The Collected Stories of Colette (69 page)

I had done nothing wrong, nor had I abetted this man, except by my torpor. But torpor is a far graver peril for a girl of fifteen than all the usual excited giggling and blushing and clumsy attempts at flirtation. Only a few men can induce that torpor from which girls awake to find themselves lost. That, so to speak, surgical intervention of Sido’s cleared up all the confusion inside me and I had one of those relapses into childishness in which adolescence revels when it is simultaneously ashamed of itself and intoxicated by its own ego.

My father, a born writer, left few pages behind him. At the actual moment of writing, he dissipated his desire in material arrangements, setting out all the objects a writer needs and a number of superfluous ones as well. Because of him, I am not proof against this mania myself. As a result of having admired and coveted the perfect equipment of a writer’s worktable, I am still exacting about the tools on my desk. Since adolescence does nothing by halves, I stole from my father’s worktable, first a little mahogany set square that smelled like a cigar box, then a white metal ruler. Not to mention the scolding, I received full in my face the glare of a small, blazing gray eye, the eye of a rival, so fierce that I did not risk it a third time. I confined myself to prowling, hungrily, with my mind full of evil thoughts, around all these treasures of stationery. A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colors; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green, and violet; a hand blotter; a bottle of liquid glue, not to mention slabs of transparent amber-colored stuff known as “mouth glue”; the minute remains of a spahi’s cloak reduced to the dimensions of a pen wiper with scalloped edges; a big ink pot flanked by a small ink pot, both in bronze; and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page; another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colors (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams of paper, creamlaid, ruled, watermarked; and, of course, that little stamping machine that bit into the white sheet, and, with one snap of its jaws, adorned it with an embossed name:
J.–J. Colette
. There was also a glass of water for washing paintbrushes, a box of watercolors, an address book, the bottles of red, black, and violet ink, the mahogany set square, a pocket case of mathematical instruments, the tobacco jar, a pipe, the spirit lamp for melting the sealing wax.

A property owner tries to extend his domain; my father therefore tried to acclimatize adventitious subjects on his vast table. At one time there appeared on it a machine that could cut through a pile of a hundred sheets, and some frames filled with a white jelly on which you laid a written page face downward and then, from this looking-glass original, pulled off blurred, sticky, anemic copies. But my father soon wearied of such gadgets and the huge table returned to its serenity, to its classical style that was never disturbed by inspiration with its disorderly litter of crossed-out pages, cigarette butts, and “roughs” screwed up into paper balls. I have forgotten, heaven forgive me, the paper-knife section, three or four boxwood ones, one of imitation silver, and the last of yellowed ivory, cracked from end to end.

From the age of ten I had never stopped coveting those material goods, invented for the glory and convenience of a mental power, which come under the general heading of “desk furniture.” Children only delight in things they can hide. For a long time I secured possession of one wing, the left one, of the great four-doored double bookcase (it was eventually sold by order of the court). The doors of the upper part were glass-fronted, those of the lower, solid and made of beautiful figured mahogany. When you opened the lower left-hand door at a right angle, the flap touched the side of the chest of drawers, and as the bookcase took up nearly the whole of one paneled wall, I would immure myself in a quadrangular nook formed by the side of the chest of drawers, the wall, the left section of the bookcase, and its wide-open door. Sitting on a little footstool, I could gaze at the three mahogany shelves in front of me, on which were displayed the objects of my worship, ranging from cream-laid paper to a little cup of the golden powder. “She’s a chip off the old block,” Sido would say teasingly to my father. It was ironical that, equipped with every conceivable tool for writing, my father rarely committed himself to putting pen to paper, whereas Sido—sitting at any old table, pushing aside an invading cat, a basket of plums, a pile of linen, or else just putting a dictionary on her lap by way of a desk—Sido really did write. A hundred enchanting letters prove that she did. To continue a letter or finish it off, she would tear a page out of her household account book or write on the back of a bill.

