work today. I have gone on waiting with the fatalistic patience learned in the music hall. I may as well wait on a little longer and then leave at the same time as the tired swarm of day girls who will disperse over the face of Paris.
The ones in the greatest hurry, and those whose job brings them back here at eight, will not go far afield: the slice of pale veal on its bed of sorrel, or the dubious lamb stew, await them in the brasserie around the corner. The others make off at the run as soon as their feet touch the pavement. “I’ve just time to rush home for a minute.”
Rush home to a grumbling “Moman,” for a wash and clean, to retie the ribbon that binds hair and forehead, to make sure that the kid has not fallen from the window or burned himself on the stove, and hoopla! the return journey. They jump on a bus, a tram, the underground, pell-mell with all the other employees—milliners, seamstresses, cashiers, typists—for whom the day’s work is over.
[Translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi]
Bastienne’s Child
1
“Run, Bastienne, run!”
The ballerinas scurry the whole length of the corridor, brushing the petals of their skirts against the wall, leaving behind them the smell of rice powder,
hair still warm from the curling tongs, new tarlatan gauze. Bastienne runs, not quite so fast, both hands encircling her waist. They have been “rung” rather late, and were she to arrive on the stage out of breath, might she not fumble, perhaps, the end of her variation, that lengthy spin during which nothing is seen of her but the fully extended, creamy swirl of a ballet skirt and two slim pink legs moving apart and coming together again with a mechanical precision already appreciated by connoisseurs?
She is not, as yet, anything more than a very young dancer, under a year’s contract to the Grand-Théâtre at X; a poor girl, of radiant beauty, tall, “expensive to feed,” as she says of herself, and underfed, because she is already five months pregnant.
Of the child’s father, there is no news.
“He’s a bad lot, that man!” says Bastienne.
But she speaks of him without tearing out her dark hair, so silky against her clear white skin, and her “misfortune” has not driven her either to the river or to the gas oven. She dances as before and recognizes three powerful deities: the manager of the Grand-Théâtre, the ballet mistress, and the proprietor of the hotel where live, besides Bastienne herself, a dozen of her comrades. However, since the morning when Bastienne, turning deathly pale during the dancing lesson, confessed with a peasant’s simplicity, “Madame, it’s because I’m expecting!” the ballet mistress has spared her. But she does not wish to be spared, and dismisses any special attention with an indignant jerk of the elbow and a “Why, I’m not ailing!”
The weight that swells her waistline she calmly accepts, apart from passing a few rude remarks on it with the inconsequence of her seventeen years. “As for you, I’m going to put some sense in you!” And she pulls in her belt, loath not to display for as long as possible, and above all on the stage, the flexibility of her slim, broad-shouldered figure. She laughingly insults her burden, slapping it with the flat of her hands, then adding, “How hungry it makes me!” Unthinkingly she commits the heroic imprudence of all penniless girls: having paid her weekly hotel bill, she often goes to bed without dinner or supper, and keeps her stays on all night to “cut her appetite.”
Bastienne, in fact, leads the indigent, happy-go-lucky but hardworking life of the little motherless ballerinas who have no lover. Between the morning lesson, starting at nine, the afternoon rehearsal, and the nightly performance, they have next to no time left for thought. Their wretched phalanstery does not know the meaning of despair, since solitude and insomnia never afflict its members.
Impudent and crafty after their fashion, driven to extremes by the ragings of an empty stomach, Bastienne and her roommate—a dumpy little blonde—sometimes spend their last pennies in the Grand-Théâtre Brasserie, after midnight, on a bottle of beer.
Seated opposite one another, they shrilly exchange the remarks of a prearranged dialogue.
“Now, if I had the money, I’d treat myself to a fat ham sandwich!”
“Yes, but you’ve not got a sou. I’ve got none neither, but supposing I had, I’d certainly order myself a nice grilled black pudding, with lots of mustard and a hunk of bread . . .”
“Oh, I’d far rather have sauerkraut, with plenty of sausage . . .”
It so happens that the sauerkraut and the grilled black pudding, so feverishly evoked, providentially descend between the two little ballerinas, escorted by the generous donor, whom they welcome with thanks, with a joke and a smile, and then leave in the lurch, all before the half hour has struck.
This innocent method of begging is the invention of Bastienne, whose “interesting condition” earns her a curiosity not so far removed from consideration. Her comrades count the weeks and consult the cards concerning the child’s fortune. They make a fuss over her, helping to tighten her dancing stays with a heave-ho as they pull on the lace, one knee pressed against her robust thighs. They freely bestow on her preposterous advice, recommending her to take witch’s potions, ever helpful, and shouting after her, as tonight, down the long dark corridors, “Run, Bastienne, run!”
They keep an anxious eye on her imprudent dancing, insist above all on escorting her back to her dressing room, to be there at the moment when, unhooking her torturous breastplate, she laughingly threatens the youngest, silliest, and most inquisitive with “Take care, or he’ll pop out and perch on your nose!”
