The Collected Stories of Colette (70 page)

“And going all out for her, too! People are saying the grounds of the accusation are extremely serious.”

“A new Lafarge case?”

“You’re demanding a lot,” said my father.

I thrust my sharp little mug between my two parents.

“What’s that, the Lafarge case?”

“A horrible business between husband and wife. There’s never been a period without one. A famous poisoning case.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed excitedly. “What a piece of luck!”

Sido gave me a look that utterly renounced me.

“There you are,” she muttered. “That’s what they’re all like at that age . . . A girl ought never to be fifteen.”

“Sido, are you listening to me or not?” broke in my father. “The relatives, put up to it by a niece of Hervouët’s, are claiming that Hervouët didn’t die intestate and that his wife has destroyed the will.”

“In that case,” observed Sido, “you could bring an action against all widowers and all widows of intestates.”

“No,” retorted my father, “men who have children don’t need to make a will. The flames of Hervouët’s lady can only have scorched Hervouët from the waist up since . . .”

“Colette,” my mother said to him severely, indicating me with a look.

“Well,” my father went on. “So there she is in a nice pickle. Hervouët’s niece says she saw the will, yes, saw it with her very own eyes. She can even describe it. A big envelope, five seals of green wax with gold flecks in it . . .”

“Fancy that!” I said innocently.

“. . . and on the front of it, the instructions: ‘To be opened after my death in the presence of my solicitor, Monsieur Hourblin or his successor.’”

“And suppose the niece is lying?” I ventured to ask.

“And suppose Hervouët changed his mind and destroyed his will?” suggested Sido. “He was perfectly free to do so, I presume?”

“There you go, the two of you! Already siding with the bull against the bullfighter!” cried my father.

“Exactly,” said my mother. “Bullfighters are usually men with fat buttocks and that’s enough to put me against them!”

“Let’s get back to the point,” said my father. “Hervoüet’s niece has a husband, a decidedly sinister gentleman by the name of Pellepuits.”

I soon got tired of listening. On the evidence of such words as “The relatives are attacking the widow!” I had hoped for bloodshed and foul play and all I heard was bits of gibberish such as “disposable portion of estate,” “holograph will,” “charge against X.”

All the same, my curiosity was reawakened when Monsieur Hervoüet’s widow paid us a call. Her little mantle of imitation Chantilly lace worn over hock-bottle shoulders, her black mittens from which protruded unusually thick, almost opaque nails, the luxuriance of her black-and-white hair, a big black taffeta pocket suspended from her belt that dangled over the skirt of her mourning, her “houri eyes,” as she called them; all these details, which I seemed to be seeing for the first time, took on a new, sinister significance.

Sido received the widow graciously, took her into the garden, and offered her a thimbleful of Frontignan and a wedge of homemade cake. The June afternoon buzzed over the garden, russet caterpillars dropped about us from the walnut tree, not a cloud floated in the sky. My mother’s pretty voice and Madame Hervouët’s imploring one exchanged tranquil remarks; as usual, they talked about nothing but salpiglossis, gladiolus, and the misdemeanors of servants. Then the visitor rose to go and my mother escorted her. “If you don’t mind,” said Madame Hervouët, “I’ll come over in a day or two and borrow some books; I’m so lonely.”

“Would you like to take them now?” suggested Sido.

“No, no, there’s no hurry. Besides, I’ve noted down the titles of some adventure stories. Goodbye for the time being, and thank you.”

As she said this, Madame Hervouët, instead of taking the path that led to the house, took the one that circled the lawn and walked twice around the plot of grass.

“Good gracious, whatever am I doing? Do forgive me.”

She allowed herself a modest laugh and eventually reached the hall, where she groped too high and to the left of the two sides of the folding door for a latch she had twenty times found on the right. My mother opened the front door for her and, out of politeness, stood for a moment at the top of the steps. We watched Madame Hervouët go off, keeping at first very close to the house, then crossing the road very hurriedly, picking up her skirts as if she were fording a river.

My mother shut the door again and saw that I had followed her.

“She is lost,” she said.

“Who? Madame Hervouët? Why do you say that? How d’you mean, lost?”

