by Colette
“But why did she confess?”
“Ah,” said Sido reflectively. “That’s because a confession is almost inevitable. A confession is like . . . let’s see . . . yes . . . it’s like a stranger you carry inside you . . .”
“Like a child?”
“No, not a child. With a child, you know the exact date it’s going to leave you. Whereas a confession bursts out quite suddenly, just when you weren’t expecting it, it tastes its liberty, it stretches its limbs. It shouts, it cuts capers. She accompanied hers with a dance, that poor murderess who thought herself so clever.”
It shouts, it cuts capers . . . Just like that, then and there, my own secret burst out into Sido’s ear: on the very day of Madame Hervouët’s last visit I had noticed the disappearance of the little stick of green sealing wax powdered with gold.
[Translated by Antonia White]
PART IV
Love
Love has never been a question of age. I shall never be so old as to forget what love is.
In the Flower of Age
“Thursday . . . Thursday is the cocktail party at the Schlumbergers’, a little six to nine affair . . . Friday we’re taking a picnic to Thoronet. I’m preparing one of those warm breads for them, stuffed with crushed anchovies in oil and sweet red peppers, with a pinch of thyme . . .”
Madame Vasco pressed her lips together in greedy anticipation, half closing her eyes.
“Sunday, of course, we’re giving the whole house the night off. Martine and Marinette want to go to the movies with the valet. Teobaldo will stay with the dogs . . . Oh, and about tonight . . . Shall we accept the invitation to the artists’ impromptu? You know, everyone dresses up in costumes made exclusively out of whatever’s lying around, old newspapers, kitchen aprons, wrapping paper, and towels . . . You already stood us up the day before yesterday, you bad boy. And last Wednesday it was the Simonis who brought me home. You don’t have to worry about being bored tonight . . . Henri Simoni is making his costume out of discarded postal parcels, all corrugated cardboard and string, it’ll be smashing!”
Paul Vasco did not answer right away. He lay stretched out on his back on the wide conjugal bed, his outspread arms bronze against the pink batiste and russet lace. A hand, whose firmness he knew well, ran like a stiff comb through the disorder of his damp, blond hair, and he decided it was time he opened his eyes.
“Ah, there you are, my two periwinkles!” said his wife in a softer voice.
Sitting up beside him, she held on her lap the small lemon-wood breakfast tray laden with pink china. The Paris morning papers were strewn across the pink bed, soiling it with their ink; a branch of pale blue plumbago, brought back by Paul from the path that led down to the sea, was being used by the white cat, which was deaf, as a toy. The sun had just entered the room and was making its way across the black rug. The bougainvillea hung slightly over the edge of the balcony. A pale sky, the sky of summer mornings on the Mediterranean, filled the window. Paul Vasco resigned himself, as he did every morning, to looking up at his wife, and every morning he was amazed.
Tall, careful of her weight, strong and healthy, she didn’t hesitate to tie her hair, thrown back and dyed a golden chestnut, with a little ribbon whose color changed with that of her dressing gown, and in the summer she tanned like a young woman. But her tan refused to penetrate certain creases, fine as incisions, forming at the corners of her eyes and around her neck, despite surgical intervention. Madeleine Vasco smiled down at her young husband, showing her teeth looked after and corrected by a master. Between her ear and her hairline, between the hair at her temples and the corner of her eye, Paul could make out the thin, scarred folds, looking mauve beneath the ochered powder. “She’s amazing,” he thought. “Even I would never imagine she was sixty-two years old. Besides, even if I did, she’d tell me it was all in my imagination.”
He closed his eyes again with the irresistible laziness that followed his morning swim and a run on the beach.
“You haven’t answered me about tonight. Sleepyhead, oh, my beautiful sleepyhead . . .”
For him it was not a question of answering but of stalling for time, of holding out, by lying motionless, until the moment when his wife, summoned by the need to oblige her stubborn beauty, would leave him for an hour and a half.
“Whatever you like,” he sighed at last.
