by Colette
“The end? But I’ve told you all there is to tell. Nothing else happened. The mission to Morocco turned up. The date’s been put forward twice. But that isn’t the only reason I’ve been losing sleep. Other signs . . .”
“What signs?”
She did not dare give a definite answer. She put out a hand as if to thrust away my question and averted her head.
“Oh, nothing, just . . . just differences.”
She strained her ears in the direction of the door.
“I haven’t seen him for three days,” she said. “Obviously he has an enormous amount to do getting ready for this mission. All the same . . .”
She gave a sidelong smile.
“All the same, I’m not a child,” she said in a detached voice. “In any case, he writes to me. Express letters.”
“What are his letters like?”
“Oh, charming, of course, what else would they be? He may be very young but he’s not quite a child either.”
As I had stood up, Marco suddenly became anguished and humble and clutched my hands.
“What do you think I ought to do? What does one do in these circumstances?”
“How can I possibly know, Marco? I think there’s absolutely nothing to be done but to wait. I think it’s essential, for your own dignity.”
She burst into an unexpected laugh.
“My dignity! Honestly, you make me laugh! My dignity! Oh, these young women.”
I found her laugh and her look equally unbearable.
“But, Marco, you’re asking my advice—I’m giving it to you straight from the heart.”
She went on laughing and shrugging her shoulders. Still laughing, she brusquely opened the door in front of me. I thought that she was going to kiss me, that we should arrange another meeting, but I had hardly got outside before she shut the door behind me without saying anything beyond: “My dignity! No, really, that’s too funny!”
If I stick to facts, the story of Marco is ended. Marco had had a lover; Marco no longer had a lover. Marco had brought down the sword of Damocles by putting on the fatal kepi, and at the worst possible moment. At the moment when the man is a melancholy, still-vibrating harp, an explorer returning from a promised land, half glimpsed but not attained, a lucid penitent swearing “I’ll never do it again” on bruised and bended knees.
I stubbornly insisted on seeing Marco again a few days later. I knocked and rang at her door, which was not opened. I went on and on, for I was aware of Marco there behind it, solitary, stony, and fevered. With my mouth to the keyhole, I said: “It’s Colette,” and Marco opened the door. I saw at once that she regretted having let me in. With an absentminded air, she kept stroking the loose skin of her small hands, smoothing it down toward the wrist like the cuff of a glove. I did not let myself be intimidated; I told her that I wanted her to come and dine with me at home that very night and that I wouldn’t take no for an answer. And I took advantage of my authority to add: “I suppose Lieutenant Trallard has left?”
“Yes,” said Marco.
“How long will it take him to get over there?”
“He isn’t over there,” said Marco. “He’s at Ville d’Avray, staying with his father. It comes to the same thing.”
When I had murmured “Ah!” I did not know what else to say.
“After all,” Marco went on, “why shouldn’t I come and have dinner with you?”
I made exclamations of delight, I thanked her. I behaved as effusively as a grateful fox terrier, without, I think, quite taking her in. When she was sitting in my room, in the warmth, under my lamp, in the glare of all that reflected whiteness, I could measure not only Marco’s decline in looks but a kind of strange reduction in her. A diminution of weight—she was thinner—a diminution of resonance—she talked in a small, distinct voice. She must have forgotten to feed herself, and taken things to make herself sleep.
Masson came in after dinner. When he found Marco there, he showed as much apprehension as his illegible face could express. He gave her a crab-like, sidelong bow.
“Why, it’s Masson,” said Marco indifferently. “Hello, Paul.”
They started up an old cronies’ conversation, completely devoid of interest. I listened to them and I thought that such a string of bromides ought to be as good as a sleeping draught for Marco. She left early and Masson and I remained alone together.
“Paul, don’t you think she looks ill, poor Marco?”
“Yes,” said Masson. “It’s the phase of the priest.”
“Of the . . . what?”