She therefore despised our useless altars. But she did not discourage me from lavishing care on my desk and adorning it to amuse myself. She even showed anxiety when I explained that my little house was becoming too small for me . . . “Too small. Yes, much too small,” said the gray eyes. “Fifteen . . . Where is Pussy Darling going, bursting out of her nook like a hermit crab driven out of its borrowed shell by its own growth? Already, I’ve snatched her from the clutches of that man. Already, I’ve had to forbid her to go dancing on the ‘Ring’ on Low Sunday. Already, she’s escaping and I shan’t be able to follow her. Already, she wants a long dress, and if I give her one, the blindest will notice that she’s a young girl. And if I refuse, everyone will look below the too-short skirt and stare at her woman’s legs. Fifteen . . . How can I stop her from being fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen years old?”

Sometimes, during that period, she would come and lean over the mahogany half door that isolated me from the world. “What are you doing?” She could see perfectly well what I was doing but she could not understand it. I refused her the answer given her so generously by everything else she observed, the bee, the caterpillar, the hydrangea, the ice plant. But at least she could see I was there, sheltered from danger. She indulged my mania. The lovely pieces of shiny colored wrapping paper were given me to bind my books and I made the gold string into bookmarkers. I had the first penholder sheathed in a glazed turquoise-colored substance, with a moiré pattern on it, that appeared in Reumont’s, the stationers.

One day my mother brought me a little stick of sealing wax and I recognized the stub of green wax, the prize jewel of my father’s desk. No doubt I considered the gift too overwhelming, for I gave no sign of ecstatic joy. I clutched the sealing wax in my hand, and as it grew warm, it gave out a slightly Oriental fragrance of incense.

“It’s very old sealing wax,” Sido told me, “and as you can see, it’s powdered with gold. Your father already had it when we were married; he’d been given it by his mother and his mother assured him that it was a stick of wax that had been used by NapoLéon I. But you’ve got to remember that my mother-in-law lied every time she opened her mouth, so . . .”

“Is he giving it to me or have you taken it?”

Sido became impatient; she always turned irritable when she thought she was going to be forced to lie and was trying to avoid lying.

“When
will
you stop twisting a lock of hair around the end of your nose?” she cried. “You’re doing your best to have a red nose with a blob at the tip like a cherry! That sealing wax? Let’s say your father’s lending it to you and leave it at that. Of course, if you don’t want . . .”

My wild clutch of possession made Sido laugh again, and she said, with pretended lightness: “If he wanted it, he’d ask you to give it back, of course!”

But he did not ask me to give it back. For a few months, gold-flecked green sealing wax perfumed my narrow empire bounded by four mahogany walls; then my pleasure gradually diminished, as do all pleasures to which no one disputes our right. Besides, my devotion to stationery temporarily waned in favor of a craze to be glamorous. I asserted my right to wear a “bustle,” that is to say, I enlarged my small, round behind with a horsehair cushion, which, of course, made my skirts much shorter at the back than in front. In our village, the frenzy of adolescence turned girls between thirteen and fifteen into madwomen who stole horsehair, cotton, and wool, stuffed rags in a bag, and tied on the hideous contraption known as a “false bottom” on dark staircases, out of their mother’s sight. I also longed for a thick, frizzy fringe, leather belts so tight I could hardly breathe, high boned collars, violet scent on my handkerchief . . .

From that phase, I relapsed once more into childhood, for a feminine creature has to make several attempts before it finally hatches out. I reveled in being a Plain Jane, with my hair in pigtails and straight wisps straggling over my cheeks. I gladly renounced all my finery in favor of my old school pinafores with their pockets stuffed with nuts and string and chocolate. Paths edged with brambles, clumps of bull-rushes, licorice “shoelaces,” cats—in short, everything I still love to this day—became dear to me again. There are no words to hymn such times in one’s life, no clear memories to illuminate them; looking back on them, I can only compare them to the depths of blissful sleep. The smell of haymaking sometimes brings them back to me, perhaps because, suddenly tired, as growing creatures are, I would drop for an hour into a dreamless sleep among the new-mown hay.

