“I understand. But how does the little Brueghel painting fit in?”
My friend lowered her eyes. “Well . . . You can imagine what disorder the ceremony was thrown into by my attack of nerves and my fainting spell. As she was fanning me and making me breathe smelling salts, my mother said to Aunt Olga, the dead man’s wife . . .”
“The wrong dead man?”
“No, the right one! Heavens, you are so annoying! . . . She said to my Aunt Olga, ‘It’s grief . . . shock . . . my poor little girl is so sensitive, so loving . . .’ A month later, Aunt Olga sent me this Brueghel ‘as a memento’—it still makes me feel ashamed—’as a memento of Uncle Poittier, whom his little Valentine loved so much.’ What could I do? Admit I had gotten my uncles mixed up? I kept the Brueghel. It’s so pretty . . .”
My friend picked up her tea napkin to gently wipe the gilded snow of the Nativity, and let out a sigh in which I tried to hear as much remorse as delight.
The “Master”
Here? Yes, we have a hole here, yes, obviously, a hole . . . Think of a stone torn from a wall, huh? The couturier looks in my direction for a nod of approval. Shall I bow to this image, this bold new image? I feel detached: I slip him my best confraternal smile. He scares me a little—but less than he scares my friend Valentine, standing fervently before him. But then, I’m not the one he’s dressing. I have no reason to assume that anxious and abandoned look, the look of the voluptuous victim . . .
My friend Valentine appalls me. She dangles her bare arms, and when the “master’s” despotic forefinger points at her, she imperceptibly tightens her elbows against her sides. I feel like telling my friend, “Come now, pull yourself together, he’s your dressmaker!” But she would answer back, still more vanquished, “Exactly!”
Moreover, the master shows an almost exaggerated, I was going to write: squeamish, discretion. It is with a distant, seemingly magnetic, index finger that he commands his client’s revolutions. She turns, takes a step forward, and stops, mesmerized—he does not even graze the material of the dress. Perhaps this extreme reserve is not an affectation at all. Around us I hear an exclusively feminine hum; in the warm, dry air I breathe in mixed perfumes, and that of my friend Valentine, décolleté, is fresh and strong—and I think of a confession from my corset maker, who flees her apartment at night and goes out, sick to her stomach, to have her dinner in a restaurant. “After all those fittings, Madame, I can’t bear to eat at home. It smells too strongly of women at the end of the day, it ruins my appetite.”
This is the first time I’ve come here with my friend Valentine, who, of course, has her dresses made by a “master couturier.” I study the “master,” who returns the compliment. He busies himself with Valentine, but I am the one he wants to impress. He takes his time with her, he ignores his other impatient subjects—he poses, not quite knowing whether what I am making of him is a flattering portrait or a caricature . . .
He’s a rather small man, well dressed, neither young nor old. His jacket is dark, his tie severe. Nothing aggressive about his clothes or his shoes, no jewelry. One doesn’t think of looking for what there’s too much of, but rather for what’s missing. He’s missing . . . a little of everything: three inches in height, as much in width, and then one would like more decisiveness in the nose, a more adventurous chin. He’s arrogant without being authoritative, and his ferrety gaze deliberately loses all its expression when it fixes on something. I wonder why it is he seems disguised, from head to foot: his face looks as if it doesn’t belong to him.
“A hole,” repeats Valentine devoutly, “yes, a hole . . .”
She nervously fingers the small lace fichu pinned to her shoulders, crumpling it in her hand over the by-now-famous “hole,” high on the waist, beneath the breast. The rest of the dress is a close-fitting shift, in a singular shade of mauve, which turns blue when the folds of transparent silk are gathered. There is also a small sprinkling of long pearls at the bottom of the tunic, and some sort of ragged piece of material, without any definite purpose, which trails off to the side onto the carpet. It is an “important” dinner dress.
“Wait! Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”
The master steals off with a malicious little hop and reappears, preciously cradling what he needed to fill in the hole: a green flower, made of knitted wool, from which hangs a ludicrous cluster of blue cherries, made of knitted wool, topped by three black leaves—made of knitted wool.
