The Collected Stories of Colette (46 page)

“Oh,” he said with a sigh, “I was afraid . . .”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

The man who takes his fox for walks in the Bois de Boulogne is a good man indeed. He believes that it pleases the little fox, who was probably his companion in the trenches and whom he tamed to the horrible sound of exploding bombs. The man with the fox, whose captive follows him like a dog at the end of a chain, doesn’t realize that, out in the open air in a setting which might recall the forest where he was born, the fox is merely a lost soul, filled with despair, a beast blinded by a forgotten light, drunk with smells, ready to rush out, to attack, or to flee—but one which has a collar around his neck . . . Apart from these details, the good little tame fox loves his master, and follows him, skimming the ground with his belly and his beautiful tail the color of lightly toasted bread. He is quick to laugh—a fox is forever laughing. He has beautiful, velvety eyes—like all foxes—and I don’t see anything more to say about him.

The other good man, the man with the cock and the hen, would emerge around eleven-thirty from the Auteuil métro. He carried a sack made of dark cloth thrown over his shoulder, rather like the knapsacks of vagrants, and, walking briskly, reached the tranquil woods of Auteuil. The first time I saw him, he had set down his mysterious sack on a bench, and was waiting for my dogs and me to go away. I reassured him, and he delicately shook his sack, from which fell, lustrous, with red crests and plumage the color of autumn, a cock and a hen that pecked and scratched at the cool moss of the forest floor, without losing a second.

I asked no idle questions and the man with the chickens informed me simply: “I bring them out at noon whenever I can. It’s only right, isn’t it . . . Animals that live in apartments . . .”

I replied by complimenting him on the beauty of the cock and the liveliness of the hen; I added that I also knew the little girl who brings her big tortoise out to “play” in the afternoons, and the man with the fox . . .

“That’s no one for me to meet,” said the chicken man.

But chance was to bring the master of the fox and the master of the chickens together on one of those paths sought out by those who, in a solitary mood, are led there by fear of the park officials and the whim of a dog, a fox, or a hen. At first, the man with the fox did not come forth. Sitting in the thicket, he held his fox in a fatherly way, around the middle of his serpentine body, and felt sorry for him when he felt him stiffen to attention. The fox’s nervous laugh bared his sharp canines, slightly yellow from soft living and soft food, and his white whiskers, pressed flat against his cheeks, had the look of makeup about them.

A few feet away, the cock and the hen, sated with grain, were taking their bath of sand and sun. The cock passed the feathers of his wings over the iron of his beak, and the hen, puffed out in the shape of an egg, feet invisible and neck ruffled, was powdering herself with dust as yellow as pollen. A faint and discordant cry, let out by the cock, roused her. She shook herself off and walked uncertainly over to her spouse as if to ask, “What did you say?”

He must have signaled a warning to her, for she did not argue and stood with him right next to the sack—the sack, a prison but not a trap . . .

However, the chicken man, astonished by this behavior, reassured his animals with “There, chick, chick, chick!” and familiar onomatopoeias.

A few days later, the fox man, who believed he was doing the right thing in giving his wild little animal this tantalizing pleasure, decided to be honest and reveal his presence and that of his fox.

“Oh, they’re peculiar animals,” said the chicken man.

“And intelligent,” added the fox man. “And not an ounce of mischief in him. He wouldn’t know what to do with your hen if you gave it to him.”

But the little fox trembled, imperceptibly and passionately, under his fur, while the cock and the hen, reassured by the sound of friendly, low voices, pecked and clucked under the fox’s velvet eye.

The two animal lovers became friendly, the way people become friendly in the Bois or at a spa. They meet, they chat, they tell their favorite story, they give away two or three secrets, not shared with their closest friends, to the unknown ear—and then they part near the No. 16 tram stop—having given neither the name of the street they live on nor the number of the house . . .

A little fox, even when tamed, cannot be near chickens without suffering serious upset. The fox grew thin, and dreamed aloud in his yelping language all night long. And his master, watching the fox’s fine, feverish nose turn away from the saucer of milk, saw coming toward him, from the depths of a green thicket at Auteuil, a wicked thought, indistinct, its moving figure pale but already ugly . . . That day, he chatted good-naturedly with his friend the chicken man and absentmindedly gave out a little play to the fox’s chain. The fox took a step—shall I call this gliding, which neither showed the tips of his feet nor crushed a single blade of grass, a step?—toward the hen.

“Hey there!” cried the chicken man.

“Oh,” said the fox man, “he wouldn’t touch her.”

“I know, I know,” said the chicken man.

The fox said nothing. Jerked back, he wisely sat down, and his twinkling eyes betrayed no thought whatsoever.

The next day, the two friends exchanged opinions about fishing.

“If it was cheaper,” said the chicken man, “I’d get a license for the upper lake. But it’s expensive. It makes carp more expensive than it is at Les Halles.”

“But it’s worth it,” replied the fox man. “You should have seen this one guy’s catch the other morning, on the little lake. Twenty-one carp and a bream bigger than my hand.”

“You don’t say . . .”

“Especially since, without meaning to brag, I’m not so bad at it myself. You should see me cast . . . It’s the way I flick my wrist . . . here, like this . . .”’