It was at this point there occurred the episode known for long afterward as “the Hervouët will affair.” Old Monsieur Hervouët died and no will could be found. The provinces have always been rich in fantastic figures. Somewhere, under old tiled roofs, yellow with lichen, in icy drawing rooms and dining rooms dedicated to eternal shade, on waxed floors strewn with death traps of knitted rugs, in kitchen-garden paths between the hard-headed cabbages and the curly parsley, queer characters are always to be found. A little town or a village prides itself on possessing a mystery. My own village acknowledged placidly, even respectfully, the rights of young Gatreau to rave unmolested. This admirable example of a romantic madman, a wooden cigar between his lips, was always wildly tossing his streaming black curls and staring fixedly at young girls with his long, Arab eyes. A voluntary recluse used to nod good morning through a windowpane and passers would say of her admiringly: “That makes twenty-two years since Madame Sibile left her room! My mother used to see her there, just as you see her now. And, you know, there’s nothing the matter with her. In one way, it’s a fine life!”

But Sido used to hurry her quick step and pull me along when we passed level with the aquarium that housed the lady who had not gone out for twenty-two years. Behind her clear glass pane the prisoner would be smiling. She always wore a linen cap; sometimes her little yellow hand held a cup. A sure instinct for what is horrible and prohibited made Sido turn away from that ground-floor window and that bobbing head. But the sadism of childhood made me ask her endless questions.

“How old do you think she is, Madame Sibile? At night does she sleep by the window in her armchair? Do they undress her? Do they wash her? And how does she go to the lavatory?”

Sido would start as if she had been stung.

“Be quiet. I forbid you to think about those things.”

Monsieur Hervouët had never passed for one of those eccentrics to whom a market town extends its slightly derisive protection. For sixty years he had been well-off and ill dressed, first a “big catch” to marry, then a big catch married. Left a widower, he had remarried. His second wife was a former postmistress, thin and full of fire.

When she struck her breastbone, exclaiming, “
That’s
where I can feel it burning!” her Spanish eyes seemed to make the person she was talking to responsible for this unquenchable ardor. “I am not easily frightened,” my father used to say; “but heaven preserve me from being left alone with Mademoiselle Matheix!”

After his second marriage, Monsieur Hervouët no longer appeared in public. As he never left his home, no one knew exactly when he developed the gastric trouble that was to carry him off. He was a man dressed, in all weathers, in black, including a cap with earflaps. Smothered in fleecy white hair and a beard like cotton wool, he looked like an apple tree attacked by woolly aphis. High walls and a gateway that was nearly always closed protected his second season of conjugal bliss. In summer a single rosebush clothed three sides of his one-storied house and the thick fringe of wisteria on the crest of the wall provided food for the first bees. But we had never heard anyone say that Monsieur Hervouët was fond of flowers, and if we now and then caught sight of his black figure pacing to and fro under the pendants of the wisteria and the showering roses, he struck us as being neither responsible for nor interested in all this wealth of blossom.

When Mademoiselle Matheix became Madame Hervouët, the ex-postmistress lost none of her resemblance to a black-and-yellow wasp. With her sallow skin, her squeezed-in waist, her fine, inscrutable eyes, and her mass of dark hair, touched with white and restrained in a knot on the nape of her neck, she showed no surprise at being promoted to middle-class luxury. She appeared to be fond of gardening. Sido, the impartial, thought it only fair to show some interest in her; she lent her books, and in exchange accepted cuttings and also roots of tree violets whose flowers were almost black and whose stem grew naked out of the ground like the trunk of a tiny palm tree. To me, Madame Hervouët-Matheix was an anything but sympathetic figure. I was vaguely scandalized that when making some assertions of irreproachable banality, she did so in a tone of passionate and plaintive supplication.

“What do you expect?” said my mother. “She’s an old maid.”

“But, Mamma, she’s married!”

“Do you really imagine,” retorted Sido acidly, “people stop being old maids for a little thing like that?”

One day, my father, returning from the daily “round of the town,” by which this man who had lost one leg kept himself fit, said to my mother: “A piece of news! The Hervouët relatives are attacking the widow.”