by Colette
“Send them to the Hotel Beauséjour? For Monsieur . . .”
“Monsieur Paul Dagueret.”
“D apostrophe?”
He gave the blond salesgirl a casual smile. “However you like, Mademoiselle. It’s of no importance to me.”
Struck by this aristocratic insouciance, the girl allowed herself a few remarks about Madame Cassart, deploring the fact that “diamonds like those . . .”
“I hadn’t noticed,” interrupted Monsieur Dagueret coldly. “I’m not an expert.”
Now, in “old lady Cassart’s” bedroom, he was searching not for the diamonds which she hardly ever took off, but for the compensation due his persevering and solitary work.
“Even if it’s only a gold chain, or those big round bracelets she threads her skinny arms through,” he murmured as he quietly rummaged through the plain, bright room in which Madame Cassart had shown her personal taste by pinning up bows made of ribbon and flowers made of colored bread crumbs everywhere . . .
Rifling through a drawer with the butt of his flashlight, he passed up an aquamarine cross and took a gold locket worth at least fifty francs. At that precise moment, he heard the garden gate squeak musically, then a key in the lock. Heavy footsteps could already be heard mounting the stairs as he decided to seek refuge behind the unfastened curtains of the French windows.
Once behind them he immediately felt awkward and thwarted. This crazy old woman never came home from the casino before midnight, other days. Through the crack between the curtains he saw her walk back and forth and heard her mutter indistinctly. She no longer bothered to throw back her military shoulders, and walked hunched over, senilely mawing the air. She carefully took off her girlish hat, then took some pins out of her hair. The prisoner saw a pale little tonsure surrounded by an abundance of hair, still thick and dyed bright red. The low-cut dress fell to the floor, a beribboned negligee hid the grainy skin, with its red blotches caused by the salty air, and the dreadful dewlaps under the chin. Beneath the loose hair, the sour face, made up as though for some drama, added to Monsieur Paul Dagueret’s uneasiness.
“What now?” he asked himself. “Obviously I have to do what I have to do, but . . . An old nag like that’s no pushover! Damn!”
He didn’t like either noise or blood, and with each second his discomfort increased. Madame Cassart spared him further agony. She turned her head sharply toward the curtains as if, all of a sudden, she had smelled him, opened them, letting out a cry hardly louder than a sigh and drew back three steps, hiding her face in her hands. He was just about to take advantage of this unexpected gesture to rush out and escape when she said to him, without uncovering her face, in an affectedly suppliant voice: “Why have you done this? Oh, why?”
He was standing between the parted curtains, bareheaded—a hat or a cap always gets lost—wearing gloves, his hair mussed.
She went on, in that high, crystalline voice certain old people have. “You should never have done this!”
She lowered her hands and it stunned him to see that she was looking at him without the slightest bit of fear, in a loving, vanquished way.
“Here we go. This is it,” he thought.
“Was this violence necessary?” sighed Madame Cassart. “The most ordinary introduction, in the casino or on the jetty, would have been sufficient, wouldn’t it? Could you believe that I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t guessed? It would have been very easy for you . . . But not like this, oh, not like this!”
She straightened her back, gathered her hair back up on the top of her head, and draped herself with a robe and the dignity of an old clown.
Astounded, the man stood there speechless, and then after a silence he said mechanically, “If anyone had ever . . .”
She interrupted him, quivering with emotion: “No, no, don’t say anything, you will never know how deeply distressed I am . . . I am . . . My reputation is spotless . . . I’ve never been married . . . People address me as Madame, but . . . your being here . . . Oh, can’t you see how upset . . . You will get nothing from me in this way, I assure you!”
Every gesture, every sigh, sparked the aggressive fires of her diamonds, but the burglar paid no attention to them, preoccupied as he was with the vexation of a sane and, moreover, modest man. He was ready to explode, to tell—and in what terms!—the impassioned old bag what she could do. He took a step forward and saw, there in front of him, his own image, reflected in a mirror, the flattering image of a handsome young man, dressed in black, and distinguished, yes . . .
