Thérèse and Isabelle

by Violette Leduc

  “The bed is shaking too much,” said Isabelle.

  The dilated flesh was grateful, severe pleasure spilled out among the petals. Sweat dripped from Isabelle’s forehead onto my back.

  “Don’t move. So I can stay inside you,” said Isabelle. We abided. I squeezed, in my turn.

  “Oh yes!” gasped Isabelle.

  I was sucking it in, driving it back, I changed it into a dog’s phallus, naked, red. It reached up to my esophagus. I was listening to Isabelle who was pressing lightly, who was following the growing tide, enjoying the outward ripples. The finger emerged from a cloud, vanished into another. My ardor claimed Isabelle, a crazy sun whirled in my flesh. Alone, Isabelle’s body ascended the calvary of my back. I was suspended in my intoxication. My legs weakened in their paradise. Refreshed, my calves were ripening. I was softened to the point of ineffable decay, I was unendingly dissolving into happiness after happiness in my own ashes. Isabelle’s finger slid out methodically and left pools of pleasure behind in my knees. It dropped me. Its going, slow ship of harmonies. We listened to the last of the cadence.

  “You had nothing.”

  “Had nothing, I!” said Isabelle.

  She laughed into my neck. The hilarity in her face was tropical.

  “Had nothing!”

  She pressed my hand between her lips, then my mouth dodged hers. We did not let these moments run together.

  “Suffocate me,” said Isabelle.

  She lay back while I smothered her and while I labored to turn her into a beauty spot on my left breast. I was squeezing her, I was shivering like blades of grass in winter.

  “Yes, you love me,” said Isabelle.

  I sat up, I had diamonds of frost on my shoulders.

  I was remembering, I saw myself under the apple tree: my mother was taking me into a meadow for our own, intimate party, when the winter wind used to overthrow April, when the summer wind dulled November’s edge. Twice a year we would settle down under the same apple tree, set out our picnic while the wind and its retinue of airs blew into our mouths and whistled in our hair. We would spread foie gras on crusty bread, drink champagne out of the same glasses as our beer, smoke a Camel or two, watch the youthful quivering of the wheat in the blade, the aged shivers of the thatched roofs. A merry-go-round for gulls, the wind spun above our love and our picnic.

  I wrapped Isabelle’s name in velvet before pronouncing it, I listened in my head to the intonation of the sentence I would say to her.

  “Won’t you turn to me?” I asked.

  Isabelle turned around. I threw myself into the Vale of Roses. The tiny lights in my skin desired the tiny lights in Isabelle’s skin, the air grew thinner. We could do nothing without the meteors that would carry us in their wake, that would toss us one into the other. We were in thrall to irresistible forces. We dropped from consciousness but were still the unit of us against the night of the dormitory. Death dragged us back to life: we returned by many ports. I could see nothing, hear nothing, yet my senses were those of a visionary. We were entwined: a miracle was fading instead of shining forth.

  “Together, together . . .”

  She was stroking her chest with my hand:

  “Lean in. Together, together . . . No, no . . . not right now.”

  She dropped back.

  “Your hand, your hand,” moaned Isabelle.

  We worked from memory, as if we had embraced already in a world before our birth, as if we were reforging a link. Isabelle’s hand against my hip, arousing me, was my own; my hand on Isabelle’s side was hers. She was my reflection, I her reflection: two mirrors making love. Our joint excursion did not falter when she threw her hair back from her face, when I pushed back the sheets. I listened in her fingers to what my fingers were singing to her. We were learning, understanding that buttocks are responsive creatures. Our hands were so light that I could follow the down on Isabelle’s skin curving against my arm, the curve of my down against hers. We explored down, we climbed back up the crevice between our clenched thighs with hidden fingernails, we were provoking, we were suppressing our quivering. Our skin was leading each hand and its double. We carried off the velveteen rains, the waves of muslin from crotch down to instep, we went back on ourselves, we were prolonging a rumbling of sweetness from our shoulders to our heels. We stopped.

  “I’m waiting for you,” said Isabelle.

