The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  “A shiver of insecurity sharpened my uneasiness; I raised my head, and just above me, just behind the crest of the dilapidated wall, I saw the mother and the daughter. Only the top half of their bodies was visible and they were watching me like hawks. It cost me a tremendous effort not to start off again at full speed. I was firm with myself and walked on slowly and nonchalantly, as if absorbed in moonlight meditation. Two heads, close side by side, followed my movement; they must be starting off again in pursuit of me. I was only too right; the two heads reappeared farther on, waiting for me. White hairs and gold hairs fluttered in the air like poplar seeds.

  “Seeing them there, perfectly still, I stopped. It was one of the hardest things I have done in my life. Then I started to walk on again slowly, down the increasing slope of the path. I passed underneath the two women. It was then that a large-sized stone fell from the top of the wall, grazed my shoulder, and rolled ahead of me down the steep path, just in front of my feet. I stepped over it and continued on my way. A little farther on, a second stone just like it took the skin off my ear as it fell before hitting my foot and quite severely bruising my big toe. I was only wearing canvas shoes. I came to a breach that lowered the level of the wall. My tormentresses were standing in the breach and waiting for me. A good honest rage, the rage of an injured man, seized me at last and inspired me to assault the breach and the two hussies. In three bounds, I was up there. No doubt they too suddenly recovered their reason and remembered that they were females, and I was a male, for after hesitating, they fled and disappeared into the neglected garden behind some pyramid fruit trees and a feathery clump of asparagus.

  “I didn’t care! I had regained control of myself. I shouted heaven knows what threats in the direction of my fugitives. I grabbed hold of a vine prop, which I brandished like a sword. It was ridiculous, but it did me no end of good. Afterward, I walked down to the path again and reached the undergrowth, spotted with moonlight like a Léopard skin. Rabbits were already scurrying about and I frightened some birds. But I was much more startled than these timid small folk. However, my nerves did not entirely let me down; I dried my bleeding ear and I began to limp because of my crushed foot.

  “The next day, I went down with what is called a ‘first-class’ bout of fever, due, I think, to the warm dampness and to the folly of not having taken a sweater. To emotion as well, I’m not idiotic enough to deny it. No encounter has ever staggered me as much as the one with that moralist, the little lady with the frizzy white hair. For an outraged mother to demand some form of compensation, right, that’s logical enough. Even for her to insist on the supreme reparation—marriage—that’s all right too. That sort of demand always ends by the lady softening down. But that mother, with that fleecy head, those eyes, that way of charging the enemy. She’d have stoned me to death if she could. Yes, yes, she really would have. What risk did she take? A wall that was crumbling of its own accord. The little thing, I think she was just an honest, straightforward, adorable idiot.

  “Well, my bout of fever was long and violent, and accompanied by shivering fits that made the bed rattle, by nightmares, even a little delirium—I’ve always been highly strung. I saw ferocious yellow cats, twin heads on a single neck. My host looked after me admirably, and luckily found in his cupboard various medicaments compounded in his professional days. He made a hole in one of my slippers to make room for my swollen injured toe. And his agreeable female relative sewed a number of medals, all of proven efficacy, into my pajamas.

  “No, I never saw Louisette again. I made no attempt to see her. At one fell swoop I had lost the taste for the twilights of Franche-Comté and satiny birch trees and clumps of heather. But for all too definite reason, there was no question of forgetting her. When I thought about her, I turned hot and cold and disgust came rushing over me, distorting and eclipsing her charms. Infinitely worse, my dear, the most hideous fear of my life unfortunately revived again, insinuating its little icy serpent, its drop of burning wax, between my shirt and my skin, between Louisette and myself, between me and other Louisettes. Henceforth, it was to deprive your old friend—look, the mere thought of it is making me sweat—of all the Louisettes in this world. What’s that you say? A punishment for my sins? Just wait! I have been granted an unexpected kind of compensation. You know the theme, exploited hundreds of times in literature and funny stories: the enemies and the victims of Don Juan substitute the duenna or some overblown chambermaid in his bed for the beautiful quarry. And the next day, the gang of practical jokers assembles around the seducer and informs him, with loud laughter, what they have done . . . Inform him? Did he really know nothing about it? Wasn’t the evidence of his own senses enough? Does that mean that, but for his tormentors, he might have been quite satisfied in the morning, when he emerged from the warm darkness of the bed? It’s perfectly possible. So let’s say, my dear, that instead of the Louisettes, I could still console myself with the chambermaid. And as I had no friends to shout it from the housetops, I did not complain too much of my lot.”

  [Translated by Antonia White]

  Bygone Spring

  The beak of a pruning shears goes clicking all down the rose-bordered paths. Another clicks in answer from the orchard. Presently the soil in the rose garden will be strewn with tender shoots, dawn-red at the tips but green and juicy at the base. In the orchard the stiff, severed twigs of the apricot trees will keep their little flames of flower alight for another hour before they die, and the bees will see to it that none of them is wasted.

