The Collected Stories of Colette Read online

  Bastienne’s Child

  CHEAP-JACKS

  The Accompanist

  The Cashier

  Nostalgia

  Clever Dogs

  The Child Prodigy

  The Misfit

  FROM THE FRONT

  “La Fenice”

  “Gitanette”

  The Victim

  The Tenor

  The Quick-Change Artist

  Florie

  Gribiche

  PART III

  Varieties of Human Nature

  The Hidden Woman

  Dawn

  One Evening

  The Hand

  A Dead End

  The Fox

  The Judge

  The Omelette

  The Other Wife

  Monsieur Maurice

  The Burglar

  The Advice

  The Murderer

  The Portrait

  The Landscape

  The Half-Crazy

  Secrets

  “Châ”

  The Bracelet

  The Find

  Mirror Games

  Habit

  Alix’s Refusal

  The Seamstress

  The Watchman

  The Hollow Nut

  The Patriarch

  The Sick Child

  The Rainy Moon

  Green Sealing Wax

  PART IV

  Love

  In the Flower of Age

  The Rivals

  The Respite

  The Bitch

  The Tender Shoot

  Bygone Spring

  October

  Armande

  The Rendezvous

  The Kepi

  The Photographer’s Wife

  Bella-Vista

  April

  PART I

  Early Stories

  Born into an unmonied family, I never learned a métier. I knew how to climb, whistle, and run, but no one ever suggested that I earn my living as a squirrel or a bird or a deer. The day necessity put a pen in my hand, and in return for my written pages I was given a little money, I realized that every day thereafter I would slowly, tractably, patiently have to write . . .

  CLOUK/CHÉRI

  EARLY VERSIONS OF CHÉRI

  Chéri was first hatched as “Clouk.” When I gave birth to this beautiful young man—who would believe it?—he was ugly, something of a runt, and sickly, suffering from swollen adenoids. But I had a vague feeling that I would not form any attachment to this quasi-scrofulous child. Spurned and thin-skinned, Clouk awoke from a few months’ sleep, cast off his pale little slough like a molting snake, emerged gleaming, devilish, unrecognizable, and I wrote the first versions of Chéri without knowing at the time that a few succinct, casual stories would ripen and grow into two rather bitter novels.

  Colette

  Clouk

  THE OTHER TABLE

  “And what if I do look at them? They’re not going to eat me. Anyway, they really are characters. What happens to some women . . . it’s not funny! The fattest one is . . . what’s her name? Yes, I remember, I’ve seen pictures of her; even with hairstyles the way they were back then, she was very pretty. No, no champagne, it makes me bloated. Besides, we’re not setting up shop here: when I think I have to be at my singing lesson at nine in the morning, it’s not funny!”

  Clouk says nothing. He wipes his monocle with the corner of his handkerchief and at the same time closes his bad eye, which the lights in the restaurant, so white they are mauve, sting to the point of tears. It is only midnight, it is raining; the manager can tell there won’t be many for supper and divides his attention between the corner where Clouk has just sat down opposite the dazzling Lulu and the table where four women are noisily eating away . . .

  “Clouk, your nose!” prompts Lulu peremptorily. “I’m forever having to stop you from sniffling, and it’s not funny!”

  “I wonder what she does think is funny,” muses Clouk. But he keeps quiet, like a good little boy, docile and loving, and sighs cautiously, through his mouth, so as to avoid the imperceptible, irritating nasal “clouk” to which he owes his nickname. He looks at Lulu. She is all black fire, dark sheen; she makes one think of jet, of deep-red rubies. She took the time, after leaving the stage, to take off her makeup and then reapply it outrageously, as if ashamed of the freshness of her twenty-four years. Her eyes, her rather thick hair, which she does not dye, her teeth, all shine with insolent strength.

  Pearls and more pearls, a white dress which, in the style of the day, combines Louis XV panniers, a Directoire-style sash, Byzantine décolletage, and Japanese sleeves; on her head is a little black glengarry, which looks as if it is worth four sous, from which there rises an aigrette worth fifty louis. Her feet are not happy under the table because of two purple shoes with gold heels. But she no longer pays them any attention. Good heavens, one’s feet are always what hurt most when, for three hours every night, one treads the boards of a raked stage, when one is subjected to spiked heels during the day and to unyielding ballet shoes in the morning.

