The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  While Céline had been with him he’d said to himself: ‘My God, how annoying she is! Ah, it’ll be good riddance if she leaves me.’ Now that she was gone he was overwhelmed, like a man who feels himself abandoned. The prospect of remaining here in this room, alone, as he had in the past, horrified him. He saw rising up before him the unending heartbreak of those painful evenings in which one evokes the joys of dead love affairs, the mortal anguish of those moments when, tired out after a day’s work, one has neither courage nor strength, when one falls asleep listlessly in an armchair, feeling half ashamed to go to bed before nightfall. The loneliness he’d borne so proudly in the past now made him cry out in fear. He knew in advance that he was beaten. He saw himself for months to come haunted by regret, incapable of producing anything, and he thought of the misery induced by failure, of the revulsion and despondency that follow those struggles in which one fights without any hope of winning.

  Ah, his pride was cut to the quick. And yet, when he thought of Céline, he no longer had a vision of the woman who’d so unworthily deceived him, he no longer saw in her anything but the sensual and sweet mistress. He had a sudden realisation of the injustices and the cruelties he’d committed; he reproached himself for his facetiousness, his haughty caresses; he acknowledged that he’d been wrong, that he should have excused her ridiculous expressions and tastes on account of her high spirits. He felt tender towards her, was not far short, frankly, of adoring her, but then in a sudden flash the memory of her betrayal struck him. He remembered Céline’s outburst that she would rather be beaten than be treated like a pathetic idiot, and for a minute he regretted not having satisfied this masochistic urge of hers; then he became calmer, admitting that he could never have consented to slap a woman, and, undressed and seated in bed, he recalled the indignities his other mistresses had visited on him.

  ‘Clémence, ah yes, she left me without even writing; Suzanne, I never knew why; Héloïse, because I kept a close watch on her; Eugénie, because I didn’t keep a close watch on her!’ And he repeated melancholically to himself: ‘When I think that Héloïse, who was so proud of her upbringing, contrived to pilfer my boxwood face-powder casket and that I’ve never heard a word from her since, I’ve no right to get angry with Céline who, in spite of not having two sous to rub together, never robbed me of anything.’

  And overwhelmed by all these memories of broken liaisons he was stirring up, moved by all these faces passing before his eyes, smiling when in the bedroom and spitting abuse in his face when they left him, he blew out the lamp.

  ‘I’m so stupid,’ he murmured, ‘it shouldn’t surprise me. Since it goes without saying that all women behave badly when they dump us, the good Lord himself wouldn’t expect Céline, who was the most uncouth of them all, to have shown any more consideration than the rest. To be fair, that wouldn’t have been very realistic.’ And he added with a forced smile: ‘Even so, it isn’t very funny; I’m going to miss that girl, I think I’m going to miss her silliness. Ah, damn it, I really wish it were two months from now.’

  XX

  ‘It’s possible,’ replied Ma Teston, ‘but if you continue to harass me like that, I’ll have you sacked by the boss.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Chaudrut answered simply, leaning back a little and slipping his hands inside the cord he was using for a belt.

  Ma Teston immediately turned her back on him and headed towards the boss’s office.

  The supervisor, who’d gone out more than two hours ago, returned with a heavy basket in her arms. All the women ran over to her crying: ‘Let’s see!’ The supervisor lifted the towel covering the wicker basket to reveal twelve flat plates, six soup plates, two hors-d’oeuvres dishes, a round platter, a salt shaker, a mustard pot, and a large soup bowl.

  ‘It’s porcelain!’ blurted fat Eugénie.

  ‘Well, do you think that when I want to make people happy,’ exclaimed the supervisor, ‘I wouldn’t buy them the best?’

  The service was passed from hand to hand. Some of the bindery women held the plates up to see the daylight through them, others tapped them with their fingernails and listened carefully to hear if they were cracked; all left their black fingerprints on the shining enamel. As it was being circulated the soup bowl was almost dropped. The supervisor immediately stopped the procession of porcelain unfurling from one end of the workshop to the other, and with a thousand precautions, piled these fabulous products from Montereau and Creil back in her basket, which she placed next to her chair where she worked.

