The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  Alix’s Refusal

  “Have you seen that poor Alix lately?”

  “Yesterday, my dear, and it’s frightening. She looks like she’s a hundred years old.”

  “A hundred wouldn’t be so bad. The worst thing is that she looks her age! What is all this . . . discouragement, this refusal to do anything to make herself attractive? Did she take a vow? She isn’t in mourning for anyone, is she?”

  “Yes, her second youth.”

  And they laughed. For even the most serious situations cannot keep women from picking at their fellow creatures, especially their fellow female creatures. It is a pastime as monotonous as sarcasm. When two women get together to disparage another woman, they first cite her vintage, then raise questions about her health, her marital fidelity, her monetary situation, fortunate or unfortunate . . .

  It so happens that I knew not only these two women here but, better still, their victim, and it’s the backbiters who, for once, I think are right.

  As resistant as it is to every sort of shock, the precious and mysterious feminine constitution has had no lack of reasons to stagger and die out for quite some time. A woman is not destroyed by material wretchedness alone. She who endures despite near-poverty, despite hard work, disintegrates beneath the weight of an obsession. It will be enough, in order for her to consummate her own ruin, that a sort of false point of honor displace, in her mind, a hard-won sense of order. Such is the case of the person on whom these two women, in a moderately compassionate tone, had turned their attention.

  A case which seemed curable, since “poor Alix” has neither fallen into the fire nor been ravaged by lupus, nor has she been wounded at the source of her livelihood. The crisis she is going through is merely one of discouragement, of whatgoodisitism—Rabelais has a beautiful word for it, one that creates an image, “déflocquement.” Women who have suffered are afflicted by this sort of weakness less often than women who have not suffered enough. Having climbed to the half-century mark, a woman, hundreds of women, all women, are faced with another, more dizzying slope and begin to plan their defense. Most turn away from it, hiding their heads under their wings. There is hardly a woman who feels threatened by her age who does not know, after a period of trial and error, how first to try on, then how to give her face a characteristic look, a style which will defy the work of time for ten, fifteen years.

  What a reprieve! I am careful not to speak lightly of these renovations, these twilight triumphs which Balzac denied. “Though already thirty-two years old,” he writes, “she could still give the illusion of youth.” What! At thirty, at the age of an old horse, the age of a tree in its most resplendent foliage, of a young elephant, of an adolescent crocodile, a woman should pack away her most ardent dreams and retire from the dance, for fear of being called an aged bacchante!

  I give my indulgence—and I am not the only one—and approval to those who wear the colors of their survival, the signs of their activity, into the arena. Too much courage has shone among the female kind, and for too many years, for women, under the pretext of loyalty, to break the contract they signed with beauty. You all seem to have this new “Alix way” about you, a look of embarrassment and apology which is not yours. “But it’s my real face!” No. Your real face is in the drawer of your dressing table, and sadly enough, you have left your good spirits in with it. Your real face is a warm, matte pink tending toward fawn, set off high on the cheeks by a glimmer of deep carmine, well blended and nearly translucent—which stops just under the lower eyelid, where it disappears deep into a bluish gray, barely visible, spread up to the brow; the thick eyebrow, carefully drawn out at the end, is brown like your thick, curling lashes between which your gray eyes look blue. I’m not forgetting the mouth whose design—equally well corrected—is a bold arc, its scarlet color making the teeth whiter. To work, my poor Alix! Show a little confidence in yourself, the inner smile you were known for will blossom all at once over the whole of you. One will only have to see you to be certain that the false Alix was that bland, retiring, discouraged, somewhat bletted woman . . . The true Alix is the one who always had a taste for adorning herself, defending herself, and pleasing others, for savoring the bitterness, the risk, and the sweetness of living—the true Alix, you see, is the young one.

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  The Seamstress

  “Do you mean to say your daughter is nine years old,” said a friend, “and she doesn’t know how to sew? She really must learn to sew. In bad weather sewing is a better occupation for a child of that age than reading storybooks.”

