by Colette
“All my stories can’t be lies,” sighed Masson.
“What’s her name?”
“Her Christian name is Marco, as you might have guessed. Women of a certain age, when they belong to the artistic world, have only a few names to choose from, such as Marco, Léo, Ludo, Aldo. It’s a legacy from the excellent Madame Sand.”
“Of a certain age? So she’s old, then?”
Paul Masson glanced at my face with an indefinable expression. Lost in my long hair, that face became childish again.
“Yes,” he said.
Then he ceremoniously corrected himself: “Forgive me, I made a mistake. No was what I meant to say. No, she’s not old.”
I said triumphantly: “There, you see! You see it is a lie, because you haven’t even chosen an age for her!”
“If you insist,” said Masson.
“Or else you’re using the name Marco to disguise a lady who’s your mistress.”
“I don’t need Madame Marco. I have a mistress who is also, thank heaven, my housekeeper.”
He consulted his watch and stood up.
“Do make my excuses to your husband. I must get back or I shall miss the last bus. Concerning the extremely real Madame Marco, I’ll introduce you to her whenever you feel inclined.”
He recited, very fast: “She is the wife of V., the painter, a school friend of mine who’s made her abominably unhappy; she has fled from the conjugal establishment where her perfections had rendered her an impossible inmate; she is still beautiful, witty, and penniless; she lives in a boarding house in the rue Demours, where she pays eighty-five francs a month for bed and breakfast; she does writing jobs, anonymous feuilletons, newspaper snippets, addressing envelopes, gives English lessons at three francs an hour, and has never had a lover. You see that this particular lie is as disagreeable as the truth.”
I handed him the little lighted lamp and accompanied him to the top of the stairs. As he walked down them, the tiny flame shone upward on his pointed beard, with its slightly turned-up end, and tinged it red.
When I had had enough of getting him to tell me about Marco, I asked Paul Masson to take me to be introduced to her, instead of bringing her to the rue Jacob. He had told me in confidence that she was about twice my age and I felt it was proper for a young woman to make the journey to meet a lady who was not so young. Naturally, Paul Masson accompanied me to the rue Demours.
The boarding house where Madame Marco V. lived has been pulled down. About 1897, all that this villa retained of its former garden was a euonymus hedge, a gravel path, and a flight of five steps leading up to the door. The moment I entered the hall I felt depressed. Certain smells, not properly speaking cooking smells, but odors escaped from a kitchen, are appalling revelations of poverty. On the first floor, Paul Masson knocked on a door and the voice of Madame Marco invited us to come in. A perfect voice, neither too high nor too low, but gay and well-pitched. What a surprise! Madame Marco looked young, Madame Marco was pretty and wore a silk dress, Madame Marco had pretty eyes, almost black, and wide-open like a deer’s. She had a little cleft at the tip of her nose, hair touched with henna and worn in a tight, sponge-like mass on the forehead like Queen Alexandra’s and curled short on the nape in the so-called eccentric fashion of certain women painters or musicians.
She called me “little Madame,” indicated that Masson had talked so much about me and my long hair, apologized, without overdoing it, for having no port and no sweets to offer me. With an unaffected gesture, she indicated the kind of place she lived in, and following the sweep of her hand, I took in the piece of plush that hid the one-legged table, the shiny upholstery of the only armchair, and the two little threadbare pancake-cushions of Algerian design on the two other chairs. There was also a certain rug on the floor. The mantelpiece served as a bookshelf.
“I’ve imprisoned the clock in the cupboard,” said Marco. “But I swear it deserved it. Luckily, there’s another cupboard I can use for my washing things. Don’t you smoke?”
I shook my head, and Marco stepped into the full light to put a match to her cigarette. Then I saw that the silk dress was splitting at every fold. What little linen showed at the neck was very white. Marco and Masson smoked and chatted together; Madame Marco had grasped at once that I preferred listening to talking. I forced myself not to look at the wallpaper, with its old-gold and garnet stripes, or at the bed and its cotton damask bedspread.