“The priest. When a woman, hitherto extremely feminine, begins to look like a priest, it’s the sign that she no longer expects either kindness or ill treatment from the opposite sex. A certain yellowish pallor, something melancholy about the nose, a pinched smile, falling cheeks: Marco’s a perfect example. The priest, I tell you, the priest.”
He got up to go, adding: “Between ourselves, I prefer that in her to the odalisque.”
In the weeks that followed, I made a special point of not neglecting Marco. She was losing weight very fast indeed. It is difficult to hold on to someone who is melting away, it would be truer to say consuming herself. She moved house, that is to say, she packed her trunk and took it off to another little furnished flat. I saw her often, and never once did she mention Lieutenant Trallard. Then I saw her less often and the coolness was far more on her side than on mine. She seemed to be making a strange endeavor to turn herself into a shriveled little old lady. Time passed . . .
“But, Masson, what’s happened to Marco? It’s ages since . . . Have you any news of Marco?”
“Yes,” said Masson.
“And you haven’t told me anything!”
“You haven’t asked me anything.”
“Quick, where is she?”
“Almost every day at the Nationale. She’s translated an extraordinary series of articles about the Ubangi from English into French. As the manuscript is a little short to make a book, she’s making it longer at the publisher’s request, and she’s documenting herself at the library.”
“So she’s taken up her old life again,” I said thoughtfully. “Exactly as it was before Lieutenant Trallard . . .”
“Oh, no,” said Masson. “There’s a tremendous change in her existence!”
“What change? Really, one positively has to drag things out of you!”
“Nowadays,” said Masson, “Marco gets paid two sous a line.”
[Translated by Antonia White]
The Photographer’s Wife
When the woman they called “the photographer’s wife” decided to put an end to her days, she set about realizing her project with much sincerity and painstaking care. But, having no experience whatever of poisons, thank heaven, she failed. At which the inhabitants of the entire building rejoiced, and so did I, though I did not live in the neighborhood.
Madame Armand—of the Armand Studio, Art Photography and Enlargements—lived on the same landing as a pearl stringer and it was rare for me not to meet the amiable “photographer’s wife” when I went up to visit Mademoiselle Devoidy. For, in those far-off days, I had, like everyone else, a pearl necklace. As all women wanted to wear them, there were pearls to suit all women and all purses. What bridegroom would have dared to omit a “string” from his wedding presents to his bride? The craze started at baptism, with the christening gift of a row of pearls no bigger than grains of rice. No fashion, since, has ever been so tyrannical. From a thousand francs upward you could buy a “real” necklace. Mine had cost five thousand francs, that is to say, it did not attract attention. But its living luster and its gay Orient were a proof of its excellent health and mine. When I sold it, during the Great War, it was certainly not for an idle whim.
I used not to wait to have its silk thread renewed till it was really necessary. Having it restrung was an excuse for me to visit Mademoiselle Devoidy, who came from my part of the country, a few villages away. From being a saleswoman in a branch of The Store of a
Thousand Necklaces, where everything was sham, she had gone on to being a stringer of real pearls. This unmarried woman of about forty had kept, as I had, the accent of our native parts, and delighted me furthermore by a restrained sense of humor which, from the heights of a punctilious honesty, made fun of a great many people and things.
When I went up to see her, I used to exchange greetings with the photographer’s wife, who was often standing outside her wide-open door, opposite Mademoiselle Devoidy’s closed one. The photographer’s furniture trespassed onto the landing, beginning with a “pedestal” dating back to the infancy of the craft, a camera stand of carved, beautifully grained walnut, itself a tripod. Its bulk and its solid immobility made me think of those massive wooden winepress screws that used to appear, at about the same period, in “artistic” flats, supporting some graceful statuette. A gothic chair kept it company and served as an accessory in photographs of First Communicants. The little wicker kennel and its stuffed Pomeranian, the pair of shrimping nets dear to children in sailor suits, completed the store of accessories banished from the studio.