  ‘Désirée is going to be very chuffed!’ said Céline. ‘That’s a beautiful wedding present you’re giving her, ma’am.’

  ‘She’s getting married? So what?’ chimed in the girl suffering with her teeth, ‘what’s so great about that? My word, you’d think it was something amazing. All this fuss over nothing. The firm wouldn’t give as much as a radish to us, if like Désirée we wanted the luxury of pissing out legitimate babies in the future!’

  ‘To you, certainly not,’ replied the supervisor, ‘no one’s going to make any sacrifices for a drudge like you!’

  The girl was going to reply, but someone alerted her that a well-dressed woman wanted to see her.

  She returned a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a lilac polka-dot camisole.

  ‘That was the old trout dropping by,’ she replied to fat Eugénie’s questions. ‘She asked me why I didn’t go to the Young Women’s Catholic Association meeting on Sunday; meetings my eye, I don’t care about them. I let her rabbit on; I said I’d had stomach cramps, and she fell for it. She even gave me this camisole.’

  The whole workshop burst out laughing.

  Ma Teston, who was slowly shuffling back in, was outraged. ‘When a person plays the little hypocrite like you, the least they could do after having swindled a charitable woman is not call them an old trout.’

  But apart from one or two girls who didn’t breathe a word, everyone else approved this way of behaving.

  ‘Well, too bad for her,’ exclaimed one, ‘why do these ’ere prudes come round bothering us anyway?’ ‘Serves ’er right,’ cried another, ‘what a disgusting bunch they are. She came sniffing round to see if she could smell a man on you. That sort spend every morning ogling young men on the sly, and every evening living it up at their posh parties. No thank you. We don’t need leeches like her.’

  ‘Hey, Old-Ma-Morality,’ said Chaudrut, ‘how did your audience with the president go? Is it today they’re going to give me my cards?’

  ‘Monsieur isn’t there,’ snorted Ma Teston angrily, ‘but rest assured you’ll get what’s coming to you.’

  Then a joke that had been going round the workshop for the last year and a half was repeated, that Chaudrut had fallen in love with Ma Teston and was only waiting for her to be widowed in order to ask for her hand.

  The old woman was outraged.

  ‘Him! Him! A good-for-nothing of his sort! Oh dear me, no, I’d rather do anything than that!’ And sure of hitting him where it hurt she cast a scornful glance at Chaudrut and said: ‘Why, he’s old enough to be my father!’

  ‘Marry you? Not on your life!’ riposted the old man, stung by this reference to his advanced age.

  But as always the supervisor intervened.

  ‘Now then, back to work! Really, no one does a thing anymore. On the flimsy pretext of drinking to Auguste’s health, every man and woman here has been boozing for the last week. But since he’s married what’s the use of that now? Not to mention the fact that I’m certain someone’s fricasseed Puss-puss; it’s a long time since anyone’s seen him and I’m not blind, there are people here whose hands are covered in scratches.’

  She was interrupted by the rollers of the folding machine striking the tables. ‘There she is!’ exclaimed a group of women, and Désirée, all perky, made her entrance.

  The supervisor gathered up her basket and placed it on the table in front of the young girl, who blushed, stepped back, clasped her hands together, then threw her
self into the arms of the supervisor, almost suffocating her with hugs.

  ‘Oh, I’m so happy, oh, yes I am!’ she repeated, quite choked. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ And she reverently delved in the hamper, gingerly taking out the hors-d’oeuvres dishes, lifting the lid of the soup bowl, pulling out the salt shaker, which she held by the tip and swung gaily around in the air. ‘Ah, a mustard pot!’ And the mustard pot was passed around the women; they examined the slot, fashioned in the edge of the lid to hold a little spoon; they enthused over the elegance of this lid, topped with a dainty little knob so you could lift it.

  Dusk was beginning to creep slowly into the workshop. Through the murky windows a pale, faded daylight spread over the tables, unfurled into shadowy corners, dying in a final burst on a bed of yellow paper trimmings.

