The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  The men creased up during these recriminations, finding the joke they’d played highly amusing. The foreman let them have their fun; that way he was hoping to avoid the incessant arguments that cropped up between them every Saturday.

  It so happened that several of them worked together assembling the same books; some would pass the sheets, and others would fold them or put them in piles; so they’d created a group account, marking down a general figure for the work produced during the week, and then dividing up the money, with much quibbling and endless recriminations, that was paid in a lump sum by the boss.

  The excitement caused by the departure of the women who’d been kicked out had still not calmed down when Céline arrived. She’d come to pick up her money and that of her sister. The others gathered round her and she confirmed the details given by Ma Teston, announcing that her mother was doing better, that Désirée and she would come back on Monday, and since she was in a hurry to get back to her father’s she looked for the little account books they had as workers paid by the hour and handed them to the supervisor, who verified them and marked them with a cross; then, crossing the assembly room, she asked Auguste to come down to the embankment the next morning, that she’d be there with her sister, and that they had some serious matters to discuss.

  Auguste accepted, but showed so little enthusiasm that Céline’s suspicions were confirmed.

  During the two or three days in which they hadn’t stirred from the house, the two girls had inevitably talked about their love affairs. Céline, disconcerted by Désirée’s inexplicable apathy, wanted her to shed some light on her feelings for Auguste. She found a coldness, an embarrassment in Désirée that stupefied her. The younger girl made no reply, couldn’t even really explain to herself the indifference she now felt for him. Vatard, for his part, was upset by how downcast his favourite looked. Céline’s words, ‘that it wasn’t worth sending for a doctor, that Désirée simply needed a husband,’ had struck home. He would no longer hesitate to grant her whatever permission she wanted now. He was only searching for a way to get rid of Auguste, to marry off his daughter if possible to another young man he had in mind, Amédée Guibout, a nephew of Tabuche’s, a young foreman earning good wages. Moreover, Désirée knew him well, they’d seen each other around for years and even though Vatard admired him and found him likeable, it had never occurred to him before that they might marry each other.

  Vatard had revealed his plan to Céline, who now detested Auguste. Ever since finding out that one evening he’d dared to cast aspersions on Désirée, she considered him the lowest of men. And yet Anatole had said much worse to her. But she no longer thought about this and reserved her indignation for the man who’d had the temerity to insult her sister. She gladly volunteered to test the ground. The kind of heartache she saw in Désirée gave her hope of success. She resolved to proceed openly and one day when seated by the fire, as they kept watch over the belly of their sick mother, she said simply: ‘If you’re that fond of Auguste, marry him; Papa will agree to it, but think it over properly before doing anything so stupid.’A blush sprang to her sister’s cheeks when she learned that she was free to marry Auguste, but she didn’t cry for joy as Céline was fearing, she hung her head and listened as her sister continued: ‘After all, you’ve probably been the least stupid of the two of us. You wanted to get married, but not to live in poverty; you’ve got ambition, you’re doing well. I don’t know why you’d want to fly the nest now and give yourself to a good-for-nothing worker, to someone who can’t do anything. Why, I ask you? He wouldn’t even be able to feed you. Hell, you deserve a foreman at least! There are plenty of young men who are as reliable and as handsome as Auguste…look at Tabuche’s nephew for example. He’s a fine lad and he’d make a far better husband than Auguste. With him, you’d be a proper lady on Sundays; you’d have a bedroom like you’ve always dreamed of, and a dog, since you like them so much; you shouldn’t consign yourself to poverty… if you wanted to, you could be the smartest, best-dressed girl in the workshop.’ Désirée didn’t reply. She was thinking. Her sister had happened to touch on desires that, after having been suppressed, were suddenly reawakening more vividly than ever, now that she glimpsed a means of satisfying them. Her vision, her ideal – of a bedroom with a mirror and a coloured engraving on the wall, a husband she could boss around, a favourable financial situation, and the right to no longer have to get up so early in the morning or work so late in the evening at the workshop – was now being sketched out clearly before her. Yet she still couldn’t think of Auguste without a certain regret. They’d been friends for so many months. And besides, this would perhaps make him very sad. It’s hard to confess to someone that you no longer love them at the very moment when you could make them most happy. But the once longed-for permission to marry him had come too late; it was therefore natural that, in her present state of mind, she felt herself drifting further away from Auguste. The difficulties that had bolstered her waning affection for so long having been removed, whatever remained of her love was now running away like water under a raised sluice-gate.