  “Nine years old? And she can’t sew?” said another friend. “When she was eight, my daughter embroidered this tray cloth for me, look at it . . . Oh, I don’t say it’s fine needlework, but it’s nicely done all the same. Nowadays my daughter cuts out her own underclothes. I can’t bear anyone in my house to mend holes with pins!”

  I meekly poured all this domestic wisdom over Bel-Gazou.

  “You’re nine years old and you don’t know how to sew? You really must learn to sew . . .”

  Flouting truth, I even added: “When I was eight years old, I remember I embroidered a tray cloth . . . Oh, it wasn’t fine needlework, I dare say . . . And then, in bad weather . . .”

  She has therefore learned to sew. And although—with one bare sunburned leg tucked beneath her, and her body at ease in its bathing suit—she looks more like a fisherboy mending a net than an industrious little girl, she seems to experience no boyish repugnance. Her hands, stained the color of tobacco juice by sun and sea, hem in a way that seems against nature; their version of the simple running stitch resembles the zigzag dotted lines of a road map, but she buttonholes and scallops with elegance and is severely critical of the embroidery of others.

  She sews and kindly keeps me company if rain blurs the horizon of the sea. She also sews during the torrid hour when the spindle bushes gather their circles of shadow directly under them. Moreover, it sometimes happens that a quarter of an hour before dinner, black in her white dress—“Bel-Gazou! your hands and frock are clean, and don’t forget it!”—she sits solemnly down with a square of material between her fingers. Then my friends applaud: “Just look at her! Isn’t she good? That’s right! Your mother must be pleased!”

  Her mother says nothing—great joys must be controlled. But ought one to feign them? I shall speak the truth: I don’t much like my daughter sewing.

  When she reads, she returns all bewildered and with flaming cheeks, from the island where the chest full of precious stones is hidden, from the dismal castle where a fair-haired orphan child is persecuted. She is soaking up a tested and time-honored poison, whose effects have long been familiar. If she draws, or colors pictures, a semiarticulate song issues from her, unceasing as the hum of bees around the privet. It is the same as the buzzing of flies as they work, the slow waltz of the house painter, the refrain of the spinner at her wheel. But Bel-Gazou is silent when she sews, silent for hours on end, with her mouth firmly closed, concealing her large, new-cut incisors that bite into the moist heart of a fruit like little saw-edged blades. She is silent, and she—why not write down the word that frightens me—she is thinking.

  A new evil? A torment that I had not foreseen? Sitting in a grassy dell, or half buried in hot sand and gazing out to sea, she is thinking, as well I know. She thinks rapidly when she is listening, with a well-bred pretense of discretion, to remarks imprudently exchanged above her head. But it would seem that with this needleplay she has discovered the perfect means of adventuring, stitch by stitch, point by point, along a road of risks and temptations. Silence . . . the hand armed with the steel dart moves back and forth. Nothing will stop the unchecked little explorer. At what moment must I utter the “Halt!” that will brutally arrest her in full flight? Oh, for those young embroiderers of bygone days, sitting on a hard little stool in the shelter of their mother’s ample skirts! Maternal authority kept them there for years and y
ears, never rising except to change the skein of silk, or to elope with a stranger. Think of Philomène de Watteville and her canvas, on which she embroidered the loss and the despair of Albert Savarus . . .

  “What are you thinking about, Bel-Gazou?”

  “Nothing, Mother. I’m counting my stitches.”

  Silence. The needle pierces the material. A coarse trail of chain stitch follows very unevenly in its wake. Silence . . .

  “Mother?”

  “Darling?”

  “Is it only when people are married that a man can put his arm around a lady’s waist?”

  “Yes . . . No . . . It depends. If they are very good friends and have known each other a long time, you understand . . . As I said before: it depends. Why do you want to know?”

  “For no particular reason, Mother.”

  Two stitches, ten misshapen chain stitches.

  “Mother? Is Madame X married?”

  “She has been. She is divorced.”

  “I see. And Monsieur F., is he married?”