  The hillside is dotted with white plum trees like puffs of smoke, each of them filmy and dappled as a round cloud. At half past five in the morning, under the dew and the slanting rays of sunrise, the young wheat is incontestably blue, the earth rust-red, and the white plum trees coppery pink. It is only for a moment, a magic delusion of light that fades with the first hour of day. Everything grows with miraculous speed. Even the tiniest plant thrusts upward with all its strength. The peony, in the flush of its first month’s growth, shoots up at such a pace that its scapes and scarcely unfolded leaves, pushing through the earth, carry with them the upper covering of it so that it hangs suspended like a roof burst asunder.

  The peasants shake their heads. “April will bring us plenty of surprises.” They bend wise brows over this folly, this annual imprudence of leaf and flower. They grow old, borne helplessly along in the wake of a terrible pupil who learns nothing from their experience. In the tilled valley, still crisscrossed with parallel rivulets, lines of green emerge above the inundation. Nothing can now delay the mole-like ascent of the asparagus, or extinguish the torch of the purple iris. The furious breaking of bonds infects birds, lizards, and insects. Greenfinch, gold-finch, sparrow, and chaffinch behave in the morning like farmyard fowl gorged with brandy-soaked grain. Ritual dances and mock battles, to the accompaniment of exaggerated cries, are renewed perpetually under our eyes, almost under our very hands. Flocks of birds and mating gray lizards share the same sun-warmed flagstones, and when the children, wild with excitement, run aimlessly hither and thither, clouds of mayfly rise and hover around their heads.

  Everything rushes onward, and I stay where I am. Do I not already feel more pleasure in comparing this spring with others that are past than in welcoming it? The torpor is blissful enough, but too aware of its own weight. And though my ecstasy is genuine and spontaneous, it no longer finds expression. “Oh, look at those yellow cowslips! And the soapwort! And the unicorn tips of the lords and ladies are showing! . . .” But the cowslip, that wild primula, is a humble flower, and how can the uncertain mauve of the watery soapwort compare with a glowing peach tree? Its value for me lies in the stream that watered it between my tenth and fifteenth years. The slender cowslip, all stalk and rudimentary in blossom, still clings by a frail root to the meadow where I used to gather hundreds to straddle them along a string and then tie them into round balls, cool projectiles that struck the cheek like a rough, wet kiss.

  I take good care nowadays not to pic
k cowslips and crush them into a greenish ball. I know the risk I should run if I did. Poor rustic enchantment, almost evaporated now, I cannot even bequeath you to another me: “Look, Bel-Gazou, like this and then like that; first you straddle them on the string and then you draw it tight.” “Yes, I see,” says BelGazou. “But it doesn’t bounce; I’d rather have my India-rubber ball.”

  The shears click their beaks in the gardens. Shut me into a dark room and that sound will still bring in to me April sunshine, stinging the skin and treacherous as wine without a bouquet. With it comes the bee scent of the pruned apricot trees, and a certain anguish, the uneasiness of one of those slight preadolescent indispositions that develop, hang about for a time, improve, are cured one morning, and reappear at night. I was ten or eleven years old but, in the company of my foster-mother, who had become our cook, I still indulged in nursling whims. A grown girl in the dining room, I would run to the kitchen to lick the vinegar off the salad leaves on the plate of Mélie, my faithful watchdog, my fair-haired, fair-skinned slave. One April morning I called out to her, “Come along, Mélie, let’s go and pick up the clippings from the apricot trees, Milien’s at the espaliers.”

  She followed me, and the young housemaid, well named Marie-la-Rose, came too, though I had not invited her. Milien, the day laborer, a handsome, crafty youth, was finishing his job, silently and without haste.

  “Mélie, hold out your apron and let me put the clippings in it.”

  I was on my knees collecting the shoots starred with blossom. As though in play, Mélie went “Hou!” at me and, flinging her apron over my head, folded me up in it and rolled me gently over. I laughed, thoroughly enjoying making myself small and silly. But I began to stifle and came out from under it so suddenly that Milien and Marie-la-Rose, in the act of kissing, had not time to spring apart, nor Mélie to hide her guilty face.

  Click of the shears, harsh chatter of hard-billed birds! They tell of blossoming, of early sunshine, of sunburn on the forehead, of chilly shade, of uncomprehended repulsion, of childish trust betrayed, of suspicion, and of brooding sadness.

  [Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod]

  October

  On the wooden balcony this morning, all among the battered wisteria and the flattened flowers of a red salvia blown in there by last night’s gale, there lay two pink and green butterflies, looking like the shed petals of a poppy. They were still just alive when I touched them, and a little spasm jerked their fragile feet up against the delicate fur of their thoraxes. One of them died very quickly; but the other continued for some minutes to quiver like an electrified flower, his antennae vibrating.

  I leave them there on the wooden floor of the balcony. As soon as I turn my back, the sparrows will come and all I shall find will be eight wings deftly cut off. They must have been overcome by the sudden autumn, these sensitive silkworm moths with pink crescents on their wings; how many times have I seen them clinging to the warm chimney that runs the length of my house, trying to shelter from the baleful October dawn!

