by Colette
“I’m telling you . . . Good God! I’m trying to tell you this is the moment when these two characters are starting to fight! When two chaps start a fight close beside you, doesn’t it affect you more than that? Good God, do stir your stumps! At least say Ah! as you would when there’s a brawl in a pub and you pick up your skirts ready to fly!”
After the sound and the fury of an hour’s effort, Brague takes a rest, finding some compensation in running through his big scene, the scene where he reads the letter from his mother. Joy and surprise, then terror, and finally despair, are depicted on features seamed with such intensity of expression, such excess of pathos, that Vanda stops sewing, Miriam slapping the soles of her feet, and the Italian dancer, swathed in a gray woolen shawl, deigns to leave the framework of a flat to watch Brague’s tears flow. A minor daily triumph, delectable all the same.
On each such occasion, however, a faint chortle like a smothered laugh has spoiled this affecting moment. Brague’s sharp ear caught it from the very first day.
The second day: “Which of you ladies is the chucklehead that’s convulsed with laughter?” he shouts. No answer, and the dismal faces of the “great hetaerae” reveal nothing.
The third day: “There’s a fine of forty sous about to fall on somebody’s nut—and I know very well who it is—for causing a disturbance during rehearsal!” But Brague does not know who it is.
The fourth day: “You there, Misfit, are you trying to get a rise out of me?” Brague storms. “You wear yourself to a shadow, yes, you strive to put into what you’re doing a little . . . of the tragic side of life, of . . . simple truth and beauty, you try to pull the mimodrama out of the common rut, only to succeed in what? In reducing misfits like you to a state of hopeless giggles!”
A chair falls, and the pale trembling form of Misfit rises from out of the Stygian gloom, bleating like a goat. “But Mon . . . Monsieur Brague, I . . . I’m not laughing, I’m crying!”
3
I’m really a wonderful guy,
So fond of the kiddies am I,
The nice sweet little dears . . .
Gam, the little perishers!
Misfit leans against an iron strut, swaying like a small chained bear as she automatically rubs her powdered shoulder blades to and fro against the cold metal. She listens, while gazing from a distance at the character whom the Compère is about to introduce to the Commère as a choice titbit, by gently pressing forefinger to thumb as if he held between them a folded butterfly.
“Plebiscites are all the fashion, my dear friend: I am happy to present to you tonight the man who, by an impressive majority, has been newly elected the Prince of Mirth—our joyous friend, adventurer, and companion—Sarracq!”
“The frock coat don’t fit him half as well as Raffort,” thinks Misfit. “And you could see even then it hadn’t been made to fit Raffort.”
She notes the difference between the pearl gray frock coat that hangs too long and loose on Sarracq and the violet silk tail coat that trusses the stout body of the Compère, who does his best, by rounding his arms and shoulders, to conceal the shortness of his sleeves. As he steps up onto the stage again, his back to the public, he turns sideways and draws in his waist, to ease the tightness of the knee breeches that are squeezing the life out of him.
An ominous heat hangs heavy on the close of the evening performance. The exasperation is due not so much to the storm that is about to break into a torrential downpour as to the fact that it is one more August night in a succession of cloudless days and nights without a drop of rain. It is a merciless summer heat that has slowly penetrated through the dim recesses of the wings down to the musty lower regions of the Empyrée-Palace. The performers know it well. Shouts of laughter are no longer heard; even the chorus girls’ dressing rooms, wide open to the corridors, no longer resound with the tumult of invigorating slanging matches. From the Commère to the grips and flymen, all creep about cautiously, with the economy of movement of shipwrecked people determined to harbor the last ounce of their strength.
“Matinee tomorrow!” thinks Misfit. She droops her head like a cab horse and, without seeing them, gazes down at her satin shoes already agape where the big toes poke through. She is revived by the refreshing whiff of ether and smelling salts. “Yes, of course, for Elsie, who’s a bit off-color. She’s struck lucky, as you might say! She’s through with it for the evening!”
Four skinny little creatures, in embroidered linen frocks, put in an appearance one after the other on the iron stairs. Their silent passage seems to attract Misfit like a magnet, and she follows them as if sleep-walking. With the same uncertain step, they file onto the stage one after the other, sing an indistinct little ditty about the games little girls get up to, at the same time kicking up their legs and baby-frock skirts, and then return breathless to the wings.