  “Why, of course he is; you know that.”

  “Oh! Yes . . . Then it’s all right if one of the two is married?”

  “What is all right?”

  “To depend.”

  “One doesn’t say: ‘to depend.’”

  “But you said just now that it depended.”

  “But what has it got to do with you? Is it any concern of yours?”

  “No, Mother.”

  I let it drop. I feel inadequate, self-conscious, displeased with myself. I should have answered differently and I could not think what to say.

  Bel-Gazou also drops the subject; she sews. But she pays little attention to her sewing, overlaying it with pictures, associations of names and people, all the results of patient observation. A little later will come other curiosities, other questions, and especially other silences. Would to God that Bel-Gazou were the bewildered and simple child who questions crudely, open-eyed! But she is too near the truth, and too natural not to know, as a birthright, that all nature hesitates before that most majestic and most disturbing of instincts, and that it is wise to tremble, to be silent, and to lie when one draws near to it.

  [Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod]

  The Watchman

  Sunday. This morning the children have an odd look on their faces. I’ve seen them look like this before, when they were organizing some theatrical production in the attic, with costumes, masks, shrouds, and dragging chains, that was their play, Le Revenant de la commanderie—a ghostly lucubration that cost them a week of fever, night frights, and furry tongues, so excited did they get with their own phantoms. But that is an old story. Bertrand is now eighteen and plans, as is suitable at his age, to reform the finances of Europe; Renaud, now over fourteen, has no other interest but to take apart and put together again motorcar engines; and Bel-Gazou, this year, asks me questions of desolating triteness: “When we go back to Paris, can I wear stockings? In Paris, can I have a hat? In Paris, will you curl my hair on Sundays?”

  No matter, I find all three of them acting strange and disposed to go off in corners and talk in low voices.

  Monday. The children don’t look at all well this morning, and so I question them.

  “What’s wrong with you youngsters?”

  “Nothing at all, Tante Colette!” exclaim my stepsons.

  “Nothing at all, Mamma!” exclaims Bel-Gazou.

  A fine chorus—and certainly a well-organized fib. The thing is becoming serious, all the more so since I overheard the two boys, at dusk, behind the tennis court, engaged in this bit of dialogue:

  “I tell you, old man, it didn’t stop from midnight to three in the morning.”

  “Who are you telling that to, for goodness’ sake! I didn’t shut an eye, it kept it up from midnight to four this morning. It went poom . . . poom . . . poom! Like that, slowly, as if with bare feet, but heavy, heavy . . .”

  They glimpsed me and rushed down upon me like two male falcons, with laughter, with white and red balls, with a studied and noisy thoughtlessness. I will learn nothing today.

  Wednesday. When last night toward eleven o’clock I went through Bel-Gazou’s bedroom to reach mine, she was not yet asleep. She was lying on her back, her arms at her side, and her dark eyes beneath the fringe of her hair were moving. A warm August moon, crescent, softly swayed the shadow of the magnolia on the parquet floor and the white bed gave off a bluish light.

  “You’re not asleep?”

  “No, Mamma.”

  “What are you thinking about, all alone like this?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “For goodness’ sake, to what?”

  “Nothing, Mamma.”

  At that very second I heard, distinctly, the sound of a heavy footstep, and not shod, on the upper floor. The upper floor is a long attic where no one sleeps, where no one, after nightfall, has occasion to go, and which leads to the top of the most ancient tower. My daughter’s hand, which I squeezed, contracted in mine.

  Two mice passed in the wall, playing and emitting birdlike cries.

  “Are you afraid of mice now?”

  “No, Mamma.”

  Above us, the footsteps sounded again, and in spite of myself I put the question “Why, who can be walking up there?”

  Bel-Gazou did not reply, and this stubborn silence was unpleasant.

  “So you hear something?”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “‘Yes, Mamma!’ Is that all you can think of to say?”

  The child suddenly burst into tears and sat up in bed.

  “It’s not my fault, Mamma. He walks like that every night.”

