Belle De Jour

by Joseph Kessel

  Charlotte and Mathilde lay naked on the bed. Mathilde’s hair was paler than the shoulder on which it lay, and Charlotte tenderly stroked it.

  “Sorry to bother you, girls,” said Mme Anaïs, “but I have to talk to you about business. You still don’t know anyone who wants to come and work here?”

  Mathilde answered first, in that timid voice of hers, as if she’d done something wrong without realizing it, but everyone else knew about it:

  “It’s no good, I don’t know anyone, Madame. I work here, go home, and that’s it.”

  “What about you, Charlotte? One of your old friends?”

  “I can’t ask them. When I left the last place I told them I was going to be somebody’s mistress. Even if I should meet any of them again, I can’t let them know I was lying.”

  Mme Anaïs sighed as if to show that she was ashamed of her sentimentality and asked, “What about Belle de Jour? Think she’ll come back?”

  “Oh hell!” And Charlotte stretched sensually.

  Mme Anaïs took a step toward the door, but Mathilde called her back. Mathilde was a passive, vague creature who enjoyed any conversation that might lend itself to speculation.

  “I was sure we’d never see her again,” she said. “That girl wasn’t one of us, she had some secret or other.”

  “A secret, a secret,” cried Charlotte. “You see a soap-opera everywhere, Mathilde. She had a lover, he left her, now she’s found another; that’s all there is to it.”

  “No, it’s not like that at all. She asked to leave at five, so she already had a man, see. That kid had a secret, all right.”

  Mme Anaïs listened carefully to this exchange. The subject had been discussed daily, and with the inexhaustible patience of semi-cloistered creatures; but Mme Anaïs hoped some chance phrase might still yield a clue. She said slowly:

  “I won’t say I’m certain, girls, but I think you’re both wrong. Why? Because Belle de Jour is coming back, that’s why. All right, you can laugh your head off, Charlotte, but in a thing like this you never know, honey, not till the very last minute.”

  She was proved right a few minutes later: the first person at the door was Séverine.

  “So it’s you, is it.” Mme Anaïs spoke in the most glacial, flat manner imaginable. “What do you think you want?”

  The sweat clinging to Séverine’s temples was witness to the effort it had been for her to satisfy the ghastly rending demands that drove her. It had been such an effort that once she had rung the bell she wanted nothing more. But Mme Anaïs’ manner cured her indifference. Was she to be forbidden entry into that sordid paradise? Where would she be able to feed the hunger she had thought dead but which now—close to the taste of its corrupted source—seemed more insatiable than ever?

  “I’d like, I’d like,” Séverine stammered, “to see if I could.…”

  “Start work again here? And disappear the minute you feel like it, without a word? Oh no, dearie, I’m not interested in amateurs. There’s the street for that.”

  Séverine would have done anything for a glimpse of Mme Anaïs’ usual affable expression then. Her whole body begged, pleaded, not to be sent off to seek out some other scummy sanctuary. This one she knew; her own imprint was on it already, as if she’d stepped in soft mud.

  “Please,” she murmured, “please.”

  Mme Anaïs pushed her into her private sitting room and said, “Listen, dearie, you’re damn lucky I’ll still talk with you at all. Anyone else and I’d have shut the door in their face, but there’s something about you … well, you make me feel like a sort of godmother and you take advantage of that, don’t you.”

  She looked at Séverine with genuine affection.

  “Now then, Belle de Jour,” she asked, “what was it? Didn’t we treat you right here? Didn’t you feel at home with us?”

  Still unable to answer Séverine nodded her head. She gave a scared smile. It was true, the work-table now looked like a familiar piece of furniture.

  “Please may I?” She made a movement to take off her hat. Then without waiting for Mme Anaïs’ permission, she put it in the closet. Only then did any peace return to her features.

  “It goes without saying,” Mme Anaïs stated simply, “that if I take you back you’ve got to be serious.”

  A violent resistance gripped Séverine.

