The Last of Cheri Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Colette

  Title Page

  The Last Of Cheri

  Copyright

  About the Book

  At the end of Chéri the young Chéri left his aging mistress Léa on the eve of his marriage. Having served in the army during the war Chéri returns to Paris haunted by memories of his carefree youth and the bounty of his benevolent mistress. In the post-war 1920's he finds it impossible to settle down to a new life with his efficient and entrepreneurial wife and friends.

  As his looks and his reputation begin to deteriorate Chéri7#8217;s life is thrown into crisis as he attempts to recapture the contentment and companionship of his luxurious youth. As Chéri and Léa confront each other, and the changes a decade has wrought on their lives and their looks, Colette displays the incredible sensitivity and insight for which she is justly famous.

  About the Author

  Colette, the creator of Claudine, Chéri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy in 1873, into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she was brought to Paris by her first husband, the notorious Henry Gauthiers-Villars (Willy), writer and critic. By dint of locking her in her room, Willy forced Colette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. But their marriage (chronicled in Mes Apprentissages) was never happy and Colette left him in 1906. She spent the next six years on the stage – an experience, like that of her early childhood, which would provide many of the themes for her work. She remarried (Julie de Carneilhan ‘is a close a reckoning with the elements of her second marriage as she ever allowed herself’), later divorcing her second husband, with whom she had a daughter. In 1935 she married Maurice Goudeket, with whom she lived until her death in 1954.

  With the publication of Chéri (1920) Colette’s place as one of France’s prose masters became assured. Although she became increasingly crippled with arthritis, she never lost her intense preoccupation with everything around her. ‘I cannot interest myself in anything that is not life,’ she said; and, to a young writer, ‘Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you’. Her rich and supple prose, with its sensuous detail and sharp psychological insights, illustrates that personal philosophy.

  Her writing runs to fifteen volumes, novels, portraits, essays, chroniques and a large body of autobiographical prose. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died was given a state funeral and buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  ALSO BY COLETTE

  Fiction

  Claudine and Annie

  Claudine Married

  Claudine in Paris

  Chéri

  Gigi and The Cat

  Chance Acquaintances

  Julie de Carneilhan

  The Ripening Seed

  The Vagabond

  Break of Day

  The Innocent Libertine

  Mitsou

  The Other One

  The Shackle

  Non-Fiction

  My Apprenticeships and Music-Hall Sidelights

  The Blue Lantern

  My Mother’s House and Sido

  The Pure and the Impure

  THE LAST OF CHÉRI

  Colette

  TRANSLATED BY

  Roger Senhouse

  CHÉRI CLOSED THE iron gate of the little garden behind him and sniffed the night air: ‘Ah! it’s nice out here!’ In the same breath, he changed his mind: ‘No, it isn’t.’

  The thickly planted chestnut trees weighed heavily upon the heat pent up beneath. A dome of rusted leaves vibrated above the nearest gas-lamp. The Avenue Henri-Martin, close-set with greenery, was stifling; only with the dawn would a breath of fresh air come up from the Bois de Boulogne.

  Bare-headed, Chéri turned back to look at the house, empty now but still lit up. He heard the clink of roughly handled glass, followed by the clear ring of Edmée’s voice, sharp with reproof. He saw his wife come to the window of the gallery on the first floor and lean out. The frosted beads on her evening dress lost their snowy whiteness, caught for a moment a greenish glint from the lamp, then flamed into yellow as she touched the gold lamé curtains.

  ‘Is that you on the pavement, Fred?’

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘You didn’t take Filipesco home, then?’

  ‘No, I didn’t; he’d hopped it already.’

  ‘All the same, I’d rather have liked . . . Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Are you coming in now?’

  ‘Not just yet. Far too hot. I’ll just stretch my legs.’

  ‘But . . . Oh well, just as you like.’

  She broke off a moment, and must have been laughing, for he could see the quiver of her frost-spangled dress.

  ‘All I can see of you from here is a white shirt-front and a white face cut out on black. Exactly like a poster for a night-club. It looks devastating.’

