The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  They all hated one another – though all, men and women alike, were as thick as thieves when it came to making fun of the supervisors – and once outside the workshop they communicated only by trading scratches with fingernails and slaps with the back of the hand. In the morning, when they arrived, there were screams of delight, wild frolics, and delirious joy at the sight of some woman coming in, painfully dragging her backside to her place or blinking her black and blue, kohl-smeared eyelids; but if the boss, exasperated at seeing some huge brute, drunk as a Pole, bouncing from one pile of papers to another, fired him and paid him off then and there, it didn’t stop the woman he was honouring with his kicks and his kisses from getting up and leaving, and taking with her a whole gang who sided with her. Then there’d be boos from the other workers, followed by the tearful laments of the more worldly-wise women: ‘She’s stupid to go after a man who beats her. If it was me, I’d be off like a shot.’ And the same women would turn up the next day with black eyes or cuts on their faces and would energetically defend their man, while the others called him a bully and a coward. And so the gossip and the stories rained down. So and so was running around like a bitch in heat after a man who didn’t really care about her, snivelling all day long over her work, and had ended up tearing out the hair of a fellow worker who was dishonest enough to have taken her lover and provocative enough to confront her with it. With all this tittle-tattle fanned by stupidity, with all this hatred that burst into flame on contact with men, it was a miracle if, at the end of a few days, ten or twelve of the same women still remained. The sieve of Débonnaire & Co. never got clogged up, and its male and female personnel splashed and trickled like a stream of dirty water through the holes of its doors.

  ‘Idlers,’ said the foreman, self-righteously, a weedy-looking man, ugly as sin, with his livid face pitted by smallpox and tufts of eyebrows sprouting over sunken eyes that swivelled milkily in red eyelids. ‘Hussies,’ sighed the supervisor, a tall angular woman, with brown eyes like apple pips and a mouth barred with formidable fangs; but the idlers and the hussies took no notice of them. On Mondays the workshop was empty; on Tuesdays the workshop was equally empty; on Wednesdays the workshop began to fill up, and by Saturday to empty again. Apart from the supervisors, who were looking after their pennies, and a poor old man who’d drunk so much in his youth he’d got a dicky stomach and could no longer drink, all the rest only worked, if they were women, in order to stuff themselves with chips and buy imitation jewellery, or if they were men, to pour glasses of white wine down their necks in the morning and guzzle bottles of cheap red wine in the afternoon.

  Such was the personnel of the firm which, for the night shift, would recruit another pile of women picked up from the gates of other binderies. Ah, the supervisor had her hands full on those long nights; first she had to dole out the work. ‘Oh, thanks a lot!’ the girls would complain, ‘it’s slave labour, that’s what that is! What a job! I’ll break my nails on that paper!’And then she had to quench their thirsts and give coffee and brandy to everyone; she had to prevent them scratching each other’s eyes out and slapping each other’s faces; and she had to register the work done, piece by piece, the firm’s full-time workers wanting to be checked out ahead of the riff-raff rounded up that evening, the latter protesting that they were being picked on and that they’d teach them not to take them for botchers and bunglers!

  So when these dregs had been swept outside, the supervisor let out a sigh of relief, adjusted the straps of her frilly bonnet, adroitly removed the sleep that was encrusting her eyes, pushed her little bench under the table with her foot, and made her way briskly towards the boss’s office.

  She stopped in surprise. Céline and Désirée were arguing furiously with him. Désirée was asking to be no longer paid piecework, but by the hour instead. ‘So,’ said the supervisor, ‘you want to be like me then.’ But Céline, who was a bit lippy, replied: ‘Eh, and why not? My sister’s not a labourer only good for folding pages, she can do the delicate jobs like stitching, and what’s more Monsieur put me on an hourly wage last week, so why shouldn’t he give my sister the same salary as me?’ After a lengthy discussion it was decided that, from then on, Désirée would get twenty-five and a half centimes an hour. The girls, delighted, bade them goodnight, waving behind their backs as they went out to wash at the pump, and then, jostling each other and jumping about in the courtyard to warm up, walked back up the Rue du Dragon towards the Rue de Vaugirard.

