The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  Speechless, Brice grabbed his upper right arm with his left hand.

  “What is it, Georges? Hurting again?”

  He tightened his lips, stricken from his shoulder to his elbow, called back to the burning, capricious, throbbing pain. His neuritis kept him awake till morning. Toward dawn, exhausted, he reached the point of surrender and vague prayers, and he begged: “My suspicions, let me have my suspicions back . . . Let me have last week’s misery back, the torture that was easing my pain—a truce, a respite, that’s all, a respite.”

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  The Bitch

  When the sergeant arrived in Paris on leave, he found his mistress not at home. He was nevertheless greeted with tremulous cries of surprise and joy, embraced and covered with wet kisses. His bitch, Vorace, the sheep dog whom he had left with his young sweetheart, enveloped him like a flame and licked him with a tongue pale with emotion.

  Meanwhile, the charwoman was making as much noise as the dog and kept exclaiming: “Of all the bad luck! Madame’s just gone to Marlotte for a couple of days to shut up her house there. Madame’s tenants have just left and she’s going through the inventory of the furniture. Fortunately, it isn’t all that far away! Will Monsieur write out a telegram for Madame? If it goes immediately, Madame will be here tomorrow morning before lunch. Monsieur must sleep here. Shall I turn on the water heater?”

  “My good Lucie, I had a bath at home. Soldiers on leave are pretty good at washing!”

  He eyed his reflection in the glass; he was both bluish and ruddy, like the granite rocks of Brittany. The Briard sheep dog, standing close to him in a reverent silence, was trembling in every hair. He laughed because she looked so like him, gray and blue and shaggy.

  “Vorace!”

  She raised her head and looked lovingly at her master, and the sergeant’s heart turned over as he suddenly thought of his mistress, Jeannine, so young and so gay—a little too young and often too gay.

  During dinner the dog faithfully observed all the ritual of their former life, catching the pieces of bread he tossed for her and barking at certain words. So ardent was the worship in which she was rooted that the moment of return abolished for her the months of absence.

  “I’ve missed you a lot,” he told her in a low voice. “Yes, you too!”

  He was smoking now, half lying on the divan. Crouching like a greyhound on a tombstone, the dog was pretending to be asleep, her ears quite still. Only her eyebrows, twitching at the slightest noise, revealed that she was on the alert.

  Worn out as he was, the silence gradually lulled the man, until his hand which held the cigarette slid down the cushion, scorching the silk. He roused himself, opened a book, fingered a few new knickknacks and a photograph, which he had not seen before, of Jeannine in a short skirt, with bare arms, in the country.

  “An amateur snapshot . . . How charming she looks!”

  On the back of the unmounted print he read: “June 5, 1916. Where was I on June the fifth? . . . Oh, I know, over in the direction of Arras. June the fifth. I don’t know the writing.”

  He sat down again and was overcome by a sleep which drove all thought away. Ten o’clock struck; he was still just sufficiently awake to smile at the rich and solemn sound of the little clock whose voice, Jeannine used to say, was bigger than its stomach. But as it struck ten the dog got up.

  “Quiet!” said the sleepy sergeant. “Lie down!”

  But Vorace did not lie down. She snorted and stretched her paws, which, for a dog, is the same as putting on a hat to go out. She went up to her master and her yellow eyes asked plainly: “Well?”

  “Well,” he answered, “what’s the matter with you?”

  Out of respect she dropped her ears while he was speaking, raising them again immediately.

  “Oh, what a bore you are!” sighed the sergeant. “You’re thirsty! D’you want to go out?”

  At the words “go out,” Vorace grinned and began to pant gently, showing her beautiful teeth and the fleshy petal of her tongue.

  “All right, then, we’ll go out. But not for long, because I’m absolutely dropping with sleep.”

  In the road Vorace was so excited that she barked like a wolf, jumped right up to her master’s neck, charged a cat, and spun around playing “inner circle” with her tail. Her master scolded her tenderly and she did all her tricks for him. Finally, she sobered down again and walked along sedately. The sergeant suited his pace to hers, enjoying the warm night and making a little song out of two or three idle thoughts.

