The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  “An omelette? How many eggs?”

  Pierre Lasnier joked mockingly: “How many eggs . . . How should I know? An omelette of six, eight . . . Yes! A nice big omelette of six to eight eggs!”

  The young woman opened her mouth and eyes wide in singular fashion, didn’t say a word, took her child back up in her arms, and left the room. To kill time Pierre Lasnier filled and emptied his crude little glass three times, took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and struck a match. But for no apparent reason he let the flaming match fall, then turned around and saw standing in the doorway, behind the blue shoulders of two policemen, the suspicious face, white with fear, of the young woman with braided hair.

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  The Other Wife

  “Table for two? This way, Monsieur, Madame, there is still a table next to the window, if Madame and Monsieur would like a view of the bay.”

  Alice followed the maitre d’.

  “Oh, yes. Come on, Marc, it’ll be like having lunch on a boat on the water . . .”

  Her husband caught her by passing his arm under hers. “We’ll be more comfortable over there.”

  “There? In the middle of all those people? I’d much rather . . .”

  “Alice, please.”

  He tightened his grip in such a meaningful way that she turned around. “What’s the matter?”

  “Shh . . .” he said softly, looking at her intently, and led her toward the table in the middle.

  “What is it, Marc?”

  “I’ll tell you, darling. Let me order lunch first. Would you like the shrimp? Or the eggs in aspic?”

  “Whatever you like, you know that.”

  They smiled at one another, wasting the precious time of an overworked maître d’, stricken with a kind of nervous dance, who was standing next to them, perspiring.

  “The shrimp,” said Marc. “Then the eggs and bacon. And the cold chicken with a romaine salad. Fromage blanc? The house specialty? We’ll go with the specialty. Two strong coffees. My chauffeur will be having lunch also, we’ll be leaving again at two o’clock. Some cider? No, I don’t trust it . . . Dry champagne.”

  He sighed as if he had just moved an armoire, gazed at the colorless midday sea, at the pearly white sky, then at his wife, whom he found lovely in her little Mercury hat with its large, hanging veil.

  “You’re looking well, darling. And all this blue water makes your eyes look green, imagine that! And you’ve put on weight since you’ve been traveling . . . It’s nice up to a point, but only up to a point!”

  Her firm, round breasts rose proudly as she leaned over the table.

  “Why did you keep me from taking that place next to the window?”

  Marc Seguy never considered lying. “Because you were about to sit next to someone I know.”

  “Someone I don’t know?”

  “My ex-wife.”

  She couldn’t think of anything to say and opened her blue eyes wider.

  “So what, darling? It’ll happen again. It’s not important.”

  The words came back to Alice and she asked, in order, the inevitable questions. “Did she see you? Could she see that you saw her? Will you point her out to me?”

  “Don’t look now, please, she must be watching us . . . The lady with brown hair, no hat, she must be staying in this hotel. By herself, behind those children in red . . .”

  “Yes. I see.”

  Hidden behind some broad-brimmed beach hats, Alice was able to look at the woman who, fifteen months ago, had still been her husband’s wife.

  “Incompatibility,” Marc said. “Oh, I mean . . . total incompatibility! We divorced like well-bred people, almost like friends, quietly, quickly. And then I fell in love with you, and you really wanted to be happy with me. How lucky we are that our happiness doesn’t involve any guilty parties or victims!”

  The woman in white, whose smooth, lustrous hair reflected the light from the sea in azure patches, was smoking a cigarette with her eyes half closed. Alice turned back toward her husband, took some shrimp and butter, and ate calmly. After a moment’s silence she asked: “Why didn’t you ever tell me that she had blue eyes, too?”

  “Well, I never thought about it!”

  He kissed the hand she was extending toward the bread basket and she blushed with pleasure. Dusky and ample, she might have seemed somewhat coarse, but the changeable blue of her eyes and her wavy, golden hair made her look like a frail and sentimental blonde. She vowed overwhelming gratitude to her husband. Immodest without knowing it, everything about her bore the overly conspicuous marks of extreme happiness.