  ‘How you adore my mother’s expressions!’ he said reflectively. ‘You can tell everyone to go to bed. I’ve got my key.’

  She waved a hand in his direction. He watched the lights go out one by one in all the windows. One particular light – a dull blue gleam – told Chéri that Edmée was going through her boudoir into their bedroom, which looked out on the garden at the back of the house.

  ‘The boudoir will soon come to be known as the study, and no mistake,’ he thought.

  The clock of Janson-de-Sailly began to strike and Chéri cocked his ear to catch the chiming notes in flight, like drops of rain. ‘Midnight! She’s in a hurry to get to bed. . . . Yes, of course, she has to be at her Hospital by nine tomorrow morning.’ He took a few nervous steps, shrugged his shoulders, and grew calmer.

  ‘It’s as if I’d married a ballet-dancer. Nine o’clock sharp, the class: it’s sacrosanct. It has to come before everything else.’

  He walked on as far as the entrance to the Bois. The day’s dust, hanging in the pallid sky, dimmed the brightness of the stars. Step for step, a second tread echoed Chéri’s: he stopped and waited for it to catch up with him. He disliked anyone walking behind him.

  ‘Good evening, Monsieur Peloux,’ said the night-watchman, touching his cap.

  Chéri answered by raising a finger to his forehead with the condescension of an officer – a trick he had picked up during the war from his fellow quartermaster-sergeants – and walked on past the night-watchman, who was trying the locks on the iron gates to the little private gardens.

  From a couple of lovers on a bench just inside the Bois came the rustle of crushed clothes and the whisper of smothered endearments. Chéri listened for an instant to the clasped bodies and invisible lips, a sound like the ripple of a ship’s prow cleaving calm waters.

  ‘The man’s a soldier,’ he noticed. ‘I’ve just heard him unbuckle his belt.’

  He was not thinking, which left his every sense on the alert. On many a calm night during the war Chéri had derived complex pleasure and subtle terror from his primitive keenness of hearing; his fingers, even when caked with mud and pocket fug, had been quick to distinguish the image on medal or coin, and to tell, by leaf or stalk, plants whose name he did not know. ‘Hi, there, Peloux lad, just tell us what I’ve got a hold of here?’ Chéri recalled the ginger-headed lad who, under cover of darkness, would push into his hand a dead mole, a small snake, a tree-frog, an over-ripe fruit, or some piece of filth, and then exclaim, ‘Blimey, he gets it every time!’ The memory made him smile, but with no pity for the ginger-headed lad, now dead. Yet he was haunted sometimes by th
e picture of his pal Pierquin, lying there on his back asleep for ever, with a look of distrust still on his face. He often spoke of him.

  This very evening, at home, when dinner was over, Edmée had deftly steered the conversation round to the pathetic little tale, put together with such studied clumsiness. Chéri had it off by heart and it ended with the words: ‘And then Pierquin said to me, “I had a dream about cats, old lad; and then I’d another dream about our river at home and it looked fair mucky. . . . The meaning of that’s pretty clear. . . .” It was at this very moment he was picked off, by the smallest scrap of shrapnel. I wanted to carry him back. They found the two of us, him on the top of me, not a hundred yards from the spot. I tell you about him because he was a rare good sort . . . and he had quite a lot to do with my being given this.’

  And, as he ended on this modest note, Chéri had lowered his eyes to his green-and-red riband and knocked the ash off his cigarette, as though to keep himself in countenance. He considered it nobody’s business that a chance explosion had thrown one of them across the other’s shoulders, leaving Chéri alive and Pierquin dead. The truth – more ambiguous than falsehood – was that the terrific weight of a Pierquin, suddenly struck dead, had kept Chéri alive and half-suffocated, indignant and resentful. Chéri still bore a grudge against Pierquin. And, further, he had come to scorn the truth ever since the day when, years ago, it had suddenly fallen from his mouth like a belch, to spatter and wound one whom he had loved.

