The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  A stream of words gushed from her mouth; she made Cyprien dizzy with her street patter, with the profusion of details she babbled concerning the bodice. After a few days, he almost regretted the generous impulse that had led him to open his drawer; one evening, he couldn’t take it any more, he told his mistress to go to the devil.

  Scenes like this were repeated. After numerous trips to the shops and despite merciless haggling, Céline discovered that her dress would cost her a lot more than she’d thought. It was then that she poured her bile over the whole household, on her father, on her mother, on her sister. Her mother didn’t even notice; Désirée, whose mind was elsewhere, was scarcely bothered; only Vatard received the full blast of these ice-cold showers. He summed up the situation like this:

  ‘I have two daughters; one of them doesn’t want to get legally married to anyone, and she’s even more unbearable than the other, who would like to marry but can’t. It’s so depressing…I don’t know what to do!’

  XIV

  Indeed, what could he have done? Everything was against him. The weather was turning bad. Summer was coming to an end. Autumn was brutally settling in over the smoking city, with its louring skies, its gloomy afternoons, its evenings drowned in rain. At six o’clock he had to light the lamp. Désirée and Céline would come back from the workshop dirtier than a dog’s backside, and immediately start to shake and scrape the mud off their clothes so they could go out again all the more quickly after supper.

  Showers trickled down ceaselessly. So Vatard sat for hours on end at the table, not wanting to go out, and Désirée had to wait, head in hands, until he was finally taken with an urge to go for a walk. If by chance he did decide to put on his walking boots, Désirée would dart out behind him, running breathlessly to meet Auguste who, shivering with cold, had been strolling up and down the road for the last twenty minutes.

  He took her to the nearest bar and they agreed, now that the evenings were turning bad, to meet there in the back room.

  But this dump, which had been almost empty the night the conscript had paid for the drinks, was now overflowing with layabouts and tarts. It became impossible to talk, or even to kiss each other. They changed venues. The bars were full everywhere. They decided to search further afield and to visit, each time they met, somewhere more deserted. Sometimes they unearthed disreputable cabarets almost completely devoid of customers, but little by little even these filled up, and even though they took refuge in dark corners, they were dogged by coarse laughter, by drunken men causing disturbances and getting into fights, by vulgar streetwalkers joking about their pleasures; by common assent they ended up leaving, disgusted, earlier than usual.

  After evenings such as these, Désirée would return home unsettled and annoyed, and Auguste, aroused in spite of it all by the filthy comments he’d heard, would act like a beast. Distrusting his urges, he would only go to meet her after he’d satisfied himself; even so, he thought that no man in his place, not even Joseph, would have acted with so much restraint; nevertheless, he tried to convince himself that, loving Désirée as he did, if she had yielded to him things would no longer have been the same; it seemed to him that if he’d already had her, he’d have savoured the kisses she let him have less.

  But despite all his precautions and all his rationalisations he still desired her physically, and it was exacerbated by the difficulty of seeing her and talking to her alone.

  Désirée was suffering as much as he was, and one evening, her powers of resistance coming to an end, she would have given herself to him if he hadn’t hesitated, if he hadn’t taken fright at the last moment.

  He had finally persuaded her, after lengthy pleading, to go to a hotel room he’d rented for two hours. She was still hesitant about going there, fearing some mishap, but it was drizzling and the bars were overflowing. She let herself be dragged there; she wanted to cry as they went up the stairs. When they entered the room, Auguste placed some wine and crackers on a round, marble-topped table. The hotel clerk brought them two glasses. Désirée sat by the hearth and withdrew into herself, hunched over, her head bowed, her feet propped on the rungs of the chair.

  At the sight of those four walls which had seen so many transient assignations, so many bestial couplings, so many miserable nights; at the sight of that fire which sputtered and smouldered without drawing, of those paltry flames that flickered round badly laid logs, licking a fireback untainted by ashes, a great shiver ran down their backs.

