The Collected Stories of Colette (52 page)

“Nevertheless, Madame, I’ve no lack of references . . .”

She enunciated the last word with difficulty, in a harsh, high tone, and interrupted herself to laugh, for no apparent reason.

“Oh, I’m sure, Madame,” I said to her. “Moreover, your name is far from unknown to me . . .”

My lie pleased her and she fiddled with her roll of paper.

“Is it? My name alone gives me a certain standing; it serves as its own . . . reference.”

The sharp sound of the word made me start, but its loudly barked first syllable seemed to have more of an effect on her who had just pronounced it for the second time. She collected herself, then untied and unrolled her manuscript, which she placed in front of me.

“I only ask,” she said, “for ten minutes of your time. That’s exactly how long it takes to read my first chapter. My first chapter demonstrates the value of the entire work. It contains the plot of the novel, without giving it away, however . . .”

With a yellow-gloved hand, she spread out twenty little typed installments. “This one would suit the readership of a large daily. And this one, twelve short novellas . . . I have six hundred and twenty-four chapters at your disposal . . . The best, as you will see, is this first which . . . sets the . . . which is the . . . the point of . . .”

She hesitated at the edge of the word and her face was veiled with a confused and agonized expression, a kind of cloud which made me forget her coloring, her stoutness, even her build, a fog from the depths of which she cried out at me, as if drowning, “ . . . of . . . reference . . . !

“I’ve always thought that the detective novel, once you dispense with the detective, is an inexhaustible source of drama and comedy. You’ll see! With the help of just three characters—a young apprentice electrician, an English officer, and a young girl, not in the least neurotic, not in the least. A gay young girl, blond and full of . . . how shall I say? of . . . let me see . . . of . . .”

Despite myself, I blurted out, “. . . references . . .”

The lady of letters jerked her head back as though I had slapped her, and for a second I waited for the explosion, in my peaceful office with the Venetian blinds closed, of some unknown, monstrous force . . . Then she stood up, deftly gathered the papers scattered in front of me, rolled them up without ever taking her eyes off me, upright and circumspect for the moment, gave herself some room, and after a brief goodbye backed out mistrustfully, anxious to escape, like someone greatly afraid, in fact, of the half-crazy.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“No, it’s not an engagement party . . . But that doesn’t fool anybody. Tomorrow I’ll be forced to announce everywhere that Claudie Grey is engaged to André Donat, or else there’ll be a scandal. The child hasn’t danced with anyone else and they’ve found accomplices in all our friends. Charles himself . . .”

Madame Grey’s eyes searched the room for her husband and found him seated at a poker table. “There he goes, he’s running his thumbnail over his lip again. Again . . . again . . . and again . . . Last week I didn’t catch him running his thumbnail over his lip once. It’s this oppressive weather, the storm won’t break.” She sighed, and settled her gaze on her daughter and André Donat, who were dancing to the sound of the pianola. Claudie resembled her; she was just as tall, and blond like her at the same age.

“Blond . . . but not for very long. Blond hair like that turns white fast, I know what I’m talking about. But the child looks lovely tonight. Really lovely. Worthy of her mother. As for her face, the resemblance is disconcerting, despite a sort of shrinkage in her features. Smaller nose, smaller eyes unfortunately, smaller mouth than mine, thank God . . . She’s just lovely. I can put my name to her, as they say. And a good girl . . . Oh, I can really feel that it’s the end and that she’s going to leave me! I’m singing her praises as if . . .”

She brought her train of thought to an abrupt halt and superstitiously knocked on the gilded wood of an armchair. Madame Grey felt an expert tenderness for her daughter, a tenderness incapable of blindness, the sort of critical devotion that ties the trainer to the champion. Her own health, her own mental and physical equilibrium had often made her uncompromising, and hard on womanly weaknesses she did not share.

“What? A migraine? You have a migraine? And where would you have dug up migraines, I never knew what they were! A chignon down low? You want to wear your hair in a chignon down low? You silly little thing, nothing looked worse on me at your age . . . What you want is your hair swept up on top of your head and the back of your neck left bare: look at the portrait Ferdinand Humbert did of me!”

What Madame Grey cherished in her daughter was a little girl in 1885, in a short dress, her legs bare and bathed in cold water; a young girl in 1895, on horseback in the Bois, her hair tied back with a bow under the black derby; a “good little girl,” easy to bring up, a bit bold, as pure as a pedigree filly, a tall, lanky girl who never heard of a hysterical fit and who wouldn’t wake up three doctors when she had her first baby . . .

Madame Grey turned a mother-in-law’s vindictive eye toward her future son-in-law. “Oh, yes, he looks quite the pretty boy. And his bread’s well buttered, he’ll take over Daddy’s business. Envious, this marriage will make everyone envious. But if I were to say what I think, deep down, I’d hear some fine shouting then!”

André Donat, interrupting the tango a moment for the buffet, bowed as he passed Madame Grey, kissed her hand lightly, snatched her little handkerchief from her sleeve, and ran off, laughing and flashing his white teeth. Madame Grey menaced him with her fan and smiled at him threateningly. She went out onto the terrace, sat down, and breathed in the dusty coolness of the Bois at night. Her fifty inflexible years bent somewhat in the solitude; she felt her stiff knees and the small of her proud back calling for bed, the smooth cambric sheets, the steaming hot-water bottle . . .

