“You very seldom go out, Mademoiselle Devoidy?”
“Never, you might say.”
“And you don’t feel any worse for it?”
“You can see for yourself. But I don’t stop other people from doing what they fancy.”
She darted her malicious gaze, directed at an invisible Madame Armand, toward the closed door. And I thought of the tart, ill-natured remarks the women herding the cattle in my native countryside exchange over the hedges as they slap the blood-swollen flies under the heifers’ sensitive bellies.
Mademoiselle Devoidy bent her head over the threading of some very tiny pearls; at the edge of her forehead, between the cheek and the ear, the chestnut hair ended in vigorous down, silver, like her little mustache. All the features of this Parisian recluse spoke to me of downy willows, ripe hazelnuts, the sandy bottom of springs, and silky husks. She aimed the point of her needle, pinched between the thumb and forefinger that rested on the table, at the almost invisible holes in the small, insipidly white pearls that she spitted in fives, then slipped on to the silk thread.
A familiar fist banged at the door.
“That’ll be Tigri-Cohen. I recognize his knock. The key’s in the door, Monsieur Tigri!”
The ill-favored face of Tigri-Cohen entered the little arena of light. His ugliness was now gay and ironical, now sad and imploring, like that of certain overintelligent monkeys who have equal reason to cherish the gifts of man and to shiver with fear at them. I have always thought that Tigri-Cohen took tremendous pains to appear crafty, reckless, and unscrupulous. He adopted, perhaps out of guilelessness, the style and manner of a moneylender who charged exorbitant rates. As I knew him, he was always ready to part with twenty francs or even a “big flimsy,” so much so that he died poor, in the arms of his unsuspected honesty.
I had known him in the wings and dressing rooms of music halls, where Tigri-Cohen spent most of his evenings. The little variety actresses used to climb on his shoulders like tame parakeets and leave wet-white all over this black man. They knew his pockets were full of small jewels, flawed pearls and gems just good enough to make into hatpins. He excited his little friends’ admiration by showing them badly colored stones with beautiful names, peridots, chalcedonies, chrysoprases, and pretentious zircons. Hail-fellow-well-met with all the girls, Tigri-Cohen would sell a few of his glittering pebbles between ten p.m. and midnight. But to the rich stars, he presented himself mainly in the role of buyer.
His taste for beautiful pearls always seemed to me more sensual than commercial. I shall never forget the state of excitement I saw him in one day when, going into his shop, I found him alone with a small, unremarkable, expressionless little man who drew out of his shabby waistcoat a sky-blue silk handkerchief and, out of the handkerchief, a single pearl.
“So you’ve still got it?” asked Tigri.
“Yes,” said the little man. “Not for long, though.”
It was an unpierced pearl, round, big as a fine cherry, and, like a cherry, it seemed not to receive the cold light shed from the even-number side of the rue Lafayette but to emit a steady, veiled radiance from within. Tigri contemplated it without saying a word and the little chap kept silent.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .” began Tigri-Cohen.
He searched in vain for words to praise it, then shrugged his shoulders.
“Can I have it a moment?” I asked.
I held it in the hollow of my palm, this marvelous, warm virgin, with its mystery of tremulous colors, its indefinable pink that picked up a snowy blue, then exchanged it for a fleeting mauve.
Before giving back the glorious pearl, Tigri sighed. Then the little man extinguished the soft rays in the blue handkerchief, thrust the whole, carelessly, into a pocket, and went away.
“It’s . . .” repeated Tigri . . . “It’s the color of love.”
“To whom does it belong?”
“To whom? To whom? Think I know? To black chaps in India! To an oyster-bed company! To savages, to people with no faith and no feelings, to . . .”
“How much is it worth?”
He gave me a look of contempt.
“How much? A pearl like that, in the dawn of its life, that’s still going about in its little blue satin chemise at the bottom of a broker’s pocket? How much? Like a kilo of plums, eh? ‘That’ll be three francs, Madame. Here you are, Madame. Thank you, Madame.’ Ah! to hear anyone ask that . . .”