  For Lulu works. Four years have been enough to transform an undernourished dressmaker’s assistant into a highly paid star of the music hall. In order to become rich she acquired the taste for money, and hard work gave her a sense of pride. Lulu is as proud as any locksmith or electrician. Like them she says in a tough voice and with mock simplicity, “I’m not afraid to work.” She also says, “I didn’t know how to do anything, but I learned how to do everything!” She in fact sings, dances, and acts with a cinematographic spirit and swiftness that is already being called “the Lulu style” . . .

  “Now who’s looking at those silly women! Clouk, you must have some old relative in the crowd!”

  Clouk laughed stupidly into his glass and glanced at the neighboring table where there was some rather loud shouting going on over a broken glass. Two operetta singers, once notorious, were laughing through all their jovial wrinkles, across from a poor, graying bit player with a healthy appetite. The fourth woman is Léa de Lonval, overripe, enormous, and magnificent as a heavy fruit fallen beneath a tree . . . All four have given themselves over to the pleasure of eating a good supper unescorted, and drinking a champagne as celebrated as themselves. They form a well-heeled and cordial group of jewel-bedecked matrons. Clouk, listening to Lulu, turns his sickly little boy’s smile toward them, without doing it on purpose . . .

  “So, you see, Clouk, I’m not saying this play they’re bringing out for me this winter isn’t a marvelous play, not at all. But they’re telling me that if I do it, I’ll be considered a great actress overnight . . . As if I need them to be considered great . . . Which doesn’t change the fact that it’s a hopeless play.”

  “Yes?”

  “Hopeless. I read it. For example, at one point it says that Linda—Linda, that’s my role—Linda ‘feverishly paces the living room with long strides,’ and a little further on, ‘She runs after him, panic-stricken,’ and a little further than that, ‘Linda, raising her arms to the sky in a wide, imploring gesture . . .’”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you mean, ‘yes’? Oh, my poor dear, I can be talking to you about the theater, or literature, or anything serious, and you always have the same silly look on your face! You must understand that that scene, the way it is, can’t be done! Can you see me, in a day dress, pacing the stage ‘with long strides’? Can you see me, in that same dress, running after my lover ‘panic-stricken’? And then try, just try raising your arms ‘in a wide, imploring gesture’ with sleeves nowadays not having any seams at the shoulders! So I told them, I said to the authors, ‘I don’t care if your play flops, but I do not want to fall flat on my face, nor do I want to dress like Raymond Duncan! There would have to be changes, a lot of changes!’”

  “Yes . . .”

  “‘Yes’ . . . There’s one thing no one can take away from you, you are a gifted conversationalist!”

  Clouk keeps himself from sniffling and adjusts th
e monocle which he uses to hide a weak eye, smaller and paler than the other. He remains silent. What could he say? Lulu’s metallic voice, her gemlike dazzle overwhelm him. That is how she is, vigilant, merciless, with a tough youthfulness nothing can penetrate. She is not a monster, she is one of those terrible young girls of today, hard and narrow-minded. He has seen her cry, but with rage, during her lessons. He has seen her laugh, to make fun of him or a friend. She is thought of as sensual, but he knows very well that she displays her beautiful skin, white and blue like milk in shadow, coldly, and that this too is part of her “job.”

  Clouk can hear, striking against the lace-covered windows, the hissing of a winter downpour which has almost turned to sleet. He is thinking about getting home, about Lulu’s conjugal silence, the voice teacher coming at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, the masseuse who comes after him . . . As she does every day, Lulu will have that set, stern look on her face, darkened by important matters. As he does every day, he will wait until it is time for her to make her entrance, when her charming mouth flowers into fresh, aggressive laughter. He feels cold, a little ill. What he needs is . . .