  Like a psalm of lamentation, the sepulchral horror of furnished hotels rose up from this sordid pigsty. It was as if all of Auguste and Désirée’s soulful thoughts of passion and tranquillity had been butchered. The young man poured some wine for the girl, but she wasn’t thirsty; he quickly knocked back several mouthfuls, went over to where she was seated and, his cheeks flushed, his hands trembling, abruptly pulled up her dress. She suddenly realised what was happening. She struggled against him, crying: ‘I don’t want to, leave me alone!’

  He let her go, ashamed of his violence, and begged her to forgive him, never suspecting that, aroused as she was, she would have given herself to him if only he’d seemed determined to take her.

  That evening gave Désirée something to think about. In spite of all her long-held good resolutions, she would have been lost if Auguste had been bolder. She admitted that she’d lost control of herself for a moment, and now she remembered the remark Céline had made one evening: ‘Men are so stupid; if they knew, we’d be undone quicker than they ever thought possible.’ In any case, now that her reason had returned, she vowed never again to expose herself like that, never again to agree to a meeting except in the street or in the crowded room of a bar.

  Their relations became strained after this attempt on her virtue. Auguste no longer dared to hold her too close and she held herself back. Nevertheless one night they were able to spend a whole evening together. Vatard had a ticket to the Cháteau-d’Eau theatre and would certainly not be back before midnight. They wandered over to the Gaité quarter, but those pleasures which they’d been deprived of and which they’d anticipated for so long, seemed to them to have died. Not knowing what to do, they went over to Gagny’s, to the Mille-Colonnes dance hall. But the crowds circulating in the narrow strip reserved for dancing just seemed sullen to them.

  One of Hervé’s quadrilles started up, a spicy dance, just the thing to make you grab a woman, a fiery music conjuring up rolling, swaying hips, petticoats flung over heads, legs swinging and kicking at the sky.

  The dancers moved and turned with a bored air. While the trills of flutes were pirouetting over the blare of the brasses, while the bass drum was stabbing the whip-stitch of its beat over the increasing din of the orchestra, Auguste waited in vain for the whirlwind of arms cutting through the air and spiralling around thighs, around thrust-out breasts, around churning feet skating across floorboards, arms stretching out and tweaking the noses of dancing girls. But the couples barely gyrated at all, moving gently about, trying not to sweat.

  The spectators, seated at tables along the sides of the dance hall and up in the gallery, seemed equally downhearted. Entire families stared at each other with a gloomy air, drinking without enthusiasm, coming to life only to cuff some brats who were dancing around and falling over, feet in the air, in the middle of the couples.

  Everyone seemed to be in a torpor; you’d have sworn they were all maudlin drunks. In one corner a policeman, still standing to attention, was dozing beneath his helmet, and the man in charge of collecting money was calling the dances in a forlorn voice. Auguste and Désirée went and sat at a table and ordered a bowl of salad. The water the waiter poured on their absinthe was cloudy and their wine bitter. They didn’t have the spirit to shake off their malaise and dance a polka together. They left, disheartened, and walked aimlessly down the Boulevard de Montrouge to the Avenue du Maine.

  Four days later, Désirée was suffering for it and had to keep to her room. She had caught a bad cold from her evening tramping throu
gh dirty streets. Despite swallowing pills and pastilles, imbibing malva-leaf infusions and herbal tea, soothing syrups and linctuses, her cough wouldn’t go away. She made use of this enforced rest to repair her old clothes and to help her sister tack her new dress together.

