by Paul Morand
“You’re right,” she said, “we don’t see Fromentine any more. As soon as she comes home, she locks herself away in her bedroom. She is, of course, sorting out her clothes and basing everything around this one central purpose: ‘a man to take her out’. Wouldn’t she be better off reading my Figaro to me? And the airs she puts on! She continually annoys her sisters. Hedwige sulks. It’s understandable, the younger one is trespassing on her preserve… she’ll return empty-handed; I’ve seen only too clearly that if he is chatting to Fromentine, he’s only really looking at Hedwige; but Angélique, I do rather wonder what’s biting her? She’s bored; did she get bored before? To think that I was counting on this man to restore some order to my affairs and all he has done is to sew disorder in my household! He’s indecisive, a dawdler,” she concluded in a caustic tone that pierced Madame de La Chaufournerie’s sluggish eardrum. “Yes, a dawdler!”
“But of whom are you talking, my dear?” the latter replied. And since Bonne looked vague and did not answer: “Would it be about a good catch for your girls?” (Herminie was prone to the sort of insights which, along with her exceptional inquisitorial ability, would have taken her far as an examining magistrate…) “And of course, all three are in love with him?”
Bonne gave a start.
“In love! My girls in love! Well, that would be the last straw!”
She drew her heavy jade-green Ottoman morning coat over her bosom (any allusions to love aroused these reflexes of threatened modesty in her) and cast a resentful glance at her friend.
“Love, love, that’s all you ever think about!” she said severely. “Should a woman of your age be meddling in such filth! Men ought to disgust you, just as they do me! You do make me laugh.”
But she wasn’t laughing; it was Madame de La Chaufournerie, her face like that of a scrawny overworked nag, who broke into an extremely rare fit of laughter.
“It’s you with your horror of men who’s the comical one! So have you decided never to marry your daughters?” she said.
“Yes, men are repugnant, but my daughters ought to get married,” said Bonne peremptorily.
The new secretary was extremely useful: since she knew neither shorthand nor typing, Pierre was obliged to learn them himself; since she did not know Paris very well, he did his own shopping and because she organized her own time badly, he also did Fromentine’s. She was aware of this and she laughed.
“I’ve never been so well waited upon,” she would say, “as I have since I’ve been employed.”
The girl answered the telephone and kept an eye on the house. Reclining on the sofa in the empty office, she leafed through illustrated magazines. To begin with, this office had disappointed her.
“But where’s your antique shop then?” she asked Pierre.
To her astonishment, he showed her his safe.
“There,” he said.
“And here was I thinking you had a very dark shop piled with collections of crocodiles up to the ceiling, with ticketed prices hanging on the end of their tails, and pretty little tea sets, and dalmatic vestments embroidered in gold, all lit by lantern fish! What a disappointment! Are you going out? Be kind, Pierre, bring me back some American cigarettes.”
He came back loaded with supplies.
“How quick you’ve been! I’m flabbergasted. You really are an electric man. It’s wonderful. Where do find the time?”
“Did anyone phone?”
“Yes. A foreign gentleman. I couldn’t catch his name.”
“Try to remember…”
“It was something like Stravinsky… Striesky… something with ‘ski’ in it.”
“It wasn’t Erckmann by any chance?”
“Yes, Erckmann, exactly.”
“He’s the keeper of the Ethnology Museum in Stockholm. I was waiting for him to call.”
“Oh? I rang off. I always ring off, for that matter, when I don’t understand.”
“And what have you done in my absence, Fromentine?”
“I’ve made a mess.”
And she laughed as she pointed to the magazines on the floor and the papers that were scattered around.
“You would make a very poor cleaning lady; a jumble shop cleaner, at best.”
After a week, Pierre re-engaged his former secretary and kept Fromentine for trips to rue Masseran to play tennis on a covered court.
He no longer talked about Hedwige. He was indifferent to Angélique. He never mentioned the Boisrosés. To think that he had almost thrown in the towel. “And now I’m turning over a new leaf,” he often said. Had he done so this time, turned a page without leaving a bookmark, without leaving a dried flower as a memory?