When Misfit, leaning against her iron stay, exhales an almost inaudible, desperate “Oh, this heat!” one of the four Babies breaks into a nervous laugh, as if Misfit had said something terribly funny.
The Summer Revue, condemned to survive until the first of September, is in the throes of its last agony. It plays to pitiful second houses where some two hundred spectators, dispersed over the echoing auditorium, eye one another with embarrassment and disappear before the Grand Finale. It comes to life again on certain Saturdays, or a rainy Sunday, when the galleries are crammed with a malodorous crowd.
With prudence verging on the cynical, the management has removed one by one from the cast all the expensive stars of the original production. The English male dancer turned up his nose at the Parisian summer; the operetta star now gives Trouville the benefit of her soprano; a hundred performances have exhausted relays of Commères. Sarracq, idol of the Left Bank, has stepped into the frock coat of Raffort, who himself had succeeded the English dancer, and thus elevated to top of the bill a name quite honestly unknown on this side of the bridges.
Only the costumes have not been renewed, the costumes and Misfit. Ever since the day when her temperamental sister, the danseuse, deposited her on the theater doorstep three years since, Mitfit has been part of the house, appearing in the chorus of all the revues, pantomimes, and ballets. Luck had it one day that the manager took notice of her to the extent of inquiring, “And what’s that little girl over there?”
“She’s one of the three francs thirty-threes,” the stage manager replied.
As from the day following, a dazzled Misfit had her salary raised from a hundred to a hundred and sixty francs a month. This change entailed putting in an appearance for endless hours spent in bovine rumination, or in work more stultifying than abject idleness—parades, chorus routine, or plastic poses. Summer and winter alike come and go without releasing her, and her soft young eyelids are already swollen by fatigue into two lymphatic pouches. She is sweet and gentle, with large submissive eyes, so much so that the stage manager refers to her by turns as “the cream of the regulars,” or “the dumbbell of the duds.”
Tonight she is feeling the heat like the rest of the world, and even more than the others, because she has eaten next to nothing. The mere thought of her dinner makes her feel sick; she imagines she is still sitting at an outside table with an untouched plate of hot beef going cold in front of her. There are also the green peas that smell of wet dog. She shakes the curls of her thick wig against her cheeks and slowly starts toward the iron stairs. She is in no haste to quit the spot where she is slowly, peacefully, fading away in a sort of funereal security. Before going down below, she risks a peep through the curtain slit and murmurs apprehensively, “Oh, it’s packed full of savages again tonight!”
The fact is, Misfit is afraid of summer audiences. She knows that the regular quiet shopkeepers who frequent the Empyrée-Palace relinquish their seats in August to strange hordes of foreigners whose raucous hubbub during the intervals she finds disquieting. She has an equal horror of rough Teutonic beards, Oriental hard blue-black hair-pads and oily skins, and impenetrable Negro smiles . . . It
must be the heat that brings them, with all the other scourges of these dog days.
Misfit is not ignorant of the fact that “savages,” in the deserted streets after midnight, follow and solicit pale and anemic little chorus girls, whose theater salary is three francs thirty-three a day.
“One’s got to live, of course,” thinks Misfit, with her sorry nag’s resignation. “But not with these, not with those, not those savages!”
She has quite made up her mind to go home alone, come what may. However worn out she may be, she will walk as far as Caulaincourt on the other side of the bridge. There her scorching small room awaits her, at the very top of a boarding house overlooking the Montmartre cemetery. The thin walls keep the heat all night long and what wind there is brings factory smoke only.
It is not a room to live in, let alone to sleep in. But Misfit has bought a half pound of plums, and these she will eat all alone, in her chemise, beside the window . . . This is her one summer luxury. She plays the game of squeezing the stones between finger and thumb and then seeing how far she can shoot them, even as far as the cemetery. When, in the silence before dawn, she hears a stone rebound from an iron crucifix and strike with a musical ring a glass pane of the chapel, she smiles as she says to herself, “I’ve won!”
[Translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi]
FROM THE FRONT
“La Fenice”
“What is there to do tonight?”