  But she got extremely bored, especially on Sunday. Céline, however, kept her company; for the past week her lover had been in the countryside, on the lookout for rundown, dilapidated landscapes, and she too determined to profit from this delay and work on her outfit. Seated by the window, they would cut, slash and sew, from time to time looking up and staring through the glass. A late burst of sunlight dappled the road here and there, dousing its pale rays in the bellies of puddles. Parisians were taking advantage of this final bright spell to go out into the countryside one more time. Trains were leaving for Versailles every ten minutes. Open-topped buses, heaving with people, were being buffeted by a wind that whipped women’s faces and ruffled their skirts. Hunched over their seats, eyes squinting, one hand on their hats, umbrellas between their legs, hordes of passengers were rolling along in a cloud of smoke and dust. The whirr of all this activity unsettled the two sisters. That happiness people feel who, after having suffered all week long behind a counter, close their shutters on a Sunday and forsake the pavements where, on warm evenings from Monday to Saturday, they settle themselves on chairs and watch their children; that enthusiasm shopkeepers have for frolicking around in the open air in places like Clamart, that idiotic pleasure they get from carrying picnic baskets slung on poles, from those snacks wrapped in greaseproof paper eaten on the grass, from those return trips holding bunches of wildflowers, from all that cavorting around, all that shrieking and stupid shouting on the way, those unbuttoned jackets, those rumpled clothes, those shirts ill-tucked into trousers, those loosened corsets, those belts let out at the waist by several notches, all those games of hide-and-seek and chase amid shrubberies stinking of the meal’s thrown away leftovers, made them envious.

  They were jealous of these people’s good fortune, not doubting for a moment that they were happier than themselves. They began to lose heart, no longer replying to the hellos and hulloos yelled by travellers in train carriages, turning their heads away when pairs of lovers smiled, overjoyed at going off to blow all the money they’d earned during the week on a slap-up feast.

  For lack of anything better to do, they would study the trains down to their last detail, the glistening of the brass handles on their carriages, the air-bubbles in the glass of their windows; they heard the telegraph-like click-clack, that gentle sound wagons make when they glide past pushed by workmen; they reflected on the different coloured smoke emitted by the engines, fumes that would vary from white to black, from blue to grey, and that was sometimes tinged with yellow, the thick, dirty yellow of the sulphur springs at Barèges; and they would recognise each locomotive, making out its nameplate, reading on its flank the factory where it had been made: at the workshops and yards of Océan, or of Cail and Co., or at the engineering factory in Graffenstaden, or at Koechlin’s at Mulhouse, or Schneider’s at Creusot, or Gouin’s at Batignolles, or the Claparède works in Saint-Denis, or the Fives-Lille group of Cail, Parent, and Schalken and Co.; and they would point out to each other the differences between all these beasts, the weak and the strong, the small ones without tenders for the suburban lines, the huge brutes for hauling freight.

  Their attention settled on an engine that had come to a halt, and then they watched the monstrous machinery of its wheels, the movement of its pistons going into the cylinders, slow and silent at first, then with increased force, the rapid in-and-out strokes, the whole frightful confusion of cranks and rods; they watched the flashes coming from the firebox, the discharges of steam from pressure valves and blow-off pipes; they heard the jolt of the locomotive as it started to move, the staccato blasts of its whistle, its shrill cries, its raucous panting.

  They would feel a childish joy whenever they noticed one, a very small one, reserved for moving merchandise in the station yard and working on the track, a dinky locomotive, smart and elegant, with its iron roof to shelter the stokers and its huge cab-windows at the back.

  This one was their favourite. From having often seen it zigzagging and meandering round and whistling cheerfully at the signals, they had taken a fancy to it. In the mornings, when they got up and half-opened their curtains, the little locomotive would be there, alert and spruce, smoking away silently, and they would laughingly say hello to it.

  But this particular Sunday, the ‘kid’ as they called it, had remained in its shed. There were only some enormous brutes near the roundhouse, their grilled bellies being picked clean with long rods. Céline and Désirée were bored to death. Moreover, the younger girl was furious. She’d scrutinised the bridge opposite to see if Auguste was there. No Auguste. She resented the fact that he couldn’t even be bothered, and, as she had a sudden fit of coughing just then, she decided it was his fault she was ill, and she told herself he had really been out of his senses to drag her round the streets like that, in all weathers.