“Tell me that I’ll see you again, but it must be somewhere outside my home at first,” the madwoman simpered. “Give me your word as a gentleman.”
. . . Distinguished, yes, as long as he kept quiet. A kind of snobbery rid him of the desire to insult and brutalize, a snobbery which respected both the old woman’s extravagant error and this moment in his own life which imitated that of a noble and romantic hero . . . He bowed as best he could and said in a deep voice, “Madame, I give you my word.”
And left, red-faced and empty-handed.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Advice
Old Monsieur Mestre again poured one can of water on the bleeding hearts, one on the newly planted heliotropes, and two on the blue hydrangeas, which were always dying of thirst. He tied up the nasturtiums, eager to climb, and with the shears he clipped the last withered thyrsus of the lilacs with a little cry, “Ha!” and wiped the dirt from his hands. His little garden in Auteuil, densely planted, well watered, and neatly arranged like a too-small parlor, was overflowing with flowers and defying the dryness of June. Up until November, it astonished the eyes—those of the passers-by at least—for Monsieur Mestre, stooped over his walled-in rectangle of earth for hours, tended it from morning to night, with the doggedness of a truck farmer. He planted, grafted, and pruned; he hunted down slugs, small suspicious-looking spiders, the green flies, and the blight bug. When night came, he would clap his hands together, exclaim “Ha!” and instead of dreaming over the phlox, haunted by gray sphinx moths beneath the white wisteria entwined with purple wisteria, and spurning the fiery geraniums, he would turn away from his charming handiwork and go off for a smoke in his kitchen, or stroll along the boulevards of Auteuil.
The lovely May evening had prolonged his day as amateur gardener by an hour after dinner. The sky, the pale gravel path, the white flowers, and the white façades held a light which did not want to end, and mothers, standing in the doorways of the little open houses, called in vain to their children, who preferred the dusty warm sidewalk to their cool beds.
“Sweetheart,” Monsieur Mestre called out, “I’m going out for a bit.”
Their house, long owned by the modest old couple, still showed, beneath the Virginia creeper, its faded brick. Around it, rich villas had sprung up—Norman chalets, Louis XVI “follies,” modern cubes painted China red or Egypt blue.
Old Monsieur Mestre knew every detail of the façades, every rare tree in the gardens. But his curiosity stopped there; he envied neither the towers nor the thick crystal of the bay windows, wide as the fish ponds. Covetous of his ignorance, he liked conjectures; he had named this thatched cottage, blinded by its long bignonia wig, “Guilty Love”; that turret the color of dried blood, “Japanese Torture.” A proper white construction, with yellow silk curtains, was called “the Happy Family,” and Monsieur Mestre, beaming with a sense of sweet irony in front of a kind of pink-and-blue confection made of cement, marble, and exotic wood, had christened it “First Adventure.”
As a “native” of the sixteenth arrondissement, he cherished the strange provincial avenues, where a trusty old tree shelters new dwellings which a storm could wash away. He walked along, stopped, patted a little girl on the head, and clicked his tongue disapprovingly at a crying child. At night, his silver hair and beard reassured the women walking home alone and they slowed their pace in order to place themselves under the protection of “this nice old gentleman.”
The pink
and gold sky lingered late into the starless May night. But closer to the earth, the lights in the lamps came on, and the dauntless nightingales sang overhead, above the green benches and the stone kiosks. Monsieur Mestre greeted a little two-story house, laid out comfortably in its garden, with a friendly glance. He called it the “Brooding Hen.” A light shone in a single window hung with pink curtains. At the same moment a young man, bareheaded in the fashion of the day, came out of the house, furiously slammed the door behind him, then the gate, and stood there motionless in the street, mulish, head down, eyes fixed on the lighted window in a black, dramatic stare. Monsieur Mestre smiled and gave his shoulders a little shrug.