  Her flesh was flaunting pearls everywhere.

  “I’ll never find it,” I said.

  Her arm lifting beneath mine made my arm lift. Isabelle was examining her body. She replaced my hand; she began the motion with her hand on mine; she left me to my motion.

  “Concentrate,” said Isabelle.

  The air was heavy, the air was barbaric.

  I rocked it, sharpened it, released it from the folds of its decline, I gave it confidence. I would not recall it all like this had I not given it my soul and my life. The pearl made the finger keener and the finger became flesh of our flesh: the motion was also there in our heads. Flesh was polishing my finger and my finger polishing Isabelle’s flesh. The motion was happening in spite of us: our fingers’ dreaming. I loosened the departed, I was anointed through and through with pagan oils.

  Isabelle sat up, she chewed at a lock of my hair:

  “Together,” she said.

  Infiltrations of languor, fissures of delight, wetlands of trickery . . . The leaves of lilacs rolled out their sweetness, the spring began its death throes, the dust of the dead was dancing in my light.

  I was at last myself while I was ceasing, at last, to be.

  The visit to my paradise was near.

  “Tell me when.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  I was leaving my skeleton behind, floating above my dust. At first the pleasure was rigid, difficult to bear. The sensation began in my foot, it flowed through flesh once more grown pure. We left our fingers in the old world, we burst open with light, we were flooded with bliss. Our limbs crushed with pleasure, our guts incandescent . . .

  “It’s rising, it’s rising . . .”

  “Never ending, never . . .”

  The veil tickled the sole of my foot, the finger spun in white-hot sun, a velvet flame twisted in my legs. Come from far away, the veil flew off even further. Walking on waves . . . I know what this means for the torrent of my thighs. I had been brushed by the mantle of the madness that never rests, I had been crushed as much as caressed by a spasm of pleasure.

  “Together.”

  “It was together . . .”

  Rest, heavenly curfew. The same death in soul and body. Yes, but death with a zither, with a bullet in the head. Our silence: the periwinkle silence of maps of the night sky. Our stars beneath our eyelids: tiny crosses.

  “Don’t go quiet,” said Isabelle.

  “I’m not. I’m carrying you.”

  I was carrying the child most like her that she could give me: I was carrying the child of her presence.

  She soothed my neck with her hair, with her cold little nose.

  “Say something . . .”

  “I can’t. I have you here . . .” I guided her hand:

  “I have you here and here . . .”

  I led her hand over my belly.

  “Crook your arm,” she said, “crook it as if we were walking out together.”

  She gave me her arm and we strolled between Little Bear and Great Bear in our map of the stars.

  My blood rushed toward her in jubilation. I turned the flashlight on.

  Her pubic hair was not twinkling; it had grown thoughtful. I embalmed Isabelle with my lips, with my hands. Pale sleeping girls were breathing all around her; shades hungry for pallor whirled above her. I opened her lips and killed myself before looking. My face was touching it, my face moistening it. I began to make love to it out of plain friendship.

  “Better than that.”

  I could not do more.

  Isabelle thrust my face deep.

  “You shall speak, you shall say it,�
� she said.

  There was a collision of clouds in my intestines. My brain was wild with greed.

  “You are beautiful . . .”

  I was picturing her. I was not lying.

  Two petals were trying to swallow me. It was as if the eye of the flashlight saw better because it was the first to see.

  “Speak,” begged Isabelle, “I’m alone.”

  “You are beautiful . . . It’s so strange . . . I don’t dare to look anymore.”

  Its language all yawnings, the monster that made requests and gave answers was frightening me.

  “Warm me again,” I said.

  The shadows’ rustling at three in the morning made me shiver.

  “Sleep a moment,” she said, “I’ll keep watch.”

  “Have I disappointed you?”

  “That is for us to face squarely, like everything else.”

  The night would be gone, soon the night would leave us nothing but tears.

  I focused the light; I was not afraid of my wide-open eyes.

  “I can see the world. It is coming from you.”

  “Be quiet.”

  Dawn and her shrouds. Isabelle was combing her hair in a zone by herself, where her hair was always loose.

