The Collected Stories of Colette (48 page)

The woman in white, whose smooth, lustrous hair reflected the light from the sea in azure patches, was smoking a cigarette with her eyes half closed. Alice turned back toward her husband, took some shrimp and butter, and ate calmly. After a moment’s silence she asked: “Why didn’t you ever tell me that she had blue eyes, too?”

“Well, I never thought about it!”

He kissed the hand she was extending toward the bread basket and she blushed with pleasure. Dusky and ample, she might have seemed somewhat coarse, but the changeable blue of her eyes and her wavy, golden hair made her look like a frail and sentimental blonde. She vowed overwhelming gratitude to her husband. Immodest without knowing it, everything about her bore the overly conspicuous marks of extreme happiness.

They ate and drank heartily, and each thought the other had forgotten the woman in white. Now and then, however, Alice laughed too loudly, and Marc was careful about his posture, holding his shoulders back, his head up. They waited quite a long time for their coffee, in silence. An incandescent river, the straggled reflection of the invisible sun overhead, shifted slowly across the sea and shone with a blinding brilliance.

“She’s still there, you know,” Alice whispered.

“Is she making you uncomfortable? Would you like to have coffee somewhere else?”

“No, not at all! She’s the one who must be uncomfortable! Besides, she doesn’t exactly seem to be having a wild time, if you could see her . . .”

“I don’t have to. I know that look of hers.”

“Oh, was she like that?”

He exhaled his cigarette smoke through his nostrils and knitted his eyebrows. “Like that? No. To tell you honestly, she wasn’t happy with me.”

“Oh, really now!”

“The way you indulge me is so charming, darling . . . It’s crazy . . . You’re an angel . . . You love me . . . I’m so proud when I see those eyes of yours. Yes, those eyes . . . She . . . I just didn’t know how to make her happy, that’s all. I didn’t know how.”

“She’s just difficult!”

Alice fanned herself irritably, and cast brief glances at the woman in white, who was smoking, her head resting against the back of the cane chair, her eyes closed with an air of satisfied lassitude.

Marc shrugged his shoulders modestly.

“That’s the right word,” he admitted. “What can you do? You have to feel sorry for people who are never satisfied. But we’re satisfied . . . Aren’t we, darling?”

She did not answer. She was looking furtively, and closely, at her husband’s face, ruddy and regular; at his thick hair, threaded here and there with white silk; at his short, well-cared-for hands; and doubtful for the first time, she asked herself, “What more did she want from him?”

And as they were leaving, while Marc was paying the bill and asking for the chauffeur and about the route, she kept looking, with envy and curiosity, at the woman in white, this dissatisfied, this difficult, this superior . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

Maurice Houssiaux beamed with a childlike contentment and a schoolboyish, bureaucratic exhilaration, which he had not felt a week earlier. It was then that the council president, calling on his experience in worldly matters and his regional influence as deputy county commissioner, had appointed him Minister of Tourism and Farm Mechanization. And he was thrilled by the large office at the ministry, its historic desk, and its Aubusson carpet. A small garden, green and flowerless, filled the tall French windows up to the arches; the window reflected the hollow back of a bewigged marble bust, and Maurice Houssiaux’s private secretary added just the right touch of new deference to his friendly informality.

Houssiaux had just put his paraph to his first piece of correspondence in a bold hand.

“Is that all, Wattier?”

“All for today, Monsieur. You’re free.”

“Can I give you a lift?”

“No, thank you. I’m preparing your work for tomorrow. And there’s that blasted grain circular . . . and your speech to the Hotel Industry, have you given it any thought?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“So have I. Your first speech must be a success . . . Don’t you do a thing, though, I have my whole night for it. It’s very important that you don’t wear yourself out the first month. Oh! And those two women from the country are still here. They’ve been waiting for two hours . . .”

“Which women?”

“The stenotypists. Would you like me to just weed one out somehow? There’s only one opening.”

“Do you have their names?”

“Here they are. Mademoiselle Valentin and Mademoiselle Lajarisse. Both are from Cransac.”

“Lajarisse, Lajarisse . . . there are three hundred people named Lajarisse in my district, sixty in the village alone. Which Lajarisse?”

“Shall I send for them? Shall I have them come in?”

Wattier danced with zeal, from one foot to the other, with the agility of a hairdresser or an acrobat, something he had suddenly acquired at the same time as his situation with Houssiaux. Houssiaux repeated the name with the distinctly southern ending, as he looked fondly at his green and melancholy garden. His once fair cheeks were covered with red blotches, and a little round belly, cinched up by a belt, moved ahead of him like a cushion for relics.

“I’ll see them,” he decided. “After all, they’re from Cransac, the heart of my constituency. Has everyone else gone?”

“Everyone’s gone. It’s always the boss who stays late.”

“I’ll see them on my way out. They’ll be telling me stories about Cransac for half an hour—first one, then the other—won’t they? But I don’t want anyone to go away upset.”

Wattier slipped off with a cruel little laugh, and Houssiaux, in his overcoat, hat in hand, walked into an adjoining office whose ministerial indigence—faded plaster walls and yellow pine desks—no longer saddened him.

“Mademoiselle . . . You’re from Cransac? Sit down, please.”

“Oh, Monsieur . . .”

The tall girl stammered in confusion, but looked at him with the boldness of a slave who knows her price. A striking brunette indeed, her hair an amber brown, with a small, imperious nose, audacious underneath her feigned shyness.