“That boy certainly is playing up to me. But for how long . . . ? When he laughed he showed me his big canines in his upper jaw and his little incisors on the bottom, too short, as if they’d been filed down; coarseness, quick physical responses . . . I pity my little girl if he has pretty chambermaids . . . And that nose of his, it’s too short, shows a lack of judgment . . . And his earlobes joined to his neck at the bottom: degeneracy. What’s more, when we visited him at his home, he was priding himself on being unable to live with disorder, on arranging his books according to the color of their spines, and on getting up at night to put his shoes in the shoe tree.”

Madame Grey shuddered and stood up. She could see in her memory a young man in his shirttails, bare feet on a mosaic bathroom floor, standing in front of an absolutely astounded young woman; a young man in the midst of confessing, with horrible, unconscious candor, that he couldn’t sleep if the fringes on the Turkish towels hung on the rack to dry were not lined up with each other. “It’s funny, darling, I’m pretty bohemian when it comes to everything else, but the fringe on the Turkish towels . . .”

“But I can’t tell Claudie that,” thought Madame Grey agitatedly. “No. I can’t. If I tell her that, and that I nearly left her father because of the way he runs his thumbnail over his lip, she’ll laugh. She won’t understand. Besides, those are things you don’t talk about. On her wedding day you can whisper a few nervous, awkward things in a young girl’s ear . . . But I could never talk to her about towel fringe, or about the thumbnail going back and forth across his lip a hundred times, or about . . . Oh, enough! Enough! She, she’ll hide things from me . . . small, terrible things, the mold that grows on married life, the refuse a man’s character leaves behind at the border between childishness and dementia . . .

“My poor little . . .” Madame Grey sighed, drew herself up to her full height, which lost in suppleness and gained in majesty, and returned to the drawing room. She gave only a little sigh to the two fiancés who were doing a Boston two-step and hurried over to the poker table.

“Make room for me, Charles, there are only four of you.”

She had no desire to play poker. But she sat down beside her husband, and her hand, that of a good wife, admonished, with a meaningful squeeze, the unconscious hand which had been running back and forth, back and forth over his lip . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

His wife placed her hand on his shoulder as she passed by. “Aren’t you glad you get to see the little dolls dance?”

He didn’t much care for this trite way of referring to the Cambodian dancers, but he gave her a nod, and admired his wife as she walked away. She was wearing a silver dress, with sulphur-yellow roses at the waist, a large fan of sulphur-colored feathers, and her hair, skillfully bleached to a very pale yellow, looked like some sort of finery bought at the same time as the roses and the fan. A tall imposing woman, she impressed people with the somewhat rudimentary beauty of her features, and with her virile blue eyes, accustomed to judging all things from above.

“The beautiful Madame Issard looks superb this evening,” said a man’s voice behind a white silk curtain painted with a brown bamboo pattern.

“Battle dress,” responded another voice. “Tonight’s the night she intends to get the marshal to give her husband the assignment.”

“That assignment is hardly any business of Issard’s. A man of letters . . . a refined intellectual . . . a homebody . . .”

“But it
is
Madame Issard’s business. In four months she’ll have won the Legion’s rosette for Issard and the ribbon for herself. Did you hear her at dinner? She was magnificent. What diplomacy! And unassailable with it . . . I don’t feel sorry for Issard.”

André Issard walked away from the bamboo-painted curtain. Not that he was afraid of hearing anything about his wife that might upset him. But he felt he needed a brief respite from all the admiration shown her throughout dinner. Moreover, announced by their timbals, each one of which separately dripped the liquid note which rings in the throats of toads, the Cambodian women were beginning their dance on a dais in front of Pierre Guesde’s fifty guests, who were spread out around the hall. Looking rather blasé behind his monocle, Issard took extreme pleasure in seeing them. His notions of exoticism did not go beyond Algiers, and the only time he had seen Ith, Sarrouth, Trassoth, and their companions was in
L’Illustration
. He found them pretty; at the same time he regretted that their round cheeks were covered with white makeup. He blamed fashion, starting in Siam, which had them wearing their hair like little boys. But most of them carried their boyish heads on a neck like the shaft of a column, without crease or blemish, covered with firm, smooth, polished skin the color of fine stoneware, sometimes the color of cherry plums, ravishing to the eye. André Issard searched for words not too overused to describe these inscrutable, childlike faces, whose shallow carving—eyes slit with a fine chisel, nose barely raised above the cheek, small mouths whose full lips showed the red pulp inside . . . with the obstinacy of an artistic pen-pusher, he searched for a way to paint the curve of Sarrouth’s hands, and the inverted fingers elongating a palm curving inward on the outside . . .

“A leaf seared by autumn? No . . . More like the twisting of a fish out of water . . . Or else . . . Yes, that’s it: it’s the heraldic curl of a panting dog’s tongue . . .”

Then the music and the magic of the wavelike movements conspired, and André Issard hardly thought of anything else. “They’re pretty . . . They’re new . . . They’re feminine, really feminine.”

He looked up and caught sight of his wife in a deep embrasure, not paying attention to the dances, but talking with the governor of a large colony. She would speak, listen, speak again, and seemed to use as much energy listening as speaking. Her eyebrows, knit together, bore down on her blue eyes, whose gaze was contemplating a glorious and harsh future.