  Seeing her so sad and uncertain like this, Céline sought to land a knock-out blow on her weak spot. She said to her: ‘Come now, am I wrong? How could you afford to bring up the children you’d have with Auguste? Tell me how you’d manage it. He barely earns enough for himself, and he also has his mother to support. To get a bit of food on your plate you’ll have to sweat for it at work. And you’re not exactly strong. You’d kill yourself working like that. I spoke to you just now about Amédée, well, Papa would be delighted…and Amédée would be too, he likes you, everyone knows that. Ah, you’re a fine, well-matched couple you two. Hey, he’s supposed to be coming round this evening. Go and kiss him! If you’re worried about falling out with Auguste, I’ll take care of it. He doesn’t need to know, at any event, that father would have accepted him in the absence of anyone else. Besides, I think he has his flings on the side, Chaudrut swears to it, so he’ll just have to put up with being dumped. After all, he won’t be the first man it’s happened to.’

  But Désirée declared that if she was going to break with him, she didn’t want to do it in a shabby way. She preferred to tell him to his face. So Céline, who was impatient to put an end to the matter, exclaimed: ‘Look, I’m going to go to the workshop to collect our money, I’ll ask Auguste to come to the embankment tomorrow. We’ll go together and it’ll be sorted out in an instant.’ And she hurried off so as not to give her sister time to change her mind.

  Vatard, who was lying in wait, threw his arms round his younger daughter and began praising Amédée, saying that she’d be as happy as a queen with him and that their marriage would be a consolation for all the troubles he’d had in his life. They kissed each other affectionately. Désirée spoke very sagely about her new lover. Now that this young man wanted her for a wife, she discerned a thousand things about him that she’d never noticed before when he was only a good friend. He was handsome, fair-haired, athletic, and he liked to laugh. She wasn’t in love with him, but that would surely come. She already wasn’t that crazy about Auguste, so what would it have been like after several months living together? And what’s more, there was no use denying it, marrying him would have plunged her into poverty. Céline and her father were right. Moreover, she had said the same thing to herself many times, but for a while she’d lost her head and her dreams of blissful prosperity had deserted her. Now that she was no longer blind as before, she realised perfectly well that, deep down, Auguste was not at all the man she needed.

  As for Vatard, he was dancing on air. He’d come to an understanding with Amédée that if the wedding took place the couple would rent a room upstairs in the same building. So Désirée could look after her mother as before, and, in order to live more cheaply, the two families could take their meals together.

  His anxiety that he and his sick wife would be left solely in the care of Céline, who deserted her post every evening, was thus allayed. Unable to prevent
his younger daughter from marrying, on pain of seeing her languish and pine away, he now vehemently set his heart on this union, was determined to hurry it along from fear of it breaking up, and he would rub his hands together, repeating to himself:

  ‘How shrewd that Tabuche is! He wasn’t wrong when he said, “Even if you don’t marry your first flame, they at least make the fires of love catch quicker in the one you do marry!” The main thing is to give the heart an initial shove, after that it goes by itself, as if on casters.’

  Auguste, feeling very annoyed at the scene he was going to have with Désirée, dragged his heels as he made his way to the meeting. He had a lunchtime rendezvous with his fiancée. He would have to explain bluntly to Désirée what his intentions were and end it. He’d have given a hundred sous for it all to be over.

  Désirée, feeling very emotional, arrived a little early with her sister, determined, like him, to end it. When they got to the embankment, the young man was nowhere to be seen.