“Ah, these girls from Cransac, what beauties!” Maurice Houssiaux said to himself as he asked Mademoiselle Valentin a few perfunctory questions.

“Yes, Monsieur . . . Oh, of course, Monsieur . . . I started out as a bookkeeper at Vanavan’s, in the rue Grande, on the corner; does Monsieur know it? But I’m a good typist, on all models, and my steno is very good . . . My father’s the one who put the banner across the rue Grande when we heard the news of your election two years ago. Does the Minister remember?”

She spoke about him in the third person, like a chambermaid, but with her eyes lowered like a smitten girl.

“She’s trying her luck,” Houssiaux said to himself. “She’s right. She can have anything she wants. And she wouldn’t be surprised to get it. She’s from Cransac. What a jewel for the office, and that head on my shoulder!”

“One of my secretaries will notify you, Mademoiselle.” She raised her eyes, which were big and tapered at the corner like a blood mare’s.

“Can the Minister leave me with a little hope?”

“I think so!”

He offered her his hand, shook the cold hand of an excited damsel, and watched her with pleasure as she bumped into a chair and fumbled with the door as she was leaving. He was returning to his office when a long mirror confronted him with his own image, alas, that of a tall, fat, graying man. It distressed him more than usual.

“You can’t have everything. There’s a certain age when . . . but there’s still Mademoiselle Lajarisse . . . What if I had Wattier send her away?”

But a short shadow already barred the door, and Mademoiselle Lajarisse, a woman in her fifties, a bit wrinkled, a bit slumped, wearing cotton gloves and a hat the color of cassis, stood before him, silently.

“You’re from Cransac, Mademoiselle? That’s quite a good recommendation. I’m so fond of Cransac and its people!”

“I moved to Paris seventeen years ago. Cashier, stenographer, typist, librarian . . .”

“Good, good. We’ll look into that, we’ll look into that . . . No, no papers. You can leave them with one of my secretaries, if there’s any need. Lajarisse? Which Lajarisses? By the bridge?”

“No, on the hill, on the road to Casteix.”

“Oh, I see, I see . . .”

He smiled, half closing his eyes. The hill on the road to Casteix . . . He used to go down to Cransac on that road, on horseback, greeted by everyone considered doubtful and seductive by that part of Cransac that wore skirts: factory girls, idle women leaning over wrought-iron balconies . . .

“I see . . . It’s far . . .”

“Not that far, Monsieur Minister . . .”

Mademoiselle Lajarisse, faded under her nearly white hair, looked at him from head to toe.

“It was your favorite route, Monsieur. Everyone there remembers.”

“So do I . . .”

 . . . Handsome boy, never tired, hunter, runner, delighting in everything that flattered him, the tears and laughter of the women, spirited horses, fiery red wines . . . Houssiaux could hear the flint stones of the steep slope roll beneath the hooves of his saddle horse . . . He shook his head, half sincere.

“Oh, Mademoiselle Lajarisse, if only I could go back to the time when I used to come down that road on my horse . . .”

“Your horse Gamin, Monsieur Minister.”

He made the joyous gesture of a young man.

“Yes!”

“And on summer days, you’d arrive without a jacket or vest, in a loose-fitting shirt, your sleeves rolled up . . .”

“Why, yes!”

“You would rein in your horse with one hand and wave to all the ladies with your hat . . . and even to the women who weren’t ladies . . . to that Carmen up on her balcony, and that little woman at the tobacconist’s, all of them.”

Houssiaux took the cotton-gloved hand in his. “Why, yes! You remember all that?”

“Oh, Monsieur Maurice . . .”

The little lady did not turn her face away, or hide her tears, or her blue eyes, in which the unforgettable image of “Monsieur Maurice” on horseback still remained . . . Houssiaux sighed with regret and let go of the hands of Mademoiselle Lajarisse, who drew away from him slightly.

“So, Monsieur, you say that all the positions are filled?”

He ran his fingers through his gray hair, as he once did through his blond hair.

“Not yours, Mademoiselle Lajarisse. Do you have a minute? Here, take this steno pad. The pencils are right there . . . Ready? ‘My dear friend and colleague, you have been so kind as to bring to my attention the facts which . . .’”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

Getting into the little villa had been so easy that the burglar wondered why, held back by some excess of caution, he had waited so long. Once inside the entrance hall, he recognized the dreary dampness which permeates seaside villas during rainy summers. He found the drawing-room door open onto the front room, as was the dining room’s, and the door to the cellar gaped beneath the staircase, testifying to the hasty flight, to a dance hall or some hollow in the dunes, of the little red-haired maid whose departure he had just witnessed. Only one servant, and she a mere slip of a thing: all that was required by Madame Cassart and her tiny villa of pink plaster and green mosaic, set in a sandy enclosure where the scrawy tamarisks all bowed at the same time and in the same direction, to the wind from the sea, like tall grass swaying in the current.

The burglar carefully closed off the open rooms; he didn’t like banging doors and was counting on a quick visit to this ugly plaything, which Madame Cassart rented for the season. A quick glance into the drawing room—done in white lacquer and cotton print—the tenant wouldn’t dare hide her savings in there.

The man walked about easily in the dark, helped by the faint light, a twilight gray, which forced its way through the lowered Venetian blinds. Only once did he risk the electric beam from his flashlight, which fell on the photograph of a very beautiful woman, wearing a long corset, her hair done up in a “figure eight,” and evening gloves.