Drenched throughout the day, Naples has been steaming like a dirty bath. The bay lies flattened by the continual rain, and Capri has melted away behind the rigid silvery downpour. A spectacular curtain of bluish-purple cloud veils and unveils Vesuvius from view and trails on down as far as the sea, where it finally shrouds the sky, crushing, as the sun sets, the living red rose that lay half open in its midst.
The tinkle of a bell echoes through the empty white hotel where we brave cholera and hail squalls. We could run or bowl a hoop down the interminable corridor under the dreary eye of the German waiters. We have the billiard room to ourselves and the bar—where the man in the white waistcoat is asleep—all the elevators and the crinkly-haired chambermaids with lovely eyes and fat shiny noses. We own the dining room—with places laid for two hundred guests—isolated from us by a three-paneled screen that prevents our seeing the half acre of polished parquet floor, dazzlingly bright . . . but . . .
“What is there to do tonight?”
In the first place, consult the barometer. Then, forehead pressed against the french window of the verandah, gaze out over the flooded quayside to watch, swaying in its iron gibbet, the electric globe big as a mauve moon as it swings in the wind.
Between one gusty squall and the next, a voice sings “Bella mia” and “Fa me dormi”: a child’s voice, shrill, metallic, nasal, sustained by mandolins. All of a sudden I am startled to see, on the other side of the windowpane, a forehead pressed against mine, two eyes trying to look into my eyes, a pair of dark eyes under the weather-beaten disorder of picturesque hair: the young girl who was singing has come up the terrace steps in search of her half-lira. I open the door a little way; the child has barely slipped in before she makes good her escape, after a confidingly suppliant gesture, a quick, utterly feminine, almost blush-making glance of appraisal. She glistens with raindrops under her stiff mantle with its pointed hood; a smell of ponds and soaking wet wool has come in with her.
“What is there to do tonight? Tell me, say something, what can we do tonight?”
Half an hour later we find ourselves stranded at La Fenice, a “caf’ cone’” of moderate size, plastered all over—walls, drop curtain, passages—with posters glorifying a local liqueur in a riot of publicity. Insipid in design, the outmoded silhouettes of the women displayed, high-bosomed and high-waisted, suffice to make us feel suddenly very far from Paris, and a little lost.
Despite two glaring floodlights, the place as a whole remains dismal; there are exactly three women in the audience, two little countrified, shabbily dressed tarts and myself. But the men are there in their hordes! While waiting for the curtain to rise they laugh uproariously, hum to the rhythm of the band, shake hands with one another, and bandy quips across the house; here reigns the familiarity found in places of ill repute.
But, on the program, what a regiment of women! And what lovely Italian names, Gemma la Bellissima, Lorenza, Lina, Maria! Among this bevy I madly hope for red-haired Venetian beauties with pink-and-white skins, Roman goddesses pale under raven-black hair, Florentines with aristocratic chins . . . Alas! . . .
Against a crudely painted backcloth, on which I certainly never expected this scene of a French château mirrored in the Loire, file past Lina, Maria, Lorenza, and Gemma la Bellissima, and countless others. The frailest of them humiliates the caryatids that support the balcony. Here, the solid is patently preferred. So much so that I suspect Lorenza di Gloria of having supplied, with considerable aid from cotton wadding and rolled-up handkerchiefs, a suitable substitute for what is lacking in the still angular body of a young Jewess; for she waves a pair of skinny arms, yellow under the armpits, around an enormous bust and all along inflated hips draped in woven satin, violet, and gold.
A shattering storm of applause greets—but why?—Gemma la Bellissima, a flaccid dancing girl in green gauze. She is the “Dancer in the Nude,” whose bashful antics are noisily acclaimed and accompanied, while her reserved smile acts as an apology for having to display so much! At one moment, turning her too-white back to the audience, she goes so far as to attempt a lascivious wriggle; but she quickly turns around again, as though wounded by the glances, to resume, eyes suitably lowered, her little game as a modest washerwoman, wringing and shaking out her spangled veil.