  They retraced their steps and, having nothing better to do, stopped in front of a photographer’s window. Désirée was choking with emotion. There could be no more shilly-shallying now. When the wine’s been poured…so for this last visit with her lover it was just a question of being firm, and she forced back the tears that came to her eyes when she thought of Auguste’s weeping face. Céline was seething, she had wanted to start the attack straightaway; moreover, she was absolutely determined to cut short any tearful discussions, any recriminations, to settle the matter quickly, to make a clean break.

  While stopped in front of the black wooden frames, Désirée felt her heart beat out a death knell and she kept scanning the entrance of the bridge in terror; Céline lost herself in contemplation of the display. She thought the poodle seated on a chair with a curtain as a backdrop, and the droopy, languid woman braiding coronets of flowers on a balcony, were wonderful; she went into raptures over the images of curly-haired men with twisted moustaches, whose boorish expressions and self-satisfied faces, whose triumphant airs and distinguished poses, held for the length of an exposure, wilted before the camera lens; she gawped in front of faded portraits, the sitter’s heads surrounded by dirty white patches that were speckled as if with flyshit: portraits of women, of roly-polies in low-cut dresses spilling enormous breasts, their faces like those on the look-out in dark doorways, who whisper ‘psst! psst’ down alleyways at night; of fifth-rate actresses in cotton bathing suits and with taffeta flowers in their hair; of housemaids with aprons over their bellies and chilblains on their fingers; of newlyweds, the woman seated with her hands on her knees, the man leaning against an armchair and with a discreetly knowing look on his face; of dazed first communicants stuffed with food; of infantrymen looking surprised and foolish. But what really took her breath away was the portrait of a family consisting of a mother, a father, a child and a cat, taken near a window, between a pot of dried mignonette and a geranium dropping its leaves; the mother, common-looking, heavy-jowled and puffy-faced, in an ill-advised white camisole; the father, easy-going and stout, with the mug of an amiable, drunken carpenter; the kid, a little rogue grown too big for his clothes; the cat, blurred in movement, as if shrouded in a mist.

  Céline communicated her thoughts to her sister, but this particular morning Désirée wasn’t interested in all these people frozen in pretentious or idiotic poses; the later it got the more she felt as if she might faint.

  ‘Well that’s great, he’s late,’ said Céline, who stationed herself directly opposite the bridge. ‘It makes you think that he’s not exactly thrilled at the prospect of seeing you again.’

  And while, tired of walking on one side of the pavement they were crossing the road to go along the other, Désirée thought of the times she’d made Auguste wait; she attributed all the blame for this break-up to herself, and the courage she’d promised herself to have when she saw him evaporated.

  Céline vaguely thought it would be useful to distract her sister and to prevent her from anticipating Auguste’s arrival; she dragged her in front of a bric-a-brac shop, a rag and bone merchant’s piled with rusty andirons, dented lamps, dusty seashells, enema pumps with their pipes and spigots missing, Legion of Honour medals, rabbit skins, old tea boxes, military breastplates, grease pans, boots, binoculars with missing lenses, candle-snuffers, and vases of artificial flowers on red chenille bases covered by dirty glass domes.

  Céline was squinting at a sliding-top bedside table, a piece gleaming like the sun with its newly-veneered mahogany, when Auguste appeared on the bridge.

  ‘There he is,’ sighed Désirée, all agitated. Then, as if they’d only just arrived that minute, they went off, without hurrying, to meet him.

  Désirée stayed a few paces behind her sister. When Céline had finished a series of noncommittal acknowledgements, they stood opposite each other, speechless. Auguste, who’d sworn to be forceful, didn’t even have the courage to ask his girlfriend for a kiss. Unconsciously each of them sensed they were no longer loved. A growing awkwardness held them there, eyes downcast, mouths dry. Céline broke the silence. ‘Why don’t we go and get a vermouth, eh? Is that all right with you, Auguste?’

