Three Women in a Mirror

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Editions Albin Michel
First publication 2013 by Europa Editions
Translation by Alison Anderson
Original Title:
La femme au miroir
Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451660

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

THREE WOMEN IN A MIRROR

Translated from the French
by Alison Anderson

for Bruno Metzger

I feel different,” she murmured.
No one paid any attention to what she said. The matrons fussed over her—adjusting a veil, her braid, her ribbons; the haberdasher shortened her skirt and the surveyor's widow put embroidered slippers on her feet, but all the while the motionless young girl was beginning to feel as though she were an object—a fascinating one, to be sure, sufficiently alluring to inspire the neighbors' vigilance—but a simple object nonetheless.

Anne gazed at the beam of sunlight slanting across the room through the squat window. She smiled. This attic room, with its fountain of gold breaking through the darkness, was like a forest surprised by dawn, where the laundry baskets were ferns, and the women were deer. Despite the ceaseless chattering, Anne could hear a silence drifting through the room, a strange, peaceful, dense silence, which came a long way to deliver its message beneath the gossips' jabbering.

Anne turned her head, hoping that one of the ladies might have heard her, but she could not catch anyone's attention; doomed to submit to their decorative obsessions, she wondered whether she had made herself clear: “I feel different.”

What could she add? In a few hours she would be getting married, and yet from the moment she had awoken, all she could see was the springtime unbuttoning its flowers. She was drawn to nature more than to her fiancé. She suspected that happiness was hiding out of doors, behind a tree, like a rabbit; she could see the tip of its nose, she could sense its presence, its invitation, its impatience . . . In her limbs she could feel a desire to run, to roll in the grass, to hug the tree trunks, to breathe her lungs full of air dusted with pollen. For her the event of the day was the day itself—cool, dazzling, generous—and not her nuptials. This thing that was happening to her—marriage to Philippe—was insignificant compared to this splendor, the month of April enhancing field and forest, a new strength causing cuckoos and primroses and blue thistles to blossom. She wanted to run out of this tiny room where the nuptial preparations were being made, she wanted to tear herself from the hands that were prettifying her, and throw herself naked into the nearby river.

Opposite the casement, the beam of light had cast the shadow of the curtain lace against the uneven whitewashed wall. Anne dared not disturb this fascinating beam. Even if someone had told her the house was on fire, she would sit there glued to her footstool.

She shuddered.

“What are you thinking about?” asked her cousin Ida.

“Nothing.”

“You're dreaming about him, aren't you?”

Anne lowered her eyes.

As the future bride had just confirmed her suspicions, Ida burst out laughing, a shrill laugh filled with lubricious thoughts. These last weeks she had been struggling with her jealousy, and all she could do was convert it to a bawdy mockery.

“Anne thinks she's already in Philippe's arms!” she proclaimed glumly to the assembled company. “The wedding night will be hot. I would not like to be their mattress.”

The women grunted, some to approve Anne, the others to stigmatize Ida's triviality.

Suddenly the door opened.

Majestically, theatrically, Anne's aunt and grandmother entered the room.

“At last, my child, you will see what your husband will see,” they declared in unison.

As if unsheathing a dagger from the folds of their black dresses, the widows brought out two carved ivory boxes and opened them slowly and gingerly: each box contained a mirror ringed with silver. A hush of surprise accompanied their revelation, for all the women knew they were witnessing a most unusual spectacle: mirrors were not part of their daily lives unless, exceptionally, they happened to own one; and if they did it was surely a rounded pewter mirror of polished metal, with a hazy, lumpy, dull image; but these glass mirrors reproduced reality with sharp features and vivid colors.

There were cries of admiration.

The two magicians received their compliments, eyes closed, then with no further ado they set to work. Aunt Godeliève positioned herself opposite Anne, Grandmother Franciska stood behind her neck, and each held her instrument with outstretched arms as though it were a shield. Solemnly, aware of their importance, they told the young girl how to use the mirrors.

“In the front mirror, you can see the mirror behind you. Thus, you can see yourself from behind or in profile. Tell us where we should stand.”

Ida drew nearer, envious.

“Where did you find them?”

“The countess has lent them to us.”

All the women praised this clever initiative: only a noblewoman had treasures of this kind at her disposal, because the peddlers did not offer them for sale to the common people, who were too poor.

Anne peered into the round frame, examined her intriguing features, admired the artful tresses woven in her blonde hair to elaborate her refined hairstyle; she was surprised to see how long her neck was, how tiny her ears. However, she had a strange sensation: while she saw nothing unpleasant in the mirror, she did not see anything familiar either: she was gazing at a stranger. This inverted face, from the front, side or back, might as easily have been another's as her own; it did not resemble her.

“Are you pleased?”

“Oh, yes! Thank you.”

Anne was replying to her aunt's solicitude; she was not especially vain, and she had already forgotten the experience with the mirror.

