The Collected Stories of Colette (49 page)

“Cassart in her better days. Some change.”

For the past two weeks in this little fishing port with big ambitions and an overnight casino made of fibro-cement, he had been leading the austere life of an entomologist, studying the customs and habits of the bathers, especially the female bathers, noting their time of arrival, their daily stations at the lotto tables and the dance hall. All he had gained, since his arrival, was a gold purse, an ordinary ring left on a washbasin, and a drawstring pouch with a hundred francs in it: meager recompense for this scrupulous existence, which aspired to a crystalline perfection. Properly attired, he frequented the casino, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and made no acquaintances, for, though confident in his appearance as a strikingly handsome man in his forties with short hair, he knew the weaknesses of his syntax and the colorful brevity of his vocabulary.

“Just enough,” he thought, “to impress the girls in the candy store—and old lady Cassart . . .”

He had been watching the woman whom he, like everyone else, called the “old crazy lady,” the tall septuagenarian whose figure was still that of a young, if old-fashioned woman, straight-backed in her stiff corset, with shoulders like a Prussian officer. Her organdy hats, her dresses of
broderie anglaise
, and her long pink or orchid-colored veils flapped on the jetty like flags, and the schoolboys behind her hurried to see her face, a death’s head in makeup, covered with balls of paraffin sunk beneath the skin of her cheeks, above a neck tightly tucked into boned tulle.

He had noticed her at the famous confectioner’s, all a-jingle with jewels, pink as a piece of cracked wax fruit; he had waited while she greedily carried off a sack of chocolate “turtles.” When she had gone, scandalous and serene, he bought some almond cookies.

“Send them to the Hotel Beauséjour? For Monsieur . . .”

“Monsieur Paul Dagueret.”

“D apostrophe?”

He gave the blond salesgirl a casual smile. “However you like, Mademoiselle. It’s of no importance to me.”

Struck by this aristocratic insouciance, the girl allowed herself a few remarks about Madame Cassart, deploring the fact that “diamonds like those . . .”

“I hadn’t noticed,” interrupted Monsieur Dagueret coldly. “I’m not an expert.”

Now, in “old lady Cassart’s” bedroom, he was searching not for the diamonds which she hardly ever took off, but for the compensation due his persevering and solitary work.

“Even if it’s only a gold chain, or those big round bracelets she threads her skinny arms through,” he murmured as he quietly rummaged through the plain, bright room in which Madame Cassart had shown her personal taste by pinning up bows made of ribbon and flowers made of colored bread crumbs everywhere . . .

Rifling through a drawer with the butt of his flashlight, he passed up an aquamarine cross and took a gold locket worth at least fifty francs. At that precise moment, he heard the garden gate squeak musically, then a key in the lock. Heavy footsteps could already be heard mounting the stairs as he decided to seek refuge behind the unfastened curtains of the French windows.

Once behind them he immediately felt awkward and thwarted. This crazy old woman never came home from the casino before midnight, other days. Through the crack between the curtains he saw her walk back and forth and heard her mutter indistinctly. She no longer bothered to throw back her military shoulders, and walked hunched over, senilely mawing the air. She carefully took off her girlish hat, then took some pins out of her hair. The prisoner saw a pale little tonsure surrounded by an abundance of hair, still thick and dyed bright red. The low-cut dress fell to the floor, a beribboned negligee hid the grainy skin, with its red blotches caused by the salty air, and the dreadful dewlaps under the chin. Beneath the loose hair, the sour face, made up as though for some drama, added to Monsieur Paul Dagueret’s uneasiness.

“What now?” he asked himself. “Obviously I have to do what I have to do, but . . . An old nag like that’s no pushover! Damn!”

He didn’t like either noise or blood, and with each second his discomfort increased. Madame Cassart spared him further agony. She turned her head sharply toward the curtains as if, all of a sudden, she had smelled him, opened them, letting out a cry hardly louder than a sigh and drew back three steps, hiding her face in her hands. He was just about to take advantage of this unexpected gesture to rush out and escape when she said to him, without uncovering her face, in an affectedly suppliant voice: “Why have you done this? Oh, why?”