  “I don’t want the daylight to come,” said Isabelle.

  It is coming, it will come. The day will shatter the night over an aqueduct.

  “I’m afraid of being parted from you,” said Isabelle.

  A tear dropped into my garden at half past three in the morning.

  I forbade myself the least thought so that she would be able to fall asleep inside my empty head. Day was taking over from the night, day was blotting out our weddings; Isabelle was falling asleep.

  “Sleep,” I said, near the hawthorns that had waited all night for the dawn.

  I stole out of bed like a traitor; I went straight to the window. High in the sky there had been a battle, and the battle’s heat was ebbing. The mists were beating a retreat; here and there, in isolated patches, night lingered, greying at the edges. Celestial dawn had come alone and no one would salute her.

  “Are you going?” asked Isabelle.

  “Sleep.”

  “Come back. My arm is cold.”

  “Listen . . . There’s someone studying.”

  “What I used to do before I knew you,” said Isabelle.

  Already a bedlam of birds in one tree, already; first glimmerings already pecked away . . .

  “I’ll do what you want,” I said.

  I licked.

  Kneeling on the pillow, Isabelle shook just as I was shaking. Let my flaming face, my mouth, be parted from her face, from her mouth. My sweat, my saliva, the lack of space, my situation as a slave in the galleys, condemned to ecstasy without respite since I fell in love with her: all bewitched me. I slaked my thirst with brine, I fed myself on hair.

  I see the new day’s half mourning, I see the tatters of the night, I smile at them. I smile to Isabelle and, forehead to forehead, I play at butting horns with her so as to forget what is dying. The melody of the bird that sings and hastens the morning’s beauty exhausts us: perfection is not part of this world even when we come upon it here.

  “The monitor is up!” said Isabelle.

  The sound of the water in the basin ages us. She has gained strength while we have lost ours. The monitor was washing the residue of sleep from her skin.

  “You’ll have to go,” said Isabelle.

  To leave her like an outcast, to leave her in secret also saddened me. There were millstones weighing down my feet and I was learning the odor of our sweat by heart.

  I sat down on her bed. Isabelle raised her desolate face to me:

  “I don’t want you to go. No, go on. It’s too dangerous.”

  I loved Isabelle without show, without raptures: I offered her my life without a word.

  Isabelle stood up, she took me in her arms:

  “Will you come every evening?”

  “Every evening.”

  “We’ll never leave each other?”

  “We’ll never leave each other.”

  My mother took me back home.

  I never saw Isabelle again.

  A STORY OF CENSORSHIP

  Here is Thérèse et Isabelle just as Violette Leduc originally wrote it, complete with those precious and acerbic pages that were unpublished until now, its bare and violent language demonstrating a liberty of tone such as no female writer in France had dared to adopt before Leduc.

  Thérèse et Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged “scandalous,” this work was censored by the publisher. Encouraged by Simone de Beauvoir, Leduc had begun writing it in spring of 1948. Two years earlier, she had published her début novel L’Asphyxie (“Asphyxia”), a fictional recreation of her childhood in a small town in Northern France, where she had lived with her mother’s “blue, hard” eyes as well as with a loving grandmother. She was also then preparing a prose poem for publication, L’Affamée (“Starved Woman” or “Craving Woman”), which recounted her “impossible” passion for de Beauvoir. Two masterpieces that went unnoticed by the wider public but were greeted with enthusiasm by the literary elite of the time. Leduc was then what we call “a writer’s writer.”

  Ravages was to be her first true novel, a project of protracted gestation that turned out to be riddled with problems, as Leduc’s correspondence shows. While suffering from loneliness and from her infatuations with inaccessible people, Leduc revised and reconstructed her former passions on paper. “I have noted the gulf that stretches between the life I am leading and the eroticism of the book I’m writing,” she confided to de Beauvoir.

  In its original version, Ravages was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc’s youth: a carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl; the time she spent living with a schoolmistress; and her encounter with a man whom she was to marry long afterward. This brief marriage ended with a suicide attempt by the author and an abortion that took her to death’s door. Leduc was to devote three years to writing “Thérèse et Isabelle,” the first part of her book. The challenge was considerable:

  I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.

