The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  Whisperings, an obtuse faith, even a local custom, were these the forces and the magic philters that procured love, decided life and death, removed that lofty mountain, an indifferent heart?

  “. . . One day when you rang the bell, and my sister was lying behind the door . . .”

  “Yes, I remember . . . You asked me ‘Is that you, Eugène?’”

  “She’d said to me: ‘Quick, quick, he’s coming. I can feel it, quick, he must tread on me as he comes in, it’s essential!’ But it was you.”

  “It was only me.”

  “She’d been lying there, believe me or not, for over two hours. Soon after that, she took to pointed things again. Knives, scissors, embroidery needles. That’s very well known, but it’s dangerous. If you haven’t enough strength, the points can turn against you. But do you imagine that one would ever lack strength? If I lived the life she does, I should have been dead by now. I’ve got nothing to sustain me.”

  “Has she, then?”

  “Of course she has. She hates. That nourishes her.”

  That Délia, so young, with her rather arrogant beauty, her soft cheek that she laid against my hand. That was the same Délia who played with twenty little glittering thunderbolts that she intended to be deadly, and she used their sharp points to embroider beaded flowers.

  “. . . But she’s given up embroidering bags now. She’s taken to working with needles whose points she’s contaminated.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said she’s contaminated them by dipping them in a mixture.”

  And Rosita Barberet launched out into the path, strewn with nameless filth, into which the practice of base magic drags its faithful adherents. She pursued that path without blenching, without omitting a word, for fastidiousness is not a feminine virtue. She would not allow me to remain ignorant of one thing to which her young sister stooped in the hope of doing injury, that same sister who loved fresh cherries . . . So young, with one of those rather short bodies a man’s arms clasp so easily and, beneath that black, curly hair, the pallor that a lover longs to crimson.

  Luckily, the narrator branched off and took to talking only about death, and I breathed again. Death is not nauseating. She discoursed on the imminent death of this unfortunate Eugène, which so much resembled the death of the husband of the woman in the sweet shop. And then there was the chemist, who had died quite black.

  “You must surely admit, Madame, that the fact of a chemist being fixed like that by his wife, that really is turning the world upside down!”

  I certainly did admit it. I even derived a strange satisfaction from it. What did I care about the chemist and the unlucky husband of the woman who kept the sweet shop? All I was waiting for now from my detailed informant was one final picture: Délia arriving at the crossroads where, amid the vaporous clouds produced by each one’s illusion, the female slaves of the cloven-footed one meet for the Sabbath.

  “Yes, indeed. And where does the devil come in, Rosita?”

  “What devil, Madame?”

  “Why, the devil pure and simple, I presume. Does your sister give him a special name?”

  An honest amazement was depicted on Rosita’s face and her eyebrows flew up to the top of her high forehead.

  “But, Madame, whatever trail are you off on now? The devil, that’s just for imbeciles. The devil, just imagine . . .”

  She shrugged her shoulders and, behind her glasses, threw a withering glance at discredited Satan.

  “The devil! Admitting he existed, he’d be just the one to mess it all up!”

  “Rosita, you remind me at this moment of the young woman who said: ‘God, that’s all hooey! . . . But no jokes in front of me about the Blessed Virgin!’”

  “Everyone’s got their own ideas, Madame. Good heavens! It’s ten to eight! It was very kind of you to let me come,” she sighed in a voice that did not disguise her disappointment.

  For I had offered her neither help nor connivance. She pulled down her hat—at last—over her forehead. I remembered, just in time, that I had not paid her for her last lot of work.

  “A drop of Lunel before you go, Mademoiselle Rosita?”

  Involuntarily, by calling her “Mademoiselle” again, I was putting her at a distance. She swallowed the golden wine in one gulp and I complimented her.

  “Oh, I’ve got a good head,” she said.

  But as she had folded up her spectacles again, she searched around for me with a vague eye, and as she went out, she bumped against the doorpost, to which she made a little apologetic bow.