The local star performer is worth listening to, and looking at as well. She is Maria X, an Italian approaching her fifties, still beautiful, and cleverly pargeted. I cannot deny, nor do I reject, the appeal of her well-trained voice, already going, and of her overdemonstrative gestures. Nor will I dispute that she possesses a natural instinct for mime which enables her to “convey the meaning” with face, shoulders, curve of the waist, plump yet responsive legs, but above all with her hands; indefatigable hands that mold, weigh, and caressingly stroke the empty air, while her weary features, bright, seductive, express laughter or tears, or become creased with wrinkles regardless of the cracks they create in her heavy makeup, till with a single knife-edged glance, with a contraction of her proud velvety eyebrows, she compels the lustful attention of the entire audience.
“Lucette de Nice.” . . . I have been looking forward to the appearance of the little French girl who bears such a pretty, childish name. Here she is. Slimness personified—at last! Rather misery-stricken in her short and heavily spangled dress, she sings hackneyed Parisian ditties. Where have I seen this slovenly yet graceful errand girl before, with no nose to speak of, and a sulky look as though she were afraid? At Olympia, perhaps? Or at the Gaîté-Rochechouart?
Lucette de Nice . . . She knows but one gesture, a curious scooping movement of the hand, not unlike a cat, preposterous but somehow pleasing. Where have I seen her? Her roving eyes encounter mine, and her smile leaves her lips to be transferred to her large blue-penciled eyes. She has recognized me too, and never again takes her eyes off me. She gives no further thought to her words. I can read on her poor-little-girl features the longing to join me, to talk to me. When she comes to the end of her song she gives me a fleeting smile, like someone about to cry, then hurriedly leaves the stage, knocking her arm against the entrance.
After that, there is yet another heavy, healthy girl, full of confidence but not fully awake, who scatters among the audience stalkless flowers attached to light pliable reeds. She is followed by a female acrobat, undisguisedly pregnant, who appears to find her act a torture and takes her bow with a distraught look on a face beaded with sweat.
Too many women, oh, far too many women! I could wish this flock enlivened by some fruity Neapolitan comic or the inevitable tenor with blue ha
ir. Five or six poodles would not spoil the show, nor would a cornet-à-piston player who tries out his skill on a box of cigars.
Such a welter of females becomes depressing! One sees them at too-close range, one’s thoughts go out to them. My eyes wander from the threadbare false hem to the tarnished gilt of a girdle, from the dim little ring to the pink-dipped white coral necklace. And then my eye lights on the red wrists under a coat of wet white, on hands hardened by cooking, washing, and sweeping; I surmise the laddered stockings and the leaf-thin soles; I imagine the grimy stairs leading up to the fireless room and the short-lived light of the candle . . . While gazing up at the present singer, I see the others, all the others . . .
“What do you say to our leaving?”
The deluge continues. A raging gale drives the downpour under the raised hood of our carriage as we go bouncing away, drawn by a devil-possessed crazy small black nag, that seems hell-bent under the encouragement of the frenzied bellowings of a humpbacked cabby.
“Gitanette”
Ten o’clock. There has been so much smoking in the Sémiramis bar tonight that my compote of apples has a vague flavor of Virginia cigarettes . . . It is Saturday night. A kind of holiday fever exists among the regulars in anticipation of the rest day tomorrow, that exceptional day so unlike all the others, with the long lie in bed in the morning, the drive out in a taxicab as far as the Pavillon-Bleu, the visit to relations, the outing for the kids shut up in some suburban boarding school who will be coming, on this lovely Sunday morning, to have a breath of the fresh invigorating air of Le Châtelet.
Sémiramis herself is up to her eyes in work, and has already put on a monster stockpot to serve as the main basis for her Sunday dinners. “Thirty pounds of beef, my dear, and the giblets of half a dozen chickens! That should keep them going for some time, I’m thinking, and allow me a few moments’ peace, for I’ll be able to serve it first as the main course for dinner, and then cold with salad for supper. And as for soup, just think of all the soup they’ll be able to have!” She is by now much calmer, smoking her everlasting cigarette as she parades from table to table her good ogress smile and her whiskey-and-soda, from which unthinkingly she takes an occasional sip. The strong bitter coffee is getting cold in my cup; my bitch, her nose running from the cigarette smoke, urges me to leave.