  Nevertheless, Leduc was assailed by doubts: “As for my work at the moment, I am discouraged,” she admits to de Beauvoir. “I find myself thinking it a pointless book full of schoolgirls’ follies I thought it was sexual narcissism, mere titivation.” De Beauvoir was convinced that Leduc would succeed in evoking “feminine sexuality as no woman has ever done: with truth, with poetry, and more besides.” Nevertheless, she was at a loss as to what to do with the audacity of Leduc’s language: “There are some excellent pages; she knows how to write in bursts, but as for publishing this, impossible. It’s a story of lesbian sexuality as crude as anything by Genet,” she told Nelson Algren.

  As revealed by her handwritten notebooks with their variants, their pages struck out or glued together, Leduc was aiming for a miniaturist’s precision in her descriptions of the erotic scenes. In her role as primary reader, and in spite of their literary value, de Beauvoir advised her against keeping certain passages for she knew “exactly where one might go too far” with a publisher. She was not mistaken.

  When, in 1954, de Beauvoir at last presented the manuscript of Ravages—already toned down in a meticulous “cleansing” process—to Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand, both members of Gallimard’s reading committee, they were disconcerted. Although he appreciated the novel’s qualities, Que
neau judged the first section “impossible to publish openly,” while Lemarchand wrote: “It’s a book of which a fair third is enormously and specifically obscene—and which would call down the thunderbolts of the law. The book also includes a number of successful passages. The story about the schoolgirls could, in itself, constitute a rather beguiling tale—if the author would agree to draw a veil over some of her operational techniques. Published as it is, this book would become a scandal.”

  At a meeting with Leduc, Lemarchand proved unyielding. Despite de Beauvoir’s support for the book, he declared that to publish the “story about the schoolgirls” it would be necessary to “take out the eroticism while keeping the emotions.” He also demanded that several passages from the novel’s second section be cut, notably the passage in the taxi about touching “the crumpled skin, fragile as an eyelid” of a penis. The description of the abortion (then illegal) with which the text ended would also be considerably censored. Lemarchand found it “too long, too technical;” Gallimard’s legal adviser thought it like a “vindication of abortion.”

  “Hard day with Violette Leduc,” de Beauvoir tells Sartre in May 1954. “She got out of bed where she had thrown herself with a fever of thirty-nine degrees following the meeting with Lemarchand. The doctor told her that that’s what caused it. I made her have lunch in the Bois, take a walk to Bagatelle, and I did my best to console her. The taxi scene literally scandalizes people: Queneau, Lemarchand, Y Levy; I sense that they feel personally offended, being male.”

  This meeting broke Leduc as both writer and woman, by forcing her to give up on Thérèse et Isabelle, the best of her book, its most sincere and most daring part. It was her favorite piece out of all her own writing. They had “cut her tongue out.” She experienced this censorship as a laceration, an amputation. Almost twenty years later, in La Chasse à l’amour (“The Hunt for Love”), a posthumous part of her autobiographical trilogy, Leduc movingly pleads her cause:

  They rejected the beginning of Ravages. It was a murder. They did not want the sincerity of Thérèse and Isabelle. They were afraid of censure. Where is censure’s true home? What are her habits, her manias? I can’t work her out. I was building a school . . . a dormitory . . . a refectory . . . a music room . . . a courtyard . . . Each brick, an emotion. Each rafter, an upheaval. My trowel digging up memories. My mortar to seal in the sensations. My building was solid. My building is collapsing. Censure has pushed my house over with the tip of one finger. I had a pain in my chest the day I learned of their rejection. I was wounded right in my heart. Society opposes it even before my book can be published. My work is broken up, scattered. My searching through the darkness of memory for the magical eye of a breast, for the face, the flower, the meat of a woman’s open sex . . . My searching, a box empty of bandages. Continue to write after such a rejection? I cannot. Stumps keep poking out of my skin.