“There!”
He plants the thing in the hollow of the décolleté bodice, and quickly pulls away his hand, like a cat that has burned its paw, and laughs an odious, theatrical laugh.
I look in the triple mirror at my friend Valentine. She has not batted an eyelash and, with the tips of her fingers, pushes up the knitted object, the horror, which is a disgrace to the mauve dress. Without hiding the sickness I feel, I also look at the master, who winks and leans his head to the side like a satisfied painter: I detest fools . . .
Very calmly, and in my honor, the master begins his recitation on the needlework so dear to our grandmothers, he sings the praises of naïve Tunisian crocheting and touchingly old-fashioned macramé—for these unsophisticated ornaments he claims a place of honor on our dresses of woven air and flowing water. Predictably, he uses words like “innovation,” “amusing attempts” . . .
“We are a ‘young house’ but we are prepared to attack everything routine. No respect for our elders. You, Madame, who are an artist, don’t you like this youthful enthusiasm which laughs while trampling on the established customs of austere couture—and which sometimes makes mistakes, heaven knows—but who else will jump into the breach and forge ahead?”
He slips away again, without waiting for an answer. And while silent young girls bustle about to get my passive and charmed friend dressed again, he calls out the procession of models for us—for me!
One after the other, in the dreary elegance of the white salon, the models dance the steps to the “mermaid on her tail fin” and the “upright serpent.” They progress with difficulty, knees joined and bound, and cut through the air as though it were heavy water, helping themselves along with their hands, which paddle the air at hip level. These are lovely creatures, whose every deformity has its grace: they no longer have any rumps—the curve is gone from the small of their backs accentuating their length: where does the stomach begin? Where are the breasts hiding?
A sign from the master hurries them on or holds them back. Now and then I move involuntarily toward a particular dress, pink and alive like a glittering skin, toward this one, in a savage blue color which blots out everything around it, toward that one made of black velvet, deep and thick as a pelt.
But something holds my arm back and dampens my pleasure: every dress has its ludicrous flaw, the imbecilic and bizarre detail, the toad thrown there like a signature by the despotic and wicked dressmaker. I see knitted flowers on moonlight gauze and unseemly little white horsehair fringe on royal Alençon lace. A delicate train hangs from a tapestry cabbage: a sheath of black plush, slender, curvacious, with a satanic elegance, tapers off, prisoner of the heaviest foundation of white cloth, twisted into a double skirt; a Greek tunic, pure white, moves forward, barred at the knees by a row of little taffeta flounces with chenille borders; finally, a spiral skirt of green Empire faille, tied up in all directions with Tom Thumb trimmings, unleashes my indignation.
“Monsieur,” I say to the dressmaker, “Monsieur, will you please just look at that! Surely you must know how ugly that is. It’s not simply a matter of bad taste; in every one of these dresses there is an intention: take any one of them, take this one here, which wipes the floor with this little square tail of gold linen embroidered with thick white cotton! Why, why do you do it?”
My unexpected vehemence makes the master stop short, and his beady eyes meet mine for a long moment. He hesitates; he lets me catch his true and mediocre face, the face of a small shopkeeper who had a hard time starting out—he hesitates between his ur
ge to deceive me and a sudden need for confession, for cynicism . . .
“Would you please tell me, Monsieur, just me, why you do this?”
He smiles a loathsome, confidential smile, he looks around him, as if he wished we were alone: will he betray his appetite for domination, claim revenge for his past as an impoverished clerk, confess the disgusted misogyny that comes from dealing with too many females, the pleasure he takes in making them ugly, in humiliating them, in subjecting them to his half-crazed fantasies, in “branding” them . . .
He hesitates, he doesn’t dare, and, finally, turning his eyes away from mine: “Just to see . . .” he says.