  As soon as she had gone, I opened the window to its fullest extent to let in the evening air. Mistaking the feeling of exhaustion her visit had given me for genuine tiredness, I made the error of going to bed early. My dreams showed the effects of it, and through them, I realized I was not yet rid of the two enemy sisters or of another memory. I kept relapsing into a nightmare in which I was now my real self, now identified with Délia. Half reclining like her on our divan-bed, in the dark part of our room, I “convoked” with a powerful summons, with a thousand repetitions of his name, a man who was not called Eugène . . .

  Dawn found me drenched with those abundant tears we rain in sleep and that go on flowing after we are awake and can no longer track them to their source. The thousand-times repeated name grew dim and lost his nocturnal power. In my own mind, I said farewell to it and thrust its echo back into the little flat where I had taken pleasure in suffering. And I abandoned that flat to those other women, to their stifled, audacious, incantation-ridden lives, where witchcraft could be fitted in between the daily task and the Saturday cinema, between the little washtub and the frying steak.

  When the short night was ended, I promised myself that never again would I climb the Paris hill with the steep, gay streets. Between one day and the next, I turned Rosita’s furtive charm, her graceful way of putting down her slender feet when she walked, and the two little ringlets that fluttered on her shoulder into a memory. With that Délia who did not want to be called Adèle, I had a little more trouble. All the more so, as, after the lapse of a fortnight, I took to running into her by pure chance. Once, she was rummaging in a box of small remnants near the entrance of a big shop, and three days later she was buying spaghetti in an Italian grocer’s. She looked pale and diminished, like a convalescent who is out too soon, pearly under the eyes, and extremely pretty. A thick, curled fringe covered her forehead to the eyebrows. Something indescribable stirred in the depths of me and spoke in her favor. But I did not answer.

  Another time, I recognized only her walk, seeing her from the back. We were walking along the same pavement and I had to slow down my step so as not to overtake her. For she was advancing by little, short steps, then making a pause, as if out of breath, and going on again. Finally, one Sunday when I was returning with Annie de Pène from the flea market and, loaded with treasure such as milk-glass lamps and Rubelles plates, we were having a rest and drinking lemonade, I caught sight of Délia Essendier. She was wearing a dress whose black showed purplish in the sunlight, as happens with redyed fabrics. She stopped not far from us in front of a fried-potato stall, bought a large bag of chips, and ate them with gusto. After that, she stayed standing for a moment, with an air of having nothing to do. The shape of the hat she was wearing recalled a Renaissance “Beguine’s,” and cupping Délia’s little Roman chin was the white crepe band of a widow.

  [Translated by Antonia White]

  Green Sealing Wax

  Around fifteen, I was at the height of a mania for “desk furniture.” In this I was only imitating my father, whose mania for it lasted in full force all his life. At the age when every kind of vice gets its claws into adolescence, like the hundred little hooks of a burr sticking into one’s hair, a girl of fifteen runs plenty of risks. My glorious freedom exposed me to all of them and I believed it to be unbounded, unaware that Sido’s maternal instinct, which disdained any form of spying, worked by flashes of intuition and leaped telepathically to
the danger point.

  When I had just turned fifteen, Sido gave me a dazzling proof of her second sight. She guessed that a man above suspicion had designs on my little pointed face, the plaits that whipped against my calves, and my well-made body. Having entrusted me to this man’s family during the holidays, she received a warning as clear and shattering as the gift of sudden faith and she cursed herself for having sent me away to strangers. Promptly she put on her little bonnet that tied under the chin, got into the clanking, jolting train—they were beginning to send antique coaches along a brand-new line—and found me in a garden, playing with two other little girls, under the eyes of a taciturn man, leaning on his elbow like the meditative Demon on the ledge of Notre-Dame.

