The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Pierre-Séraphin Vatard had married young, to a woman who was quite jolly in her good moments, but bloody-minded at others. All in all, he’d been lucky. Eulalie was a bit cantankerous and capricious, but at bottom she was a spirited, if unintelligent girl. She had brought only two children into the world: Céline and Désirée. Vatard was happy to have fathered girls, and not wanting to risk having a boy he turned a deaf ear to the promptings of his nocturnal appetites. Deep down, he’d always been a circumspect, gentle man, and would have been a perfect husband if it wasn’t for his complete indifference to the thousand and one problems of life and his invincible laziness when it came to overcoming them. What he wanted was a life of idleness and peace. He’d been happy living with her, giving in to his wife’s demands, replying: ‘Yes, dear’ to everything she said, and so, all things considered, she pampered him, letting him live on the few sous she’d been left after the death of her brother, a tanner who made sheepskin saddle blankets in the old Faubourg Saint-Marceau quarter. The only arguments that occasionally arose between them took place at night, when they couldn’t sleep. They were becoming embittered, lying there staring into the blackness of the bedroom: him, suffering from rheumatism with no hope of a cure; her, already feeling the first symptoms of an enormous dropsy.

  The two big afflictions that, one after the other, had delivered a terrible blow to this easy, carefree existence he was promising himself were caused by his wife’s illness and Céline’s amazing appetite for running after men. But after a fit of depression, he quickly consoled himself. Désirée was old enough to look after him and to replace her mother, and, as for the other, the best thing to do was to shut his eyes to her escapades. Besides, he had acted as a father should: he’d reproached her for what the courts would have called ‘the dissoluteness of her morals’, but she’d become angry, had thrown the whole household into disarray, threatening to wreck everything if he annoyed her again. Vatard had then adopted a more indulgent approach, and anyway his daughter’s tremendous gift for the gab kept him distracted while he digested his food in the evening. He even began to regard her as being very lively, very exuberant. With her slangy street expressions, her mannerisms picked up in some disreputable dance hall and her laugh of a girl who knew life, she reminded him of his youth and of a certain mistress he’d almost fallen in love with. At the time when he was counting on marrying her off, these traits, like those of a female docker, had given him some anxiety. Céline would have scared off any respectable suitors, but now, given the fact that she was happy living like a right slut, it was better that she was amusing, and not nasty and mean like all those girls embittered by celibacy. As for Désirée, Vatard would let her do as she thought fit, provided she took care of his meals and didn’t run out the house as soon as night fell. There was little to distract him in the company of his wife, who would sit riveted to her easy chair, mutely suffering. The unfortunate woman lived with her mind in a daze and said not a word. And added to which, she spoiled his appetite with her constant look of anguish and the way she had of letting her stew grow cold in her dish.

  This particular evening, poor Eulalie sat without stirring, watching her husband with an unflinching gaze that embarrassed him. Désirée was dozing in a chair, Céline was pacing listlessly from stove to window. The leg of lamb was overcooked. Never had his daughters been in such a state. The older girl, who’d stayed out all the night the day before, and who, in order to rest her partied-out legs had strained her arms the following evening at work, basted the roast with a trembling hand, spilling the sauce over the edge of the plate, and spattering herself with grease from top to toe. The younger, who had only just stood up, had collapsed again on a chair and, eyes closed, her nose nestling in her shoulder, shivering and ill-at-ease, was snoring slowly; as for Vatard, he was smoking his pipe feeling sorry for himself; a smell of burning came from the kitchen; finally Désirée woke with a start, rubbed her eyes energetically and laid the table. The meal was tense. Annoyed, the father kept his silence, the daughters tapped at their plates and ate distractedly. When the dessert had been gulped down, it was the turn of the father to doze and the daughters to wake up.