  They ate and drank heartily, and each thought the other had forgotten the woman in white. Now and then, however, Alice laughed too loudly, and Marc was careful about his posture, holding his shoulders back, his head up. They waited quite a long time for their coffee, in silence. An incandescent river, the straggled reflection of the invisible sun overhead, shifted slowly across the sea and shone with a blinding brilliance.

  “She’s still there, you know,” Alice whispered.

  “Is she making you uncomfortable? Would you like to have coffee somewhere else?”

  “No, not at all! She’s the one who must be uncomfortable! Besides, she doesn’t exactly seem to be having a wild time, if you could see her . . .”

  “I don’t have to. I know that look of hers.”

  “Oh, was she like that?”

  He exhaled his cigarette smoke through his nostrils and knitted his eyebrows. “Like that? No. To tell you honestly, she wasn’t happy with me.”

  “Oh, really now!”

  “The way you indulge me is so charming, darling . . . It’s crazy . . . You’re an angel . . . You love me . . . I’m so proud when I see those eyes of yours. Yes, those eyes . . . She . . . I just didn’t know how to make her happy, that’s all. I didn’t know how.”

  “She’s just difficult!”

  Alice fanned herself irritably, and cast brief glances at the woman in white, who was smoking, her head resting against the back of the cane chair, her eyes closed with an air of satisfied lassitude.

  Marc shrugged his shoulders modestly.

  “That’s the right word,” he admitted. “What can you do? You have to feel sorry for people who are never satisfied. But we’re satisfied . . . Aren’t we, darling?”

  She did not answer. She was looking furtively, and closely, at her husband’s face, ruddy and regular; at his thick hair, threaded here and there with white silk; at his short, well-cared-for hands; and doubtful for the first time, she asked herself, “What more did she want from him?”

  And as they were leaving, while Marc was paying the bill and asking for the chauffeur and about the route, she kept looking, with envy and curiosity, at the woman in white, this dissatisfied, this difficult, this superior . . .

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  Monsieur Maurice

  Maurice Houssiaux beamed with a childlike contentment and a schoolboyish, bureaucratic exhilaration, which he had not felt a week earlier. It was then that the council president, calling on his experience in worldly matters and his regional influence as deputy county commissioner, had appointed him Minister of Tourism and Farm Mechanization. And he was thrilled by the large office at the ministry, its historic desk, and its Aubusson carpet. A small garden, green and flowerless, filled the tall French windows up to the arches; the window reflected the hollow back of a bewigged marble bust, and Maurice Houssiaux’s private secretary added just the right touch of new deference to his friendly informality.

  Houssiaux had just put his paraph to his first piece of correspondence in a bold hand.

  “Is that all, Wattier?”

  “All for today, Monsieur. You’re free.”

  “Can I give you a lift?”

  “No, thank you. I’m preparing your work for tomorrow. And there’s that blasted grain circular . . . and your speech to the Hotel Industry, have you given it any thought?”

  “Yes, but
. . .”

  “So have I. Your first speech must be a success . . . Don’t you do a thing, though, I have my whole night for it. It’s very important that you don’t wear yourself out the first month. Oh! And those two women from the country are still here. They’ve been waiting for two hours . . .”

  “Which women?”

  “The stenotypists. Would you like me to just weed one out somehow? There’s only one opening.”

  “Do you have their names?”

  “Here they are. Mademoiselle Valentin and Mademoiselle Lajarisse. Both are from Cransac.”

  “Lajarisse, Lajarisse . . . there are three hundred people named Lajarisse in my district, sixty in the village alone. Which Lajarisse?”

  “Shall I send for them? Shall I have them come in?”

  Wattier danced with zeal, from one foot to the other, with the agility of a hairdresser or an acrobat, something he had suddenly acquired at the same time as his situation with Houssiaux. Houssiaux repeated the name with the distinctly southern ending, as he looked fondly at his green and melancholy garden. His once fair cheeks were covered with red blotches, and a little round belly, cinched up by a belt, moved ahead of him like a cushion for relics.