  But at home this evening, the Americans – Majors Marsh-Meyer and Atkins, and Lieutenant Wood – had not appeared to listen to him. With the vacant faces of athletic first communicants, with fixed and expressionless eyes, they had simply been waiting to go to a night club, waiting with almost painful anxiety. As for Filipesco! ‘Needs watching,’ Chéri decided laconically.

  The lake in the Bois was encircled with a fragrant mist that rose rather from the scythed slopes of its banks than from the stagnant water. Chéri was about to lean against a tree, when, from the shadows, a woman boldly brushed against him. ‘Good evening, kid . . .’ The last word made him start; it was uttered in a low parched voice, the very voice of thirst, of dusty roads, of this dry hot night. . . . He made no answer, and the dim figure came a step nearer on soft-soled shoes. But he caught a whiff of black woollens, soiled linen, dank hair, and turned back with long springy strides towards his own home.

  The dull blue light was still on: Edmée had not yet left her boudoir study. In all probability she would still be seated at her desk, signing chits for drugs and dressings, reading through the day’s notes and the short reports made by her secretary. Her pretty school-marm head, crimped hair with a reddish tint, would be bent over her papers.

  Chéri pulled out the small flat key on the end of its thin gold chain. ‘Here we go. In for another carefully measured dose of love. . . .’

  As was his habit, he entered his wife’s boudoir without knocking. Edmée showed no sign of surprise, but went on with her telephone conversation. Chéri listened.

  ‘No, not tomorrow. . . . You won’t want me there for that. The General knows you perfectly well. And at the Ministry of Commerce, there’s . . . What do you mean? “Have I got Lémery?” No, certainly not! He’s charming, but . . . Hullo? . . . Hullo? . . .’ She laughed, showing her small teeth. ‘Oh come! that’s going too far. . . . Lémery makes up to every woman, provided she’s not blind or lame. . . . What? Yes, he’s come in, he’s here at my elbow. No, no, I’ll be very discreet. . . . Goodbye. . . . See you tomorrow. . . .’

  A plain white wrap, the white of her pearl necklace, was slipping off one shoulder. She had taken the pins from her chestnut hair, which, slightly frizzed by the dry atmosphere, followed every movement of her head.

  ‘Who was that?’ Chéri asked, as she put back the receiver and turned to ask him:

  ‘Fred, you’ll let me have the Rolls tomorrow morning, won’t you? It will look better for bringing the General back here to lunch.’

  ‘What General?’

  ‘General Haar.’

  ‘Is he a Boche?’

  Edmée frowned. ‘Really, Fred, you’re too old for such jokes! General Haar is coming to inspect my Hospital tomorrow. Then he can go back to America and tell them all that my Hospital can compare with any effort of the sort over there. Colonel Beybert will be showing him round, and they’ll both come back here for luncheon afterwards.’

  Chéri took off his dinner-jacket and sent it flying in the direction of a chair.

  ‘I don’t give a damn! I’m lunching out.’

  ‘What d’you mean. What’s all this?’

  A spasm of rage crossed Edmée’s face; but she smiled, picked up the dinner-jacket with care, and changed her tone of voice. ‘Didn’t you ask me a moment ago who that was on the telephone? Your mother.’

  Chéri collapsed into an armchair and said nothing. His features were set in their most beautiful and impassive mould. Over his forehead hovered an air of serene disapproval. This was apparent, too, on his lowered eyelids, faintly shadowed now at the approach of his thirtieth year, and on his mouth, which he was careful never to compress too tightly, keeping his lips gently apart as in sleep.

  ‘You know,’ Edmée continued, ‘she wants Lémery, of the Ministry of Commerce, to do something about her three cargo-loads of leather. There are three ships filled with leather, at present held up in harbour at Valparaiso. There is something in the idea, you know! The only thing is that Lémery won’t grant the necessary import licence . . . at least, that’s what he says. Do you know how much money the Soumabis offered your mother as a minimum commission?’

  With a wave of the hand, Chéri brushed aside ships, leather, and commission.

  ‘Not interested,’ he said simply.

  Edmée dropped the subject, and affectionately approached her husband.

