Jezebel

by Irene Nemirovsky

  ‘He had modest tastes, even displaying a certain leaning towards asceticism, and he was extremely ambitious; the role of the affectionate lover of a wealthy woman seems totally out of character for him. He must surely have been seduced by the status of a woman in high society: he suffered because of the obscure nature of his birth and wished to make his way in the world.

  ‘I deplore the tragedy that cost him his life, for I always believed the boy to have a promising future.’

  ‘Bring in the next witness.’

  It was a young lad of about twenty who looked as if he came from the east Mediterranean. His black hair was badly cut and he had a dry face that seemed very emotional. He spoke quickly, mumbling a bit, embarrassed no doubt by his foreign accent.

  ‘State your name.’

  ‘Constantin Slotis.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Your address?’

  ‘6 rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques.’

  ‘Profession?’

  ‘Medical student.’

  ‘You are neither related to nor a friend of the accused. You do not work for her nor does she work for you. Do you swear to speak without prejudice and with no fear of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Raise your hand and say, “I so do swear.” Did you know Bernard Martin?’

  ‘We were neighbours.’

  ‘Did he ever confide in you?’

  ‘Never. He wasn’t the type. He never talked much.’

  ‘What type of man was he, in your opinion?’

  ‘Sarcastic, violent, not very sociable. We had some friends in common, men and women. Everyone will tell you the same thing.’

  ‘Did he have financial problems?’

  ‘We all did. What I mean, Your Honour, is that in the Latin Quarter we live fairly well from the first day of the month to the fifth, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Did he ever borrow money from you?’

  ‘No, but he would have had a hard time doing it. You don’t go looking for water in a dry river, as the saying goes where I come from.’

  ‘Did you have the impression that his financial resources had increased shortly before his death?’

  ‘No, Your Honour.’

  ‘Did you ever meet the defendant when she visited Bernard Martin at his home?’

  ‘I only saw her once, on 13 October 1934.’

  ‘Your recollection seems very precise!’

  ‘I had an exam the next day and the perfume the woman wore was so strong that I could smell it through my door. It prevented me from working. The next day I got a very bad mark. That’s why I remember the circumstances so well.’

  The people in the courtroom started laughing.

  ‘When she left,’ Slotis continued, ‘well, I opened my door to get a look at her. She was very beautiful. That’s her all right.’

  ‘Did she remain at your friend’s very long?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  ‘Did you ever speak to Bernard Martin about her visit?’

  ‘Yes. I ran into him that same evening at a bordello on the rue Vavin. We were a little drunk, I think … I said to him, “Well, my pal, you’re doing all right for yourself,” you know, the kind of thing you say when something like that happens. He laughed. He had a very harsh look on his face as he laughed. I even thought: “Now there’s a woman who’s going to get it … one day …” ’

  ‘He was the one who “got it”, as you put it. What did he say then?’

  ‘He recited Athalie’s dream to me, Your Honour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My mother Jezebel appeared before me …’

  ‘That is quite a chastisement,’ said the Judge, looking at Gladys Eysenach.

  She was listening to Slotis with intense attention; her delicate nostrils were flaring; her bright eyes stared; a sly, cruel expression appeared on her beautiful, ravaged face, an expression that was the stock image of a murderer. The members of the public watching felt even more confident that they had the right to judge her.

  ‘Did the witness see Bernard Martin on the eve of his death?’

  ‘Yes. He was completely drunk.’

  ‘Did he normally drink?’

  ‘Rarely, and he could usually hold his liquor, but that night he was completely depressed. He was very upset about the death of one of his former mistresses, Laurette, Laure Pellegrain, who had lived with him until last November. She had tuberculosis. She died in Switzerland.’

  ‘Did you know about this woman?’ the Judge asked Gladys.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied with difficulty.

  ‘And the money that you gave to your young lover went to this woman, did it not?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Look at her,’ a man in the courtroom whispered in his neighbour’s ear, ‘look at the defendant. She must have suffered a lot because of that Bernard Martin. Sometimes when they talk about him, a look of hatred spreads across her face. But apart from that, she doesn’t look like a woman who has killed someone.’

  A young blonde with milky white skin and wisps of hair peeking out from under her black hat stepped into the witness box, folding her large red hands in front of her. Her name, Eugenie Wildchild, made the public laugh; even she seemed amused when she heard it.

  The Judge banged the table with the paperknife he was holding. ‘It is not appropriate to laugh,’ he said. ‘This is not some sort of show.’

  ‘I’m only laughing because I’m nervous.’

  ‘Well, compose yourself and answer the questions. You are employed by Madame Dumont, owner of the building on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques where the victim resided. Do you recognise the defendant as the person who visited Bernard Martin on several occasions?’

  ‘Yes, Your Honour,’ the girl replied, ‘I recognise her.’

  ‘Did you see her often?’