  “I’ll see Jeannine tomorrow morning . . . I’m going to sleep in a comfy bed . . . I’ve got seven more days to spend here . . .”

  He became aware that his dog, which had trotted ahead, was waiting for him under a gas lamp with the same look of impatience. Her eyes, her wagging tail, and her whole body asked: “Well? Are you coming?”

  As soon as he caught up with her, she turned the corner at a determined trot. It was then that he realized she was going somewhere.

  “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “the charwoman usually . . . Or Jeannine . . .”

  He stood still for a moment, then went on again, following the dog, without even noticing that he had, all at once, stopped feeling tired, and sleepy, and happy. He quickened his pace and the delighted dog went ahead, like a good guide.

  “Go on, go on!” ordered the sergeant from time to time.

  He looked at the name of a road, then went on again. They passed gardens with lodges at the gates; the road was dimly lit and they met no one. In her excitement, the dog pretended to bite the hand that hung at his side, and he had to restrain a brutal impulse, which he could not explain, in order not to beat her.

  At last she stopped, as though saying: “Well, here we are!” before an old, broken-down railing, protecting the garden of a little low house smothered in vines and bignonia, a timid, shrouded little house.

  “Well, why don’t you open it?” said the dog, which had taken up a position before the wooden wicket gate.

  The sergeant lifted his hand to the latch and let it fall again. He bent down to the dog, pointed with his finger to a thread of light along the closed shutters, and asked her in a low voice: “Who’s there? . . . Jeannine?”

  The dog gave a shrill “Hi!” and barked.

  “Shhh!” breathed the sergeant, clapping his hands over her cool, wet mouth.

  Once more he stretched out a hesitant arm toward the door and the dog bounded forward. But he held her back by her collar and led her to the opposite pavement, whence he gazed at the unknown house and the thread of rosy light. He sat down on the pavement beside the dog. He had not yet gathered together all those images and thoughts which spring up around a possible betrayal, but he felt singularly alone, and weak.

  “Do you love me?” he murmured in the dog’s ear.

  She licked his cheek.

  “Come on; let’s go away.”

  They set off, he in front this time. And when they were once more in the little sitting room, she saw that he was putting his linen and slippers in a sack that she knew well. Desperate but respectful, she followed all his movements, while tears, the color of gold, trembled in her yellow eyes. He laid his hand on her neck to reassure her.

  “You’re coming too. I’m not going to leave you anymore. Next time you won’t be able to tell me what happened ‘after.’ Perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps I haven’t understood you properly. But you mustn’t stay here. Your soul wasn’t meant to guard any secrets but mine.”

  And while the dog shivered, still uncertain, he held her head in his hands, saying to her in a low voice: “Your soul . . . Your doggy soul . . . Your beautiful soul . . .”

  [Translated by Enid McLéod]

  The Tender Shoot

  “There’s no reason for you to stay on in Paris,” I said, in May 1940, to my old friend—what shall I call him? Let’s say Chaveriat, yes, Albin Chaveriat; in France there are enough Chaveriats, Basque by origin, who have settled in Franc
he-Comté and all over the place to ensure that none of them will object to the use I make of his name. “As you’ll only mope in Paris as long as the war goes on, find somewhere to live in the country for a bit. Why don’t you go and join Curnonsky at Mélanie’s place in Riec-sur-Belon?”

  “I don’t like sea breezes,” said Chaveriat. “Also, I don’t want to eat too well. I should lose my figure.”

  “The Midi? St.-Tropez? Cavalaire?”

  Chaveriat bristled his short white mustache.

  “Settings for the gay life . . . sinister, now it’s dead and gone.”

  “Do you feel any inclination to be a paying guest? Go to Normandy, to the Hersents’. They won’t budge from their estate unless they’re dislodged by fire and sword. There’s a river, a billiard room, a badly kept-up tennis court, a croquet lawn. The entire family is in excellent health and, with their daughters and nieces alone, the place teems with young girls . . .”

  “Not another word! You’ve just said the very thing that would put me off.”

  “Neither the wind nor good food nor the South of France nor young girls. You’re difficult to suit, Albin.”