“Do look at the little painting, over there,” Madame Marco said to me. “It was done by my husband. It’s so pretty that I’ve kept it. It’s that little corner of Hyères, you remember, Masson.”
And I looked enviously at Marco, Masson, and the little picture, who had all three been in Hyères. Like most young things, I knew how to withdraw into myself, far away from people talking in the same room, then return to them with a sudden mental effort, then leave them again. Throughout my visit to Marco, thanks to her delicate tact which let me off questions and answers, I was able to come and go without stirring from my chair; I could observe or I could shut my eyes at will. I saw her just as she was and what I saw both delighted and distressed me. Though her well-set features were fine, she had what is called a coarse skin, slightly leathery and masculine, with red patches on the neck and below the ears. But, at the same time, I was ravished by the lively intelligence of her smile, by the shape of her doe’s eyes and the unusually proud, yet completely unaffected carriage of her head. She looked less like a pretty woman than like one of those chiseled, clear-cut aristocratic men who adorned the eighteenth century and were not ashamed of being handsome. Masson told me later she was extraordinarily like her grandfather, the Chevalier de St-Georges, a brilliant forebear who has no place in my story.
We became great friends, Marco and I. And after she had finished her Indian novel—it was rather like La Femme qui tue, as specified by the man who got paid ten sous a line—Monsieur Willy soothed Marco’s sensitive feelings by asking her to do some research on condition she accepted a small fee. He even consented, when I urgently asked him to, to put in an appearance when she and I had a meal together. I had only to watch her to learn the most impeccable table manners. Monsieur Willy was always professing his love of good breeding; he found something to satisfy it in Marco’s charming manners and in her turn of mind, which was urbane but inflexible and slightly caustic. Had she been born twenty years later she would, I think, have made a good journalist. When the summer came, it was Monsieur Willy who proposed taking this extremely pleasant companion, so dignified in her poverty, along with us to a mountain village in Franche-Comté. The luggage she brought with her was heartrendingly light. But at that time, I myself had very little money at my disposal, and we settled ourselves very happily on the single upper floor of a noisy inn. The wooden balcony and a wicker armchair were all that Marco needed; she never went for walks. She never wearied of the restfulness, of the vivid purple that evening shed on the mountains, of the great bowls of raspberries. She had traveled and she compared the valleys hollowed out by the twilight with other landscapes. Up there I noticed that the only mail Marco received consisted of picture postcards from Masson and “Best wishes for a good holiday,” also on a postcard, from a fellow ghostwriter at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
As we sat under the balcony awning on those hot afternoons, Marco mended her underclothes. She sewed badly, but conscientiously, and I flattered my vanity by giving her pieces of advice, such as: “You’re using too coarse a thread for fine needles . . . You shouldn’t put blue baby ribbon in chemises, pink is much prettier in lingerie and up against the skin.” It was not long before I gave her others, concerning her face powder, the color of her lipstick, a hard line she penciled around the edge of her beautifully shaped eyelids. “D’you think so? D’you think so?” she would say. My youthful authority was adamant. I took the comb, I made a charming little gap in her tight, sponge-like fringe, I proved expert at softly shadowing her eyes and putting a faint pink glow high up on her cheekbones, near her templ
es. But I did not know what to do with the unattractive skin of her neck or with a long shadow that hollowed her cheek. That flattering glow I put on her face transformed it so much that I promptly wiped it off again. Taking to amber powder and being far better fed than in Paris had quite an animating effect. She told me about one of her former journeys when, like a good painter’s wife, she had followed her husband from Greek village to Moroccan hamlet, washed his brushes, and fried aubergines and pimentos in his oil. She promptly left off sewing to have a cigarette, blowing the smoke out through nostrils as soft as some herbivorous animal’s. But she only told me the names of places, not of friends, and spoke of discomforts, not of griefs, so I dared not ask her to tell more. The mornings she spent in writing the first chapters of a new novel, at one sou a line, which was being seriously held up by lack of documentation about the early Christians.