“I loathe things that have been papered over,” he sometimes exclaimed. Regencrantz, who had watched him rushing eagerly for a drink when he wasn’t thirsty, would have said that he had also thrown himself into this business without having the least desire to do so. He had vanished from the Boisrosés’ home just as he always did everywhere, as if through a trapdoor. In the blink of an eyelid he was no longer there; he melted into the crowd like sugar in water; walls absorbed him; he slipped away as people do in dreams; dreams are apartments without doors that one enters through walls.
Pierre had passed through many a milieu in this way without pausing there, doing whatever business he had to do quickly and never coming back. At the casino, he walked into the gaming room and shouted “banco!” over everyone’s heads; before they had had time to look round, he had grabbed his winnings and disappeared. Disappeared for the season too, for he detested the game and only played it in order to test his luck.
“What a card you are, Quick Silver!” Fromentine said as she passed him the two racquets, which he tucked under his arm. “The things you teach me!” she added with apparent ecstasy.
Pierre was in the habit of leaving Fromentine in the street or in his car, waiting for him like a small dog. She was furthermore wonderfully passive and easily distracted, with, at the same time, a great facility for not doing or thinking of anything for hours on end, like a becalmed sailing ship. When, a moment later, Pierre returned, ready to set off at full tilt, she would follow him with the same easy manner, keeping up the same absolutely neutral appearance, never complaining, and with that marvellous temperament that frivolous, selfish people have.
Coming back from rue Masseran, Pierre stopped in boulevard de Grenelle in front of a shop which, even as a child, used to fascinate him. They had made clocks there since the eighteenth century and the wrought-iron sign hanging outside represented a belfry. Dials in the shop window informed passing travellers from the métro what the time was in every language. The time in Stamboul was in Turkish letters, the time in Calcutta in Bengali, the time in Suez in Arabic, the time in Peking in Chinese characters.
“How many minutes these dials must have ticked off over one hundred and fifty years!” Pierre exclaimed. “Think of it… what human impetus could compete against them? What diastoles and systoles will ever match their range and their mechanism?”
“You’re a philosopher in your own way,” replied Fromentine with shrewd simplicity, “the philosopher of the quarter-second.”
“I’m not a philosophic person,” replied Pierre drily. “I’m a tragic person. You don’t understand a thing.”
“Talk to me more about yourself,” sighed Fromentine as she reapplied some rouge, “it’s fascinating.”
Pierre had not been back to Saint-Germain since the visit to the Louvre. But he would have liked to talk to Fromentine about her sisters. Each time, she found an excuse for not responding to him. And when he was with her, he felt increasingly more alone than he had done beforehand. He would have liked to know how the Boisrosés reacted to Fromentine’s absence, to her returning home late at night, to the presents he gave her—in short, to that sort of artificial household atmosphere brought about by the relationship of a pretty secretary with her employer, where thoughts are dictated on notepads, where the trousseau is replaced by files, the jam
cupboards by metal cabinets, kisses by licked envelopes and cradles by desk trays.
Yet this beautiful girl, at his side all day long, did not imply a presence, however. She brought him no relief in his isolation. Even Chantepie, even Placide radiated more warmth. Even the cat did. With everyone else, Pierre felt some resistance and thus some warmth (from the friction). With Fromentine, he felt none at all. She gave way to him on everything.
It was worse than ever.
Since she now brought up his post when she arrived in the morning, he did not even have a relationship with the concierge. When he was with Fromentine, Pierre sometimes thought of Angélique and Hedwige, rather as the owner of a Houdon plaster cast must think of the original; Fromentine was less of a Boisrosé and more a plaster cast of the other Boisrosé girls. He thought of her sisters in the way that one might want to reread a classic in the original, having developed a liking for it from the early pages of a translation. He remembered the little tea party at Saint-Germain, and the more he visualized the polished drawing room, the bedroom with its canopied bed and the black stove with its little red light, the lonelier he felt.
