The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  “All of them, really?”

  “All but one. But I expect you to pry that one out of me.”

  She stood up as if to dance, impulsively. That night she did not wish to hear any more. That night she would take with her what he had said, that ambiguous promise, its tone of amorous defeat and defiance.

  “Are you leaving already?”

  She replied with a nod of her head, held out the tips of her fingers, and Bussy prudently lowered his voice and asked: “Tomorrow, may I . . .”

  “Tomorrow I’ll phone you before eleven,” she said. “As usual.”

  She reached the row of chairs, disarranged by the music lovers’ departure toward the refreshment stand, where Antoinette stubbornly remained sitting alongside the purple lady. Treacherously, Clara brushed up against the white velvet dress as she passed, and murmured, “Pardon me . . .” while looking elsewhere.

  Clara always woke at the same hour and all at once. Since she first felt herself in love with Robert Bussy, her clear mind’s first thoughts were of the woman with whom she was vying for him. In her thoughts she would force open Antoinette’s front door, climb a familiar staircase, slip into a bedroom she once knew quite well, hung everywhere with silk whose ivory color matched the ivory of dusky skin, and stopped only when she reached the bed where, protected by two long black braids, there slept her beautiful rival. “Wake up! Wake up!” ordered the early-morning phantom. “And let me wake your fears and suspicions; wake up for our daily task!”

  On days when her jealousy was strongest, her phantom visit intoxicated her with a kind of hallucination, and then slowly, regretfully, she withdrew back into herself, from the white bedroom . . .

  In the evening, after dreaming of Bussy and desiring Bussy, after measuring the small amount of security Bussy provided her, her last lucid moment drew her back to her former friend. She wished her “Bad night!” with a kind of gentleness, reviewed the use she had made of the day just ending, and laid plans for the next. When a party, an evening of music or dancing, promised her that she would run into her former friend, as well as Bussy, she would tremble with a little shock, feeling the blood rising to her cheeks, reddening them with anger, enhancing her . . . Her main concern had to do with attracting Bussy, of course. But at the same time—and sometimes even before—she had to outwit, by using her knowledge of Antoinette’s habits, what was being planned for Bussy by the passionate and scheming Antoinette, the secretive Antoinette, the criminal and despised Antoinette . . . Unrelentingly, Clara aimed the weapon of persistent thought in her rival’s direction. As it happened, Antoinette, forced on all occasions to concede and melt away, did in fact dissolve and disappear. It was the one thing that Clara, though she wished for it with all her might, had not foreseen. During the opening-night performance of Bussy’s new play, Bottomless Pits, Clara, looking dazzling up in her box, leaned over the red velvet armrest and scanned the house with her keen eyes.

  “Where is Antoinette, by the way?” she asked the author during the last intermission.

  “I don’t remember you making me her keeper,” Bussy replied, wounded by the fact that Clara could be concerned with something other than his three acts.

  She thought he was lying and did not insist. But Antoinette did not attend the “Venetian Night” given by the Fauchier-Magnans on the grounds of their château either, and so could not see Bussy as a lord in white and Clara as a doge’s wife in red, being rocked on the black cushions of a gondola . . .

  “What a party!” exclaimed Clara’s friends the next day.

  “Yes . . .” she said distractedly. “Lovely. But something was missing . . . I don’t know what . . . Maybe I’m wrong . . . It was lovely . . .”

  She was bored more often, she displayed an impatience that was unlike her, a desire for change. So she threw herself madly into Bussy’s arms the day he confessed to her that his own solitude no longer made sense and that he was turning himself over, bound hand and foot, into Clara’s power. At first she wanted a “Peasant Wedding,” that is to say, a bunch of Parisians jammed into a small country church, and an outdoor reception, red roses on simple linen tablecloths . . . Then she renounced her rustic childishness when she realized that Antoinette could not be present, even in disguise. “Just where is Antoinette?”

  She decided to ask this question, which had been obsessing her quietly, out loud to her friends, who laughed in her face.