  Every day from the balcony I watch all the gardens shrinking in this peaceful, threatened corner of Passy. Mine is losing its roof of leaves; and what remains now of the threefold arch of roses? Only the rusty iron, with a few bare branches tied to it. And what I call the “neighbor’s park,” where I used to hear invisible children laughing and running, was it nothing but that square enclosure, that clump of trees hemmed in by high, sad walls?

  The pleasant provincial existence, which flourishes here in summer, deserts the gardens now and huddles as though abashed behind closed windows. Even on days when the sun returns, those young girls, whose pale frocks and shining hair I would glimpse between the branches, will no longer be there, lying back in their basket chairs.

  I used to listen to them living close at hand behind a curtain of leaves. I would hear the embroidery scissors clattering on an iron table, the thimble rolling on the gravel, and the pages of a magazine rustling. A cheerful noise of spoons and cups told me that it was five o’clock and I would yawn with hunger. Now nothing remains all around me but the relics of a long summer: an empty hammock swings in the wind and a metal frog, belonging to some garden game, gulps the rain. Paths that have lost their mystery wind under the tattered trees, and walls stripped bare reveal the limits of our jealously measured paradises.

  I am afraid now of discovering that the young girl in pink—a slim gardener who used to prune the rose bushes on the other side of the arbor—is ugly. I would like to remain uncertain, until the trees are green again, whether the united couple, whose leisurely sauntering I used to hear twice a day, is young or old.

  The three children who sit singing on the terrace steps of the house that belongs to the lady in mourning stop abruptly if I look at them. I make them feel uncomfortable. All the same, they were aware this summer that I was here; but I didn’t know which one it was who called out “Thank you” when I threw a lost ball back over the hedge of clipped acacias. Now I make them feel uncomfortable and they embarrass me. I shan’t dare any longer to cross the garden wearing a dressing gown, with my hair still wet.

  My thoughts turn to the house, to the fire and the lamp; there are books and cushions and a bunch of dahlias the color of dark blood; in these short afternoons, when the early evenings turn the bay window blue, decidedly it’s time to be indoors. Already on the tops of the walls and on the still-warm slates of the roofs, there appear with tails like plumes, wary ears, cautious paws, and arrogant eyes, those new masters of our gardens, the cats.

  A long black torn keeps continual watch on the roof of the empty kennel; and the gentle night, blue with motionless mist that smells of kitchen gardens and the smoke of green wood, is peopled with little velvety phantoms. Claws lacerate the barks of trees, and a feline voice, low and hoarse, begins a thrilling lament that never ends.

  The Persian cat, draped like a feather boa along my windowsill, stretches and sings in honor of his mate dozing down below in front of the kitchen. He sings under his breath, as though in an aside, and seems to be awaking from a six months’ sleep. He inhales the wind with little sniffs, his head thrown back, and the day is not far off when my house will lose its chief ornament, its two faithful and magnificent guests, my Angoras, silvery as the leaves of the hairy sage and the gray aspen, as the cobweb covered with dew or the budding flower of the willow.

  Already they refuse to eat from the same plate. While waiting for the periodical and inevitable delirium, each plays a part before the other, just for the pleasure of making themselves unrecognizable to each other.

  The male conceals his strength, walking with his loins low, so that the fluffy fringe of his flanks brushes the ground. The she-cat pretends to forget him, and when they are in the garden she no longer favors him with a single glance. In the house she becomes intolerant, and jealous of her prerogatives, grimacing with a look of bitter hatred if he hesitates to give way to her on the staircase. If he settles on the cushion that she wants, she explodes like a chestnut thrown on the fire, and scratches him in the face, like a true little cowardly female, going for his eyes and the tender velvet of his nose.

  The male accepts the harsh rules of the game and serves his sentence, as its duration is secretly fixed. Scratched and humiliated, he waits. Some days yet must pass, the sun must sink lower toward the horizon, the acacia must decide to shed, one by one, the fluttering gold of its oval coins. Then there must come some dry nights, and an east wind to frighten the last leafy fingers off the chestnut trees.

  Under a cold sickle of moon they will go off together, no longer a fraternal couple of sleeping and sparring partners, but passionate enemies transformed by love. He is compact of new cunning and bloodthirsty coquettishness, while she is all falsehood and tragic cries, equally ready for flight or for sly reprisals. The mysteriously appointed hour has but to sound, and old lovers and bored friends though they are, each will taste the intoxication of becoming for the other the Unknown.

  [Translated
by Enid McLéod]

  Armande

  “That girl? But, good heavens, she adores you! What’s more, she’s never done anything else for ten whole years. All the time you were on active service, she kept finding excuses for dropping in at the pharmacy and asking if I’d had a letter.”

  “Did she?”

  “She wouldn’t leave the shop until she’d managed to slip in her ‘How’s your brother?’ She used to wait. And while she was waiting, she’d buy aspirin, cough lozenges, tubes of lanolin, toilet water, tincture of iodine.”