  Céline heated some water for coffee. At that moment the darkening sky rumbled, violent squalls shook the house from attic to basement and swirls of wind rushed down the chimney, forcing smoke from the fire into the room. Suddenly, everyone was up on their feet and rushed to the windows to open them. ‘By heaven,’ said Vatard, ‘if this weather continues the Testons won’t come,’ and he rested his elbow on the frame of the window with the satisfaction of someone who feels sheltered and who wouldn’t be upset to see others get soaked. ‘The main thing is that they should have left home by now,’ he thought. ‘All the same, they must be feeling a bit rum being out on the street in weather like this!’ The rain got heavier, cross-hatching the whole street with its grey diagonals; blasts of wind were lashing the slates of the roofs, making them rear up into the air and shatter on the pavement with a sharp crack; at intervals, squalls of rain would fling themselves against a cornice and then burst, exploding into a fine spray. One could hear the patter of the water against the windowpanes, the hiccupping of streaming gutters, the dull moaning of blocked water-spouts, the trill from the throats of overflowing drainpipes gushing onto the pavement, pouring continuously onto tiles, reviving the faded ochre of the walls, staining them with dark blotches, teeming down sometimes with the din of an avalanche, sometimes with the sizzle of a hot frying pan.

  Vatard was beginning to enjoy himself inordinately. He was watching some passers-by hurrying as fast as their legs could carry them: the women, splashing along, hair glued to their foreheads, the brims of their hats wilting; the men, running so fast their heels were hitting their backsides and causing trousers as stiff as boards and topcoats stuck to hips to flap, trying to protect hats the glue of which was seeping out; then, a bit later, when all these unfortunates had disappeared and the street was deserted, Vatard delighted in listening to the plaintive song of the gargoyles, the retching sound of badly welded downpipes.

  At that moment the Testons appeared in the distance: the wife, her dress lifted up to her knees, squelching through puddles in waterlogged shoes, the husband, bent double, hunched against the rain, dragging his other half behind him. Vatard was gazing at a cast iron drainpipe that had split. Water was splashing, leaking out in a white spray through its cracks, frothing into soapy bubbles, blossoming into white roses, then all these watery flowers broke up and fell into a sheet of unspeakably dirty water, while fresh ones bloomed anew only to shed their petals once more in a murky spittle.

  ‘If they come past on this side of the pavement, they’ll be for it,’ Vatard said to himself, but the unfortunate couple couldn’t see they were walking straight towards the waterfall. They were tottering along, eyes closed, blinded by the rain and deafened by the wind, which was jerking around the old umbrella onto which they were clinging. They held each other by the arm, hanging onto one another at every gust, lowering their heads, splashing their legs, mopping their necks. Just as they were sinking into this lake of mud, they reached the curb and passed by the pipe. Their umbrella crumpled and resounded like a drum, the husband and wife swore, she, losing her shawl, hitching her clothes up almost to her waist, him, wrestling with the flapping umbrella. A gust of wind cut across the street at an angle, buffeting the wife’s ringlets and surging into the umbrella which, ceasing to shelter its owner, caused him to receive the whole deluge from the overflowing gutters right on top of his skull. Teston danced like an idiot beneath the shower, and his wife, exasperated, the strings of her bonnet whipping against her cheeks, swore and cursed, swallowing wind and rain, calling her husband a good-for-nothing imbecile. Vatard was splitting his sides with laughter when the couple knocked at his door. ‘Oh what weather! what weather!’ the wife exclaimed. Teston didn’t say a word, his hair streaming, he had water up his nostrils and was sniffling, pitiful and grotesque, with his hat in rags and his shoes squirtin
g out a spoonful of dirty water with every step he took.

  ‘Wait, Madame Teston,’ said Céline, ‘I’ll go find you a jacket and some slippers.’

  ‘And you, my old friend,’ proffered Vatard, ‘do you want an overcoat?’ But Teston declared that he didn’t need anything, except something hot to drink; he huddled in one of the nooks by the fireplace and there, pulling out a checkered handkerchief, he mopped his head. His wife unfastened her clothes; she angrily took off her shawl, once white but now dirty brown like a dishcloth ready to be wrung out. Turning her back to the fireplace, her meagre figure, swaddled in a mass of undergarments, was reflected in the mirror, and, thin as a rake, it stretched out like those interminable barley-sugars that fez wearing carnies drape over metal rods with bells on, at fairs out in the suburbs. The arc of her shoulders descended in a sharp slope down to her hips, which furrowed her slip and joined to form a small shapeless backside, braced by two long stays. The water had soaked her through, from top to toe; she wiped herself more or less dry, showing off, as her arms were to-ing and fro-ing, her rib cage. They wrapped her up as best they could in one of Désirée’s old nightgowns, and, squatting in front of the fire, she undid the laces of her boots. The polish had run and the leather had shrivelled and was sticking to her feet. Vatard had to give her a hand, and, between two puffs of his pipe, he pulled them off for her. Then she let out a long anguished wail, her stockings were in such a sorry state. The whole of the toe end seemed to have been soaked in a bath of ink, the stain growing lighter or changing colour the closer it got to the leg, black turning to brown and brown turning to yellow; at the instep, the stain was bigger but no darker than pale gray. Teston’s wife slipped on some old, mismatched clogs and, her nose in her handkerchief, her body shattered, she stared at the fire, which was burning noisily, blazing hot and high, crackling in a volley of tiny explosions.