  Désirée, in a daze, was dragging her feet and stopping in front of all the shop windows; the other, inured by dissipated nights to the stomach’s early morning hunger pangs and to a cold that chilled you to the marrow and made you hunch your shoulders and hasten your steps, would shout at her sister, calling her a good-for-nothing slacker.

  The Rue de Sèvres stretched out interminably with its religious communities, its abbeys, its hospices for the sick, and its boarding schools for girls, but what slowed the younger girl’s pace wasn’t the squadron of cripples and beggars groaning pitifully, caps outstretched, as the church filled up, nor was it that starving rabble who, arms in slings and legs swaddled in bandages, gathered, drunk and paralysed with cold, in front of the tiny entrance to the Hospital Sisters of Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve, it was those numerous devotional shops, those innumerable sellers of cheap religious souvenirs, of which the street is full.

  Near the Jesuit seminary, where the coachmen’s horses pranced, and where, dismounted from their seats, liveried flunkies assumed the mawkish poses of the pious poor, there were painted statues of the Virgin, sombre Madonnas suitable for putting in niches, Christs as large as life, with dashes of lilac on their chests and carmine-red on their hands, beneficent Jesuses, curly-haired and blond, arms outstretched, welcoming and well-groomed, then, on the lower shelves, monstrances, patens and ciboriums gleaming with their gilt and inlay work, strange vigil lights with hearts of red glass mounted on bronze, or in the form of lilies with pistils and stems of copper, vases with the initials J. and M. interlaced, and, piled up on a partition, bouquets of white paper roses framing a tiny redeemer made of pink wax, who wriggled on straw, trapped, as if he were an old woman’s plaything, beneath a dome of glass.

  And all these shops receded into the distance, diminishing in splendour the closer the street got to the Boulevard des Invalides.

  Here and there, alternating with them, gaping onto the pavement, were bars with varnished winebarrels along the walls and crimson grilles on their windows. At this hour they were teeming with people. Drunks, elbows on zinc counters, eyes bleary and teeth empurpled by cheap wine, were laughing right under the girls’ noses. Céline flounced her skirt and flashed her eyes; turning round, she called to her sister who was daydreaming in front of a herbalist’s window, looking in wonder at amber necklaces, enemas with their red hoses, rubber teats, buffalo-horn combs, powder-puffs, and tiny soft sponges shaped like almonds, her finger pointing out shaving brushes and elastic suspenders to the other girl, who just pouted. ‘Them, they’re for men!’ said Céline, who began walking again, but her sister was dawdling further and further behind, gawping now in front of a stuffed Puss-in-Boots in a shoe shop, idling in front of the door of a washhouse adorned with a tricolour flag made of zinc, standing amazed before the windows of clothes shops in which hung velveteen trousers at eight francs, complete kids’ outfits with cardboard labels: ‘The Little Rascal’, ‘The Sailor Boy’, and ‘The Milk Maid’, red tool-belts for carpenters, striped percalines, surah silks woven in the Batignolles, starched shirts, and cravats patterned with wavy lines and polka dots.

  ‘Oh, what beautiful blouses,’ sighed Désirée, ‘that fluting is so dainty.’

  ‘Yes, go on, look…those aren’t for the likes of us, my girl; and to think there are women no better than me who can put them on their backs, and not just on Sundays, but every day the good Lord made! And if that’s not enough to make you mad, while we’re slaving away, tarts like Gamel’s daughter are stuffing down oysters and d
raping themselves in lace. And what’s more she’s ugly, that slut; and she doesn’t do anything, she just sleeps and drinks and stuffs her face and has a laugh! It makes you want to pack it in, when all’s said and done. Are you coming? What are you muttering about…that I should do as she does? Certainly, if I wanted to I could do the same as her…’

  ‘And don’t I know it, don’t I know it,’ said Désirée, ‘look, leave me alone, you’re hurting me with your nails, and anyway I don’t know why you’re mad at Virginia, she paid for all those glasses of mulled wine you had last summer.’

  ‘What? I’m fed up with her mulled wine!’ shouted Céline, exasperated; then her anger changed course and she suddenly turned on a delivery boy who, without meaning to, knocked his basket against her hair, and she shouted harshly at him, while the errand boy, after having retreated to a safe distance, taunted her, patting his thigh with his hand flat, then in a fist, his thumb sticking out.