  “Oh yes, yes. But only every other day, please,” she implored humbly. “I promise you, I can’t.…”

  “O.K.,” snapped Mme Anaïs after a brief thoughtful silence. “In a little while you’ll be begging me to come every day.”

  Then in a voice so happy it made Séverine tremble she called out:

  “Charlotte! Mathildel Here’s Belle de Jour.”

  Nude and incredulous, the two girls ran in. As they cried out their astonishment Séverine felt her knees quiver. Their bare bodies, so close to each other and so immodestly different in color, caused her an only too pleasant sense of weakness. Softly, half-regretfully, she asked: “Won’t you catch cold?”

  “Oh, we’re used to it,” answered Charlotte. “Anyway the apartment’s heated. Mme Anaïs is very good about that.”

  Her white teeth flashed in an ambiguous smile as she added, “Come on, try. Feels good, doesn’t it, Mathilde?”

  Séverine put up no resistance at all as Charlotte undressed her. But when all her clothes had been removed by those quick hot hands she was filled with a confusion that clouded her vision.

  The sudden silence brought her to her senses. Despite the professional indifference of the women around Séverine they were all three strangely moved, almost embarrassed. This firm, healthy body was almost too virginal, too aristocratic.

  Mme Anaïs recovered first. Two feelings rose in her, pride in her house and care for her interests.

  “You really couldn’t be better built,” she stated with respect.

  Charlotte was warmly kissing Séverine’s shoulders when the bell rang. Séverine went pale, but it turned out to be one of Charlotte’s customers.

  “If you want to take it easy a while,” said Mme Anaïs, “Mathilde will show you your room. I have some work to do. If there’s a ring at the bell put on your dress. We have to be respectable here.”

  Belle de Jour’s room was smaller than the one in which she’d met M Adolphe, but in all other ways just like it: the same dark wallpaper, the same dark-red, almost black pattern in the curtains, on an armchair and on the quilt, and the same toilet articles behind a screen.

  “It’s dark already,” she murmured. But without switching on the light she went to the window. The rue Virène was a narrow old street, but the men and women she saw walking along were free. Mathilde, who had followed her, watched the passers-by with her for a while and then asked cautiously: “Unhappy to be here with us, Madame Belle de Jour?”

  Astonished, Séverine swung around. She had forgotten Mathilde’s presence and, without quite knowing why, her uncertain voice and her shadow a fraction lighter than the darkness (yet so immobile she no longer seemed naked) made Séverine infinitely sad.

  “Mind you, I’m not asking why,” Mathilde added quickly, mistaking Séverine’s movement. “We all have our secrets, don’t we. It doesn’t matter as far as I’m concerned because, you see, Lucien—that’s my husband —he knows anyway. It isn’t my fault nor his neither. He’s sick, he has to be in the country. Right?”

  She waited in vain for some reply that would give her a hint to go on, then murmured:

  “I’m sorry, I bore you with my stories, don’t I? Mme Anaïs and Charlotte aren’t so far wrong when they say I’m a little crazy. I have to talk about … well, it’s natural enough with you, but when I’m with the clients.…”

  She’s looking for someone to explain to her why she belongs to everyone when she herself only loves one person, Séverine thought distractedly. The subject failed to interest her. Too easy to classify this wretched existence under the heading of some maladjustment. But she, who would give her the key to the puzzle of
why she was in this place when she was rich and had Pierre?

  “What about Charlotte?” Séverine inquired abruptly.

  “She’s lucky. She was a model, then found out she could make more here. And besides, she enjoys it with just about anyone—with me too. I don’t go for that sort of thing but I don’t argue about it. Might as well do what she wants.”

  For a while she was silent, then added hesitantly: “You know, I feel sorry for you, Madame Belle de Jour. The other time I saw just how.…”

  A darkness that was not the lack of daylight reigned in the room then, and the red accents turned into marks of night. Mathilde couldn’t see the savage anger on Séverine’s face but a voice heavy with hatred made her jump.