  To the protests of the supervisor, who was annoyed at watching them loaf about, the women, gathered in a circle and whiling away the time, replied that they could no longer see to work.

  So someone hollered for a man who came with his wax taper, and all the gaslights blazed, casting the laughter of their fire over the penetrating melancholy of the approaching night.

  Everyone returned to their seats.

  ‘So the wedding’s set for Saturday next?’ said the supervisor.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ replied Désirée.

  The supervisor bent over her work and quietly asked herself this question, which she’d never been able to answer in the thirty years she had worked at the bindery:

  ‘Girls who go out on the binge are nearly always terrible workers; those who don’t, earn good money but then they get married and become worse than useless because they no longer come to work at all. What can be done?’ And, rethreading her needle, she went on: ‘That’s another fine binder gone. Once she’s married, Désirée will be like all the others, she’ll give up her job; I’ll have to find some decent young girl as a replacement.’And at the thought of the search she’d have to make in order to unearth one, she shook her head and sighed a sigh that spoke volumes.

  “After two silently smoked pipes, he would put Eulalie to bed, and, in a bad mood, yawn until ten o’clock…” (here) A dry-point by Jean François Raffaëlli used in the illustrated edition of Les Soeurs Vatard (Ferroud, 1909).

  “Putting on his coat, he followed the crowd of workers who were all leaving in a group; he caught up with Désirée at the doorway and suggested they walk back together…” (here) A dry-point by Jean François Raffaëlli from the illustrated edition of Les Sœurs Vatard.

  Publicity poster for the Theatre Delille.

  Publicity poster for the Folies-Delille. Bobino.

  A contemporary illustration of a brocheuse, or worker in a book bindery.

  A contemporary caricature of Zola and the Naturalists entitled Zola and his school. Caricatures of this period were often extremely graphic and scatalogical, with pigs, merde and chamber-pots frequently being used as symbols associated with Zola and the other Naturalists.

  The publisher of Les Sœurs Vatard, Georges Charpentier (1846-1905).

  Dedication page of Pierrot sceptique, signed to Georges Charpentier by Huysmans and Léon Hennique in 1881.

  Part of the first page of the manuscript of Les Sœurs Vatard.

  Notes

  I

  39 …All right, ladies, a little quiet. This phrase is repeated almost word for word a number of times, showing that even though Huysmans was consciously situating his book within the conventions of Naturalism in terms of its subject matter, he was also self-consciously stylising aspects of the novel in a non-Naturalist way at the level of language. Huysmans frequently used the repetition of words and phrases both in his prose poems and his novels to achieve a certain kind of literary effect.

  39 …He died, that soldier sto–ic. Lines from a popular song about one of the heroes of the French Revolution, General François Marceau (1769-1796). The refrain runs: “He has gone, that soldier stoic/To fight against Kings on the Rhine/Singing loud and proud/Long live the Republic!” Although the song is specifically about the French Revolution, the reference to the Rhine would no doubt have had a more contemporary significance given the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war.

  40 …Have pity on my suff–er-in’. These lines are adapted from a popular patriotic song, La fille d’auberge (The Barmaid), written by Gaston Villemer and Lucien Delormel, which laments the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. The song is about a serving maid in an inn near Alsace who turns away German soldiers saying that they only serve French soldiers and that one day the Germans will be chased out of Alsace.

  41 …But whether the branches. These lines are from another popular ballad, L’Amour n’a pas de saison (Love knows no season).

  II

  45 …Débonnaire & Co. Huysmans’ idea to use a bookbindery as the backdrop for his novel was no doubt inspired by the bookbinding firm owned by his family, and which he inherited after his mother’s death. See the introduction for more details.

  45 …wicker-hamper of fat. Huysmans uses the word gabion in the original, which was an early form of sandbag, being a large wickerwork cylinder, about two feet in diameter and three or four feet tall. They were used to form barriers around trenches by filling a row of them with the earth that had been dug out.

  47 …a dicky stomach and could no longer drink. In the original Huysmans uses the phrase estomac en meringue, an expression meaning to have a stomach as weak and fragile as a meringue.