“Do you realize how fortunate you are?” said Grandmother Franciska.

“But of course,” protested Anne, “I am so fortunate to have you.”

“No, I was talking about Philippe. In this day and age there are virtually no men left.”

The women standing near them nodded gravely. In Bruges, men were extremely rare. The town had never known such a penury; the men had vanished. Who was left? One fellow for every two women? Perhaps only one for every three. Poor Flanders, the country was afflicted with a strange phenomenon: a scarcity of the virile sex. In a few decades, the male population in the north of Europe had diminished to a worrisome degree. Many women resigned themselves to living as spinsters, or in lay communities with other women; some abandoned the idea of having children, and the more robust among them learned Herculean professions such as ironwork or carpentry, so that nothing was lacking.

The haberdasher thought she heard criticism in her friend's tone, and shot her a severe look.

“It is the will of God!”

Grandmother Franciska shuddered, fearing she might be accused of blasphemy. She corrected herself: “Of course it is God who has sent us this ordeal. It is God who called our men to the Crusades. It is for God that they are dying, fighting the infidels. It is God who drowns them at sea, on the road, in the forest. It is God who kills them at work. It is God who calls them to Him, before calling us. It is He who leaves us to rot without them.”

Anne understood that Grandmother Franciska despised God; she was expressing more terror than adoration, describing Him as a pillager, a torturer, and a murderer. It did not seem to Anne that God was any of those things, or that He acted in the way her grandmother described.

“You, my little Anne,” continued the widow, “you will have a traditional life: a man to yourself, and many children. You are blessed. What's more, your Philippe is not an ugly man, is he, ladies?”

They all laughed, some of them embarrassed, others titillated by having to express themselves on such a subject. Philippe was sixteen years old, and was the perfect example of a robust Flemish lad: sturdy, long-legged, thin-waisted, broad-shouldered, with tawny skin and hop-colored hair.

Aunt Godeliève exclaimed, “And do you know that the fiancé is down in the street, awaiting his betrothed?”

“No?”

“He knows that we are preparing her, he is steaming with impatience. Toss water on the fire! If a body could die of impatience, I think by now he would be dead.”

Anne went over to the window, whose oiled paper frame had been opened to allow the springtime to enter; careful not to block the stream of light, she leaned sideways and saw Philippe below her on the greasy pavement, a smile on his lips, chatting with his friends who had come from Bruges to Saint-André, the village where her grandmother Franciska lived, one league from the great town. It was true, from time to time he would glance up at the top floor of the house; eager and exuberant, he was waiting for her.

This warmed her heart. She mustn't doubt herself!

Anne had been living in Bruges for a year. Before that, she had known nothing but an isolated farm in the north, among the damp and malodorous lowlands crushed by cloudy skies; she had lived there with her aunt and cousins, her only family since her mother died bringing her into the world, never revealing her father's identity. As long as her uncle had been running the farm she had never sought to leave; but when he died, aunt Godeliève decided to move back to Bruges where her brothers lived. Not far away, her mother, Franciska, was living out her last days in Saint-André.

For Godeliève Bruges represented a reassuring return to her origins, but for Anne and her three cousins, Ida, Hadewijch, and Bénédicte, it had been a shock: the country girls had to learn to be city dwellers; the children, young women.

Ida, the eldest, was determined to throw in her lot with a man as quickly as possible, so she approached the available boys with a boldness and almost masculine spirit that did not help her cause. Philippe, for example, had been courted in the shoe shop where he worked, and after responding to Ida's greetings, he set about conquering Anne, bringing her a flower every morning, shamelessly showing Ida that she had served merely as a stepping stone to help him reach her cousin.

Confronted with this maneuver—quite ordinary in its way—Ida had been left with more scorn for Anne than pride. Anne did not view her fellow humans the way her companions did: while other young women saw a lusty fellow in the apprentice cobbler, Anne saw a child who had just grown up, perched high on his long legs, surprised by this new body that went bumping into doors. She felt sorry for him. She could see his girlish side—his hair, his tender mouth, his pale skin. Beneath his low, resonant voice, in the occasional inflection or hesitant emotion, she could still hear the echoes of a little boy's high-pitched voice. When she went to market in his company, she studied the human landscape within him—shifting, unstable, changing—and it was to that landscape more than anything that she grew attached, for even a growing plant was a source of fascination to her.

“Would you like to make me happy?” Philippe asked her one day. Blushing, she had reacted, promptly and sincerely.

“Yes, of course!”

“
Happy
, happy?” he pleaded.

“Yes.”

“Be my wife.”

This prospect was less enchanting: what, him, too? He was reasoning like her cousin, like all the people who bored her to death. Why such convention? Spontaneously, she began to bargain: “Don't you think I can make you happy without marrying you?”

He stepped back, suspicious.

“Might you be that sort of girl?”

“What are you talking about?”