  “Where have you been, Clara? Antoinette married her most handsome cousin and the two of them are off traveling in the Indies. The marriage took ten minutes, and the trip will take two years.”

  One day as she was lunching outdoors with Bussy, she noticed that spring had arrived and that the petals of the apple tree were drifting down into the pitcher of frothy cider. Bussy, noticing her silence, placed his hand on hers. She raised her eyes and saw in her fiancé the dullness women find in men they no longer love. He launched into an account of the plot of his next play. Clara was seized by an attack of nervous yawns so furious that she thought she was sick and asked to be taken home.

  “I’ll call to see how you are before dinner,” said Bussy, fussing over her.

  “No, no, don’t. I’ll phone you. It’s nothing . . .”

  He received no phone call, only a brief note, so cavalier that his masculine pride could not believe it. “There’s a man behind all this,” he concluded. “She’s made a fool out of me . . .” But he was mistaken. Clara, lying peacefully in bed, was giving herself over to the benefits of aspirin, and on the backs of her closed eyelids Bussy’s image was growing more and more indistinct. Thanks to approaching sleep, it disappeared entirely behind another image, which Clara welcomed without rancor or distress, calling it as she once did by its nickname, “Anto!” She cried, but softly. In the hope that a long friendship could reunite two women, separated only by the passing of an ephemeral man, Clara began calling, began waiting for the absent, the longed-for, the irreplaceable Antoinette . . .

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  The Respite

  “How’s your arm tonight?”

  “Not bad, not bad.”

  “Oh, you always say that. And your knee? I know, ‘not bad, not bad’ . . . The wind is blowing terribly outside. God only knows what I must have looked like on the Pont des Arts. Holding on to my hat like this; my pleated skirt—you’ll never catch me in a pleated skirt again—blown up against my back, my purse without a handle, and me clutching it under my arm like this, no, no, women are just too foolish to dress in a way that’s so . . . And as for my hair, just look at it!”

  She exaggerated her disarray with a kind of artistry, raising one shoulder up to her ear, screwing up her mouth, wrinkling the skin on her forehead to help keep her hat in place, and squeezing her short skirt between her thighs. She had never been afraid of making faces; she indulged in extreme and grotesque mimicry and somehow remained beyond reproach. Already past thirty, she would imitate Chevalier, improvise an old general’s mustache out of wads of cotton, stuff a pillow under her skirt, and exclaim: “Allow me to present to you the pregnant concierge!”

  “Does she deliberately make herself ugly out of modesty or pride?” Brice wondered, watching his wife walk pigeon-toed, run into the corner of the table, and rub her thigh. “It’s a kind of lie, too.”

  “You didn’t pick up my medicine?”

  She looked over her shoulder at her husband, and winked as if to say: “Child!”

  “Yes, I did. Got you this time!”

  “Oh, a phone call would have been enough to replenish my stock. I’m afraid about tonight . . .”

  On his desk he set his big expert’s magnifying glass, that venerable old tool dethroned by other newer methods of investigation. Antique, set in copper, it superimposed three lenses which could be used with one over the other or be opened out into a trefoil.

  “Were you studying something?” asked Marcelle.

  “Nothing,” he sighed. “Who cares about painting these days, genuine or fake?
Speaking of which, the Tiepolo drawings Myrtil Schwabe bought are fakes. Of course, I gave her ample warning.”

  Do you think it is that e-e-easy

  To fool an expert such as me-e-e . . .

  sang Marcelle.

  “She’s got her nerve . . .” thought Brice indignantly. With his left hand he grabbed his upper right arm, and smiled the way patients who flaunt a certain stoic aplomb smile. Marcelle’s tall figure leaned over him.

  “Is it very bad? Try to hold out for another thirty or forty minutes. Let’s save the ammunition for tonight. Can you?”

  “Can I? Come on, it’s a game for me . . .”