As lonely as if he were in the desert.
The less he was invited the more he felt the attraction of that little provincial place so far away, of that precipitous little town to which Fromentine returned every evening: the side plates stacked inside the larger ones, the financial and economic chatter of the dismal Vincent; the tall figure of Hedwige, reticent, but fiery deep down because of that very reticence, and passionate; their first loving words at the foot of the staircase; Angélique and her attentiveness (when she passed a plate to you, it was more like a caress).
Pierre did, after all, owe her a response. Had he not told her she need not worry, that he had an “idea”, that he would sort out their Mas Vieux business?
“As for the Mas Vieux, I told you that I had an idea. If I have not mentioned it to you again, it’s because that promise…”
Pierre had taken it upon himself to write to Angélique and to go and see her, at a time when Fromentine was not there.
“You don’t owe us anything,” Angélique said simply, as she shook her lovely raffia-coloured hair.
“… It’s just that in my mind that promise happened to be the natural sequel to my undertaking to Hedwige. Perhaps you didn’t know that I asked her to marry me?”
“I do know.”
“Perhaps you didn’t know that she refused?”
“No, she didn’t refuse. She told you to wait, which is not the same thing.”
“I longed for her too much for it not to be the same thing.”
“Why did you employ Fromentine as a secretary?”
“To tell you the truth, dear Angélique, it has been a very foolish venture, more and more absurd, and all I want is to be free of it.”
Pierre stood up, set off with his neck outstretched, like a wild duck on a direct flight, stopped because of lack of space, and returned to Angélique.
“Will you talk to me about Hedwige instead?”
“You’ll have to keep still if you want me to explain Hedwige to you,” Angélique began. “She’s someone who is totally honest and very loyal. You showed great human understanding in choosing her: I admire you for that and I like you even more because of it. The family want Hedwige to be happy, but I want you to be happy together and at the same time. For a start, Hedwige is far more intelligent than all of us put together (it’s true that when we’re all together, we’re silly and frivolous). Of course, she’s not very cultured (my methodical and scientific Vincent often says that in the Boisrosés’ home books are only used to prop up table legs), but you yourself have enough culture and erudition to manage without a learned wife. Then Hedwige is exceptionally honest: as a child, she was the one out of all of us who lied the least readily. All right, you know all this only too well and you would prefer to see me revealing Hedwige’s faults? Very well. You are not unaware that there are two kinds of human beings: the givers and the takers. Hedwige clearly belongs to the former. But like all givers, her nerves are frail; her sensitivity is exceptional. She is impressionable; she can be easily discouraged; the slightest thing exhausts her and when she’s worn out, you may find her unsure of herself; no, it’s not that… how can I put it… you may find her… a little changeable; anyway, you won’t find her like that! I’m warning you so that you don’t get upset; avoid using force with her; listen: Hedwige always gives in. Hedwige is someone who’s both calm and good. Take care of her, give her the time to breathe and she will repay everything in long years of happiness because she loves you and she wants to be your wife.”
“Has she told you so?”
“Amongst ourselves, we don’t tell each other things. There’s no point. Everything has been said long before we talk about it.”
“When may I see her?” asked Pierre.
“Come to the house tomorrow.”
Thus did Pierre set off again to Saint-Germain. He, who has never taken a backward step, is once again climbing the steep road that leads him to the Boisrosés’ home. He, for whom instantaneity is dogma and for whom haste is second nature, is patiently retracing the path already trod.