  “I’ve always been difficult, my dear. That is what has made me end up as the pearl of bachelors.”

  Chaveriat walked across, without his stick, to one of my three windows. When he made a conscious effort, he limped hardly at all. Last year an attack of gout that “ran up to the heart,” as they used to say, laid him to rest before his martial figure, still slender at seventy, suffered the humiliation of being definitely crippled. White-haired, with lively black eyes and a clipped mustache, he was presumed to have broken many hearts in his youth. But I can definitely state that, in 1906, he was only a quite ordinary-looking dark man.

  Being a good walker, he was as fond of long walks as hairdressers are of fishing. In the country, Albin, who did not shoot, would go off for hours with a gun. He would bring back, by way of game, a little pink peach tree snapped off by a hailstorm, a stray cat, a handkerchief full of flap mushrooms. Things like that endeared him to me. From time to time, I would search in vain for what was missing from our friendship, a friendship limited by the closely guarded secrets of Albin Chaveriat’s love life. Before his death, he revealed only one to me and on that very day I suggested he should spend the war—we did not know, in May 1940, what those words implied—in a country house gay with young girls. For I reverted to his refusal which had been uttered with that marked reticence of voice and manner which provokes an inevitable retort from the other person: “My good man, you don’t leave this house till you’ve told me the whole story!”

  Albin did not leave the house. It was all the easier for me to make him stay because, for dinner, we had had deliciously fresh fish, mushrooms, taken off the fire before they were reduced to the condition of tasteless rags in which most French people serve them, and a semi-liquid crème au chocolat to satisfy those who like eating it with a spoon as well as those who prefer to drink it straight out of the little pot. In 1940, our Paris markets were still so well stocked that we walked through the neighborhood of Les Halles just to feast our eyes. In talking, we used such expressions as “the phony war” and “war in disguise” and we were, all of us, rather like animals without a sense of smell.

  To break down my guest’s inhibitions and loosen his tongue I offered him the last of my good marc brandy.

  “Is it the Hersents themselves who put you off going to Normandy or their plethora of young girls, Colonel?”

  Chaveriat had long ago given up laughing when one called him that. I think he rather liked having the tribute of an imaginary rank paid to his brush of white hair, his mustache, and his not unattractive limp.

  “Neither one nor the other, my dear. There is nowhere in the world I like better than Normandy and I’ve always adored young girls, or rather the young girl as a species.”

  “Well, well, well!”

  “Does that astonish you? Why? We’ve only known each other for twenty-five years and I’m sixty-eight. Do you suppose that for something like forty years I was entirely occupied in living up to your idea of me which, by the way, is certainly very different from my idea of yourself? Yes, my two ruling passions were young girls and shooting. Now I couldn’t even take a shot at a jay and a young girl has, not cured me, but put young girls out of my life forever . . . You want a story and you shall have it. It isn’t a pretty one, far from it. But it can no longer do any harm to anyone and by now I fear its heroine may well have sons of eighteen.”

  “How did I acquire a taste for young girls? I think it was through a masculine friendship. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, I had a friend, one of those fellow adolescents to whom a normal boy is more faithfully devoted than to any mistress. Once turned twenty, a woman, or military service, or a profession breaks into one’s life and ruins this beautiful mutual affection. Actually, our military service made hardly any difference to Eyrand and me: we went through the mill together. The first betrayal came from him, for that was what I called his marriage. Getting married at twenty-three and a half was, according to my family, an ‘imprudence.’ I have just told you the name I gave our separation. No, thanks, one glass of marc is enough for me. If I drank more, I would tell my story badly and not as impartially as I should.

  “I remember I stubbornly refused to spend my holidays with Eyrand, the first year of his marriage, in a small country house standing in some seventy-odd acres which represented the best part of his wife’s dowry and which he farmed himself. It was no good his writing to me over and over again and sending me snapshots of his young wife and his cattle and his farm, my back remained up. I sent him stupid letters in reply, because I thought his wife read them . . . And also because my friend’s expressed nothing but a stolid happiness. Never a doubt or a worry or an anxiety, never anything at all about which I might have consoled him . . . Actually, I would like a drop of marc. Just a drop, no higher than the star engraved on the glass.