  He shut his eyes so that she would not read in them an overwhelming fact which he himself did not as yet believe: for the second time since that morning, the neuritis had just deserted his right shoulder and his arm as far as the elbow. So total was the reprieve becoming, so eager were the muscles to move, and so astonished were they to feel themselves free and light, that he nearly betrayed himself, nearly groaned with ease. “Not to suffer,” thought Brice, “what pleasure can compare with this inner silence, this perfection of one’s whole being? Do I even have a left arm? Where is my left arm, its burning right shoulder, the shooting pains of a probe being helped along with a stylet, replaced from time to time by a heavy roller which crushes half the forearm, leaving the other half bound down, in spasms, pulling on its chains?”

  He stretched his leg out gingerly. “Nothing in the leg anymore. My knee is being a dear, like a young boy’s knee, the knee of a runner . . .” Meanwhile, his wife, in the next room, was speaking to him.

  “What did you say, Marcelle?” he shouted. “What square are you talking about?”

  “St. Julien-le-Pauvre,” she answered from the other bedroom. “What they’ve done with that little corner is just wonderful. I’m also going to go see the Jardins des Gobelins, apparently they’ve kept the old fruit trees. Can you imagine? Open-wind apricot trees in Paris . . .”

  He heard her laugh.

  “Talk about wind, they’re getting plenty of it today!”

  She reappeared in the doorway of his room. Brice had just enough time to draw in his arm, which he had been stretching, bending, stretching with underhanded exhilaration. Marcelle gave her husband a searching look.

  “You’re suffering like a poor little baby and hoping I won’t be able to tell.”

  “It’s impossible to hide anything from you,” said Brice, taking on the jerky delivery, the smile of the discreet martyr.

  She stopped twisting around her finger the ringlets of her hair tangled by the gusting wind, knelt down next to the armchair, put her big, careful arm around Brice’s neck, and leaned over gently, cheek to cheek.

  “Poor, poor baby.”

  “Marcelle,” Brice said grimly, “you’re wearing your hair too long, I’ve told you so a hundred times.”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “You should change that idiotic hairdo, those curly wood shavings, and that flat part on the back of your head!”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “You say, ‘Yes, darling,’ but you’re just making fun of me!”

  “Yes, darling.”

  He freed his head with an exasperated gesture, and Marcelle stood up.

  “Careful now, you silly goose,” she said tenderly. “No acrobatics. What if I put a nice hot towel on your shoulder while you’re waiting for your medicine?”

  “Hot and useless . . .”

  “So it will mix the pointless with the unpleasant. One more word and you’ll get my Michel Simon imitation.”

  She stood in front of him, too tall, long-armed, but well proportioned, and built simply from head to feet. Maturity rested lightly on her, without excess weight, reddening her face a bit, heightening the clear blue of her eyes. Marcelle judged her nose, her mouth, the shape of her chin strictly: “It’s not very finely made, but it’s good and solid.”

  For the moment she felt useless and was trying not to show her pity. She pulled the little peplum of her dark green jacket down over her short green-, gray-and-brown-plaid skirt. “It’s the same outfit she’s wearing in the photograph,” thought Brice. “The square buttons, the little Scotch trim on the pockets and collar, everything’s the same . . . Photography really is a fine art!” He was overcome with rage, afraid of losing his composure, and asked to be left alone.

  “I’d like to try to sleep a little before dinner, you understand.”

  Puzzled, Marcelle did not respond right away.

  “I’d be happy if you slept, of course, but . . . what about tonight?”

  “Tonight, tonight . . . One sleepless night more or less, for the last eight days . . .”

  “Seven days, Georges . . .”

  “Seven days, then! They obviously haven’t seemed long to you!”

  As he grew more upset, she was quick to give in.

  “I’m going, I’m going. Something to drink? Are you comfortable like that? You don’t want me to take away the big cushion?” His only response was a shake of his head, and before she left, he had still to endure the caress of a cool hand on his.