  ‘You will have luncheon here tomorrow, won’t you? There’ll probably be Gibbs – the reporter from Excelsior, who’s going to photograph the Hospital – and your mother.’

  Chéri shook his head with no sign of impatience.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘General Hagenbeck –’

  ‘Haar.’

  ‘. . . and a Colonel, and my mother in her uniform. Her tunic – what d’you call it? her jacket? – with its little leather buttons; her elastic uplift-belt; epaulettes; high colonel’s collar and her chin cascading over . . . and her cane. No, really, I don’t pretend to be braver than I am. I’d rather go out.’

  He was laughing quietly to himself, and his laugh seemed mirthless. Edmée put a hand, already trembling with irritation, upon his arm; but her touch was light.

  ‘You can’t mean that seriously?’

  ‘Certainly I can. I shall go for lunch to Brekekekex, or somewhere else.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘With whom I choose.’

  He sat down and kicked off his pumps. Edmée leant against a black lacquer cabinet and racked her brain for words to make him behave sensibly. The white satin front of her dress rose and fell in rhythm to the quickened pace of her breathing, and she crossed her hands behind her back like a martyr. Chéri looked at her with an air of pretended indifference. ‘She really does look a lady,’ he thought. ‘Hair all anyhow, in her chemise, on her way to the bath – she always looks a lady.’

  She lowered her eyes, caught Chéri’s, and smiled.

  ‘You’re teasing me,’ she said plaintively.

  ‘No,’ Chéri replied. ‘I shan’t lunch here tomorrow, that’s all.’

  ‘But why?’

  He rose, walked as far as the open door into their room – which was in darkness and filled with night scents from the garden – and then came back to her.

  ‘Because I shan’t. If you compel me to explain myself, I shall speak out and perhaps be rude. You’ll burst into tears, and “in your distress”, as the saying goes, you’ll let your wrap slip to the floor and . . . and unfortunately it won’t have the slightest effect on me.’

  Another spasm o
f rage passed over his wife’s features, but her much-tried patience was not yet exhausted. She smiled and shrugged the one bare shoulder peeping from under her hair.

  ‘It’s quite easy to say that it won’t have any effect on you.’

  He was walking to and fro, clad in nothing but his short white silk pants. All the time he was testing the elasticity of his instep and calf muscles, and kept rubbing his hand over the twin brown scars under his right breast, as if to preserve their fading hue. Lean, with less flesh on his body than he had had at twenty, at the same time in better shape and training, he liked to parade up and down in front of his wife as a rival rather than a lover. He knew himself to be the more perfect specimen and, as a connoisseur, could condescend to admire in her the slim hips, the small breasts, and the graceful, almost imperceptible lines which Edmée knew so well how to clothe in tubular frocks and slinky tunics. ‘Are you fading away, then?’ he would sometimes ask her, just for the fun of annoying her. He would watch her whole body writhe in anger, and note its sudden and unsuspected vigour.

  This reply of his wife’s was distasteful to him. He wanted her to look well-bred, and to be silent, if not unresponsive, in his arms. He came to a halt, puckered his brow, and looked her up and down. ‘Pretty manners, I must say. Do you learn them from your Physician-in-charge? The war, Madame!’

  She shrugged her bare shoulder.

  ‘What a child you are, my poor Fred! It’s lucky we’re by ourselves. To go on at me like that just because of a little joke . . . which was really a compliment. And for you to try and teach me manners, you . . . you! And after seven years of marriage!’

  ‘Where do you get the seven years from?’

  He sat down, naked as he was, as though for a prolonged discussion, his legs wide apart with all the ostentation of an athlete.

  ‘Well . . . really . . . nineteen-thirteen . . . nineteen-nineteen . . .’

  ‘Excuse me! it’s clear that we don’t reckon by the same calendar. Now, I count from . . .’

  Edmée arched a knee, taking the weight of her body on the other leg, a confession of her weariness; but Chéri interrupted her with: ‘Where’s all this talk leading us? Come on, let’s go to bed. You’ve got your ballet-class at nine tomorrow, haven’t you?’