  Nevertheless, she decided to continue on her way, but Désirée was dragging her heels along the pavement, even stopping again in front of a shop selling consecrated candles, pointing with her podgy finger, which left dirty marks on the glass, at wax tapers, fluted, flared, plain or wrapped in paper printed with fleur-de-lys, at ‘rat’s tail’ candle-holders with pale corkscrewed candles in them, at pure sanctuary incense with instructions for use written on the box; she would just stand there half asleep, or, turning around, she’d gaze uncomprehendingly at the line of cabs, at the trees in the square with their peeling bark, at the shops of the Bon Marché enveloped in the distance by a dusty blue haze. Céline stamped her feet in anger. ‘Anatole’s going to give me what for,’ she’d say to her, ‘I’m begging you, pull yourself together and come on!’

  They trotted on wearily, and along the way the religious images started up again, becoming absurd, losing their gilt, fading, smudging, drowning in thick layers of dirt: there were engravings full of little boys on their knees, of prostrate women, of swollen-cheeked angels pointing to the heavens, of Mater Dolorosas copied after the model of Delaroche’s with tearful eyes and rays of light streaming from their hands, of children with lambs around their necks, there were crucifixes with shells underneath for holy water, sacred hearts made of platinum, nickel-silver and silver-gilt, hearts pierced by swords with flames at the top and dripping blood at the bottom, hollow Immaculate Virgins made of tallow and of unglazed porcelain, badly-moulded and badly-varnished Saint Josephs, illuminated cribs, fluffy donkeys, a whole Judea in cardboard, a whole Nazareth in painted wood, a whole imitation religion, blossoming between jars of dusty chocolates and old gum balls!

  Désirée didn’t really wake up until they were in front of the old hospital for incurables; she pressed the knob of a water fountain and it spat a jet of water into a pitcher held between the hands of a stone Egyptian and splashed a nearby lady from head to foot. Then her eyes lit up again and, delighted by this prank, she ran off and caught up with her sister, who had already got as far as the Boulevard des Invalides.

  After that the Rue de Sèvres continued, widening a little and flowing into a square like the mouth of a funnel, then, turning into the Rue Lecourbe, it ran on, flanked at each street corner by an enormous tavern, by a long trail of black buildings. The quarter grew gloomier the closer it got to the ramparts. This teeming road, and the deserted boulevards that crossed it at right angles and retreated as far as the eye could see, this populace seething on the pavements, the women coming out to wipe down the sweating plasterwork of the passages, the men strutting about smoking pipes, their hands in their pockets, the toddlers sliding around on their backsides amid streams of gutter water, all spoke of the lamentable distress of the old suburbs, an endless desolation of wages frittered away by drunkenness and finished off by illness.

  The two sisters stopped not far from Chez Ragache, in front of a small restaurant whose attractions – plates of cauliflower and bowls of cloudy soup – were visible through green-tinged panes of glass bordered by white curtains. Céline pushed at the door with her shoulder and went straight up to a big lad, cap flat on the back of his head, sitting with one of his pals and shuffling a pile of greasy dominoes.

  ‘Ah good, not a moment too soon…’ said Anatole, ‘Mademoiselle has finally decided to show up. So what’s your excuse, you know very well I don’t like to be kept waiting by a woman. Stop! not another word, that’s enough; what are you drinking?’

  Céline attempted a gesture of indifference which ended up, under Anatole’s unflinching stare, in a look of submission and fear, and she stammered, disconcerted: ‘Me…I could do with something hot…is there any mulled wine on the stove, Madame Antoine?’

  ‘But of course, I’ll go and heat some for you, and you Mademoiselle Désirée, should I prepare a glass for you as well?’

  The younger girl nodded yes. She was standing in front of the cast-iron stove in the middle of the room. She didn’t seem to be conscious of what she was doing, because her fingers were grazing the metal top and, somewhat unsteady on her feet, she was staring with a dejected air at the copper knob of the stove pipe. The restaurant was empty. There were only some old jackets and capes hanging on the wall and, on a table at the back, a double salt cellar and a mustard jar whose lid had lost its tip. At this hour, old Ma Antoine was giving the kitchen a good going over, wiping with her greasy rag at the milk sizzling on the stove and blowing tiny bubbles that popped and stank. Every ten minutes she came back into the dining room, dabbing at her endlessly dripping nose, pouring fresh glassfuls for the two men, furtively rubbing a nailless finger over the wax blobs sticking to the necks of the bottles. Anatole and his friend Colombel had been drinking like fish while waiting for the girls. The game of dominoes came to an end. Colombel got up, stretched himself, adjusted the legs of his tight trousers, scraped his shoes on the floor tiles in order to get rid of the crust of cigarettes and mud besmirching them, and, pirouetting round on one foot, howled out: ‘Mademoiselle Désirée, when, oh, when are you going to let me court you?’