Today, in the warmest corner of the big dressing room, there stands, supported on two chairs, the tray of an old traveling trunk with a canopy of flowered wallpaper. It is the piteous crib of a tiny little Bastienne, hardy as a weed. She is brought to the theater by her mother at eight, and is removed at midnight under her cloak. This much-dandled, merry little mite, this babe with scarcely a stitch of clothing, who is dressed by small clumsy hands that knit for it, awkwardly, pilches and bonnets, enjoys, despite her environment, the gorgeous childhood of a fairy-tale princess. Ethiopian slaves in coffee-colored tights, Egyptian girls hung with blue jewelry, houris stripped to the waist, bend over her cot and let her play with their necklaces, their feather fans, their veils that change the color of the light. The tiny little Bastienne falls asleep and wakes in scented young arms, while peris, with faces the rose-pink of fuchsias, croon her songs to the rhythm of a far-distant orchestra.
A dusky Asian maid, keeping watch by the door, shouts down the corridor, “Run, Bastienne, run! Your daughter is thirsty!”
In comes Bastienne, breathless, smoothing her tense billowing skirts with the tips of her fingers, and runs straight to the tray of the old traveling trunk. Without waiting to sit down or unfasten her low-cut bodice, she uses both hands to free from its pressure a swollen breast, blue in color from its generous veins. Leaning over, one foot lifted in the dancer’s classical pose, her flared skirts like a luminous wheel around her, she suckles her daughter.
2
“Look, Bastienne, the Serbs are here, and over here is Greece. This part streaked with thin lines is Bulgaria. All this bit marked in black shows the advance made by the Allies, while the Turks have been forced to retreat as far as here. Now d’you understand?”
Bastienne’s huge eyes, the color of light tobacco, are wide open and she nods her head politely, muttering, “Mmm . . . mmm . . .” She takes a long look at the map over which her companion Peloux is running a thin, hardened finger, and finally exclaims, “Lord, how small it is, how very small!”
Peloux, who was hardly expecting this conclusion, bursts out laughing, and it is on her now that Bastienne focuses in astonishment her huge orbs, always a little slow in registering any change of thought.
The complicated map, covered with dotted lines and hatching, represents to Bastienne nothing but a confused design for embroidery. Fortunately Constantinople is there, printed in capitals. She knows of its existence, it’s a town. Peloux has a sister, an older sister of twenty-eight, who once played in a comedy at Constantinople, in the presence of . . .
“In whose presence was it, Peloux, your sister played in Constantinople?”
“In front of the Sultan, of course!” comes the lie direct from Peloux.
Bastienne, incredulous and deferential, spends another moment or two deciphering the newspaper. What a lot of unreadable names! What a lot of unknown countries! For, after all, she did once dance in a divertissement which brought together the five parts of the world. Very well, those five parts were: America, which had meant a foundation makeup of terra-cotta; Africa, brown tights; Spain, fringed shawls; France, a snow-white tutu, and for Russia, red leather boots. If the map of the world had now to be cut up like a jigsaw puzzle, and from each small section had to be conjured up a fully armed, wicked little nation nobody had ever heard of, then it made life far too complicated . . . Bastienne casts a hostile glance at the nebulous photographs around the edge of the map and declares, “To start with, all those fellows there look like the cycle cops in their flat caps! Now, Peloux, supposing you give the child a good slap, just to teach her not to eat your thread!”
Tired of staring so long at “small print,” Bastienn
e gets to her feet, sighs, and winds around her ear, like a ribbon, a strand of her long black hair. She deigns to cast a majestic animal glance upon her daughter, crawling on all fours at her feet, then bends down and, lifting a corner of the petticoat and chemise, administers by the count, on a round rosy little behind, a good half dozen resounding slaps.
“Oh!” protests Peloux, in rather a frightened whisper.
“Don’t you worry,” Bastienne retorts, “I’m not killing her. Besides, she minds pain so little, it’s unbelievable.”
Indeed, there’s no sound to be heard either of the dramatic tears or the piercing shrieks of very young children when they sob to the point of suffocation: nothing but the furious drubbing of two small shoes against the floorboards, where the tiny little Bastienne rolls herself into a ball like a caterpillar knocked off a gooseberry bush, and no more.
. . . Bastienne is today a truly magnificent creature, due to her premature motherhood, and to having recovered the habit of regular meals now that she has a warm lodging. A gallant tradesman, as much out of pity as dazzled by her beauty, had brought home mother and child on Christmas Eve when Bastienne was reveling on tuppence worth of hot roasted chestnuts.
His reward is to come back every evening to the small apartment from which can be seen a gray flowing river and find there a tall, friendly Bastienne, gay, a little standoffish but faithful, busied over her career and her daughter. She thrives in a home of her own, at ease in one of those aprons such as are worn by girls who deliver bread, and tied, as it is today, over her kimono, her hair hanging over her shoulders with that newly washed but still uncombed look that enhances her nineteen years.
This is a lovely holiday afternoon for Bastienne and her friend. Peloux. No ballet is in rehearsal at the Grand-Théâtre, the dry December weather makes the stove roar, and ahead of them lie four good hours of freedom, while drop by drop the coffee fills the tinplate filter. Peloux is puckering the “underskirts” of a workaday costume in coarse bluish-white tarlatan, and without pricking her finger or making a mistake, she contrives to keep an eye on the war news, the deserted street, and a catalogue of novelties.