He was standing between the parted curtains, bareheaded—a hat or a cap always gets lost—wearing gloves, his hair mussed.

She went on, in that high, crystalline voice certain old people have. “You should never have done this!”

She lowered her hands and it stunned him to see that she was looking at him without the slightest bit of fear, in a loving, vanquished way.

“Here we go. This is it,” he thought.

“Was this violence necessary?” sighed Madame Cassart. “The most ordinary introduction, in the casino or on the jetty, would have been sufficient, wouldn’t it? Could you believe that I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t guessed? It would have been very easy for you . . . But not like this, oh, not like this!”

She straightened her back, gathered her hair back up on the top of her head, and draped herself with a robe and the dignity of an old clown.

Astounded, the man stood there speechless, and then after a silence he said mechanically, “If anyone had ever . . .”

She interrupted him, quivering with emotion: “No, no, don’t say anything, you will never know how deeply distressed I am . . . I am . . . My reputation is spotless . . . I’ve never been married . . . People address me as Madame, but . . . your being here . . . Oh, can’t you see how upset . . . You will get nothing from me in this way, I assure you!”

Every gesture, every sigh, sparked the aggressive fires of her diamonds, but the burglar paid no attention to them, preoccupied as he was with the vexation of a sane and, moreover, modest man. He was ready to explode, to tell—and in what terms!—the impassioned old bag what she could do. He took a step forward and saw, there in front of him, his own image, reflected in a mirror, the flattering image of a handsome young man, dressed in black, and distinguished, yes . . .

“Tell me that I’ll see you again, but it must be somewhere outside my home at first,” the madwoman simpered. “Give me your word as a gentleman.”

 . . . Distinguished, yes, as long as he kept quiet. A kind of snobbery rid him of the desire to insult and brutalize, a snobbery which respected both the old woman’s extravagant error and this moment in his own life which imitated that of a noble and romantic hero . . . He bowed as best he could and said in a deep voice, “Madame, I give you my word.”

And left, red-faced and empty-handed.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

Old Monsieur Mestre again poured one can of water on the bleeding hearts, one on the newly planted heliotropes, and two on the blue hydrangeas, which were always dying of thirst. He tied up the nasturtiums, eager to climb, and with the shears he clipped the last withered thyrsus of the lilacs with a little cry, “Ha!” and wiped the dirt from his hands. His little garden in Auteuil, densely planted, well watered, and neatly arranged like a too-small parlor, was overflowing with flowers and defying the dryness of June. Up until November, it astonished the eyes—those of the passers-by at least—for Monsieur Mestre, stooped over his walled-in rectangle of earth for hours, tended it from morning to night, with the doggedness of a truck farmer. He planted, grafted, and pruned; he hunted down slugs, small suspicious-looking spiders, the green flies, and the blight bug. When night came, he would clap his hands together, exclaim “Ha!” and instead of dreaming over the phlox, haunted by gray sphinx moths beneath the white wisteria entwined with purple wisteria, and spurning the fiery geraniums, he would turn away from his charming handiwork and go off for a smoke in his kitchen, or stroll along the boulevards of Auteuil.

The lovely May evening had prolonged his day as amateur gardener by an hour after dinner. The sky, the pale gravel path, the white flowers, and the white façades held a light which did not want to end, and mothers, standing in the doorways of the little open houses, called in vain to their children, who preferred the dusty warm sidewalk to their cool beds.

“Sweetheart,” Monsieur Mestre called out, “I’m going out for a bit.”

Their house, long owned by the modest old couple, still showed, beneath the Virginia creeper, its faded brick. Around it, rich villas had sprung up—Norman chalets, Louis XVI “follies,” modern cubes painted China red or Egypt blue.

