by Colette
One night, attired in my decorous kimono, I was dressing as usual with my door open. I had finished making up my face and my neck and was heating my curling tongs on a spirit lamp. The quick, hurried little step of Carmen Brasero (I knew it was Carmen by the clatter of her heels) sounded on the stone floor and stopped opposite my dressing room. Without turning around, I wished her good evening and received a hasty warning in reply.
“Hide that! The fire inspectors. I saw those chaps upstairs. I know one of them.”
“But we’ve all got spirit lamps in our dressing rooms!”
“Of course,” said Carmen. “But for goodness’ sake, hide it. That chap I know’s a swine. He makes you open your suitcases.”
I put out the flame, shut the lid, and looked helplessly around my bare cell.
“Where on earth can I hide it?”
“You’re pretty green, aren’t you? Do you have to be told every single thing? Listen . . . I can hear them coming.”
She turned up her skirt, nipped the little lamp high up between her thighs, and walked off with an assured step.
The fire inspectors, two in number, appeared. They ferreted about and went off, touching their bowler hats. Carmen Brasero returned, fished out my lamp from between her thighs, and laid it down on my makeup shelf.
“Here’s the object!”
“Marvelous,” I said. “I’d never have thought of doing that.”
She laughed like a child who is thoroughly pleased with itself.
“Cigarettes, my handbag, a box of sweets . . . I hide them all like that and nothing ever drops out. Even a loaf that I stole when I was a kid. The baker’s wife didn’t half shake me! She kept saying, ‘Have you thrown it in the gutter?’ But I held my loaf tight between my thighs and she had to give it up as a bad job. She wasn’t half wild! It’s these muscles here that I’ve got terrifically strong.”
She was just going off when she changed her mind and said with immense dignity: “Don’t make any mistakes! It’s nothing to do with the filthy tricks those Eastern dancers get up to with a bottle! My muscles are all on the outside!”
I protested that I fully appreciated this and the three feathers, shading from fawn to chestnut, which adorned Carmen’s enormous blue straw hat went waving away along the corridor.
The nightly ritual proceeded on its way. “The Miracle of the Roses” trailed its garlands of dusty flowers. A squadron of eighteenth-century French soldiers galloped up the staircase, banging their arms against the walls with a noise like the clatter of tin cans.
I did my own turn after these female warriors and came down again with whiffs of the smoke of every tobacco in the world in my hair. Tired from sheer force of habit and from the contagion of the tiredness all around me, I sat down in front of the makeup shelf fixed to the wall. Someone came in behind me and sat down on the other cane-topped stool. It was one of the French soldiers. She was young and, to judge by the color of her eyes, dark. Her breeches were half undone and hanging down; she was breathing heavily through her mouth and not looking in my direction.
“Twenty francs!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Twenty francs’ fine! I’m beyond twenty francs’ fine, Monsieur Remondon! They make me laugh!”
But she did not laugh. She made an agonized grimace which showed gums almost as white as her teeth between her made-up lips.
“They fined you twenty francs? Why on earth?”
“Because I undid my breeches on the stairs.”
“And why did you undo . . .”
The French soldier interrupted me: “Why? Why? You and your whys! Because when you can stick it, you stick it, and when you can’t anymore, you can’t!”
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. I was afraid she was going to faint, but at the buzz of an electric bell, she leaped to her feet.
“Hell, that’s us!”
She rushed away, holding up her breeches with both hands. I watched her down to the end of the passage.
“Whoever’s that crazy creature?” asked Mademoiselle d’Estouteville languidly. She was entirely covered in pearls and wearing a breastplate in the form of a heart made of sapphires.
I shrugged my shoulders to show that I had not the least idea. Lise Damoiseau, who was wiping her superb features with a dark rag thick with Vaseline and grease paint, appeared in her doorway.
“It’s a girl called Gribiche who’s in the chorus. At least that’s who I think it is.”
“And what was she doing in your dressing room, Colettevilli?” asked Carmen haughtily.
“She wasn’t doing anything. She just came in. She said that Remondon had just let her in for a twenty-franc fine.”
Lise Damoiseau gave a judicious whistle.
“Twenty francs! Lord! Whatever for?”
“Because she took her breeches down on the staircase when she came off the stage.”
“Jolly expensive.”
“We don’t know for certain if it’s true. Mightn’t she just have had a drop too much?”
A woman’s scream, shrill and protracted, froze the words on her lips. Lise stood stock-still, holding her makeup rag, with one hand on her hip like the servant in Manet’s Olympe.
The loudness and the terrible urgency of that scream made all the women who were not up on the stage look out of their dressing rooms. Their sudden appearance gave an odd impression of being part of some stage spectacle. As it was near the end of the show, several of them had already exchanged their stork-printed kimonos for white embroidered camisoles threaded with pale blue ribbon. A great scarf of hair fell over the shoulder of one bent head and all the faces were looking the same way. Lise Damoiseau shut her door, tied a cord around her waist to keep her kimono in place, and went off to find out what had happened, with the key of her dressing room slipped over one finger.