With a snap of his fingers he called for a cigarette, which Madeleine put, already lit, between his lips.
“You could say,” he joked, “that the only thing I brought here was a mouth to smoke with . . .”
“And who’s asking you for anything else?” she countered.
With a penetrating and bold gaze, she caressed that mouth, whose smile and firm freshness had persuaded her into the foolishness of remarrying, ten months after the death of her first husband, thus snatching, from a minor office position, a poor, handsome, and by chance honest young man. For Paul Vasco she had given up her widow’s weeds and her semi-mourning, dyed her gray hair, and from her widow’s chrysalis had emerged a tall, strong woman in love, so set on happiness that she dazzled her young spouse, thirty years her junior. For two years now, from January to May, they had been coming “to the Riviera,” as Paul naively put it, he as yet not having grown tired of the luxury of an estate in the south, with its paths of pink sand, its wisteria, and its marble terraces. The smiles around them were discreet, for Madame Paul Vasco, shaded by large hats, wearing simple makeup, had a rather flashy way of refusing her husband’s arm when climbing the stairs of the casinos. He followed her, served her, and found her young. However, he could never overcome his apprehension when she was dancing with him. “I’ve got a strong heart, you know . . .” she would say. “I’ll give you a few pointers when they play the hesitation waltz.” In fact, she waltzed with long, gliding, somewhat masculine steps, and she never had to stop to catch her breath, holding her hand to her flat, jewel-clad breast. It was Paul who while dancing would experience a certain anguish, grow pale, and say softly, “Enough . . .” He could not hold up next to his wife’s stamina, her bony and mechanical lightness. He had a childish fear of a sudden creaking of hinges, a squeaking of springs. She never seemed less alive than when she was proving her agility, and as they danced he would press his temple against hers, trying not to notice that as she waltzed she stared wildly, straight ahead, and breathed through her painted, half-open mouth.
But once he was back at the estate, life again became sweet and easy. He felt at home there, and quickly developed a taste for laying out gardens and plotting the best colors for the flower beds with the head gardener.
“Shall we go somewhere?” Madeleine asked him after their siesta.
“Yes!” exclaimed Paul enthusiastically. “Let’s go to Fréjus. I need seven hundred geranium-ivy cuttings!”
“Teobaldo will pick them up in the station wagon, don’t bother.”
He pouted, and Madeleine looked at the pouting mouth.
“What a child! You really want to go? Have them bring the car around . . .”
For she gave in whenever she feared he might be getting bored. Somewhat distracted, and vain about his physical beauty, he was never bored when he was parading around half naked in the sun or tossing the medicine ball with the trainer who came down from Cannes.
One evening as Madeleine Vasco was calling her husband and fidgeting with impatience in a long black velvet dress trimmed with monkey fur, and shouting, “We’ll be late! The ballet starts at nine in Monte Carlo!” she was stupefied to see Paul emerge from the cellar, whitened ever so slightly by spider webs and saltpeter, with a venerable old bottle under each arm.
“Where have you been?”
“Can’t you tell?” he said. “We absolutely have to put the wine book back in order and the vintages in the racks have to be reclassified. It’s a shambles down there!”
Madeleine raised her plucked eyebrows and the wrinkles on her forehead all the way up to her hairline.
“What can that p
ossibly have to do with us, my darling?”
“Why,” said Vasco, “it’s the man’s job to keep the cellar in order.”
“Does it amuse you?”
He smiled a competent smile. “Very much.”
“And that’s why you’re going to make us miss Les Sylphides?”
He seemed to wake up suddenly, looked at the dress, the woman, and the dazzling new jewel she was wearing on her bodice, next to skin which had lost its smoothness, its soft and supple mystery. He offered no protest and dashed off to get dressed.
“Give me five minutes!”
She remained alone, waiting for him on the lower terrace, walking in the wind which was ruffling the water and bringing the day to an end. She yawned and admitted to herself that she had no less of an appetite for delicate fish and champagne than for lights, music, new faces . . .