  “In the end Eyrand got tired, as you can well imagine. When I saw that I had lost, and largely through my own fault, a friend I could never replace, I became unsociable with everyone except extremely young females. I was attracted by their sincere bluntness, by an interest that was usually sheer pretense, by beauty in embryo and character still unformed. They were seventeen, eighteen, a little more or a little less, while I was getting on for thirty. In their company, I felt the same age as themselves. In their company . . . It would be truer to say, in their arms. What is there in a young girl that is ripe and ready and eager to be exploited except her sensuality? No, don’t let’s argue about that, I know you don’t agree with me. You won’t prevent my having had—and for good reason—an almost terrified preference for that mixture of frenzy and determination, recklessness and prudence you find in a young girl who has—how shall I put it?—gone beyond certain limits. You have to have known a considerable number of young girls to realize that, compared to adult women, the majority of them are the inspired enthusiasts of the sex, ready to take the wildest risks. Also that, in dangerous situations, nothing can equal their complete calm. Public opinion has its set phrase: ‘The coward who attacks young girls.’ Good Lord! I can assure you that, on the contrary, one needs a very unusual temperament and remarkable self-control to resist them. Only don’t get it into your head that my inclination became a monomania or a morbid obsession. In love, I’ve often been just like any other man, involved for a time in a liaison, attracted toward a sensible marriage, then no less sensibly escaping from it, irresolute . . . I assure you, a man just like other men.

  “In 1923, I had already given up shooting but I accepted invitations from sportsmen. One of my friends, a retired chemist—there were parts of the country where, almost overnight, all the big estates had passed into the hands of the said chemists—had just bought such a beautiful property in Doubs that I planned my whole year so as to take a late summer holiday, between the fifteenth of August and the fifteenth of October. I did not enjoy it as much as I
had hoped, on account of the rather boring collection of people staying there and the continual ostentatious gluttony. Food and drink alike, there was too much of everything, and it went on day after day. Things got to such a point that I had to pretend to be a dreamy recluse suffering from a liver complaint in order to have a right to solitude and sobriety. The owners of the big houses in the neighborhood used to tap me on the shoulders after meals, belching discreetly.

  “‘So you’re not quite up to the mark? You ought to see someone.’ I abstained from replying that, on the contrary, I would far rather see no one, and I kept myself to myself. Except that I undertook to teach a quite good-looking woman, a cousin of the owner’s, how one catalogues a library, and some other pleasant ways of spending a hot afternoon.

  “What a country it is, my dear, all that region of Doubs! And what an estate! The new owner had not had time to make disastrous ‘improvements’ or to change that look—burning even more than burnt—that September has up there. The shortened days were still sweltering enough to take the skin off your hands when you lunched outdoors, and at night, just before dawn, a marvelous cold came in through the open windows, a cold that turned the leaves of the cherry trees all red—and the elms and chestnuts prematurely yellow. No season had ever been so yellow, including the grass in the fields which had not had enough rain to give a second hay crop. But, because the trees were so old and thick, the undergrowth remained and as mushroomy as you could wish. There are lots of ‘violets’ in Franche-Comté. The violet is a delicate kind of mushroom.

  “Sparrow hawks—they were golden, too—would escort me a little way, circling very high above my head to find out my intentions, and as I was innocent of any evil design, they would abandon me.

  “Being a good walker (I’m talking of twenty years ago) I wandered over hill and dale; I discovered a little lock in the park with its sluice gates rotted away and its pool dried up, the remains of a carved saint in her niche, an ancient ‘belvedere,’ from which it had long been impossible to see anything, full of rabbit dung and prickly broom. I left the park without realizing it because the chemist preferred to install bathrooms all over the house rather than rebuild the walls around his property. But a few hundred yards farther on, the landscape became tamer and was cut up into small cultivated squares bounded by low, mortarless walls that made warm shelters for vipers. Although the district was fairly thick with small hills, I did not lose my way. I never do get off my track, you know. What’s making you smile? Ah, I see what you mean. No, thanks, no more brandy. I should love a glass of cold water.