In love as in everything else, he behaved ardently. But saying “in love” is to exclude love. One might as well describe love affairs as delights. Pierre wolfed down ladies in the twinkling of an eye. He enlivened them, he swept them off their feet, he pushed them into corners, he found something to dislike about them and, all of a sudden, he broke up with them. Their unimportance, the pride they experienced in seeing themselves transformed into a burning bush, their inviting sighs, the passiveness with which they resisted did the rest. Particularly since no one could be kinder than he was. This starving wolf who rushed out with gaping and fiery jaws had never frightened a single lamb; the lambs actually ran towards him, not being in the habit of remaining terror-stricken for long. Pierre upset the objects of his attention graciously and irked them just as much as was necessary with his restless behaviour; he hugged and kissed openly, his mouth was fresh, his skin was warm. He strung words together well, he threw himself at women, devoured them without digesting them, and vanished before they had the time to say “phew”, not that a woman would ever utter such a sound. He telescoped situations, returning to the classical unities of time, place and action. He readily confused the declaration of love with ravishment in the taxi, the taxi with the enclosed theatre box, the staircase with the sofa, the squeezed hand with the arm around the waist, the handkerchief with the brassiere, the first date with the last, and the tact and consideration of the early stages with the ecstasies of the ending. All this with so little space between the point of departure and the destination that women believed they were being offered an initial token of gratitude when he was already giving them a farewell present.
He would make plans to die rather than be trapped into wedding preparations every time. The looser the women were, the more fickle they found him. The entire vocabulary that was once used for artillerymen and lovers could equally apply to him: Pierre prepared for action, he unmasked, he struck, he dismantled. It was charming because it was what the young did and, apart from a few tears, it actually suited everyone. He could count on his fingers, the sprightly lad, the girls whom he had made cry, or who had slapped him, or with whom he had genuinely fallen out. He was born like that, belonging to an age when love brought no shame on anyone, when one deprived oneself of nothing, when duties and obligations were by common consent reduced to the minimum. “There’s no reason,” Pierre used to say, “why a pleasure ride by rail should not also be an express train.” His train was always full and he had never had to complain about a derailment.
But Pierre had just reached his thirty-fifth birthday. Not having discovered love, he began to treat it with respect. “The day I find a woman whom I don’t throw myself at,” he told himself, “I shall have arrived at my destination.” He sensed that when that day came, it would not be he who would have to gi
ve up his bad habits, it would be they that would give him up.
Hedwige was waiting for him in the drawing room. The tea stood steaming on the tray; an indoor dress, red like that of the old silks of the Orient, flowed down her firm body in lovely folds, like a waterfall over a rock. This scenario immediately made him want to be outside.
“Let’s go out,” he said, “take a coat. I won’t be able to speak unless I have fresh air.”
They went for a walk on the nearby terrace, in the winter twilight, with the early evening lights of Paris below them and the tall forest trees that stopped in a straight line at the edge of the lawn.
Hedwige agreed to accompany him without making any fuss. She found it natural that a hand other than hers should record her fate. She relied on God to take good care of her. Following Pierre in this park did not bother her. She is serene, sensible and brave. The geese are keeping watch.
Pierre was also very self-possessed, very calm. With gravitation causing them to lean towards one another, their fingers became entwined and they were able to reach a deeper understanding of a situation that distinguished them from other people and yet made them similar to everyone else.
This coral-red and sulphur-yellow dusk, this garden filled with naked statues beneath the snow-filled sky, these dark oak trees swaying in the breeze—all these romantic incantations, far from exciting Pierre, cautioned him to exercise modesty and restraint. He felt an expectation growing inside him and he was trying hard to fill it because it was leading him beyond, not just his desires, but what he felt himself capable of. Just as a Christian hopes for a holy death, he was hoping for a real life. His respect for what was happening to him and for the person who was causing it to happen—since Hedwige is innocent and spotless in every respect—preclude him from making any aggressive move.
For the first time ever he is taking his time and he is doing so with infinite pleasure, for he has his life in front of him and he is moving, at a natural pace, along the widest and best-known of roads; a road whose surroundings he does not recognize and whose name he is even unfamiliar with, since he has never been along it; it’s a road designed for pedestrians, where fast cars cannot go. He is going to knock at the oracle’s door, like peasants at the door of the Blessed Virgin, to ask whether their land will be fertile. He is leaving daily life behind and is entering a dream in which children, inventors, madmen and those who draw the jackpot live, a dream conducive to the fulfilment of grand designs, not of petty desires. That is why he moves with the heaviness of a man asleep, at the slow pace of a deep-sea diver.