  The other two welcomed this proposition as a deliverance. They settled themselves in the café at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Quai de la Tournelle, and since they had to talk about something Auguste inquired about Madame Vatard’s health. She was doing well. This conversation lasted five minutes, after which there was another long period of silence.

  ‘Look!’ Auguste suddenly shouted, ‘there’s our friend from the Rue du Cotentin.’ They called her over and Auguste invited her to have a drink with them, but she was in a hurry. They asked her about her boyfriend. She shrugged in an offhand way. ‘I don’t know…he must be still at the garrison in Dax; he wrote to me several times, but I’ve moved and I didn’t give him my new address and I forgot to go and collect his letters. He should be in good health, at least there’s no reason for him to be ill, but excuse me I’ve got to go, I’m expected.’

  ‘Ah yes, that’s always the way it is with love,’ Céline declared. Désirée and Auguste didn’t dare look at one another. Céline continued in an aggressive tone: ‘Listen to me, you two, we’ve got to clear this up. Auguste, father certainly doesn’t want you to marry Désirée, and my sister can’t hang on to her virtue forever, and to be fair to you, you can’t stay in the waiting room any longer if the ticket counter’s not going to open for you. Well, there you are, between ourselves, if you give each other your freedom, if each of you were to marry someone else, that would probably not be the most stupid thing you could do!’

  Désirée gasped; she looked up at Auguste. He didn’t look particularly like someone who had received a sudden shock.

  He said, in his turn, that after all Céline was right; that breaking up was certainly hard, that as for himself he was heartily sorry for it, but at the end of the day…

  ‘So Chaudrut was telling the truth,’ Céline interrupted, ‘go on admit it, you’re taking this so well because you’re planning to get married.’

  He blushed, stammered a bit, and confessed. Désirée mumbled that she too was on the point of doing the same thing. Then they looked at each other. They asked each other about their plans, saying tactfully that they’d have preferred to stay together, but they nevertheless had to be realistic, that they weren’t children anymore and couldn’t just do as they pleased, and both quivering with emotion they added: ‘All the same, do you remember the good times we spent together? Do you remember the first time you came to the workshop…the day when I met you at the gingerbread fair…the walks on Sundays when we were both free…that nice meal under the trees at La Belle Polonaise?’ And both of them recalled the winks they’d exchanged in shops, their arm-in-arm strolls through the Gaité quarter, their kisses in darkened streets; then they suddenly stopped and blushed. An image of the moment when, if he’d been bolder, she would have fallen into his arms, surged up in their minds at the
same time; they shivered, each lost in their thoughts, thinking that they would no doubt be married now if that evening had ended differently.

  Auguste tried to chase away the melancholy regret this memory conjured up, and he said very gently to Désirée that he’d always remember their relationship with pleasure; and then, a little embarrassed, smiling with tears in her eyes, she replied: ‘I haven’t always been kind to you; you’re not angry with me anymore are you?’ But he insisted that it was he who was to blame, that he’d been beastly, that it was her, not him, who should be complaining.

  Céline wanted to put a stop to these effusions, which were threatening to revive their barely dormant affections.

  They stared at each other in silence, putting all their tenderness, all their pity, into their looks.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy with her,’ stammered Désirée.

  He squeezed her hand across the table and, thanking her, he in his turn wished her every kind of happiness.

  Céline held her tongue, amazed. Never had she seen a break-up take place like this, with neither insults nor blows. ‘How kind you both are,’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands together, and they both sat there, opposite one another, smiling, their hearts brimming with emotion. Auguste was impatient to escape. He was beginning to choke. Désirée for her part was trembling and making every effort not to cry. The memories they’d stirred up were throwing their hearts into turmoil. ‘Let’s go,’ said Céline, ‘come on, let’s go Désirée, we’ve got to get back to prepare lunch.’They got up and, out in the street, without saying a word, Auguste held out his hand, but Désirée proffered her cheek and they kissed quickly and then fled, gripped by an immense sadness at the thought that their whole former way of life had collapsed and that they would have to try, each in their own way, to rebuild another.