  A gentle warmth filled the room; the curtains had been drawn, Désirée had put an old handtowel under the door to stop drafts and a great sense of well-being, a warm drowsiness overcame them. Désirée prepared some hot wine in a pan and Vatard, happy to think that he wouldn’t be obliged, like the Testons, to get up and dash through the streets to get home, looked with visible satisfaction at his friend, whose coat and boots were giving off clouds of smelly steam.

  No one said a word. Vatard was beaming with happiness, Ma Teston was thinking about her ruined bonnet, her husband about his wife’s murderous mood, Céline about her lover, her mother about nothing at all, and Désirée about the wine, which she had over sweetened.

  Then tongues began to loosen. The men talked between themselves, the women spoke to each other about their friends at the bindery.

  Madame Teston affected a boundless delight on learning that Désirée would no longer be paid piecework but by the hour, insinuating that if only she’d been a bit more cunning, she’d have been able to get a rate of thirty centimes instead of twenty-five and a half. She went on about it so much that the young girl, who had previously been delighted by her success, agreed that perhaps she’d been stupid and she ended up feeling completely dissatisfied with the raise she’d been given.

  And while the women were chatting away, Vatard, brandishing his pipe at each word, was shouting:

  ‘A wife is the saviour of the working man, that’s what I say,’ then he spoke pitifully about Tabuche, who had separated from his wife. Now that he was ill, he stayed at home, alone, like a poor dog. He had an abscess on his finger, a nasty infection as everyone knows, and he was going to be reduced to having himself looked after by the nuns of Saint-Thomas on the Rue de Sèvres, who could cure it without operating.

  Teston’s wife also knew a man who’d had a bad infection on his thumb. He’d stuck it into the backside of a frog and the pain had diminished the further his thumb went in; he was cured now, but the frog was dead.

  Vatard didn’t think much of this particular remedy; he even maintained that it was a joke, but the old lady swore on the head of her mother that she had this story from the very person to whom it had happened.

  The upshot of this discussion was that it was always better not to call a doctor when you were sick. Tabuche was right to go to the nuns. Doctors lanced these kinds of abscesses only on the poor. As for the rich, if they couldn’t be cured without being butchered they wouldn’t send for them, and then they’d lose their practices.

  Céline then came up with the novel idea that families who are comfortably off are happier than those who own nothing.

  Everyone agreed. After a short silence, as if it had some connection with his friend Tabuche’s abscess, Vatard resumed the conversation: ‘I was on the Rue de Rennes today and I met the Thomassins’s former maid. She has a position now in the house of an engineer and she buys him brandy at six francs a bottle…’

  ‘For a bottle? Unbelievable!’ exclaimed Teston’s wife.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ replied Vatard, and he shook his head, not listening to Céline who was laying into one of her companions who she’d met in a dive in Montparnasse, cavorting around, legs in the air and arms dangling.

  ‘A girl who respects her family can go and dance at the Banquet d’Anacreon or the Mille-Colonnes, but she doesn’t go to the Grados dance hall. What a notorious pick-up joint that is!’

  But old Teston was describing the discovery of a little girl of nine who had been found, raped and murdered, at the bottom of a well. Then all their conversations blended into one, and everyone briefly bewailed the unfortunate child’s fate.

  As for Vatard, he doubted that the story was true. ‘It’s the police,’ he said gravely, ‘they want to distract public opinion.’