  Left alone, he tested his arm and his leg, both feeling as new and impatient as himself. He closed his fist firmly around his bunch of keys to keep them from jingling. He took the page torn from the newspaper, the photograph he had studied twenty times, back out of the drawer, and placed the triple lens over it. Blurred faces came into focus and seemed to rise up toward him. If you recognize yourself as the person in the circle, please stop by our offices; you will receive the sum of . . . In the center of the white circle, the features of a fat lady peered questioningly at the photographer, as she was starting down the stairs to the métro. Above her, two lovers were bidding each other an avid goodbye, with a passionate kiss which bent the woman back over the iron railing; the man could barely be seen, behind a pleated plaid skirt, a dark jacket, and a pointed felt hat. Beneath the hat’s wide brim Brice recognized the straight, somewhat large nose, the overly long ringlets of hair, and the religiously lowered eyelids. “I’ve never seen the shape of her jaw so clearly before. How long has she had that chin? It’s like an animal’s, really. She’s like all women; once out of their usual companion’s sight, they change . . .”

  He felt keen, shrewd, filled with hatred. He started to undo, to take off his long, blue, flannel invalid’s robe. “Too soon. She wouldn’t believe the attack subsided so quickly. I’ll take care of this dirty business tomorrow . . .”

  At first he used the information provided by the newspaper itself: Photograph taken in the Xth arrondissement, and the name of the station, Château-Landon. He was proud of himself for not having asked his wife any questions, but he had her followed. In her presence, he had no trouble grasping his upper right arm with his left hand, as if overcome by a brief, sharp pain, and into his limping around the apartment he put all the casualness of the cripple reconciled to his lameness.

  He experienced the strange vigor of the suspicious, their physical immunity, but also a jealous torment which at times made him tremble all over, especially at night, and against which he cowardly asked for help.

  “Ask them to fix me a hot-water bottle, Marcelle. Would you hand me the vicuña blanket?”

  He found out nothing, neither around the entrance to the métro nor in his wife’s mail, and having called off the too-costly gumshoe after a week, he ventured a vague but direct inquiry: “What would make you really happy, Marcelle?”

  She turned her prominent eyes toward him and answered without having to think: “Lots of money, to buy a house in the country with, a complete fishing outfit, and the best bootmaker for sport shoes. And another apartment that wouldn’t be so close to the Seine.”

  “She’s stupid,” thought Brice. “Stupid or very clever.”

  “And another husband, Marcelle? What would you think of a brand-new husband? New, handsome, robust?”

  He laughed, but Marcelle wrinkled up her nose.

  “That, my dear, i
s what I call humor for men only. Little games that go over big in certain government offices. Take my Uncle Auguste, you know what he and his colleagues used to do in the offices for Air Purification? When they weren’t telling stories about their wedding nights, they were staining pieces of paper with ink and folding them in half to make designs, or else they’d play at what-would-you-do-if-you-won-a-million.”

  “Customs of a bygone age,” said Brice vexedly.

  “Thank God! Ever since women started working in government offices, the men have been behaving a little better!”

  In the end, Brice lost his patience. One day he even admitted to himself that his interrogation humiliated himself most of all. Surprised by an unexpected hug from Marcelle—“Do you still like my big monkey’s arms around your neck?”—he was unable to hide his sudden emotion and his wet eyes.

  “It’s my nerves. You know, now that the worst is over . . . it’s easing up . . .”

  She kissed him, and boisterously celebrated the departure of the fickle pain. But when they were apart, he was once again seized with rage, became overexcited while out walking, rushed home, and did not wait any longer to thrust in front of his wife’s eyes the crumpled page from the newspaper which never left him. He had considered accompanying his action with some accusatory remark, but all he could come up with was: “Can you see anything, here, in the way of a resemblance?”

  Sitting down, Marcelle smoothed out the creases in the paper with the palm of her hand.

  “Oh, well, yes,” she said slowly. “Well, yes, yes . . .”

  Brice suddenly felt very tired and sat down.

  “I can see,” Marcelle continued, “that a Scotch plaid is almost always prettier when it’s worn on the bias than when it’s worn straight. I can see that my saleslady is right when she says a design altered to a client’s taste is always less pretty . . . This’ll teach me . . . Compare the square shapes of my plaid to the diamonds on this woman here . . .”

  She broke off to laugh. “Say, Georges, by the way, look at these two in the photograph, they’re really putting their hearts into it, did you see? And coram populo!”