A noise of dragging feet announced the procession which appeared at the end of the passage. Two stagehands were carrying a sagging body: a limp, white, made-up lay figure which kept slipping out of their grasp. They walked slowly, scraping their elbows against the walls.
“Who is it? Who is it?”
“She’s dead!”
“She’s bleeding from the mouth!”
“No, no, that’s her rouge!”
“It’s Marcelle Cuvelier! Ah, no, it isn’t . . .”
Behind the bearers skipped a little woman wearing a headdress of glittering beads shaped like a crescent moon. She had lost her head a little but not enough to prevent her from enjoying her self-importance as an eyewitness. She kept panting: “I’m in the same dressing room with her. She fell right down to the bottom of the staircase . . . It came over her just like a stroke . . . Just fancy! Ten steps at least she fell.”
“What’s the matter with her, Firmin?” Carmen asked one of the men who was carrying her.
“Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” answered Firmin. “What a smash she went! But I haven’t got time to be doing a nurse’s job. There’s my transparency for the Pierrots not set up yet!”
“Where are you taking her?”
“Putting her in a cab, I s’pose.”
When they had gone by, Mademoiselle d’Estouteville laid her hand on her sapphire breastplate and half collapsed on her dressing stool. Like Gribiche, the sound of the bell brought her to her feet, her eyes on the mirror.
“My rouge has gone and come off,” she said in her loud schoolboy’s voice.
She rubbed some bright pink on her blanched cheeks and went up to make her entrance. Lise Damoiseau, who had returned, had some definite information to give us.
“Her salary was two hundred and ten francs. It came over her like a giddy fit. They don’t think she’s broken anything. Firmin felt her over to see. So did the dresser. More likely something internal.”
But Carmen pointed to something on the stone floor of the passage: a little star of fresh blood, then another, then still others at regular intervals. Lise tightened her mouth, with its deeply incised corners.
“Well, well!”
They exchanged a knowing look and made no further comment. The little “Crescent Moon” ran by us again, teetering on her high heels and talking as she went.
“That’s all fixed. They’ve packed her into a taxi. Monsieur Bonnavent’s driving it.”
“Where’s he driving her to?”
“Her home. I live in her street.”
“Why not the hospital?”
“She didn’t want to. At home she’s got her mother. She came to when she got outside into the air. She said she didn’t need a doctor. Has the bell gone for ‘Up in the Moon’?”
“It certainly has. La Toutou went up ages ago.”
The Crescent Moon swore violently and rushed away, obliterating the little regularly spaced spots with her glittering heels.
The next day nobody mentioned Gribiche. But at the beginning of the evening show, Crescent Moon appeared breathlessly and confided to Carmen that she had been to see her. Carmen passed the information on to me in a tone of apparent indifference.
“So she’s better, then?” I insisted.
“If you like to call it better. She’s feverish now.”
She was speaking to the looking glass, concentrated on penciling a vertical line down the center of her rather flat upper lip to simulate what she called “the groove of chastity.”
“Was that all Impéria said?”
“No. She said it’s simply unbelievable, the size of their room.”
“Whose room?”
“Gribiche and her mother’s. Their Lordships the Management have sent forty-nine francs.”
“What an odd sum.”
In the mirror, Carmen’s green eyes met mine harshly.
“It’s exactly what’s due to Gribiche. Seven days’ salary. You heard them say she gets two hundred and ten francs a month.”
My neighbor turned severe and suspicious whenever I gave some proof of inexperience which reminded her that I was an outsider and a novice.
“Won’t they give her any more than that?”
“There’s nothing to make them. Gribiche doesn’t belong to the union.”
“Neither do I.”
“I should have been awfully surprised if you did,” observed Carmen with chill formality.
The third evening, when I inquired, “How’s Gribiche?” Lise Damoiseau raised her long eyebrows as if I had made a social gaffe.
“Colettevilli, I notice that when you have an idea in your head, it stays up in the top story. All other floors vacant and to let.”
“Oh!” sneered Carmen. “You’ll see her again, your precious Gribiche. She’ll come back here, playing the interesting invalid.”
“Well, isn’t she interesting?”
“No more than any other girl who’s done the same.”
“You’re young,” said Lise Damoiseau. “Young in the profession I mean, of course.”
“A blind baby could see that,” agreed Carmen.
I said nothing. Their cruelty which seemed based on a convention left me with no retort. So did their perspicacity in sensing the bourgeois past that lay behind my inexperience and in guessing that my apparent youth was that of a woman of thirty-two who does not look her age.
It was on the fourth or fifth night that Impéria came rushing in at the end of the show and started whispering volubly to my roommates. Wanting to make a show of indifference in my turn, I stayed on my cane stool, polishing my cheap looking glass, dusting my makeup shelf, and trying to make it as maniacally tidy as my writing table at home.
Then I mended the hem of my skirt and brushed my short hair. Trying to keep my hair well groomed was a joyless and fruitless task, since I could never succeed in banishing the smell of stale tobacco which returned punctually after each shampoo.