  “Shut up. This minute. You have no right.…”

  Séverine had to summon all her will-power to keep from bursting into sobs. Suddenly she pulled Mathilde against her and said imperiously:

  “Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m a little crazy too. And now that we have time on our hands come and show me how Charlotte does it with you.”

  Why? Why? Séverine asked herself between teeth clenched despite the jolts of the taxi taking her home. What was there in such joyless prostitution? With disgust she remembered Mathilde’s passive body, the poor girl’s tears, her respectfulness which Séverine didn’t want and which nearly drove her mad. Then she had been allotted to an old man, and hadn’t even felt the shudder of degradation that had made M Adolphe’s caresses bearable. There had been only one moment when she’d found herself moved by a certain nameless pleasure—when Mme Anaïs had divided with her the derisive wages of her body. But this was little enough with which to face the ordeal ahead: Pierre’s eyes.

  This time Séverine made no attempt to escape by senseless flight. Her first trial helped her to control her feelings, but it didn’t lessen her terror. It continued to grow, in fact, as she approached her house. Still, this fear was preferable to plumbing the depths of her absurd, monstrous, inscrutable perversion: thinking about that would drive her insane. At the moment, she was faced with the problem of salvaging the only happiness left to her, and she believed she could do it.

  Having completed her external purification, Séverine dressed. She had no gift for dissimulation, she wasn’t made that way, but an instinct of self-preservation warned her to avoid the tactics she’d used last time. So she didn’t ask Pierre to take her out, and managed to act natural till dinner-time. But she couldn’t eat. Pierre questioned her in a loving voice that was altogether too much for Séverine. She answered clumsily. She was still too much of a novice in sin to know how to play a role, and she was too self-conscious to carry off her part, as she’d been able to do two weeks ago, out of sheer animal intuition. There was an awkwardness about her movements, a guilty haste in all her words.

  Pierre’s face was shadowed by a nameless anguish. He wasn’t exactly worried, but his senses were on the alert, the first step toward suspicion. Petrified, Séverine recognized this. Fortunately, the meal was ending.

  “Going to do some work?” she asked him.

  “Yes. Coming?” Pierre spoke nervously.

  Séverine had forgotten that when Pierre worked on an article, now, she would go with him and read beside him in his study. She had begun to do this since the morning she’d sworn to pay more attention to her husband’s welfare.

  Memories of that dawn of fine sweet promises momentarily crushed Séverine, but she didn’t dare retreat. Once she’d sat down in her usual chair, however, she realized that the clumsiest excuse to be alone would have been better than this false intimacy. The watching room, the quiet, bookish atmosphere, the soft light and Pierre’s unusually solemn features—it was impossible to permit them to enter her mind and mingle with images of the rue Virène. Séverine’s misery was so acute that she failed to notice her husband looking at her peculiarly. Suddenly she heard him stand up. Her eyes fled to the book she was holding, and she went pale. The book was upside down; she had no time to reverse it. Pierre made no comment but he forestalled the explanations Séverine was about to stammer out.

  “You want to be alone to think in peace, don’t you,” he said. “I guess you’d better be in bed.”

  Séverine had never heard him speak with such authority. She got up obediently and in fear.

  Pierre took a few seconds to control his voice, then said:

  “I hope it won’t bother you to kiss me goodnight.”

  Séverine was overwhelmed by his words. That night she would have welcomed any excuse for preventing Pierre from coming into her room, as he always did, to see if she were asleep; but he himself avoided the visit. Did that mean that he had some presentiment of the truth, that perhaps he knew.…

  She threw herself on her bed and bit the pillow to stifle the scream. A fervent prayer, vast as her despair, enveloped her: oh God let me escape this time, just this time, and it’ll be the end to these insane, sordid experiments.

  The outburst was so sharp and all-consuming that it quieted her. She began to undress. The more naked she became the more clearly the images of two bodies appeared in her memory. Her pleasure in them was muddied when she recognized the obscene forms of Mathidle and Charlotte. She yielded to the fantasy for only a second; but it was long enough to tell her that the promise she’d made in an attempt to appease fate was made in vain. But she refused to admit it, and, to avoid a struggle that threatened her reason and might drive her to seek help by confessing to Pierre, Séverine took one of the sleeping-pills left over from her illness.