  But Désirée barely heard him, with tears in her eyes after a big yawn she was stretching her fingers and flexing her knees; it was Céline, now in a passionate clinch with Anatole, who answered: ‘That’s an insult that is! What have you got to offer? Your heart? Only people who’ve got nothing else offer that! It’s not good enough, you can take a running jump!’

  Colombel forced a laugh behind his excessively thick beard. Anatole, much amused, fondled his girlfriend’s breasts and shouted: ‘The whole package belongs to Papa!’ Colombel came back and sat down, and shuffled the dominoes once again. The door opened and two men came in. They were sporting their Sunday best, suits fit for walking out with some nice girl on their arm, for harvesting cheap wine in bars. They were wearing brand-new felt hats, striped trousers with patches between the thighs, frock coats that had been cleaned and repaired at the Temple, and string ties. They shook hands with everyone, made fun of Céline who, her nose in her glass of hot wine, was nibbling lemon peel every time a slice came within reach of her lips, and then sat down opposite one another, a bottle and two glasses between them, leaning low over the table chatting nose to nose, breathing right into each other’s faces, slapping each other on the arms, as if to make themselves better understood.

  ‘Now then,’ said Colombel, ‘where are you off to today looking so swanky?’

  ‘We’re taking his blonde for a stroll, my friend; we’re going to have a glass of Rigolboche and something to eat at the Place Pinel, and then afterwards…well, we’ll see…’

  ‘Hey, that’s an idea,’ exclaimed Anatole, ‘supposing we go and get a fry-up somewhere, and some escargots? How about it, Céline? Colombel and your sister could come with us.’ But the girls refused; they had to return home and prepare a meal for their father, and anyway they were too tired, it would have to be another time. ‘Yes, there’s no way,’ murmured Céline, ‘though it would’ve been nice…’ and she leaned on her elbows, dreamily contemplating a wheel-of-fortune screwed
to the wall, seeing in its painted scene of a couple kissing beneath a bower the pleasures of such intimate tête-à-têtes, the leisurely eaten fish stew, the morsels one shares using the same fork, the coffee brandy drunk from the same cup… then one of the workers gave it a spin and the countryside scrambled, clearing again as it stopped spinning, and Céline just sat there, daydreaming of those long walks where you flirt with each other, of those journeys home along the Seine when you stare languidly into each other’s eyes and when, amid the thickets, mouths meet from time to time, of all that happiness which, in short, ends up in arguments as soon as the defensive walls are breached.

  ‘Now look,’ said Anatole, ‘sitting there playing hard-to-get isn’t going to get us very far. Are you coming, yes or no?’

  ‘But I can’t,’ repeated Céline.

  ‘Oh, suit yourself!’ And while the young girls were rubbing sleep out of their eyes and preparing to return home, Colombel, annoyed at seeing them leave, ordered several shots of brandy, and then he tossed them down his bulging throat as the two sisters, tottering along, reached their lodgings, where they slept like babies, without even having had the energy to unlace their dresses.

  That evening old Vatard returned, in a very good mood at the thought that a rare lamb chop would be waiting for him on the table. The old man had spent the day at the home of his friend Tabuche, a carpenter whose first consideration once he found himself quite well-off had been to fall out with his missus and build himself a wine cellar. Vatard, acting the gallant, paid a number of extravagant compliments to his wife, who had a belly like a bass drum, then kissed his daughters, and, emptying his pipe on his thumbnail, shot a long spurt of saliva into the ash, dabbed it with his finger and rubbed it on his trouser leg so as to remove the nicotine stains with which it was speckled, then, collapsing into an armchair, legs spread wide, arms dangling, he sat in a state of blissful content.