“Another drama! And you can see right away what it’s all about! We’re eighteen, nineteen years old. We want to take a bite out of life with the teeth of a tiger. We want to be the master. We’ve had a scene with Mama and Papa, and we’ve run out, after some ugly words we already regret . . . And what we really want is to go back in. But our pride won’t let us. Ah, youth!”
Carried along, he said in a low, fatherly voice, “Ah, youth!”
The young man spun around on his heels and looked none too kindly at the silver-haired old man, who looked at him from above, with the benevolent majesty of a fortune-teller, as he held out his arm toward the house.
“Young man, this isn’t where you should be. That is.”
The young man started and backed away a step.
“Oh . . . no . . .” he said dully.
“Oh, yes . . .” said Monsieur Mestre. “Will you deny the impulse you just had to go back in?”
The big dark eyes in the still-beardless face opened in disbelief. “How . . . how do you know?”
Monsieur Mestre placed a prophetic hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I know quite a few things. I know . . . that you were wrong to resist the impulse that was urging you to go back in.”
“Monsieur . . .” begged the pale young man, “Monsieur, I don’t want, I don’t ever want . . .”
“Yes, yes,” scoffed the indulgent old man. “Rebellion, the flight to freedom . . .”
“Yes . . . oh, yes,” sighed the adolescent. “You know everything . . . rebellion . . . escape . . . shouldn’t I . . . can’t I . . .”
Monsieur Mestre’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Escape . . . freedom . . . It’s all words! As unhappy as you are, when you get a hundred feet from here, won’t you be seized again by that same force that made you stop in front of me, by the same voice crying out to you, ‘Go back! I’m the truth, I’m happiness, I am where the secret to this freedom you’re searching for lies, security . . .’”
The young man interrupted Monsieur Mestre’s flowery speech with a look of unspeakable hope, smiled wildly, and ran back into the house.
“Bravo,” exclaimed Monsieur Mestre in a low voice, congratulating himself.
After the door slammed shut, he heard the cry of a young voice, brief, as if muffled under a kiss. He nodded his head in thanks and was walking away, happy, discreet, when the door opened again and the young man, gasping, threw himself into his arms. He had a drunken look on his face, a pallor made green by the late light of day, which seemed wonderful to Monsieur Mestre; his eyes, brimming with tears, wandered from the rose sunset to Monsieur Mestre, to the cedar tree glistening with nightingales.
“Thanks to you . . . thanks to you,” he stammered.
“I don’t deserve it, young man.”
“If . . . if . . .” the boy interrupted, grasping him by the hands. “It’s done. Thanks to you. For days and days I didn’t dare. I endured everything. I cared so much for her. I knew she was lying to me, and that all those nights . . . But I didn’t dare. And then by some miracle I ran into you! You set me back on the track, you made me understand that running away wouldn’t do me any good, that I would be carrying my torture with me . . . You told me that deliverance, peace . . . oh, at last, peace . . . depended on doing something . . . Thank you, thank you . . . I did it. Thank you.”
He let go of Monsieur Mestre’s hands, started to run as though on winged, silent feet, his black hair pushed back away from his pale face. Then Monsieur Mestre felt his heart sink; he took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead and his hands, which the feverish grip had left feeling hot and moist, and saw on his handkerchief the red marks left by his fingers.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Murderer
After he had killed her, with a blow from the little lead weight under which she kept her wrapping paper, Louis found himself at a loss. She lay behind the counter, one leg bent back under her, her head turned away, and her body turned toward him, in a ridiculous pose which put the young man in a bad mood. He shrugged his shoulders and almost said to her, “Get up now, you look ridiculous!” But at that moment the bell on the shop door rang, and Louis saw a little girl come in.
“A card of black mending wool, please.”
“We don’t have any more,” he said politely. “We won’t have any until tomorrow.”
She left, closing the door carefully, and he realized that he hadn’t even thought that she could have walked up to the counter, leaned over, and seen . . .