  ‘Do you think that, in student lodgings, you remember all the women who come? But her, I noticed her particularly, because she wasn’t like the others; she had beautiful clothes and wore a fox stole. But I don’t remember whether she came three, four or five times. It was something like that …’

  ‘Did Bernard Martin ever confide in you?’

  ‘Him? Really!’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have left you with a very nice impression.’

  ‘He was an odd boy. He wasn’t a bad lot, but he was different from the others. Sometimes he would work all night long and then sleep all day. I’ve seen him go days on end without eating anything except the oranges that Madame Laure brought for him. He was affectionate to her. He loved her.’

  ‘Did she seem jealous of the accused? Did you ever hear them argue?’

  ‘Never. He was very worried about Madame Laure’s health. She had a problem with her chest. That’s what she died from in Switzerland a month after she went away.’

  ‘And did you ever overhear any conversations, secrets, requests for money, perhaps, between Bernard Martin and the defendant?’

  ‘Never. She never stayed long when she came. What I do remember, for example, what I noticed several times when I went into the room after she’d gone, was that the bed was still all made up. Now, maybe they must have worked it out some other way, don’t you think?’

  ‘Thank you; no need to go into detail,’ said the Judge, as the crowd laughed.

  Meanwhile, the accused woman, huddled on her bench, was overcome by nerves and started shaking. She was sobbing, and saying over and over again in despair, ‘Have pity on me! Let me be. I killed him! Put me in prison, kill me, I deserve it! I deserve it a thousand times over; I deserve to be miserable and put to death, but why subject me to such shame? Yes, I killed him, I’m not asking for leniency, I just want it to be over, please let it be over …’

  The hearing was adjourned until the next day. The crowd slowly dispersed. It was late; night was falling.

  The summations would be heard the next day.

  The accused woman was no longer of interest to anyone. She seeme
d to have lost all her beauty overnight, once and for all. She was an old, haggard woman. She was barely visible on the stand; she had left her hat on and lowered it to hide her face. The crowd only had eyes for Gladys Eysenach’s Defence Counsel; he was still quite young with a scornful smirk and a beautiful mane of dark hair. He was the star of the day.

  Meanwhile, she listened to the prosecution’s summation, her face hidden in her hands: ‘Until the night of 24 December 1934, the woman whom you see before you, gentlemen of the jury, was a member of life’s privileged classes. She was still beautiful, in good health, freely enjoying a considerable fortune. Nevertheless, from her early childhood she had no family, no home, no example of morality. Ah! If only she had been fortunate enough to be born into a respectable middle-class family …’

  The accused woman slowly let her hands fall on to her knees. She raised her face for a moment; it was pale and tense. She continued listening.

  ‘A poor woman, an ignorant woman, an abused woman would perhaps have deserved leniency. But this woman …

  ‘I implore the gentlemen of the jury not to allow the flame of justice to be extinguished. You must prove that justice exists for everyone, that if the charm, the beauty, the sophistication of this woman must be taken into account, they must be placed on the scales of justice in order to cause them to weigh heavily on the side of harshness. This woman committed murder. Her act was premeditated. She deserves a punishment that is proportionate to her crime.’

  Next came the wonderful summation of the defence. Every now and again his biting voice turned sweet, almost feminine. The lawyer portrayed Gladys as a woman who had lived only for love, who cared for nothing in the world but love, and who deserved, in the name of love, to forget and to be forgiven; he spoke of the terrible demon of sensuality who lies in wait for ageing women, pushing them towards misdeeds and shame. The women in the courtroom were crying.

  The Judge then turned towards Gladys and asked the traditional question: ‘Does the accused have anything she wishes to add?’

  Gladys remained silent for a long time. Finally, she shook her head and replied, ‘No. Nothing.’ Then, she added quietly, ‘I am not asking for leniency. I committed a terrible crime …’

  It was a warm, stormy evening, shot through with the dazzling rays of the setting sun; the atmosphere in the courtroom was nearly suffocating, and the observers grew more and more nervous and worked up. A muffled hum ran through the crowd, predicting the forthcoming verdict. The jury had retired and the accused woman had been led out.

  Towards nine o’clock in the evening a bell finally rang, so low that it could hardly be heard; it marked the end of the jury’s deliberation. Night had fallen. In the courtroom, packed to capacity, steam seemed to rise from the crowd and form condensation on the closed windows; the heat was unbearable.

  The foreman of the jury, pale, his hands shaking, read out the responses to the questions. The Judge announced the verdict. A murmur ran through the press box and the people standing in the public gallery: ‘Five years in prison …’

  The spectators filed out of the doors of the ancient Law Courts. As they walked outside, everyone stopped at the entrance to breathe in the cool wind; it was raining again, in large, irregular drops.

  ‘It’ll rain again tomorrow,’ someone said, pointing at the sky.

  ‘Let’s go for a beer,’ said someone else.

  Two women were talking about their husbands. The wind carried their words towards the dark, peaceful Seine.

  Just as people forget the actors as soon as a play is over, so no one gave Gladys Eysenach another thought. She had played her part. It had been a rather banal part, in the end. A crime of passion … A somewhat modest sentence … What would become of her? No one cared about her future; no one cared about her past.