An incurable smell of painted canvas dominated this top landing. Yet the painting of a reversible canvas background, in monochrome gray, certainly did not date from yesterday. One side of it represented a balustrade on the verge of an English park; the other, a small sea, bounded in the distance by a hazy port, whose horizon dipped slightly to the right. As the front door was frequently left open, it was against this stormy background and this slanting sea that I used to see the photographer’s wife encamped. From her air of vague expectancy I presumed that she had come out there to breathe the coolness of the top landing or to watch for some customer coming up the stairs. I found out later that I was wrong. I would go into her opposite neighbor’s and Mademoiselle Devoidy would offer me one of her dry, pleasant hands; infallible hands, incapable of hurrying or trembling, that never dropped a pearl or a reel or a needle, that gummed the point of a strand of silk by passing it, with one sure twist of the fingers, through a half-moon of virgin wax, then aimed the stiffened thread at the eye of a needle finer than any sewing needle.
What I saw most clearly of Mademoiselle Devoidy was her bust, caught in the circle of light from her lamp, her coral necklace on her starched white collar, her discreetly mocking smile. As to her freckled, rather flat face, it merely served as a frame and a foil for her piercing brown, gold-spangled eyes that needed neither spectacles nor magnifying glass and could count the tiny “seed pearls” used for making those skeins and twists that are known as “bayadères” and are as dull as white bead trimming.
Mademoiselle Devoidy, living in cramped quarters, worked in the front room and slept in the back one, next door to the kitchen. A double door, at the entrance, made a minute hall. When a visitor knocked or rang, Mademoiselle Devoidy would call out, without getting up: “Come in! The key turns to the left!”
Did I feel the beginnings of a friendship with this fellow native of my own province? I most certainly liked her professionable table, covered with green baize, with a raised edge like a billiard table, and scored with parallel troughs along which her fingers ranged and graded the pearls with the help of delicate tweezers, worthy to touch the most precious matter: pearls and the wings of dead butterflies.
I also had a friendly feeling for the details and peculiarities of a craft that demanded two years’ apprenticeship, a special manual dexterity, and a slightly contemptuous attitude toward jewels. The mania for pearls, which lasted a long time, allowed the expert stringer to work in her own home and do as much as she chose. When Mademoiselle Devoidy told me, suppressing a yawn: “So-and-so brought me masses last night, I had to compose till two o’clock in the morning,” my imagination swelled these “masses” to fairy-tale size and elevated the verb “compose” to the rank of creative labor.
In the afternoon, and on dark mornings in winter, an electric bulb, set in a metal convolvulus, was switched on above the table. Its strong light swept away all the shadows on the workbench on which Mademoiselle Devoidy allowed nothing to stand; no little vase with a rose in it, no pin tray or ornament in which a stray pearl might hide. Even the scissors seemed to make themselves perfectly flat. Apart from this precaution, which kept the table in a permanent state of pearl-decked nudity, I never saw Mademoiselle Devoidy show the faintest sign of wariness. Chokers and necklaces lay dismembered on the table like stakes not worth picking up.
“You’re not in a great hurry? I’ll clear a little place for you. Amuse yourself with what’s lying about while I rethread you. So it refuses to get any fatter, this string? You’ll have to put it in the hen coop. Ah, you’ll never know your way about.”
All the time Mademoiselle Devoidy was teasing, her smile was busy reminding me of our common origin, a village ringed with woods, the autumn rain dripping on the piles of apples on the edge of the fields, waiting to be taken to the cider press . . . Meanwhile, I did, indeed, amuse myself with what was lying about on the table. Sometimes there were huge American necklaces, ostentatious and impersonal; Cécile Sorel’s pearls mingled with Polaire’s choker, thirty-seven famous pearls. There were jewelers’ necklaces, milky and brand-new, not yet warmed into life by long contact with women’s skin. Here and there, a diamond, mounted in a clasp, emitted rainbow sparks. A dog collar, a fourteen-row choker, stiffened with vertical bars of brilliants, spoke of wrinkled dewlaps, an old woman’s sinewy neck, perhaps of scrofula . . .
Has that curious craft changed? Does it still fling heaps of treasures, defenseless fortunes into the laps of poor and incorruptible women?