As soon as his wife had closed the door to her bathroom, Paul Vasco sat up on the rumpled bed and let out a gentle sigh. He was not a cynical man and he accepted kindness in a spirit of resignation. His wife’s frivolous energy did not frighten him unduly, for she did not bring to her way of leading the life of a young socialite the insane bitterness of aged bacchantes, but rather the determination of an ex-bourgeoise who remembered what it was like to have a dotty old homebody for a first husband. Paul learned how to escape, every fifth time, then every third time, from the dinners, the suppers, the automobile races, and the rallies. “Banner of Honor to the red-and-white sedan of Madame Paul Vasco . . .”
He slid down to the foot of the pink bed and swore to himself that he would not go to the artists’ costume party. “Those clowns of all ages can get themselves up in old newspapers, grocery bags, straw wigs, curtains, and straw mats without me.” There was sure to be a painful moment when he would say to Madeleine, “I’m not going.” There would be that look in his wife’s eyes, as if they were lying in ambush between the lashes of a starlet, and the silent disdain inflicted on a stay-at-home young man by an indomitable sixty-year-old scatterbrain . . . But what a reward it was, afterward, to savor an evening devoted to filing away bills and reading a manual dealing with the rejuvenation of trees by frequent injections into the root cap!
He managed his day as carefully as an adolescent wanting to spend the night at a friend’s, a soldier hoping to slip over the wall . . . While she was having a light dinner across from him, he asked his wife what sort of costume she was planning. Excitedly, she confided to him that, for herself, she was counting on using a crocheted bedspread lent her by Luc-Albert Moreau, and for Paul, a big lampshade tied around his waist, or else a woven straw seat cover.
“But we go in evening clothes, and put our costumes on there,” she added.
He made no objection, but as soon as he was alone, he put on a comfortable robe and his slippers, sat down in front of a blazing fire which made his cheeks glow, and, while waiting for the conjugal onslaught, read the evening edition of L’Eclairceur de Nice et du Sud-Est, over which he fell asleep.
Toward midnight, a sequined train slithered down the stairs with a delicate, snake-like sound. But the heavy tapping of heels, on each step, made it known that Madeleine’s knees were struggling against the onset of anchylosis. She came to the bottom of the stairs followed by her obedient, steel-gray, and glittering train. A scarlet cape, thrown over her shoulders, left only her bedecked, golden, proud head showing. Walking toward a mirror, she caught sight of her young sleeping husband and stopped. He was asleep with his head drooping to one side, with the light from the fire caressing his plump, dimpled chin, and two clearly drawn frown marks framing his childishly pouting mouth. An empty cup was proof that he had had some verbena tea, and the deaf cat slept at his feet on the open newspaper. Leaning over, Madeleine Vasco pressed her bracelets to her side to keep them from jingling. Where had she seen that robe and those slippers before, and the hermetic cat, the medicinal cup, and above all this sudden sleepiness which betrays a man’s weakness? . . . The image of the late Monsieur Perrin, her first husband, rose up between her and Paul Vasco, and she drew back. Facing her in the mirror, a tall woman, scarlet and gray, thin because she had to be, erect because she wanted to be, matched her glance for glance, and her mouth, smothered with lipstick, smiled. Madame Vasco took a last look at the sleeping man, muttered gruffly, “Just another old man!” and with two fingers picked up her train and left without looking back.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Rivals
“Nice dress,” Clara thought. “But it seems to me Antoinette isn’t looking very well. Maybe it’s just because I don’t want her to look very well . . . We’ll see what he thinks. How can a man of taste be interested in a woman with such a high forehead?”
She leaned over the shoulder of a young woman sitting in the first row of gilded seats.
“Marise, do heights make you dizzy?”
“Heights? . . . Yes, very dizzy.” Marise answered precipitously. “Don’t even talk about it, it makes me weak in the knees.”