“When I’ve put in lions in the arena and a golden-haired virgin abandoned to the licentious soldiers and a band of Christians escaping in a storm,” said Marco, “I shall come to the end of my personal erudition. So I shall wait for the rest till I get back to Paris.”
I have said: we became great friends. That is true, if friendship is confined to a rare smoothness of intercourse, preserved by studiously veiled precautions that blunt all sharp points and angles. I could only gain by imitating Marco and her “well-bred” surface manner. Moreover, she aroused not the faintest distrust in me. I felt her to be straight as a die, disgusted by anything that could cause pain, utterly remote from all feminine rivalries. But though love laughs at difference in age, friendship, especially between two women, is more acutely conscious of it. This is particularly true when friendship is just beginning, and wants, like love, to have everything all at once. The country filled me with a terrible longing for running streams, wet fields, active idleness.
“Marco, don’t you think it would be marvelous if we got up early tomorrow and spent the morning under the fir trees where there are wild cyclamens and purple mushrooms?”
Marco shuddered, and clasped her little hands together.
“Oh, no! Oh, no! Go off on your own and leave me out of it, you young mountain goat.”
I have forgotten to mention that, after the first week, Monsieur Willy had returned to Paris “on business.” He wrote me brief notes, spicing his prose, which derived from Mallarmé and Félix Fénéon, with onomatopoeic words in Greek letters, German quotations, and English terms of endearment.
So I climbed up alone to the firs and the cyclamens. There was something intoxicating to me in the contrast between burning sun and the still-nocturnal cold of the plants growing out of a carpet of moss. More than once, I thought I would not go back for the midday meal. But I did go back, on account of Marco, who was savoring the joy of rest as if she had twenty years’ accumulation of weariness to work off. She used to rest with her eyes shut, her face pale beneath her powder, looking utterly exhausted, as if convalescing from an illness. At the end of the afternoon, she would take a little walk along the road that, in passing through the village, hardly left off being a delicious, twisting forest path that rang crisply under one’s feet.
You must not imagine that the other “tourists” were much more active than we were. People of my age will remember that a summer in the country, around 1897, bore no resemblance to the gadabout holidays of today. The most energetic walked as far as a pure, icy, slate-colored stream, taking with them camp stools, needlework, a novel, a picnic lunch, and useless fishing rods. On moonlit nights, girls and young men would go off in groups after dinner, which was served at seven, wander along the road, then return, stopping to wish each other good night. “Are you thinking of bicycling as far as Saut-de-Giers tomorrow?” “Oh, we’re not making any definite plans. It all depends on the weather.” The men wore low-cut waistcoats like cummerbunds, with two rows of buttons and sham buttonholes, under a black or cream alpaca jacket, and check caps or straw hats. The girls and the young women were plump and well nourished, dressed in white linen or ecru tussore. When they turned up their sleeves, they displayed white arms, and under their big hats, their scarlet sunburn did not reach as high as their foreheads. Venturesome families went in for what was called “bathing” and set off in the afternoons to immerse themselves at a spot where the stream broadened out, barely two and a half miles from the village. At night, around the communal dining table, the children’s wet hair smelled of ponds and wild peppermint.
One day, so that I could read my mail, which was rich with two letters, an article cut out of Art et Critique, and some other odds and ends, Marco tactfully assumed her convalescent pose, shutting her eyes and leaning her head back against the fiber cushion of the wicker chair. She was wearing the ecru linen dressing gown that she put on to save the rest of her wardrobe when we were alone in our bedrooms or out on the wooden balcony. It was when she had on that dressing gown that she truly showed her age and the period to which she naturally belonged. Certain definite details, pathetically designed to flatter, typed her indelibly, such as a certain deliberate wave in her hair that emphasized the narrowness of her temples, a certain short fringe that would never allow itself to be combed the other way, the carriage of the chin imposed by a high, boned collar, the knees that were never parted and never crossed. Even the shabby dressing gown itself gave her away. Instead of resigning itself to the simplicity of a working garment, it was adorned with ruffles of imitation lace at the neck and wrists and a little frill around the hips.