  The sleep it accorded was brief and brutal. She woke at dawn. Her head hurt. All her senses were like limp leaves blowing in the wind. As she struggled to escape this heavy listlessness Pierre came into her room. The sight of her husband just as she became fully conscious of what had happened dilated Séverine’s eyes with the horror of the damned. If Pierre had been hesitating about speaking, his wife’s look decided him:

  “Séverine, we can’t go on like this. I can’t have you being afraid of me.”

  She stared at him, motionless. He continued more hurriedly.

  “You’re too sincere to play games with me. What is it, darling? You can tell me. Nothing could hurt me more than the way you’ve been acting. You’d be doing me a favor if you told me … but you won’t confide in me, will you, even if I could help you. Listen … maybe—look, I’m speaking to you as lovingly as ever but believe me I’ve been thinking it out all night—what I mean is, maybe you’re in love with someone. You haven’t been unfaithful, I know that, and besides the word is meaningless as far as we’re concerned; but you’re attracted to someone else, it worries you.…”

  A queer strident burst of laughter stopped Pierre. It was followed by desperate protestations.

  “Someone else! … And you really thought … but I love you, I couldn’t ever love anyone else … my love, my whole life … I’m completely yours … can’t I be a little upset without … I’d rather die than see you unhappy, my darling …”

  Séverine’s face had now lost its look of distraction. Her eyes were clear, and shining with such humble adoration that Pierre couldn’t doubt that he had been wrong. Suddenly everything seemed marvellously clear to him. Séverine was right. No one got as close to death as she’d been without an upheaval of their entire organism. What an idiot he was, how happy he felt!

  “I should have remembered the expression on your face when you were waiting for me that time at the hospital,” he said.

  Séverine interrupted feverishly, “But I’ll meet you there every day … I’ll even … wait, I’ll get dressed in a second and come with you.”

  He couldn’t dissuade her, nor could he alter her decision to meet him when he finished work. She even went with him to the clinic where he operated afternoons; when he’d finished working he found her in the waiting-room.

  Séverine would have liked to make herself Pierre’s servant; but she couldn’t get herself to welcome him to her bed when, moved by so much affection, he des
ired her.

  But the physical desire that for a moment had beautifully hardened Pierre’s face, Séverine, sleepless, transferred despite herself to foul faces lurking in dubious surroundings. When daylight came she had no desire for these images, but she knew now that soon enough she’d feel a pressing need for them. If she didn’t go to Mme Anaïs’, the door would be closed to her for good. The fear of being denied food for her sad sensuality sent her running there as soon as she’d left Pierre at the clinic, where even on that day she had accompanied him.

  That was the beginning of Séverine’s true addiction. Routine took the place of pleasure. She was no longer uncontrollably hurled toward the rue Virène; she found herself going there in a lethargy which each time made her less and less responsive. During this period, she no longer expected the joy she’d hoped for at first; but she found it pleasant to enter the over-heated apartment and take possession of her questionable room. She now heard Mme Anaïs’ interminable conversations, as well as those of the girls, without displeasure—as if listening to some dim lullaby. She herself talked. In order to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about her she invented a past which conformed to both Mathilde’s and Charlotte’s conjectures: she’d had a lover who had seduced her as a girl. She had adored him and he’d left her. Now she was mistress to another man, not so nice, but she humored him along. That was why she had to be so careful, and why she could give so little time to Mme Anaïs.

  From then on Belle de Jour had no need to go unsatisfied. The house lived chiefly off a few regular customers. They jumped at the chance for something new. Séverine submitted to their desires without annoyance and without pleasure. She often yearned for the terrors she’d known at first, as an intractable animal; but even M Adolphe, who came occasionally to possess her, couldn’t revive them. It amazed her that such a ludicrous individual could ever have affected her so much.