Night was falling, darkening the little stationery-notions shop. One could still make out the rows of white boxes with an ivory-nut button or a knot of passementerie on the side. Louis struck a match mechanically on the sole of his shoe in order to light the gas jet, then caught himself and put the match out under his foot. Across the street, the wine merchant lit up his whole ground floor all at once, and in contrast the little stationery-notions shop grew darker in a night streaked with yellow light.
Once again Louis leaned over the counter. To his overwhelming astonishment he saw his mistress still lying there, her leg bent back, her neck turned to the side. And something black besides, a thread, as thin as a wisp of hair, was trickling down her pale cheek. He grabbed the forty-five francs in change and dirty bills that he had so furiously refused earlier, went out, took off the door’s lever handle, put it in his pocket, and walked away.
For two days he lived the way a child lives, amusing himself by watching the boats on the Seine and the schoolchildren in the squares. He amused himself like a child, and like a child, he grew bored with himself. He waited and could not decide whether to leave the city or to go back to street peddling like before. His room, paid for by the week, still harbored a stash of Paris monuments on stacks of postcards, mechanical jumping rabbits, and a product you squeezed from a tube to make your own fruit drinks. But Louis sold nothing for two days, while staying in another furnished room. He didn’t feel afraid, and he slept well; the days flowed by smoothly, disturbed only by that pleasing impatience one feels in big port cities after booking passage on an ocean liner.
Two days after the crime he bought a newspaper, as on other days, and read: WOMAN SHOPKEEPER MURDERED IN THE RUE X. “Aha!” he said out loud like an expert, then read the article slowly and attentively, noted that the crime, because of the victim’s “very retired” existence, was already being considered “mysterious,” and folded the paper back up. In front of him his coffee was getting cold. The waiter behind the bar was whistling as he polished the zinc, and an old couple next to him were dipping croissants in hot milk. Louis sat there for several moments, dumbstruck, with his mouth half open, and wondered why all these familiar things had suddenly ceased to be close and intelligible to him. He had the impression that, if questioned, the old couple would answer in a strange language, and that, as he whistled, the waiter was looking right through Louis’s body as if it weren’t even there.
He got up, threw down some money, and headed off toward a train station, where he bought a ticket for a suburb whose name reminded him of the races and afternoons spent boating. During the ride it seemed to him that the train was making very little noise and that the other passengers were speaking in subdued voices.
“Maybe I’m going deaf!”
After getting off the train, Louis bought an evening paper,
and reread the same account as in the morning paper, and yawned.
“Damn, they’re not getting anywhere!”
He ate in a little restaurant near the station and inquired of the owner as to the possibility of finding a job in the area. But he accomplished this formality with great repugnance, and felt ill at ease when the man advised him to see a dentist in a neighboring villa who regrettably had just lost a young man, employed until the day before to care for his motorcycle and to sterilize his surgical instruments. Despite the late hour, he rang the dentist’s doorbell, claimed he was a maker of mechanical toys, didn’t argue about the pay—two hundred and fifty francs—and slept that same night in a small attic room, hung with that blue-and-gray-flowered wallpaper usually used for lining cheap trunks.
For a week he kept the job as laboratory assistant to the American dentist, a great horse of a man, big-boned and red-haired, who asked no questions and smoked with his feet up on the table, as he waited for his rare clients. Clad in a white linen lab coat and leaning against the open gate, Louis breathed the fresh air, and the maids from the villas would smile at his gentle, swarthy face.
He bought a paper every day. Banished from the front page, the “crime in rue . . .” now languished on page 2, amid colliding trains and swindling somnambulists. Five lines, two lines confirmed dispassionately that it remained “a complete mystery.”
One spring afternoon, made fragrant by a brief shower and pierced with the cries of swallows, Louis asked the American dentist for a little money, “to buy himself some underwear,” took off his white lab coat, and left for Paris. And since he was nothing but a simple little murderer, he went straight back to the stationery-notions shop. There were children playing in front of the lowered iron shutter and a week’s worth of splashing had left the door caked with mud. Louis walked the hundred steps back and forth on the sidewalk across the street for a long time and did not leave the street till after nightfall.