Nevertheless, I was observing my neighbors. Whatever was preoccupying them and making them all so passionately eager to speak brought out all their various characters. Lise stood squarely, her hands on her hips, as if she were in the street market of the rue Lepic, throwing back her magnificent head with the authority of a housewife who will stand no nonsense. Little Impéria kept shifting from one leg to the other, twisting her stubby feet and suffering with the patience of an intelligent pony. Carmen was like all those lively energetic girls in Paris who cut out or finish or sell dresses; girls who instinctively know how to trade on their looks and who are frankly and avidly out for money. Only La Toutou belonged to no definite type, except that she embodied a literary infatuation of the time; the legendary princess, the fairy, the siren, or the perverted angel. Her beauty destined her to be perpetually wringing her hands at the top of a tower or shimmering palely in the depths of a dungeon or swooning on a rock in Liberty draperies dripping with jasper and agate. Suddenly Carmen planted herself in the frame of my open doorway and said all in one breath: “Well, so what are we going to do? That little Impéria says things are going pretty badly.”
“What’s going badly?”
Carmen looked slightly embarrassed.
“Oh! Colettevilli, don’t be nasty, dear. Gribiche, of course. Not allowed to get up. Chemist, medicine, dressings, and all that . . .”
“Not to mention food,” added Lise Damoiseau.
“Quite so. Well . . . you get the idea.”
“But where’s she been hurt, then?”
“It’s her . . . back,” said Lise.
“Stomach,” said Carmen, at the same moment.
Seeing them exchange a conspiratorial look, I began to bristle.
“Trying to make a fool of me, aren’t you?”
Lise laid her big, sensible hand on my arm.
“Now, now, don’t get your claws out. We’ll tell you the whole thing. Gribiche has had a miscarriage. A bad one, four and a half months.”
All four of us fell silent. Mademoiselle d’Estouteville nervously pressed both her hands to her small flat stomach, probably by way of a spell to avert disaster.
“Couldn’t we,” I suggested, “get up a collection between us?”
“A collection, that’s the idea,” said Lise. “That’s the word I was looking for and I couldn’t get it. I kept saying a ‘subscription.’ Come on, La Toutou. How much’ll you give for Gribiche?”
“Ten francs,” declared Mademoiselle d’Estouteville without a second’s hesitation. She ran to her dressing room with a clinking of sham diamonds and imitation sapphires and returned with two five-franc pieces.
“I’ll give five francs,” said Carmen Brasero.
“I’ll give five too,” said Lise. “Not more. I’ve got my people at home. Will you give something, Colettevilli?”
All I could find in my handbag was my key, my powder, some sous, and a twenty-franc piece. I was awkward enough to hesitate, though only for a fraction of a second.
“Want some change?” asked Lise with prompt tact.
I assured her that I didn’t need any and handed the louis to Carmen, who hopped on one foot like a little girl.
“A louis . . . oh, goody, goody! Lise, go and extract some sous out of Madame——” (she gave the name of the leading lady). “She’s just come down.”
“Not me,” said Lise. “You or Impéria if you like. I don’t go over big in my dressing gown.”
“Impéria, trot around to Madame X. And bring back at least five hundred of the best.”
The little actress straightened her spangled crescent in her mirror and went off to Madame X’s dressing room. She did not stay there long.
“Got it?” Lise yelled to her from the distance.
“Got what?”
“The big wad.”
The little actress came into my room and opened her closed fist.
“Ten francs!” said Carmen indignantly.
“Well, what she said was . . .” Impéria began.
Lise put out her big hand, chapped with wet white.
“Save your breath, dear. We know just what she said. That business was slack and her rents weren’t coming in on time and things were rotten on the Bourse. That’s what
our celebrated leading actress said.”
“No,” Impéria corrected. “She said it was against the rules.”
“What’s against the rules?”
“To get up . . . subscriptions.”
Lise whistled with amazement.
“First I’ve heard of it. Is it true, Toutou?”
Mademoiselle d’Estouteville was languidly undoing her chignon. Every time she pulled out one of the hideous iron hairpins, with their varnish all rubbed off, a twist of gold slid down and unraveled itself on her shoulders.
“I think,” she said, “you’re too clever by half to worry whether it’s against the rules. Just don’t mention it.”
“You’ve hit it for once, dear,” said Lise approvingly. She ended rashly: “Tonight, it’s too late. But tomorrow I’ll go around with the hat.”
During the night, my imagination was busy with this unknown Gribiche. I had almost forgotten her face when she was conscious but I could remember it very clearly white, with the eyes closed, dangling over a stagehand’s arm. The lids were blue and the tip of each separate lash beaded with a little blob of mascara . . . I had never seen a serious accident since I had been on the halls. People who risk their lives daily are extremely careful. The man who rides a bicycle around and around a rimless disk, pitting himself against centrifugal force, the girl whom a knife thrower surrounds with blades, the acrobat who swings from trapeze to trapeze high up in mid-air—I had imagined their possible end just as everyone does. I had imagined it with that vague, secret pleasure we all feel in what inspires us with horror. But I had never dreamed that someone like Gribiche, by falling down a staircase, would kill her secret and lie helpless and penniless.