  “I’ll see them,” he decided. “After all, they’re from Cransac, the heart of my constituency. Has everyone else gone?”

  “Everyone’s gone. It’s always the boss who stays late.”

  “I’ll see them on my way out. They’ll be telling me stories about Cransac for half an hour—first one, then the other—won’t they? But I don’t want anyone to go away upset.”

  Wattier slipped off with a cruel little laugh, and Houssiaux, in his overcoat, hat in hand, walked into an adjoining office whose ministerial indigence—faded plaster walls and yellow pine desks—no longer saddened him.

  “Mademoiselle . . . You’re from Cransac? Sit down, please.”

  “Oh, Monsieur . . .”

  The tall girl stammered in confusion, but looked at him with the boldness of a slave who knows her price. A striking brunette indeed, her hair an amber brown, with a small, imperious nose, audacious underneath her feigned shyness.

  “Ah, these girls from Cransac, what beauties!” Maurice Houssiaux said to himself as he asked Mademoiselle Valentin a few perfunctory questions.

  “Yes, Monsieur . . . Oh, of course, Monsieur . . . I started out as a bookkeeper at Vanavan’s, in the rue Grande, on the corner; does Monsieur know it? But I’m a good typist, on all models, and my steno is very good . . . My father’s the one who put the banner across the rue Grande when we heard the news of your election two years ago. Does the Minister remember?”

  She spoke about him in the third person, like a chambermaid, but with her eyes lowered like a smitten girl.

  “She’s trying her luck,” Houssiaux said to himself. “She’s right. She can have anything she wants. And she wouldn’t be surprised to get it. She’s from Cransac. What a jewel for the office, and that head on my shoulder!”

  “One of my secretaries will notify you, Mademoiselle.” She raised her eyes, which were big and tapered at the corner like a blood mare’s.

  “Can the Minister leave me with a little hope?”

  “I think so!”

  He offered her his hand, shook the cold hand of an excited damsel, and watched her with pleasure as she bumped into a chair and fumbled with the door as she was leaving. He was returning to his office when a long mirror confronted him with his own image, alas, that of a tall, fat, graying man. It distressed him more than usual.

  “You can’t have everything. There’s a certain age when . . . but there’s still Mademoiselle Lajarisse . . . What if I had Wattier send her away?”

  But a short shadow already barred the door, and Mademoiselle Lajarisse, a woman in her fifties, a bit wrinkled, a bit slumped, wearing cotton gloves and a hat the color of cassis, stood before him, silently.

  “You’re from Cransac, Mademoiselle? That’s quite a good recommendation. I’m so fond of Cransac and its people!”

  “I moved to Paris seventeen years ago. Cashier, stenographer, typist, librarian . . .”

  “Good, good. We’ll look into that, we’ll look into that . . . No, no papers. You can leave them with one of my secretaries, if there’s any need. Lajarisse? Which Lajarisses? By the bridge?”

  “No, on the hill, on the road to Casteix.”

  “Oh, I see, I see . . .”

  He smiled, half closing his eyes. The hill on the road to Casteix . . . He used to go down to Cransac on that road, on horseback, greeted by everyone considered doubtful and seductive by that part of Cransac that wore skirts: factory girls, idle women leaning over wrought-iron balconies . . .

  “I see . . . It’s far . . .”

  “Not that far, Monsieur Minister . . .”

  Mademoiselle Lajarisse, faded under her nearly white hair, looked at him from head to toe.

  “It was your favorite route, Monsieur. Everyone there remembers.”

  “So do I . . .”

  . . . Handsome boy, never tired, hunter, runner, delighting in everything that flattered him, the tears and laughter of the women, spirited horses, fiery red wines . . . Houssiaux could hear the flint stones of the steep slope roll beneath the hooves of his saddle horse . . . He shook his head, half sincere.

  “Oh, Mademoiselle Lajarisse, if only I could go back to the time when I used to come down that road on my horse . . .”

  “Your horse Gamin, Monsieur Minister.”