  Clouk stares at the other table, the table with the old ladies. They laugh constantly, and perhaps for no reason, with that lightheartedness which comes to a woman when the peril of men has at last left her. Léa de Lonval, a colorful woman beneath her white hair, looks like Louis XV, and the older of the operetta singers has the sauciness of a racy grandmother. If Clouk dared, he would slip over to their table, all frail and small, squeeze in between those fat gossips’ arms, amid the rustling skirts and the doughy knees, and lean up against the ample shoulders, lost, drowned in that melting warmth of slightly senile nannies; he would warm himself, console himself for being the envied lover of Lulu, sparkling there in front of him like a frosty little tree . . .

  THE SCREEN

  When Lulu left him, Clouk did not give in right away to the stunned despair which dismays the very young. He went on with his life, going out to restaurants and bars, driving around in his car. His everyday little face seemed unchanged, clean and comical, his left eyebrow clamped down to hold his monocle in place, his fishlike mouth open slightly. As he was ordinarily quiet, no one noticed that he wasn’t speaking at all and that he was sniffling more often. He was conducting himself quite well. But the “close” circle of friends who were looking after him finished him off with enough sympathy to kill an ox. One would clap him on the back with the crude cordiality of a sergeant. One melancholy and sisterly friend discreetly informed him as to Lulu’s whereabouts and carryings-on, under the guise of “keeping things out in the open.” Without saying a word, the least cruel would hand Clouk a full glass . . .

  And so when his friends, gasping from self-sacrifice, wanted to return to their usual occupations, it was noticed that Clouk, drinking more, was not eating at all, and that his collars looked like hoops around the neck of a plucked bird.

  Clouk was suffering, still stunned. He did not dare say it, and he began confronting his interrogators with the smile of one whose feet have been stepped on while waltzing. His headstrong, youthful sadness knew nothing of the confidences in which the lyricism of old incorrigible lovers takes comfort. He believed he was hardly thinking at all, did not delude himself, and did not repeatedly whisper her name: “Lulu . . . Lulu . . .” But without knowing it, he endured a twofold pain. At times he would reel, light-headed, floating, as if blank forever; at times he would run away, hoping to leave far behind him, in the place he was fleeing, the intolerable memory.

  He ran into Lulu one night in the restaurant, accompanied by her new “friend,” and was quite proud of himself for feeling neither shocked nor heartbroken. But the next day, sitting in a music hall, he broke down in tears watching a clown who couldn’t free himself from a piece of flypaper; and his circle of friends, rising up as one, scorned Clouk to the point of dropping him altogether. Only the sisterly and melancholy friend named Eva stood by the sniffling, phlegmy Clouk, calling him “poor thing.”

  “You poor thing, I can’t stand seeing you like this anymore. Let’s go have a smoke.”

  “A smoke of what?”

  “Opium.”

  “Oh, no . . . no opium.”

  Clouk still remembered, after one try—three pipes following a heavy dinner—a severe case of indigestion. But his consoler’s authority left him no room to argue, and less than an hour later Clouk, undressed, shivering under a kimono, was lying down on a thin mattress covered with a white mat, cold and smooth to the touch like the skin of a lizard.

  Across from him, on the other side of the lacquered tray, he could see Eva fussing about, stout and heavy in her Japanese dress, with her dyed hair hanging across her unpowdered cheek, suddenly affectionate with that bizarre motherliness of women opium smokers: “Wait, you’re not comfortable . . . This cushion here under your head . . . Oh, he’s so pale, a real Pierrot . . . You’ll feel better in a minute . . . I’ll turn off the ceiling light. As you can see, it’s not set up as an opium den; most of the time, it’s my little living room.”

  Clouk, lying on his side, clenched his teeth to keep himself from shivering, or crying, or talking. His eyes wandered from the ceiling hung with fabric to the cheap plaster Buddha, dark against the bright wall, then returned to the three luminous, living blazes formed by Eva’s face and deft hands in the shadows. The little oil lamp, beneath its crystal hood, also caught his eye and he blinked, bothered by the short flame, without the strength to turn his head away . . .

  “Wait,” said Eva, “I’ll cover the flame for you. Would you like the butterfly, or the spider, or the little moon?”