Every muscle of his ugly, passionate mime’s face was working, that face that was always overloaded with too much expression, too much laughter, too much sadness. That evening, in Devoidy’s room, I remember he was dripping with rain and seemed not to notice it. He was exploring his pockets with a mechanical gesture, pockets that were secret hoards of necklaces of colored stones, cabochon rings, little bags in which diamonds slept in tissue paper. He flung some ropes of pearls on the green baize.
“There, Devoidy, my love, do me that for tomorrow. And that one. Don’t you think it’s hideous? If you pulled out the pigeon’s feather stuffed in the middle of that nut, you could thread it on a cable. Anyway, change the stuffing.”
From force of habit, he bent over my necklace, with one eye screwed up.
“The fourth one from the middle, I’ll buy that. No? Just as you like. Goodbye, my pets. Tonight I’m going to the dress rehearsal of the Folies-Bergère.”
“Should be a fine evening for business,” said Mademoiselle Devoidy politely.
“That shows you don’t know a thing about it. Tonight my good ladies will be thinking of nothing but their parts, their costumes, the audience’s reaction, and going off into faints behind a flat. See you soon, pets.”
Other visitors, especially female ones, passed through the boltless door into the narrow circle of harsh light. I stared at them with the avid curiosity I have always felt for people I run no risk of seeing again. Richly dressed women thrust out hands filled with precious white grain into the glare of the lamp. Or else, with a proud, languid gesture acquired from constantly wearing pearls, they undid the clasps of their necklaces.
Among others, my memory retains the picture of a woman all silvered with chinchilla. She came in very agitated and she was such a sturdy daughter of the people under all her luxury that she was a joy to the eye. She plumped herself down rudely on the straw-seated stool and commanded: “Don’t unstring the whole row. Just get me out that one, on the side, near the middle, yes, that beauty there.”
Mademoiselle Devoidy, who did not like despots, calmly and unhurriedly cut the two silk knots and pushed the free pearl toward her client. The beautiful woman grabbed it and studied it from very close up. Under the lamp, I could have counted her long, fluttering eyelashes, which were stuck together with mascara. She held out the pearl to the stringer.
“You, what’s your idea about this here pearl?”
“I know nothing about pearls,” said Mademoiselle Devoidy impassively.
“Sure you’re not joking?”
The beautiful woman pointed to the table, with evident irony. Then her face changed; she seized a little lump of cast iron under which Mademoiselle Devoidy kept a set of ready-threaded needles and brought it down hard on the pearl, which crushed into tiny fragments. I exclaimed “Oh!” in spite of myself. Mademoiselle Devoidy permitted herself no other movement than to clutch an unfinished string and some scattered pearls close against her with her sure hands.
The customer contemplated her work without saying a word. Finally, she burst into vehement tears. She kept noisily sobbing: “The swine, the swine,” and, at the same time, carefully collecting the black from her lashes on a corner of her handkerchief. Then she stuffed her necklace, amputated of one pearl, into her handbag, asked for “a little bit of tissue paper,” stowed every single fragment of the sham pearl into it, and stood up. Before she left the room, she made a point of affirming loudly. “That’s not the last of this business, not by a long shot.” Then she carried away into the outside air the unpleasant whiff of a brand-new,
very fashionable scent: synthetic lily-of-the-valley.
“Is that the first time you’ve seen a thing like that happen, Mademoiselle Devoidy?”
Mademoiselle Devoidy was scrupulously tidying up her workbench with her careful hands, unshaking as usual.
“No, the second,” she said. “With this difference, that the first time, the pearl resisted. It was real. So was the rest of the necklace.”
“And what did the lady say?”
“It wasn’t a lady, it was a gentleman. He said: ‘Ah! the bitch!’”
“Why?”
“The necklace was his wife’s. She’d made her husband believe it cost fifteen francs. Yes. Oh, you know, when it comes to pearls, it’s very seldom there isn’t some shady story behind them.”
She touched her little coral necklace with two fingers. I was amazed to catch this slightly sneering skeptic making a gesture to avert ill luck, and to see the cloud of superstition pass over her stubborn brow.
“So you wouldn’t care to wear pearls?”