  Such a spectacle of peaceful family life could not deceive Sido. She noticed, moreover, that I looked prettier than I did at home. That is how girls blossom in the warmth of a man’s desire, whether they are fifteen or thirty. There was no question of scolding me and Sido took me away with her without the irreproachably respectable man’s having dared to ask the reason for her arrival or for our departure. In the train, she fell asleep before my eyes, worn out like someone who had won a battle. I remember that lunchtime went by and I complained of being hungry. Instead of flushing, looking at her watch, promising me my favorite delicacies—whole-meal bread, cream cheese, and pink onions—all she did was to shrug her shoulders. Little did she care about my hunger pangs, she had saved the most precious thing of all.

  I had done nothing wrong, nor had I abetted this man, except by my torpor. But torpor is a far graver peril for a girl of fifteen than all the usual excited giggling and blushing and clumsy attempts at flirtation. Only a few men can induce that torpor from which girls awake to find themselves lost. That, so to speak, surgical intervention of Sido’s cleared up all the confusion inside me and I had one of those relapses into childishness in which adolescence revels when it is simultaneously ashamed of itself and intoxicated by its own ego.

  My father, a born writer, left few pages behind him. At the actual moment of writing, he dissipated his desire in material arrangements, setting out all the objects a writer needs and a number of superfluous ones as well. Because of him, I am not proof against this mania myself. As a result of having admired and coveted the perfect equipment of a writer’s worktable, I am still exacting about the tools on my desk. Since adolescence does nothing by halves, I stole from my father’s worktable, first a little mahogany set square that smelled like a cigar box, then a white metal ruler. Not to mention the scolding, I received full in my face the glare of a small, blazing gray eye, the eye of a rival, so fierce that I did not risk it a third time. I confined myself to prowling, hungrily, with my mind full of evil thoughts, around all these treasures of stationery. A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colors; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green, and violet; a hand blotter; a bottle of liquid glue, not to mention slabs of transparent amber-colored stuff known as “mouth glue”; the minute remains of a spahi’s cloak reduced to the dimensions of a pen wiper with scalloped edges; a big ink pot flanked by a small ink pot, both in bronze; and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page; another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colors (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams of paper, creamlaid, ruled, watermarked; and, of course, that little stamping machine that bit into the white sheet, and, with one snap of its jaws, adorned it with an embossed name: J.–J. Colette. There was also a glass of water for washing paintbrushes, a box of watercolors, an address book, the bottles of red, black, and violet ink, the mahogany set square, a pocket case of mathematical instruments, the tobacco jar, a pipe, the spirit lamp for melting the sealing wax.

  A property owner tries to extend his domain; my father therefore tried to acclimatize adventitious subjects on his vast table. At one time there appeared on it a machine that could cut through a pile of a hundred sheets, and some frames filled with a white jelly on which you laid a written page face downward and then, from this looking-glass original, pulled off blurred, sticky, anemic copies. But my father soon wearied of such gadgets and the huge table returned to its serenity, to its classical style that was never disturbed by inspiration with its disorderly litter of crossed-out pages, cigarette butts, and “roughs” screwed up into paper balls. I have forgotten, heaven forgive me, the paper-knife section, three or four boxwood ones, one of imitation silver, and the last of yellowed ivory, cracked from end to end.

  From the age of ten I had never stopped coveting those material goods, invented for the glory and convenience of a mental power, which come under the general heading of “desk furniture.” Children only delight in things they can hide. For a long time I secured possession of one wing, the left one, of the great four-doored double bookcase (it was eventually sold by order of the court). The doors of the upper part were glass-fronted, those of the lower, solid and made of beautiful figured mahogany. When you opened the lower left-hand door at a right angle, the flap touched the side of the chest of drawers, and as the bookcase took up nearly the whole of one paneled wall, I would immure myself in a quadrangular nook formed by the side of the chest of drawers, the wall, the left section of the bookcase, and its wide-open door. Sitting on a little footstool, I could gaze at the three mahogany shelves in front of me, on which were displayed the objects of my worship, ranging from cream-laid paper to a little cup of the golden powder. “She’s a chip off the old block,” Sido would say teasingly to my father. It was ironical that, equipped with every conceivable tool for writing, my father rarely committed himself to putting pen to paper, whereas Sido—sitting at any old table, pushing aside an invading cat, a basket of plums, a pile of linen, or else just putting a dictionary on her lap by way of a desk—Sido really did write. A hundred enchanting letters prove that she did. To continue a letter or finish it off, she would tear a page out of her household account book or write on the back of a bill.