He stood up, let go of the fox’s chain, and reeled his arm masterfully. Something red and frenzied streaked through the grass, in the direction of the yellow hen, but the chicken man’s leg shot out sharply, blocking the swift red streak, and all one heard was a muffled little bark. The fox returned to his master’s feet and lay down.

“Any closer . . .” said the chicken man.

“You can’t imagine how surprised I am,” said the fox man. “You little rascal, don’t you want to say you’re sorry to the man, right now? What is all this now?”

The chicken man looked his friend in the eye and there he read his secret, his dim, unformed, and wicked thought . . . He coughed, suddenly choked with hot, angry blood, and nearly jumped on the fox man, who at that moment was saying to himself, “I’ll knock his brains out, him and his whole hen house . . .” Then both of them made the same effort to return to everyday life, lowered their heads, and moved away from each other, forever, with the common sense of good men who have just come within a hair’s breadth of turning into killers.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

When Madame de la Hournerie returned home, after half a day devoted entirely to the hairdresser and the milliner, she quickly tossed aside her new hat to get a good look at her new hairstyle. Urged on by Anthelme, who declared himself to be the “last word” in hairdressing, she had just abandoned her 1910-style chignon, the bouffant waves of beautiful chestnut hair befitting a woman in her fifties, as well as the wave and curls which had covered her forehead and ears. She came home with her hair still brown, but pulled back and pressed down Chinese style, brilliantined, knotted into a varnished shell at the nape of her neck, and pierced through, like a heart, with a little arrow set with diamonds.

Looking into the mirror framed by two harsh lamps, she gave a little start at the sight of the sloping forehead, which she rarely saw and had concealed more carefully than a breast, and at the hard glare of her eyes, skillfully made up, but which the light reached and robbed of their mystery, like the sun on a forest spring after the woodcutter has been through. She picked up a hand mirror and admired the big knot of polished hair and the glinting arrow at the back of her neck.

“What is there to say? It’s the style,” she said out loud, to reassure herself. “Besides, Emilie de Sery just now swore to me that I was a real revelation . . .”

But faced with this lady with the lacquered skull, the broad and slightly sunken cheeks, thin lips, and thickening nose, she did not recognize herself and felt uneasy. With the art of a painter who enhances the color of a landscape suddenly inundated by unobstructed sunlight, she added some rouge to her bare ears, her temples, and underneath her eyebrows, and then covered her entire face with a shade of pink powder she hardly ever used.

“That’s better,” she decided. “It’s obviously a daring hairstyle! After all, why shouldn’t I wear my hair in a daring style?”

She rang, received the ambiguous compliments of her maid: “Everything that changes Madame enhances her!,” took off her town clothes, and went downstairs to dine alone. Her elegant widowhood, dating back five years, was undaunted by a few hours’ solitude, and Madame de la Hournerie frequently dined or lunched alone, as a form of hygienic and agreeable mortification, just as she would have eaten yogurt or gone to bed at five o’clock in the evening.

Marien, in evening dress, was waiting for her, arms at his side, in front of one of the sideboards. The pride of the
maison La Hournerie
, he stood six feet tall, with strong features, fair hair and fair skin, and the black eyes of a fanatical Breton. When he was thirteen, Madame de la Hournerie and her husband had taken him from the fifty cows he was tending in the fields. Promoted to “little servant” and provided with a sleeved vest and a white apron, Marien quickly earned his stripes. He overcame his fear of the telephone, demonstrated a flair for arranging the flowers in the vases and centerpieces, toned down his peasant voice, and learned to walk as quietly as a cat. Later, when he traded his footman’s braided suit for the black tie and tails of the head butler, a sort of instinctive propriety taught him how not to overestimate by too much the cost of fruit, flowers, cleaning materials, and products for the care of all kinds of metals. In return for which Madame de la Hournerie prematurely awarded him the supreme rank of “treasure” usually reserved for servants who had grown white-haired and feeble. But Marien, an athletic statue of silence, could never extinguish the expressive fires of his severe black eyes, mirrors for soubrettes, stars in which this shopgirl or that saleswoman would be held burning . . .

Madame de la Hournerie entered the dining room briskly, sat down, and shivered.

“Serve me quickly, Marien. You wouldn’t exactly say it’s warm in here, would you? Well then, my dear, didn’t I say something to you?” said Madame de la Hournerie familiarly, at times still openly treating Marien like a “little servant.”

“But the oven isn’t hot enough yet,” replied an uncertain voice at last.

Madame de la Hournerie, who was feeling the cold in two recently exposed and sensitive places—her forehead and her ears—looked up at Marien, who seemed to lose his composure, poured a full ladle into the soup bowl, served Madame de la Hournerie, and resumed his traditional place, facing his mistress. The butler’s dark eyes, wide with surprise, contemplated, with an indescribable expression of horror and shame, the huge naked forehead, white as marble, and the dome of waxed hair, which matched the red mahogany of the Empire furniture. Unsettled, Madame de la Hournerie pushed her soup away from her.

“Bring the next course, Marien. I’m not very hungry. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a touch of the flu.”

Marien removed the soup, ran toward the kitchen as if in flight, and brought out a shrimp soufflé. As he was serving it, he chipped the edge of an old plate, spilled a few drops of red wine on the tablecloth, then returned to the sideboard and resumed his shocked contemplation.