  He made the joyous gesture of a young man.

  “Yes!”

  “And on summer days, you’d arrive without a jacket or vest, in a loose-fitting shirt, your sleeves rolled up . . .”

  “Why, yes!”

  “You would rein in your horse with one hand and wave to all the ladies with your hat . . . and even to the women who weren’t ladies . . . to that Carmen up on her balcony, and that little woman at the tobacconist’s, all of them.”

  Houssiaux took the cotton-gloved hand in his. “Why, yes! You remember all that?”

  “Oh, Monsieur Maurice . . .”

  The little lady did not turn her face away, or hide her tears, or her blue eyes, in which the unforgettable image of “Monsieur Maurice” on horseback still remained . . . Houssiaux sighed with regret and let go of the hands of Mademoiselle Lajarisse, who drew away from him slightly.

  “So, Monsieur, you say that all the positions are filled?”

  He ran his fingers through his gray hair, as he once did through his blond hair.

  “Not yours, Mademoiselle Lajarisse. Do you have a minute? Here, take this steno pad. The pencils are right there . . . Ready? ‘My dear friend and colleague, you have been so kind as to bring to my attention the facts which . . .’”

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  The Burglar

  Getting into the little villa had been so easy that the burglar wondered why, held back by some excess of caution, he had waited so long. Once inside the entrance hall, he recognized the dreary dampness which permeates seaside villas during rainy summers. He found the drawing-room door open onto the front room, as was the dining room’s, and the door to the cellar gaped beneath the staircase, testifying to the hasty flight, to a dance hall or some hollow in the dunes, of the little red-haired maid whose departure he had just witnessed. Only one servant, and she a mere slip of a thing: all that was required by Madame Cassart and her tiny villa of pink plaster and green mosaic, set in a sandy enclosure where the scrawy tamarisks all bowed at the same time and in the same direction, to the wind from the sea, like tall grass swaying in the current.

  The burglar carefully closed off the open rooms; he didn’t like banging doors and was counting on a quick visit to this ugly plaything, which Madame Cassart rented for the season. A quick glance into the drawing room—done in white lacquer and cotton print—the tenant wouldn’t dare hide her savings in there.

  The man walked about easily in the dark, helped by the faint light, a twilight gray, which forced i
ts way through the lowered Venetian blinds. Only once did he risk the electric beam from his flashlight, which fell on the photograph of a very beautiful woman, wearing a long corset, her hair done up in a “figure eight,” and evening gloves.

  “Cassart in her better days. Some change.”

  For the past two weeks in this little fishing port with big ambitions and an overnight casino made of fibro-cement, he had been leading the austere life of an entomologist, studying the customs and habits of the bathers, especially the female bathers, noting their time of arrival, their daily stations at the lotto tables and the dance hall. All he had gained, since his arrival, was a gold purse, an ordinary ring left on a washbasin, and a drawstring pouch with a hundred francs in it: meager recompense for this scrupulous existence, which aspired to a crystalline perfection. Properly attired, he frequented the casino, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and made no acquaintances, for, though confident in his appearance as a strikingly handsome man in his forties with short hair, he knew the weaknesses of his syntax and the colorful brevity of his vocabulary.

  “Just enough,” he thought, “to impress the girls in the candy store—and old lady Cassart . . .”

  He had been watching the woman whom he, like everyone else, called the “old crazy lady,” the tall septuagenarian whose figure was still that of a young, if old-fashioned woman, straight-backed in her stiff corset, with shoulders like a Prussian officer. Her organdy hats, her dresses of broderie anglaise, and her long pink or orchid-colored veils flapped on the jetty like flags, and the schoolboys behind her hurried to see her face, a death’s head in makeup, covered with balls of paraffin sunk beneath the skin of her cheeks, above a neck tightly tucked into boned tulle.

  He had noticed her at the famous confectioner’s, all a-jingle with jewels, pink as a piece of cracked wax fruit; he had waited while she greedily carried off a sack of chocolate “turtles.” When she had gone, scandalous and serene, he bought some almond cookies.