She wondered what was making her body so panicky. Ham, rolls and chocolate, cream cheese, they were all nourishing foods, and she had learned to live on almost nothing. But taking herself to task like that did no good: she was still a plum tree shaken by a gale. And the more she trembled, the more she understood what it was that had happened. She had tried to get rid of something that was indispensable to her – her little fox. She had chosen a man – Dumont-Boigny – from a page of the telephone book, so that she could sell him the thing she had adored, still adored. And that man, without having met her, without hesitation, had rejected her and set her back on the right path. An extraordinary man, that Dumont-Boigny: he had sent her away, he had saved her after she had waited hours to see him. He must be able to see into the future, his office must have walls of glass. Without a gesture, without moving from his chair, without showing his face, it was in his power to pull you aside from the thing that would rend you apart. Before long she would have been imagining him armed with a sword, a knight errant rescuing her from her unhappiness and her grief. Liar, storyteller, braggart! Your little fox is there beside you, isn’t that enough for you, you third-rate daydreamer? Who was it speaking to her like that? It was the shawl spreadeagled across the mattress on the floor. Abandoned, yes, it would have been difficult to look more abandoned than that. So much the worse. She switched off the light and held out her handbag to M. Dumont-Boigny: she had sometimes seen Negroes, and white men too, carrying their ladies’ handbags in the street, or in gardens. She switched the light back on. The furniture, the room, her possessions, they none of them wanted anything to do with that sort of thing: you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. M. Dumont-Boigny had been swept out of existence before even making his entrance. She became annoyed: she didn’t want to recognize the fact that her walls were ready to protect her, that she was herself only when she was living alone, and that every crack in her floorboards was aware of that fact. ‘Oh, you!’ she cried, throwing herself at the spreadeagled shawl. But the shawl merely wriggled joyfully on the mattress.
‘So I begged, what of it?’ The flowers were snickering, the flowers were weeping. She had begged, and she had done well to beg. A stomach is not a rule of grammar, one has to take what comes. Everything in the room agreed with that. And also … You betrayed us! The shout came swelling out from the skirting board where the little insect had been working away at its methodical task the night before. Mademoiselle has been staring at mink tails – ‘I was begging’ – in the furriers’ shops along rue d’Hauteville … The sideboard laughed. Mademoiselle was eyeing – ‘I was begging’ – the monogrammed writing paper in a stationer’s … The columns of the sideboard were contorted with laughter. The steel of her knife rattled out its ultimatum: if she was not in agreement with them, then it would lose its temper. She belonged to those that she belonged to, that was quite clear. Otherwise … she would have her throat cut. Her throat cut. Had she understood quite clearly? The furniture, the possessions, the things in her room had gone mad. In whom was she to place her trust? Throat cut, throat cut, hummed faded traces of foliage on the carpet, which had remained neutral until that point. ‘What did I do?’ she asked the tattered garment hanging from a nail. You abandoned us, growled the shawl spreadeagled across the mattress on the floor. ‘I went out. But I have always gone out in the daytime.’ Who could gainsay that? The flower on her breakfast bowl was a nun with two petals for a face saying amen. Before, you stayed with us when you went out, the knife blade hissed. You didn’t change while you were away! the doorknob spat at her. ‘Have I changed?’ she asked the divisions and subtractions in the margin of the newspaper with utter candour.
She put on the dressing gown her concierge had given her, she grew taller with its train behind her, she made a tour of the room, stopping in front of each object to deliver the same speech: ‘When I went out I took you with me. The sideboard that waited and leaned over the lock gates to watch the barge: that was you as well as me. The chair that rested by the Sevran–Paris bus: that was you as well as me.’ Not this afternoon, the iron bar of the window howled lugubriously back at her.
‘It was only a finger on the page of a telephone book,’ she recalled aloud through the engulfing roar of an overhead Métro. Her afternoon was shattered into fragments inside her. Oh, the fidelity inside her for that shawl spreadeagled across the mattress on the floor, oh, the heart-rending fidelity she felt.
She was walking slower and slower. The furniture, her possessions, her things were so many imperial presences, and she was their subject. She knelt down beside the whitewood packing case and lifted the rags inside. Her angel, her little angel. He was asleep, his muzzle stretched a long way out in front of him, at peace after his long days of running through the countryside. He would sleep forever, and she would wear him always curled round her neck. She began wearing him right away. She went from the chair to the table, from the table to the sideboard, from the sideboard to the little window, from the little window to the mattress on the floor. She stroked each of them with her finger; exchanged signs of recognition with each piece of furniture, with each thing, while the little fox continued his deep sleep round her neck. Then she folded her overcoat in four, placed it inside the whitewood packing case, set her battered hat and her handbag containing the three francs on top of it, and closed the lid. She lay down on her mattress on the floor dressed in the long dressing gown with its train, and looked at the quivering iron stay of the little window pierced with its four holes. She did not hear the roar of the overhead Métro, nor the hours chiming out from the direction of the pancake shop.
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin …
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinUKbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Translated from the French La Femme au petit renard
First published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Publishers 1967
This edition published by Penguin 2018
Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1965
English-language translation copyright © Derek Coltman 1967
Introduction copyright © Deborah Levy 2007
The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted
Cover image: Paris, France, 1954 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
ISBN: 978-0-241-35746-0
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur Page 8