“Then don’t look at Antoinette’s forehead. It’s the steppes as far as the eye can see. Her hairline is all the way at the back of her head. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s indecent.”
With a well-studied imitation of modesty, she lowered a large wave of curly auburn hair over her forehead. At the same time, alerted by the marvelous telepathy of enmity, Antoinette glared at her with luminous black eyes and guessed everything. She immediately began whispering urgently into the ear of a stout lady caparisoned in purple sequins, and tracing parallel lines with her fingernail on her pure, high forehead . . . Clara, who did not hide her forehead solely out of coquetry, clenched her jaws.
“So it’s come to that,” she thought. “If Antoinette and I were ever left alone, what wouldn’t we be capable of? She would grab me by the throat, I’d drag her by her long hair, which she’s never had cut, by those black braids of hers she used to wrap around my neck. I shudder to think . . .”
She gave a little shiver and threw a light scrap of ermine over her shoulders . . . In vain, the Capet Quartet outdid itself in the Brahms finale. In vain, two voices blended ravishingly in a mocking and lively piece by Monteverdi. Clara, watching Antoinette, was waiting for a man to arrive. “He won’t get here until his play is over. Tonight’s the second night for the critics. God knows I know how to make allowances for things; a dramatist can’t lose interest in . . . There he is!”
She straightened her collar, adopted the attitude he preferred, a myopic and impertinent air, with the crest of curly hair falling down over her forehead between her eyebrows. As he greeted the mistress of the house, then the large lady in purple, then Antoinette, Clara nearly ceased thinking. She was all eyes and believed it could only be love. She noticed that he lingered in front of Antoinette, taking advantage of the slight commotion caused by the singers’ success. She convinced herself that it was not Antoinette’s hand he had kissed, but her wrist, one might as well say her arm. She observed, frozen with impatience, that Antoinette had not gotten up, and that he remained standing, that he was wallowing in an incomparable landscape of fleshy hills and valleys, as white as the white velvet dress which was merely an extension of it . . . Stinging tears of jealousy filled Clara’s eyes and she feverishly opened her gold compact . . .
“Would you like me to introduce you to the tenor?” asked her friend seated in front of her.
“No!” she answered, a bit too loudly.
A short distance away, he heard, he recognized Clara’s voice, and walked toward her between two rows of empty seats. Whether out of pleasure at seeing her or as a precaution, he smiled at her as he approached, with that vague tenderness allowed him by the shape and deep blue color of his eyes. He was not very young, but his wicked and flattering reputation along with his success in the theater had not yet given women of leisure the occasion to concern themselves with his age. Ever since it began to appear as if he wanted to get married, ever since one of his plays, which condemned celibacy, had given reserv
ed young girls and dauntless young women a ray of hope, Antoinette and Clara, the one a widow, the other a divorcee, and former childhood friends, were no longer on speaking terms.
“Good evening, Chiarissima!”
She was beside herself, but she kept thinking, “She’s watching us, she’s watching us!” and looking up, she gave the bowing Bussy the confident smile of a schoolgirl in love with her teacher.
“That pink dress!” he said.
“Do you like it?”
“Not at all.”
“Oh . . .” she moaned. “Why not?”
“Too pink. Besides, a faun like you doesn’t wear dresses with pink ruffles. With that tuft of auburn curls, like a goat’s or a nymph’s, between those green eyes, no, you don’t put on pink ruffles, you wear a garland, you drape yourself in an animal skin, a very small animal skin . . .”
Quickly, with calculated irreverence, he tugged at the bouquet of russet curls, sending them dancing over Clara’s forehead. She could not hold back a little shriek, which must have pierced Antoinette’s heart. Pale and watchful, her rival sat holding a glass of orangeade as if it were a poisoned cup, and did not drink.
“How did the play go tonight?”
“Fine.”
“That’s all . . . ‘fine’?”
Bussy gave her a caressing and grateful smile. “No, better than fine, much better.”
“How was the box office?”
“Twenty-two thousand, despite all the press comps. I tell you all my secrets.”