Old Monsieur Mestre knew every detail of the façades, every rare tree in the gardens. But his curiosity stopped there; he envied neither the towers nor the thick crystal of the bay windows, wide as the fish ponds. Covetous of his ignorance, he liked conjectures; he had named this thatched cottage, blinded by its long bignonia wig, “Guilty Love”; that turret the color of dried blood, “Japanese Torture.” A proper white construction, with yellow silk curtains, was called “the Happy Family,” and Monsieur Mestre, beaming with a sense of sweet irony in front of a kind of pink-and-blue confection made of cement, marble, and exotic wood, had christened it “First Adventure.”

As a “native” of the sixteenth arrondissement, he cherished the strange provincial avenues, where a trusty old tree shelters new dwellings which a storm could wash away. He walked along, stopped, patted a little girl on the head, and clicked his tongue disapprovingly at a crying child. At night, his silver hair and beard reassured the women walking home alone and they slowed their pace in order to place themselves under the protection of “this nice old gentleman.”

The pink and gold sky lingered late into the starless May night. But closer to the earth, the lights in the lamps came on, and the dauntless nightingales sang overhead, above the green benches and the stone kiosks. Monsieur Mestre greeted a little two-story house, laid out comfortably in its garden, with a friendly glance. He called it the “Brooding Hen.” A light shone in a single window hung with pink curtains. At the same moment a young man, bareheaded in the fashion of the day, came out of the house, furiously slammed the door behind him, then the gate, and stood there motionless in the street, mulish, head down, eyes fixed on the lighted window in a black, dramatic stare. Monsieur Mestre smiled and gave his shoulders a little shrug.

“Another drama! And you can see right away what it’s all about! We’re eighteen, nineteen years old. We want to take a bite out of life with the teeth of a tiger. We want to be the master. We’ve had a scene with Mama and Papa, and we’ve run out, after some ugly words we already regret . . . And what we really want is to go back in. But our pride won’t let us. Ah, youth!”

Carried along, he said in a low, fatherly voice, “Ah, youth!”

The young man spun around on his heels and looked none too kindly at the silver-haired old man, who looked at him from above, with the benevolent majesty of a fortune-teller, as he held out his arm toward the house.

“Young man, this isn’t where you should be. That is.”

The young man started and backed away a step.

“Oh . . . no . . .” he said dully.

“Oh, yes . . .” said Monsieur Mestre. “Will you deny the impulse you just had to go back in?”

The big dark eyes in the still-beardless face opened in disbelief. “How . . . how do you know?”

Monsieur Mestre placed a prophetic hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I know quite a few things. I know . . . that you were wrong to resist the impulse that was urging you to go back in.”

“Monsieur . . .” begged the pale young man, “Monsieur, I don’t want, I don’t ever want . . .”

“Yes, yes,” scoffed the indulgent old man. “Rebellion, the flight to freedom . . .”

“Yes . . . oh, yes,” sighed the adolescent. “You know everything . . . rebellion . . . escape . . . shouldn’t I . . . can’t I . . .”

Monsieur Mestre’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Escape . . . freedom . . . It’s all words! As unhappy as you are, when you get a hundred feet from here, won’t you be seized again by that same force that made you stop in front of me, by the same voice crying out to you, ‘Go back! I’m the truth, I’m happiness, I am where the secret to this freedom you’re searching for lies, security . . .’”

The young man interrupted Monsieur Mestre’s flowery speech with a look of unspeakable hope, smiled wildly, and ran back into the house.

“Bravo,” exclaimed Monsieur Mestre in a low voice, congratulating himself.

After the door slammed shut, he heard the cry of a young voice, brief, as if muffled under a kiss. He nodded his head in thanks and was walking away, happy, discreet, when the door opened again and the young man, gasping, threw himself into his arms. He had a drunken look on his face, a pallor made green by the late light of day, which seemed wonderful to Monsieur Mestre; his eyes, brimming with tears, wandered from the rose sunset to Monsieur Mestre, to the cedar tree glistening with nightingales.