  XV

  Auguste was in a deep gloom. First his meetings with Désirée had been interrupted, and now he had another cause for concern. His mother was becoming increasingly ill. She needed a break, a respite from going to buy food, from cooking, from breathing fumes from the fire, from doing the laundry; above all she needed company. She had suddenly come to detest the Rue du Champ-d’Asile. The windows of her apartment overlooked Montparnasse cemetery, and the lushness of its trees and the stark whiteness of its tombs, which in the summer had given her so much pleasure with their nests of warbling birds and their dense tangle of plants, now cast an incurable melancholy over her spirit. Auguste was in a very difficult position. The good woman adored him as all mothers do their only son, and he loved her with the grateful affection of a man who dimly recalls the tremendous struggle against poverty endured by a woman widowed at a youthful age and left with a child to raise. He had to make a decision and be quick about it: a doctor was consulted. He finally decided to settle her with one of his aunts who owned a run-down cottage with a small garden near the Rue de Picpus. The neighbourhood was somewhat dismal, but the little house was sunny and flowery, and once there, no longer finding herself alone, she wouldn’t be in danger of lacking any care during the day if her illness unfortunately became more serious.

  But for him, however, life was going to be hard. The distance between Picpus and the Saint-Sulpice quarter was long, though the additional fatigue of having to travel further mattered little to him. The big difficulty to resolve was that of his meetings with Désirée. They were already too short, even though both of them lived in the same quarter. Now they would only last a few minutes, the little time they had to spend together must necessarily be taken up in coming and going. Not to dine at his mother’s and have to sit in some dive until Désirée was free was too much to bear; besides, the poor woman was so unhappy when she didn’t see him sitting next to her with his soup in front of him, that he couldn’t really imagine depriving her, suffering as she was, of this little pleasure. His mother was moreover like all old women who have lost their appetite and are disgusted by the sight of food; she felt sick when supper was placed before her, and, in spite of the doctor’s advice, she wouldn’t have touched her meat at all if Auguste hadn’t gently coerced her into sucking the blood from a rare cutlet, even if it meant spitting out the piece she had in her mouth when she couldn’t swallow it.

  Auguste was like all people who, after having prevaricated for a long time, suddenly come to a decision. He wanted the move to be completed without delay. He put a notice on the door saying the apartment was available to sublet for six months, borrowed a small cart, and, with the help of his friends, loaded it up with furniture; he harnessed himself to the straps and with the others pushing and stopping at every corner for a drink he trundled his furnishings and his goods, step by step, that very morning.

  Besides, he’d easily obtained permission to come t
o the workshop two hours late. The foreman thought highly of him. Despite his lack of knowledge of bookbinding practices, he possessed at least one good quality: that of only rarely failing to show up for work on a Monday morning and being neither insubordinate nor rude; moreover, his affair with Désirée had made him more interesting. Everyone knew of Vatard’s refusal to let him marry his daughter and everyone thought he was in the wrong: not only those who were less scrupulous, but also upright individuals such as Ma Teston and the supervisor. If they’d had a daughter to marry off themselves they probably wouldn’t have given her to Auguste, but not being directly concerned in the matter it amazed them that a father could be so hard-hearted as to let two lovers languish like that. A folk-memory of novels and songs lamenting the misfortunes of couples in love surged up within them, without them even being conscious of it. The snivelling sentimentality of the common people revealed itself; Vatard became a monster to them and they would all have helped Auguste deceive him if need be.

  No one was surprised, therefore, that Auguste chatted for hours with Céline, who served as an intermediary; in the morning giving the young man news about Désirée, explaining that they’d put a mustard poultice on her chest, that she was doing fine, and that she’d be able to go out soon; and in the evening, recounting what she’d learned about Auguste to her sister, that he was unhappy not to see her, that he was more in love with her than ever.

  Céline also informed her about Auguste’s change of address. Désirée was somewhat irritated that he’d acted in this way without telling her first. She couldn’t understand the old woman’s aversion for her apartment and became alarmed, unjustly fearing that her lover was seeking an excuse to see her less often, struck by the terrible thought that, having been unable to seduce her, he was gradually trying to break with her. But all her suspicions vanished when she saw him again. He seemed so happy and kissed her with such feeling that she felt guilty for having suspected him and was more charming and sweet to him than usual. The intimacy that had existed between them and which, despite all their efforts, had never been the same since he’d tried to touch her up in the hotel, resumed again as if nothing had come between them.