When the day was drawing to a close, Madame Armand sometimes came and sat at the green baize table. Out of discretion, she refrained from handling the necklaces over which her bird-like gaze wandered with glittering indifference.
“Well, so your day’s work’s over, Madame Armand?” Mademoiselle Devoidy would say.
“Oh, me . . . mine doesn’t have to be fitted into the day like my husband’s. My dinner to warm up, the studio to tidy, little things here and there . . . it’s easily done.”
Rigid when she was standing, Madame Armand was no less rigid seated. Her bust, tightly encased in a red-and-black tartan bodice with braided frogs, visible between the stiff half-open flaps of a jacket, made me think of a little cupboard. She had something of the fascination of a wooden ship’s figurehead. At the same time she suggested the well-mannered efficiency of a good cashier and various other sterling virtues.
“And Monsieur Armand, what nice thing’s he up to at this moment?”
“He’s still working. He’s still on his last Saturday’s wedding. You see, he has to do everything in a little business like ours. That wedding procession on Saturday is giving him a lot of trouble, but it means quite a good profit. The couple in one picture, a group of the bridesmaids, the whole procession in four different poses, goodness knows what all. I can’t help him as much as I’d like to.”
The photographer’s wife turned to me as if to apologize. As soon as she spoke, all the various stiff and starchy phenomena of the close-fitting bodice, the jacket, the imitation gardenia pinned in her buttonhole melted in the warmth of a pleasant voice with hardly any modulations in it, a voice made to recount local gossip at great length.
“My husband gets tired, because he’s starting this exophthalmic goiter, I call it his exo for short. The year’s been too bad for us to take on an assistant cameraman. The tiresome thing is, I haven’t got a steady hand, I break things. A pot of glue here, a developing tank there, and bang, there goes a frame on the floor. You can see a mile off what a loss that means at the end of a day.”
She stretched out a hand toward me that was, indeed, shaking.
“Nerves,” she said. “So I stick to my own little domain, I do all the housework. In one way it seems to be good for my nerves, but . . .”
She frequently paused on a “but,” after which came a sigh, and when I asked Mademoiselle Devoidy whether this “but” and this sigh hid some mela
ncholy story, my fellow countrywoman retorted: “What an idea! She’s a woman who tight-laces to give herself a slim waist so she has to fight every minute to get her breath.”
Madame Armand, who had regular features, remained faithful to the high military collar and the tight, curled fringe because she had been told she looked like Queen Alexandra, only saucier. Saucier, I cannot honestly say. Darker, definitely. Heads of blue-black hair accompanied by white skin and a straight little nose abound in Paris and are usually of pure Parisian origin with no trace of Mediterranean blood. Madame Armand had as many lashes as a Spanish woman and a bird’s eyes, I mean black eyes rich with a luster that never varied. The neighborhood paid her a laconic and adequate tribute by murmuring, as she passed, the words “handsome brunette.” On this point, Mademoiselle Devoidy’s opinion allowed itself one reservation.
“Handsome brunette’s the word . . . Especially ten years ago.”
“Have you known Madame Armand ten years?”
“No, because she and little old Big Eyes only moved into this place three years ago. I’ve been in the house much longer than they have. But I can very well imagine Madame Armand ten years ago. You can see she’s a woman who’s devouring herself.”
“Devouring herself? That’s a strong expression. You’re not exaggerating?”
An offended look, the color of spangled iron ore, passed under the lamp and met my eyes in the shadow.
“Anyone may be mistaken. Madame Armand may be mistaken too. Just fancy, she’s got it into her head that she leads a sedentary life. So every evening, either before dinner or after, she goes out on foot to take the air.”
“It’s a good healthy habit, don’t you think?”
Mademoiselle Devoidy, as she pinched her lips, made the little colorless hairs of mustache at the corners of her mouth converge—just as diving seats do when they close their nostrils to the water.
“You know what I think of healthy habits. Now that the photographer’s wife has got a bee in her bonnet that she has breathless fits if she doesn’t go out, the next thing will be she’ll be found on the stairs one day, dead of suffocation.”