  She therefore despised our useless altars. But she did not discourage me from lavishing care on my desk and adorning it to amuse myself. She even showed anxiety when I explained that my little house was becoming too small for me . . . “Too small. Yes, much too small,” said the gray eyes. “Fifteen . . . Where is Pussy Darling going, bursting out of her nook like a hermit crab driven out of its borrowed shell by its own growth? Already, I’ve snatched her from the clutches of that man. Already, I’ve had to forbid her to go dancing on the ‘Ring’ on Low Sunday. Already, she’s escaping and I shan’t be able to follow her. Already, she wants a long dress, and if I give her one, the blindest will notice that she’s a young girl. And if I refuse, everyone will look below the too-short skirt and stare at her woman’s legs. Fifteen . . . How can I stop her from being fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen years old?”

  Sometimes, during that period, she would come and lean over the mahogany half door that isolated me from the world. “What are you doing?” She could see perfectly well what I was doing but she could not understand it. I refused her the answer given her so generously by everything else she observed, the bee, the caterpillar, the hydrangea, the ice plant. But at least she could see I was there, sheltered from danger. She indulged my mania. The lovely pieces of shiny colored wrapping paper were given me to bind my books and I made the gold string into bookmarkers. I had the first penholder sheathed in a glazed turquoise-colored substance, with a moiré pattern on it, that appeared in Reumont’s, the stationers.

  One day my mother brought me a little stick of sealing wax and I recognized the stub of green wax, the prize jewel of my father’s desk. No doubt I considered the gift too overwhelming, for I gave no sign of ecstatic joy. I clutched the sealing wax in my hand, and as it grew warm, it gave out a slightly Oriental fragrance of incense.

  “It’s very old sealing wax,” Sido told me, “and as you can
see, it’s powdered with gold. Your father already had it when we were married; he’d been given it by his mother and his mother assured him that it was a stick of wax that had been used by NapoLéon I. But you’ve got to remember that my mother-in-law lied every time she opened her mouth, so . . .”

  “Is he giving it to me or have you taken it?”

  Sido became impatient; she always turned irritable when she thought she was going to be forced to lie and was trying to avoid lying.

  “When will you stop twisting a lock of hair around the end of your nose?” she cried. “You’re doing your best to have a red nose with a blob at the tip like a cherry! That sealing wax? Let’s say your father’s lending it to you and leave it at that. Of course, if you don’t want . . .”

  My wild clutch of possession made Sido laugh again, and she said, with pretended lightness: “If he wanted it, he’d ask you to give it back, of course!”

  But he did not ask me to give it back. For a few months, gold-flecked green sealing wax perfumed my narrow empire bounded by four mahogany walls; then my pleasure gradually diminished, as do all pleasures to which no one disputes our right. Besides, my devotion to stationery temporarily waned in favor of a craze to be glamorous. I asserted my right to wear a “bustle,” that is to say, I enlarged my small, round behind with a horsehair cushion, which, of course, made my skirts much shorter at the back than in front. In our village, the frenzy of adolescence turned girls between thirteen and fifteen into madwomen who stole horsehair, cotton, and wool, stuffed rags in a bag, and tied on the hideous contraption known as a “false bottom” on dark staircases, out of their mother’s sight. I also longed for a thick, frizzy fringe, leather belts so tight I could hardly breathe, high boned collars, violet scent on my handkerchief . . .