Morning Glories
The wasp was eating away at the red-currant glaze of the tart. She set about it with methodical and gluttonous haste, head down, legs sticky, half disappearing into a little vat with pink transparent sides. I was surprised not to see her puff out, swell up, and become as round as a spider . . . And my friend hadn’t arrived, my friend the gourmand, who faithfully comes to have her tea with me because I indulge her little idiosyncrasies, because I listen to her chatter, because I never agree with her about anything . . . She can relax with me; she is quick to tell me, in a tone of gratitude, that I’m hardly ever coquettish with her, and I don’t scrutinize her hat or her dress with an aggressive, female eye. She keeps quiet if someone says anything bad about me at one of her other friend’s; she goes as far as to exclaim, “Ladies, Colette may be a little crazy, but she is not as nasty as you make her out to be!” She is, you see, quite fond of me.
Whenever I think about her, I feel that pitying and ironic pleasure which is one of the forms which friendship takes. You have never seen a woman more blond, or more fair-skinned, or more dressy, or more carefully coiffed! The shade of her hair, of her real hair, hovers delicately between silver and gold; the ringlets of a little six-year-old Swedish girl had to be sent for when my friend wanted the prescribed chichis our hats require. Beneath this crown of so rare a metal, my friend’s complexion, so as not to look yellow by comparison, is brightened up with pink powder, and her eyelashes, brushed brown, protect her mobile gaze, a gray-and-amber gaze, perhaps brown too, a gaze which knows how to settle, caressingly, imploringly, on a man’s eyes, caressing and imploring.
That is my friend, about whom I will have said everything I know if I add that she flaunts the fact that her name is Valentine, in these days of short nicknames, when the little names women go by—Tote, Moute, Loche—sound like a hiccup that couldn’t be held back.
“She forgot,” I thought patiently. The wasp, asleep or dead from overindulgence, head down, had sunk into the vat of delights. I was about to open my book again when the doorbell shivered and my friend appeared. With a half twist, she spiraled her overlong dress around her legs and landed next to me, with her parasol across her knees—the skillful movement of an actress, or a model, almost an acrobat, which my friend executes so perfectly each time.
“This is a fine time for tea! What in the world have you been doing?”
“Why nothing, my dear! You are amazing, living here between your dog, your cat, and your book! Do you think Lelong could create all those gorgeous dresses without me trying them on?”
“Come on . . . just eat and be quiet. That? It’s not dirty, it’s a wasp. Can you believe she dug that little well all by herself! I watched her, she ate all that in twenty-five minutes.”
“What? You watched her? Well, you really are a disgusting creature, after all. No, thank you, I’m not hungry. No, no tea either.”
“Shall I ring for the toast, then?”
“If it’s for me, don’t bother . . . I’m not hungry, really,”
“Have you eaten somewhere else, you little beast?”
“Heavens, no! I just feel funny, I don’t know what’s wrong . . .”
Surprised, I looked up at my friend’s face, which I had not yet isolated from her insane hat, as big as a parasol, topped with a bursting rocket of feathers, a hat like fireworks, like the fountains at Versailles, a hat made for a giantess which would have showered down my friend’s little head all the way to her shoulders, if it weren’t for the famous Swedish-blond chichis . . . The pink-powdered cheeks, the brightly rouged lips, and the stiff eyelashes made up her usual fresh little mask, but something underneath it all seemed changed to me, lackluster, missing. High up on the cheek with less powder, a mauve furrow held the mother-of-pearl glaze left by recent tears . . .
This made-up distress, the distress of a brave doll, suddenly moved me, and I couldn’t keep myself from taking my friend by the shoulders in a gesture of concern, which was something that rarely occurred between us.
She sank back and blushed beneath her pink powder, but didn’t have time to pull herself together and sniffed back her sobs in vain.
A minute later, she was crying, wiping the inside of her eyelids with the corner of a tea napkin. She cried freely, careful not to stain her crepe de Chine dress with her tears, not to ruin her face, she cried carefully, neatly, the little martyr to makeup.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked her gently.
She shook her head “no,” sighed, trembling, and held out her cup, which I filled with tea that had gone cold.
“Thank you,” she murmured, “you’re so nice . . . Please forgive me, I’m so nervous . . .”
“Poor thing! You don’t want to tell me anything?”