  ‘Or it was the Jesuits,’ murmured Madame Teston, who was an anticlerical. As for the girls, they believed it had happened.

  But what moved Teston’s wife the most, and what made the story more horrible and more fascinating, was not so much the slashed throat of the child or the outrage she’d endured, it was the fact that her knickerbockers had been ripped by a brutal hand and had exposed her poor little naked belly. She went into transports over these knickerbockers, saying that she was obviously the daughter of someone rich, a prince or a duke, those kind of men were so depraved, you only had to read novels to know that.

  Désirée put a spoon in each glass and poured the wine, a fringe of pink foam forming round the rim. They all clinked their glasses, and between two mouthfuls Ma Teston added: ‘And to think that we were exposed to that kind of thing when we were children…’

  At that moment the rain began to fall again, and the windows groaned under the force of the wind. ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ said Teston, ‘we should be going.’ His wife put on her barely dry things, laced up her shrivelled boots, and, cursing the weather, she kissed the girls and said she’d see them the next day at the workshop; then as they disappeared to view, splashing and grumbling into black squalls of rain, Céline said to her sister:

  ‘He’s not so bad is he, Colombel?’

  ‘Him!’ replied the other, laughing, ‘he’s not much of a looker.’

  ‘By God, you’re hard to please you are; I’m not saying he’s handsome, but he’s not an ugly boy either,’ and as her sister didn’t respond, she added: ‘So he’s not the one to make you happy?’

  ‘Definitely not!’ said Désirée. ‘Are you in…I’m blowing out the candle… one… two… three…’And the room went dark.

  III

  Céline’s first lover was called Eugène Tourte. Tall, dark and handsome with a sardonic air and winning eyes, he drove her crazy with his wandering hands and suggestive jokes that went too far. It had been hot that night. By the side of a secluded path, near two clumps of trees that faced each other and bowed in the wind like saucy couples clowning around during the quadrille in some cheap dance hall, she succumbed; she didn’t, as was customary, hide her face in her hands, but simply closed her eyes, she fell without hesitation and got up without shame. She was surprised. Now that her curiosity was satisfied, she no
longer understood why women became so passionately attached to men. So it was for this, it was for these gropings and these pangs, it was for this momentary agitation, this cry wrenched from a shudder, that they would weep and let themselves be beaten by the toughest of the muscle-bound workmen at the bindery. Oh, how stupid! But then, little by little, she listened to the revelations of her flesh, its mounting desires, irritating and insistent; then she understood the faint-heartedness, the weakness, the furious desperation of a girl. She became insufferable. This explosion of affection, which made her bill and coo and swoon like an idiot, exasperated her lover, who, after having first beat her black and blue with his cane, left her and went to work in another bindery on the Right Bank.

  Next she chose Gabriel Michon as her master, a bald shrimp of a man with the chubby cheeks of a cherub and the rheumy eyes of a drunk. This one kicked her backside with his boots from the very first night; then two others replaced him, sharing the temporary night camp of her favours between them, but they left her by common accord after a quarrel that ended in them giving her a cuffing and buying each other copious rounds of drink, while she, nursing her cheek, opened the floodgates and wept. There was a short respite, then Anatole joined the workshop as a press setter, and, after they’d fooled around a few times in dark corners, they became lovers one day when it was raining and he offered to go and get her some tripe for lunch.

  In truth, all these impetuous love affairs were ruining her looks and did little to satisfy her. All these comings and goings, these pirouettes with one, these tumbles with another, resulted in a cycle that went from bad to worse and from worse to bad. This one would swindle her out of her money and drink it down with another girl; that one would beat her to a pulp, mocking her, making as if to hit her, making her so scared that seeing him roll up his sleeves she’d squeal like an animal about to have its throat cut. In the end, slaps in the face, kicks in the rear, such was her lot in life: the man was stronger or weaker, the thrashing more or less intense, but that was all. Anyway, it was only to be expected. Céline didn’t have that slutty look that delights a man. She was pretty, if a bit affected, chic, an attractive girl even, with that delicate, almost unsettling thinness of girls who have been corrupted before their time, but the louts at the bindery preferred those enormous sows whose clothes split under the ponderous weight of their flesh, who jeered haughtily with laughs that shook their double chins and made their bellies dance.