Sido shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve no idea. It’s just my impression. Keep that to yourself.”

I kept silence faithfully. This was all the easier, as continuing my series of metamorphoses like a grub, I had entered a new phase—the “enlightened bibliophile”—and I forgot Madame Hervouët in a grand turnout of my stationery shop. A few days later, I was installing Jules Verne between
Les Fleurs animées
and a relief atlas when Madame Hervouët appeared on the scene without the bell having warned me. For we left the front door open nearly all day so that our dog Domino could go in and out.

“How nice of a big girl like you to tidy up the bookshelves,” exclaimed the visitor. “What books are you going to lend me today?”

When Madame Hervouët raised her voice, I clenched my teeth and screwed up my eyes very small.

“Jules Verne,” she read, in a plaintive voice. “You can’t read him twice. Once you know the secret, it’s finished.”

“There’s Balzac up there, on the big shelves,” I said, pointing to them.

“He’s very heavy going,” said Madame Hervouët.

Balzac, heavy going? Balzac, my cradle, my enchanted forest, my voyage of discovery? Amazed, I looked up at the tall dark woman, a head taller than myself. She was toying with a cut rose and staring into space. Her features expressed nothing which could be remotely connected with opinions on literature. She became aware I was gazing at her and pretended to be interested in my writer’s equipment.

“It’s charming. What a splendid collection!”

Her mouth had grown older in the last week. She remained stooping over my relics, handling this one and that. Then she straightened herself up with a start.

“But isn’t your dear mother anywhere about? I’d like to see her.”

Only too glad to move, to get away from this “lost” lady, I rushed wildly out into the garden, calling “Mamma!” as if I were shouting “Fire!”

“She took a few books away with her,” Sido told me when we were alone. “But I could positively swear she didn’t even glance at their titles.”

The rest of the “Hervouët affair” is linked, in my memory, with a vague general commotion, a kind of romantic blur. My clearest recollection of it comes to me through Sido, thanks to the extraordinary “presence” I still have of the sound of her voice. Her stories, her conversations with my father, the intolerant way she had of arguing and refuting, those are the things that riveted a sordid provincial drama in my mind.

One day, shortly after Madame Hervouët’s last visit, the entire district was exclaiming “The will’s been found!” and describing the big envelope with five seals that the widow had just deposited in Monsieur Hourblin’s study. At once uneasy and triumphant, the Pellepuits-Hervouët couple and another lot, the Hervouët-Guillamats, appeared, along with the widow, at the lawyer’s office. There, Madame Hervouët, all by herself, faced up to the solid, pitiless group, to what Sido called those “gaping, legacy-hunting sharks.” “It seems,” my mother said, telling the story, “that she smelled of brandy.” At this point, my mother’s voice is superseded by the hunchback’s voice of Julia Vincent, a woman who went out ironing by the day and came to us once a week. For I don’t know how many consecutive Fridays, I pressed Julia till I wrung out of her all she knew. The precise sound of that nasal voice, squeezed between the throat, the hump, and the hollow, deformed chest, was a delight to me.

“The man as was most afeared was the lawyer. To begin with, he’s not a tall man, not half so tall as that woman. She, all dressed in black she was, and her veil falling down in front right to her feet. Then the lawyer picked up the envelope, big as that it was” (Julia unfolded one of my father’s vast handkerchiefs) “and he passed it just as it was to the nephews so they could recognize the seals.”

“But you weren’t there, Julia, were you?”

“No, it was Monsieur Hourblin’s junior clerk who was watching through the keyhole. One of the nephews said a word or two. Then Madame Hervouët stared at him like a duchess. The lawyer coughed, ahem, ahem, he broke the seals, and he read it out.”

In my recollection, it is sometimes Sido talking, sometimes some scandalmonger eager to gossip about the Hervouët affair. Sometimes it seems too that some illustrator, such as Bertall or Tony Johannot, has actually etched a picture for me of the tall, thin woman who never withdrew her Spanish eyes from the group of heirs-at-law and kept licking her lip to taste the
marc
brandy she had gulped down to give herself courage.