Those tokens of a particular period of feminine fashion and behavior were just the very ones my own generation was in process of rejecting. The new “angel” hairstyle and Cléo de Mérode’s smooth swathes were designed to go with a boater worn like a halo, shirt blouses in the English style, and straight skirts. Bicycles and bloomers had swept victoriously through every class. I was beginning to be crazy about starched linen collars and rough woolens imported from England. The split between the two fashions, the recent one and the very latest, was too blatantly obvious not to humiliate penniless women who delayed in adopting the one and abandoning the other. Occasionally frustrated in my own bursts of clothes-consciousness, I suffered for Marco, heroic in two worn-out dresses and two light blouses.
Slowly, I folded up my letters again, without my attention straying from the woman who was pretending to be asleep, the pretty woman of 1870 or 1875, who, out of modesty and lack of money, was giving up the attempt to follow us into 1898. In the uncompromising way of young women, I said to myself: “If I were Marco, I’d do my hair like this, I’d dress like that.” Then I would make excuses for her: “But she hasn’t any money. If I had more money, I’d help her.”
Marco heard me folding up my letters, opened her eyes, and smiled.
“Nice mail?”
“Yes . . . Marco,” I said daringly, “don’t you have your letters sent on here?”
“Of course I do. All the correspondence I have is what you see me get.”
As I said nothing, she added, all in one burst: “As you know, I’m separated from my husband. V.’s friends, thank heaven, have remained his friends and not mine. I had a child, twenty years ago, and I lost him when he was hardly more than a baby. And I’ve never had a lover. So you see, it’s quite simple.”
“Never had a lover . . .” I repeated.
Marco laughed at my expression of dismay.
“Is that the thing that strikes you most? Don’t be so upset! That’s the thing I’ve thought about least. In fact I’ve long ago given up thinking about it at all.”
My gaze wandered from her lovely eyes, rested by the pure air and the green of the chestnut groves, to the little cleft at the tip of her witty nose, to her teeth, a trifle discolored, but admirably sound and well set.
“But you’re very pretty, Marco!”
“Oh!” she said gaily. “I was even a charmer, once upon a time. Otherwise V. wouldn’t have married me. To be perfectly frank with you, I’m convinced that fate has spared me one great trouble, the tiresome t
hing that’s called a temperament. No, no, all that business of blood rushing into the cheeks, upturned eyeballs, palpitating nostrils, I admit I’ve never experienced it and never regretted it. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said mechanically, looking at Marco’s mobile nostrils.
She laid her narrow hand on mine, with an impulsiveness that did not, I knew, come easily for her.
“A great deal of poverty, my child, and before the poverty the job of being an artist’s wife in the most down-to-earth way . . . hard manual labor, next door to being a maid-of-all-work. I wonder where I should have found the time to be idle and well groomed and elegant in secret—in other words, to be someone’s romantic mistress.”
She sighed, ran her hand over my hair, and brushed it back from my temples.
“Why don’t you show the top part of your face a little? When I was young, I did my hair like that.”
As I had a horror of having my alley cat’s temples exposed naked, I dodged away from the little hand and interrupted Marco, crying: “No, you don’t! No, you don’t! I’m going to do your hair. I’ve got a marvelous idea!”
Brief confidences, the amusements of two women shut away from the world, hours that were now like those in a sewing room, now like the idle ones of convalescence—I do not remember that our pleasant holiday produced any genuine intimacy. I was inclined to feel deferent toward Marco, yet, paradoxically, to set hardly any store by her opinions on life and love. When she told me she might have been a mother, I realized that our friendly relationship would never be in the least like my passionate feeling for my real mother, nor would it ever approach the comradeship I should have had with a young woman. But at that time, I did not know any girl or woman of my own age with whom I could share a reckless gaiety, a mute complicity, a vitality that overflowed in fits of wild laughter, or with whom I could enjoy physical rivalries and rather crude pleasures that Marco’s age, her delicate constitution, and her whole personality put out of her range and mine.