She raised one shoulder slantwise, torn between her commercial prudence and the desire not to lie.
“I don’t know. One doesn’t know one’s own self. Down there, at Coulanges, there was a chap who couldn’t have been more of an anarchist, he frightened everyone out of their wits. And then he inherited a little house with a garden and a round dovecote and a pigsty. If you were to see the anarchist now! There’s quite a change.”
Almost at once, she recovered her restrained laugh, her pleasantly rebellious expression, and her way of approving without being sycophantic and criticizing without being rude.
One night when I had lingered late with her, she caught me yawning, and I apologized by saying: “I’ve got one of those hungers. I don’t take tea and I had hardly any lunch, there was red meat—I can’t eat underdone meat.”
“Neither can I,” said my fellow countrywoman. “In our part of the world, as you well know, they say raw meat is for cats and the English. But if you can be patient for five minutes, a mille-feuilles will be wafted here to you, without my leaving my chair. What do you bet?”
“A pound of chocolate creams.”
“Pig who backs out of it!” said Mademoiselle Devoidy, holding out her dry palm quite flat to me. I slapped it and said, “Done!”
“Mademoiselle Devoidy, how is it that your flat never smells of fried whiting or onions or stew? Have you got a secret?”
She indicated yes by fluttering her eyelids.
“Can I know?”
An accustomed hand knocked three times on the front door.
“There you are, here it comes, your mille-feuilles. And my secret’s revealed. Come in, Madame Armand, come in!”
Nevertheless, she fastened my little middle-class necklace at the back of my neck. Loaded with a basket, Madame Armand did not at once offer me her chronically trembling fingers and she spoke very hurriedly.
“Mind now, mind now, don’t jostle me, I’ve got something breakable. Today’s chef’s special is bœuf à la bourguignonne and I brought you a lovely bit of lettuce. As to mille-feuilles, nothing doing! It’s iced Genoese cakes.”
Mademoiselle Devoidy made a comic grimace at me and attempted to unburden her obliging neighbor. But the latter exclaimed: “I’ll carry it all into the kitchen for you!” and ran toward the dark room at the back. Quickly as she had crossed the lighted zone, I had caught sight of her face and so had Mademoiselle Devoidy.
“I must fly, I must fly, I’ve got some milk on the gas ring,” Madame Armand cried out, in tomboyish tones.
She crossed the front room again at a run and pulled the door closed behind her. Mademoiselle Devoidy went out into the kitchen and came back with two Genoese cakes, with pink icing, on a plate adorned with a flaming bomb and the inscription Fire Brigade Alarm.
“As sure as eggs is eggs,” she said, with a thoughtful air, “the photographer’s wife has been crying. And she hasn’t any milk on her gas ring.”
“Domestic scene?”
She shook her head.
“Poor little old Big Eyes! He’s not capable of it. Neither is she, for that matter. My, you’ve gone through that cake quickly. Would you like the other one? She’s rather put me off my food, Monsieur Armand’s good lady, with that face all gone to pieces.”
“Everything will be all right tomorrow,” I said absentmindedly.
In exchange for that flat remark, I received a brief, trenchant glance.
“Oh, of course it will, won’t it? And anyway, if it isn’t all right, you don’t care a fig.”
“What’s all this? You think I ought to be more passionately concerned over the Armand family’s troubles?”
“The Armand family isn’t asking you for anything. And neither am I. It would most certainly be the first time anyone had heard me asking anyone for anything . . .”
Mademoiselle Devoidy had lowered her voice in the effort to control her irritation. We were, I imagine, utterly ridiculous. It was this cloud of anger, rising suddenly between two hot-blooded women, that fixed the details of an absurd, unexpected scene in my memory. I had the good sense to put an end to it at once by laying my hand on her shoulder.
“Now, now. Don’t let’s make ourselves out blacker than we are! You know quite well that if I can be any use to this good lady . . . Are you frightened about her?”
Mademoiselle Devoidy flushed under her freckles and covered the top of her face with one hand, with a simple and romantic gesture.