So Monsieur Hourblin read out the will. But after the first lines, the document began to shake in his hands and he broke off, with an apology, to wipe his glasses. He resumed his reading and went right through to the end. Although the testator declared himself to be “sound in body and mind,” the will was nothing but a tissue of absurdities, among others, the acknowledgment of a debt of two million francs contracted to Louise-Léonie-Alberte Matheix, beloved spouse of Clovis-Edme Hervouët.

The reading finished in silence and not one voice was raised from the block of silent heirs.

“It seems,” said Sido, “that, after the reading, the silence was such you could hear the wasps buzzing in the vine arbor outside the window. The Pellepuits and the various Guillamats did nothing but stare at Madame Hervouët, without stirring a finger. Why aren’t cupidity and avarice possessed of second sight? It was a female Guillamat, less stupid than the others, who said afterward that, before anyone had spoken, Madame Hervouët began to make peculiar movements with her neck, like a hen that’s swallowed a hairy caterpillar.

The story of the last scene of that meeting spread like wildfire through the streets, through people’s homes, through the cafés, through the fairgrounds. Monsieur Hourblin had been the first to speak above the vibrating hum of the wasps.

“On my soul and conscience, I find myself obliged to declare that the handwriting of the will does not correspond . . .”

A loud yelping interrupted him. Before him, before the heirs, there was no longer any Widow Hervouët but a somber Fury whirling around and stamping her feet, a kind of black dervish, lacerating herself, muttering, and shrieking. To her admissions of forgery, the crazy woman added others, so rich in the names of vegetable poisons, such as buck-thorn and hemlock, that the lawyer, in consternation, exclaimed naïvely: “Stop, my poor good lady, you’re telling us far more than anyone has asked you to!”

A lunatic asylum engulfed the madwoman, and if the Hervouët affair persisted in some memories, at least, there was no “Hervouët case” at the assizes.

“Why, Mamma?” I asked.

“Mad people aren’t tried. Or else they’d have to have judges who were mad too. That wouldn’t be a bad idea, when you come to think of it . . .”

To pursue her train of thought better, she dropped the task with which her hands were busy; graceful hands that she took no care of. Perhaps, that particular day, she was shelling haricot beans. Or else, with her little finger stuck in the air, she was coating my father’s crutch with black varnish . . .

“Yes, judges who would be able to assess the element of calculation in madness, who could sift out the hidden grain of lucidity, of deliberate fraud.”

The moralist who was raining these unexpected conclusions on a fifteen-year-old head was encased in a blue gardener’s apron, far too big for her, that made her look quite plump. Her gray gaze, terribly direct, fixed me now through her spectacles, now over the top of them. But in spite of the apron, the rolled-up sleeves, the sabots, and the haricot beans, she never looked humble or common.

“What I do blame Madame Hervouët for,” Sido went on, “is her megalomania.
Folie de grandeur
is the source of any number of crimes. Nothing exasperates me more than the imbecile who imagines he’s capable of planning and executing a crime without being punished for it. Don’t you agree it’s Madame Hervouët’s stupidity that makes her case so sickening? Poisoning poor old Hervouët with extremely bitter herbal concoctions, right, that wasn’t difficult. Inept murderer, stupid victim, it’s tit for tat. But to try and imitate a handwriting without having the slightest gift for forgery, to trust to a special, rare kind of sealing wax, what petty ruses, great heavens, what fatuous conceit!”

“But why did she confess?”

“Ah,” said Sido reflectively. “That’s because a confession is almost inevitable. A confession is like . . . let’s see . . . yes . . . it’s like a stranger you carry inside you . . .”

“Like a child?”

“No, not a child. With a child, you know the exact date it’s going to leave you. Whereas a confession bursts out quite suddenly, just when you weren’t expecting it, it tastes its liberty, it stretches its limbs. It shouts, it cuts capers. She accompanied hers with a dance, that poor murderess who thought herself so clever.”

It shouts, it cuts capers . . . Just like that, then and there, my own secret burst out into Sido’s ear: on the very day of Madame Hervouët’s last visit I had noticed the disappearance of the little stick of green sealing wax powdered with gold.

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

PART IV

Love