“Oh, God, yes. It’s not that complicated, really. He doesn’t love me anymore.”
He . . . her lover! I hadn’t thought of that. A lover, her? when? and where? and who? this ideal mannequin was taking her clothes off in the middle of the afternoon for a lover? All sorts of ludicrous images rose up—spread themselves out—before me, which I dispelled, exclaiming, “He doesn’t love you anymore? That’s not possible!”
“Oh, yes, it is! It was a terrible scene . . .” She opened her gold mirror, powdered her face, and wiped her eyelids with a moist finger. “A terrible scene, yesterday . . .”
“Jealous?”
“Him, jealous? I’d be only too happy! He’s mean. He scolds me for things . . . but there’s nothing I can do about it!”
She sulked, her chin doubled up against her high collar.
“You be the judge, then! He’s a delicious young man, and for six months there hasn’t been a single cloud, not a hitch, never this! He got moody sometimes, but with an artist . . .”
“Oh, he’s an artist?”
“A painter, my dear. And a very talented one. If I could tell you his name, you’d be very surprised. He has twenty red-pencil drawings he’s done of me, some with my hat on, some with it off, in all my dresses! There’s something soaring, something ethereal about them. The movement in the skirts is an absolute wonder . . .”
She was coming to life, a bit undone, the wings of her thin nose shining with carefully daubed tears and the beginnings of a faint blotchiness . . . her eyelashes had lost their black mascara, her lips their carmine . . . Beneath the big hat, both becoming and ridiculous, beneath the postiche chichis, I could make out for the first time a not very pretty woman, but not ugly either, a bland woman you might say, but touching, sincere, and sad.
Her eyelids suddenly reddened.
“And . . . what happened?” I asked, taking the risk.
“What happened? Why, nothing! We’ll say nothing, my dear. Yesterday, he greeted me in a funny way . . . like a doctor . . . And then friendly all of a sudden: ‘Take off your hat, darling!’ he said to me. ‘I’m keeping you for dinner, all right? I’ll keep you for good if you want!’ It was this very hat I had on, and you know what a terrible struggle it is to get it on and take it off again.”
I didn’t know, but I nodded my head, with great conviction.
“. . . I sulk a little. He insists, I sacrifice myself and start taking out my pins and one of my chichis stays caught in the barrette of my hat, there, you see . . . It didn’t matter to me, everybody knows I have hair, don’t they, and he better than any
one! But he’s the one who’s blushing and trying to hide. I replanted my chichi, like a flower, put my arms around his neck, my lips up to his ear, and whispered to him that my husband was away in Dieppe on business, and that . . . Well, you understand! He didn’t say anything. Then he threw down his cigarette and it all started. The things he said to me! The things he said to me . . . !
With each exclamation she struck her knees with her open hands, with a common and disheartened gesture, like my maid when she tells me that her husband has beaten her again.
“He said the most unbelievable things to me, my dear! He controlled himself at first, but then he started walking around talking . . . ‘I couldn’t want anything more than to spend the night with you, darling . . .’ (the nerve!) ‘but I want . . . I want what you must give me, what you can’t give me!’”
“Good Lord, what?”
“Wait, you’ll see . . . ‘I want the woman you are at this moment, the graceful, slim little fairy crowned with a gold so light and so abundant that her hair spills down to her brow like foam. I want this skin the color of fruit ripened in a hothouse, and these paradoxical lashes, all this beauty from the English School! I want you, just as you are now, and not how the cynical night will give you to me; I remember!—you’ll come to me conjugal and tender, uncrowned and uncurled, with your hair untouched by the iron, straight and twisted into braids. You’ll come small, without your high heels on, your eyelashes missing their velvety softness, your powder washed away; you’ll come disarmed and self-assured, and I’ll be left speechless in front of this other woman . . . !
“‘But you already knew that,’ he cried, ‘you knew it! The woman I desired, you, as you are now, has almost nothing in common with her poor and simple sister, who comes out of your bathroom every night! What gives you the right to change the woman I love? If you care about my love, how do you dare deflower the very thing I love?’