  1

  Gladys may have been older and in decline, but she was still beautiful. Time had touched her reluctantly, with a careful, gentle hand. It had scarcely altered the shape of her face: her every feature seemed lovingly sculpted, tenderly caressed. Her long white neck remained untouched; only her eyes, which nothing could make younger, no longer sparkled as before. The expression in her eyes betrayed the anxious wisdom and weariness of age, but when she lowered them, everyone watching her could see the young girl who had danced for the first time at the Melbournes’ ball in London, one beautiful June evening so very long ago.

  In the Melbournes’ reception room, with its pale wood panelling and hard window seats upholstered in red damask, narrow mirrors set into the panelling had reflected a slim young girl, still somewhat awkward and rather shy; she had golden hair that fell in a fringe on to her pale forehead and sparkling dark eyes. No one knew who she was: her name was Gladys Burnera.

  She wore long gloves, a white dress whose skirt was decorated with chiffon, and a corsage of fresh roses; a wide satin belt showed off her waist; when she danced, she looked as if happiness were lifting her off the ground, as if a gust of wind might carry her away; her hair, literally the colour of gold, was plaited and wound round her head in a crown; no doubt she was wearing it that way for the first time: she paused in front of every mirror, tilted her head and looked at her pale, slender neck, completely bare, without even a delicate gold chain. A little bouquet of small red roses, richly coloured and sweet-smelling, her favourite flowers, was tucked into her belt at the waist; every now and again she would close her eyes to breathe in their perfume, and she knew that she would never, ever forget that scent of roses in the warm ballroom, the feel of the night breeze on her shoulders, the brilliant lights, the waltz that lingered in her ears. She was so very happy. No, not happy, not yet, but it was the expectation of happiness, the heavenly desire and passionate thirst for happiness, that filled her heart.

  Only yesterday she had been the powerless, sad child of a mother she detested. Today she looked like a woman, beautiful, admired, soon to be loved. ‘Loved,’ she thought and immediately felt profound anxiety: she believed herself ugly, poorly dressed, badly educated; her gestures became brusque and awkward: fearfully she looked around for her cousin, Teresa Beauchamp, who was sitting with the other mothers. But gradually, dancing made her feel giddy; her blood ran faster, burning through her veins; she turned her head, studied the trees in the private park, the warm, humid night illuminated by yellow lights, the white columns in the ballroom, as slender and elegant as the young women. Everything was bewitching; everything looked beautiful to her, rare and enchanting; life took on a new flavour she had never tasted before: it was bittersweet.

  Until she was eighteen years old, she had lived with her mother, a cold woman, harsh and virtually mad, an elderly painted doll who was sometimes frivolous and sometimes terrifying, who dragged her Persian cats, her daughter, her restlessness, all over the world.

  As she danced that evening at the Melbournes’ home, she was haunted by the image of that small, dried-out, cold woman with her green eyes. The two months she could spend in London with the Beauchamps would pass so quickly … She shook her head; she dismissed such thoughts and danced more lightly, more quickly; her skirts swayed around her and their swaying light chiffon gave her a delightful feeling of giddiness.

  She would never, ever forget that brief summer. Never would she recapture that unique feeling of joy. Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences, not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness. And so she danced, she ran, through the Beauchamps’ gardens at dawn, and then suddenly she felt that she’d been sleepwalking, that she was already half awake, that the dream was over.

  Her cousin, Teresa Beauchamp, did not understand such passion, such joie de vivre that at times was transformed into moments of deep sadness. Teresa had always been m
ore fragile, cooler. She was a few years older than Gladys. She was thin, slight; she had the physique of a fifteen-year-old girl, a delicate little head with skin pulled rather tightly across her temples, a yellowish complexion, beautiful dark eyes and a soft, wheezing voice that betrayed the early signs of the damage caused by the pulmonary condition from which she suffered.

  She had married a Frenchman, but since she had been born and raised in England, she always spent time there; she owned a beautiful house in London. Teresa’s childhood had been happy, her adolescence exemplary; she had been introduced into high society gradually, but Gladys had been thrown into it suddenly, all at once. Teresa had never been as beautiful as Gladys; no man had ever looked at her the way they looked at this gauche young girl.

  When they arrived at the Melbournes’, Gladys had grabbed Teresa’s hand and squeezed it like a terrified child. Now she was dancing; she moved past Teresa without seeing her, a sweet, triumphant smile on her beautiful lips. Teresa, who felt tired after just one waltz, looked enviously at Gladys, admiring the delicate frame that hid nerves of steel. Yet, whenever she was asked ‘Isn’t your little cousin beautiful?’ she would slowly nod her head with the surprised, weary gesture that made her look as graceful as an injured bird, then give a measured reply: ‘She has the makings of a great beauty’, for women do not see how the fleeting and almost terrifying radiance of beauty will fade from the faces of their peers.