  49 …the Hospital Sisters of Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve. In the original Huysmans refers to it by its shorthand name Dames Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve. He mentions the same institution in La Cathédrale, L’Oblat and Les Foules de Lourdes, mostly in relation to the statue of the Vierge noire (the Black Virgin), which was housed there.

  50 …that slut. In the original Huysmans uses the word volaille, which literally means ‘fowl’ or ‘poultry’, but which in the nineteenth century was also slang for a prostitute or a woman of easy virtue.

  51 …patting his thigh with his hand flat. Although this insulting gesture isn’t used today, it seems fairly clear that it has a sexual meaning, equivalent to ‘Screw you!’ or ‘Fuck you!’

  52 …after the model of Delaroche’s. Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) was a French painter renowned for his large historical and religious canvases. His iconic Virgin at the foot of the Cross, or Mater dolorosa, was painted in 1858 and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

  52 …toddlers sliding around on their backsides. In the original Huysmans uses the expression, se frottant à l’écorche-cul, the definition of which is given in La Flore pornographique, a glossary of phrases and bits of slang used by the Naturalists, and published in 1883 by Antoine Laporte, under the pseudonym Ambroise Macrobe.

  53 …Chez Ragache. This was a cabaret near the Barrière du Maine, 53 rue de Sèvres, that specialised in cheap meals. The establishment was also mentioned in Les Excentriques (1852) a collection of literary portraits by Jules Husson (1821-1889), who wrote under the name of Champfleury and was an influential figure in the Realist movement.

  54 …cheap wine. Huysmans uses the word campêche, the name of a tree from which a red colouring was produced. According to Argot and Slang: A New French And English Dictionary of the Cant Words, Quaint Expressions, Slang Terms and Flash Phrases used in the High and Low Life of Old and New Paris by Albert Barrère (London: Whittaker, 1889), the term campêche was commonly used to signify ‘bad wine, of which the ruby colour is often due to an adjunction of logwood’.

  55 …a glass of Rigolboche and something to eat. In the original Huysmans uses the term lichoter un rigolboche. Although this is defined in Albert Barrère’s Argot and Slang as ‘to make a hearty meal,’ the expression could equally refer in this case to an actual drink of the period called a ‘Rigolboche’. Huysmans also used the term lichoter, a slang word for drinking, in Marthe (1876), and he mentions Rigolboche as an alco
holic drink in one of his early prose pieces L’Ambulante (published in La Cravache parisienne in December 1876 and reprinted in Croquis parisiens, 1880), where he points out an advertising slogan for it on the wall of a cabaret in the Place Pinel. The drink, a kind of cherry liqueur, was named after a popular Parisian dancer, Marguerite Badel (1842-1920), who was nicknamed ‘Rigolboche’ and renowned for her cancan during the Second Empire. As the phrase is a little ambiguous and supports both interpretations I have included a reference to both drinking and eating.

  55 …wheel-of-fortune. The word tourniquet in the original makes reference to a wooden game of chance that drinkers would sometimes use to determine who would pay for a round.

  63 …the Banquet d’Anacreon. Formerly situated at 47 Boulevard Saint-Martin, the Banquet d’Anacreon combined entertainment and food. William Makepeace Thackeray mentions it in a letter of 1850 to Mrs Brookfield: ‘The Banquet d’Anacreon is a dingy little restaurant on the boulevard where all the plays are acted…’

  63 …the Mille-Colonnes. Situated at 20 Rue de la Gaité, Montparnasse, the Mille-Colonnes was a dance hall-cumrestaurant, with the dance hall on one side of the garden and the restaurant on the other.

  63 …the Grados dance hall. The Bal Grados was a low-class dive on the Rue de Gaité. Huysmans also mentions it in a piece he wrote for Le Gaulois in June 1880, and André Gill, in his Correspondance et memoirs d’un caricaturiste (1840-1885), remembers that the Rue de la Gaité used to be ‘the liveliest street in the world’, and that the Bal Grados was a ‘rollicking dance hall’.

  64 …put a spoon in each glass. Another instance of Huysmans’ attention to detail, spoons being placed in glass before pouring in a hot liquid in order to prevent the glass cracking.

  III