  “Who?”

  “The footsteps.”

  “The footsteps of whom?”

  “Of no one.”

  “Heavens, how stupid children are! Here you are again, making a fuss over nothing, you and your brothers! Is this the nonsense you hide in corners to discuss? Well now, I’m going upstairs. Yes, I’m going to let you hear some footsteps overhead!”

  On the topmost landing, clusters of flies clinging to the beams whirred like a fire in the chimney as I passed with my lamp, which a gust of air put out the minute I opened the garret door. But there was no need of a lamp in these garret regions with their tall dormer windows where the moonlight entered by milky sheets spread out on the floor. The midnight countryside shimmered as far as the eye could see, the hills embossed with silver, the shallow valleys ashy-mauve, watered in the lowest of the meadows by a river of glittering fog which screened the moonlight . . . A little sparrow owl imitated the cat in a tree, and the cat replied to him. But nothing was walking in the garret beneath the forest of crisscrossed beams. I waited a long while, breathing in the fleeting nocturnal coolness, the odor of a granary which always hovers in a garret, then went downstairs again. Bel-Gazou, worn out, was sleeping.

  Saturday. I have been listening every night since Wednesday. Someone does walk up there, sometimes at midnight, sometimes toward three o’clock. Tonight I climbed up and down the stairs four times. To no purpose. At lunchtime I forced the youngsters to speak out. Anyway, they have reached the limit with their hocus-pocus.

  “Children, you must help me clear up a mystery. We’re bound to be enormously amused—even Bertrand, who has lost all his illusions. Just imagine! I’ve been hearing, every night, someone walking above Bel-Gazou’s room . . .”

  They exploded, all at once.

  “I know, I know!” Renaud exclaims. “It’s the commander in armor, who came back to earth once before, in Grandfather’s time. Page told me all about it and . . .”

  “What a farce!” said Bertrand laconically. “The truth is that isolated and collective instances of hallucination have occurred here, ever since the Holy Virgin, in a blue sash and drawn by four white horses, suddenly appeared in front of Guitras and told him . . .”

  “She didn’t tell him anything!” squealed Bel-Gazou. “She wrote to him!”

  “An
d sent the letter by the post?” sneered Renaud. “That’s childish!”

  “And your commander isn’t childish?” said Bertrand.

  “Excuse me!” retorted Renaud, flushing red. “The commander is a family tradition. Your Virgin, that’s a piece of village folklore, the kind you hear everywhere . . .”

  “Now, now, children, have you finished? Can I put in a word? I know just one thing and it’s this: in the garret there are sounds, unexplainable, of footsteps. I’m going to stand watch tomorrow night. Beast or man, we’ll find out who is walking. And those who want to stand watch with me . . . Good. Adopted by a count of hands!”

  Sunday. Sleepless night. Full moon. Nothing to report except the sound of footsteps heard behind the half-open door to the garret, but interrupted by Renaud, who, trigged out in a Henri II breastplate and a red bandanna, dashed forward romantically shouting, “Stand back! Stand back!” We hoot at him and accuse him of having “spoiled everything.”

  “Strange,” Bertrand remarks with crushing and reflective irony, “strange how anything fantastic can excite the mind of a boy, even though he grew up in British schools . . .”

  “Eh, my lad,” adds my girl in an unmistakably Limousin accent, “you must not say, ‘Stand back!’ You must say, ‘I’m going to give you a wallop!’”

  Tuesday. Last night the two boys and I stood watch, leaving Bel-Gazou asleep.

  The moon at the full whitened from one end to the other a long track of light where the rats had left a few ears of nibbled maize. We kept ourselves in the darkness behind the half-open door and suffered boredom for a good half hour, watching the path of moonlight shift, become oblique, lick the lower part of the crisscrossed beams . . . Renaud touched my arm: someone was walking at the far end of the garret. A rat scampered off and climbed along a slanting beam, followed by its serpent tail. The footsteps, solemn-sounding, approached, and I tightened my arms around the necks of the two boys.