  With the tips of her fingers, she turned the tiny screens of colored glass, jade, and horn around the globe of the lamp. Clouk was silent, intimidated, and tired, and the screens passed between him and the flame like the figures of a new and incomprehensible game . . .

  Hearing the drop of opium sizzle, he leaned back on his elbows. His hands were shaking so badly as he took hold of the bamboo that he burned his first bowl somewhat, and his throat filled with acrid smoke.

  “Very clever,” said Eva without impatience. “Here, let me fix you another.”

  Clouk, having lain back down, breathed in the smell of the opium, surprised to find it agreeable, comestible, soothing.

  “You understand . . .” he began despite himself.

  Eva merely nodded and he ventured on. “You understand, don’t you? I haven’t been eating or sleeping much lately. When you’re worrying yourself sick . . .”

  She interrupted him by offering him a second pipe, which he exhausted with one long inhalation, without taking a breath, and his consoler, who knew the price of silence, whistled softly to express her admiration.

  Lying back on the mat, Clouk repeated slowly: “You understand that since . . . since it happened, it’s been as if I have nothing of my own. It’s strange, I can’t get it into my head that I still do have things of my own, even my money, since . . . well, since then. You see, I . . . I’m worried . . .”

  Already intoxicated, Clouk spoke with childlike sweetness. Several more times he said, “I don’t have anything of my own . . . of my own . . .” then was quiet, and stopped the pathetic shivering, the tightening of his stomach muscles, and the flexing of his toes. He sat up for a third pipe and lay back down once more, happy to be thinking again at last, lucidly assessing his lovelorn misery, assimilating it to his utter destitution. A mellifluous murmuring of rising water filled his ears, and his entire body, healed, experienced the sensation of a lukewarm bath, whose liquid density would lift him . . . He did not think of Lulu’s apparition, and did not call it forth, but the successive settings of their life as lovers rose with singular and progressive strength. Clouk, motionless, his eyes half open and dead, was reveling in the heightened colors of Lulu’s little living room, the deep greens of a garden at a spa. A gnarled old wisteria clung to the pitted wall of a tower; Clouk followed the tortured vine of the clambering trunk, coun
ted the flowery clusters, inhaled their acacia-like fragrance . . .

  Other landscapes appeared, without Lulu in them, but as if still fragrant with her passage, and all of them, vast or intimate, were inscribed in the nacreous little moon, in the tiny screen hooked on to the lamp . . .

  “Clouk, are you asleep?”

  Clouk heard but did not answer. Even if he had wanted to, he would not have been able to turn his eyes away from the transparent disk of lustrous mother-of-pearl. But Eva’s hand, bumping the lamp, made the screen slip off and Clouk groaned, wounded by the naked light.

  “There, there, shhhh . . . I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  The pink penumbra once again veiled the flame, and Clouk’s eyelids moistened, brimming with well-being. Borne along with the murmuring of the rising water, he was slipping off to a black and priceless sleep. “Nothing of my own?” he said to himself without moving his lips. “No more mistress, no more home?” He smiled, or thought he smiled, and took pity on himself for having cherished and regretted such perishable belongings, since now he possessed, beaming gently within reach of his eyes and his fingers, milky, iridescent, deliciously round, huge as a star, no bigger than a precious coin, the little mother-of-pearl moon, the opaline satellite of the opium lamp.

  CLOUK ALONE

  “You rats! You can’t, you can’t desert me like this!”

  “We most certainly can! Stop, Clouk, you’ll tear my coat . . . Make him stop, can’t you see I can’t raise my arms in these sleeves!”

  The small woman struggles, and Clouk holds on to her with the sticky perseverance of a tipsy man. He is only a little drunk, and besides, the fine rain showers his damp forehead, the warm rims of his ears . . .

  “You’re not going to desert me too, are you? You’re more loyal than that!”

  The circle of friends dwindled despite Clouk’s entreaties. He latched on to two “loyal” friends whom he succeeded in detaining for twenty minutes on the main staircase of his residence, then for a good quarter of an hour on the divan in the front hall. He still hopes to keep them awhile on the terrace, despite the damp night, the wind shaking the roasted chestnut trees . . .