“Now, you’re being too nice. Don’t be too nice to me. When anyone’s too nice to me, I don’t know what I’m doing, I boil over like a soup.”
She uncovered her beautiful moist spangled eyes and pushed the straw-seated stool toward me.
“One minute, you’ve surely got a minute? That’s rain you hear; wait till the rain’s over.”
She sat down opposite me in her working place and vigorously rubbed her eyes with the back of her forefinger.
“Get this well into your head first—Madame Armand isn’t a tittle-tattle or a woman who goes in for confidences. But she lives very near, right on my doorstep. This place is just a little two-bit block of flats, the old-fashioned kind. Two rooms on the right, two rooms on the left, little businesses that can be done in one room at home. People who live so very near you, it isn’t so much that you hear them, anyway they don’t make any noise, but I’m conscious of them. Especially of the fact that Madame Armand spends so much time out on the landing. In places like this, if anything’s not going right, the neighbors are very soon aware of it, at least I am.”
She lowered her voice and compressed her lips; her little mustache hairs glistened. She pricked her green table with the point of a needle as if she were cabalistically counting her words.
“When the photographer’s wife goes out shopping for herself or for me, you can always see the concierge or the flower seller under the archway or the woman in the little bistro, coming out, one or other of them, to see where she’s going. Where is she going? Why, she’s going to the dairy or to buy hot rolls or to the hairdresser, just like anyone else! So then the nosy parkers take their noses inside again, anything but pleased, as if they’d been promised something and not given it. And the next time, they start all over again. But when it’s me who goes out or Madame Gâteroy downstairs or her daughter, people don’t stop and stare after us as if they expected something extraordinary was going to happen.”
“Madame Armand has a . . . a rather individual appearance,” I risked suggesting. “Perhaps she does somewhat overdo the tartan, too.”
Mademoiselle Devoidy shook her head and seemed to despair of making herself understood. It was getting late; from top to bottom of the building, doors were slamming one by one, on every floor chairs were being drawn up around a table and a soup tureen; I took my leave. The door of the photographic studio, unwontedly shut, turned the camera pedestal and the crossed shrimping nets under the gas jet into an important piece of decoration. On the ground floor, the concierge rais
ed her curtain to watch me going: I had never stayed so late.
The warm night was foggy around the gas lamps and the unusual hour gave me that small, yet somehow rewarding pang I used to experience in the old days when I came away from stage performances that had begun when the sun was at its zenith and finished when it was dark.
Do those transient figures who featured in long-past periods of my life deserve to live again in a handful of pages as I here compel them to? They were important enough for me to keep them secret, at least during the time I was involved with them. For example, my husband, at home, did not know of the existence of Mademoiselle Devoidy or of my familiarity with Tigri-Cohen. The same was true of Monsieur Armand’s wife and of a certain sewing woman, expert at repairing worn quilts and making multicolored silk rags into patchwork pram covers. Did I like her for her needlework that disdained both fashion and the sewing machine or was it for her second profession? At six o’clock in the afternoon, she abandoned her hexagonal pieces of silk and went off to the Gaîté-Lyrique, where she sang a part in Les Mousquetaires au couvent.
For a long time, in the inner compartment of my handbag, between the leather and the lining, I kept a fifty-centime “synthetic” pearl I had once lost in Tigri-Cohen’s shop. He had found it, and before returning it to me, he had amused himself by studding my initials on it in little diamonds. But at home, I never mentioned either the charming mascot or Tigri himself, for the husband I was married to then had formed such a rigid, foursquare idea of the jeweler, such a conventional notion of a “dealer,” that I could neither have pleaded the cause of the latter nor rectified the error of the former.
Was I genuinely attached to the little needlewoman? Did I feel real affection for the misunderstood Tigri-Cohen? I do not know. The instinct to deceive has not played a very large part in my different lives. It was essential to me, as it is to many women, to escape from the opinions of certain people, which I knew to be subject to error and apt to be proclaimed dogmatically in a tone of feigned indulgence. Treatment of this sort drives us women to avoid the simple truth, as if it were a dull, monotonous tune, to take pleasure in half lies, half suppressions, half escapes from reality.