Having just shown out a good client, Mme Anaïs paused to consider the justness of her thinking. She simply had to find a partner for Charlotte and Mathilde. They were both attractive, but the house lacked variety; moreover, an empty room was a complete waste. All the same, Mme Anaïs hesitated to seek a replacement for Belle de Jour. That one would have fitted perfectly—so educated, so lady-like. And perhaps Mme Anaïs found it hard to forget the look that had brought them together for a second.
Charlotte and Mathilde lay naked on the bed. Mathilde’s hair was paler than the shoulder on which it lay, and Charlotte tenderly stroked it.
“Sorry to bother you, girls,” said Mme Anaïs, “but I have to talk to you about business. You still don’t know anyone who wants to come and work here?”
Mathilde answered first, in that timid voice of hers, as if she’d done something wrong without realizing it, but everyone else knew about it:
“It’s no good, I don’t know anyone, Madame. I work here, go home, and that’s it.”
“What about you, Charlotte? One of your old friends?”
“I can’t ask them. When I left the last place I told them I was going to be somebody’s mistress. Even if I should meet any of them again, I can’t let them know I was lying.”
Mme Anaïs sighed as if to show that she was ashamed of her sentimentality and asked, “What about Belle de Jour? Think she’ll come back?”
“Oh hell!” And Charlotte stretched sensually.
Mme Anaïs took a step toward the door, but Mathilde called her back. Mathilde was a passive, vague creature who enjoyed any conversation that might lend itself to speculation.
“I was sure we’d never see her again,” she said. “That girl wasn’t one of us, she had some secret or other.”
“A secret, a secret,” cried Charlotte. “You see a soap-opera everywhere, Mathilde. She had a lover, he left her, now she’s found another; that’s all there is to it.”
“No, it’s not like that at all. She asked to leave at five, so she already had a man, see. That kid had a secret, all right.”
Mme Anaïs listened carefully to this exchange. The subject had been discussed daily, and with the inexhaustible patience of semi-cloistered creatures; but Mme Anaïs hoped some chance phrase might still yield a clue. She said slowly:
“I won’t say I’m certain, girls, but I think you’re both wrong. Why? Because Belle de Jour is coming back, that’s why. All right, you can laugh your head off, Charlotte, but in a thing like this you never know, honey, not till the very last minute.”
She was proved right a few minutes later: the first person at the door was Séverine.
“So it’s you, is it.” Mme Anaïs spoke in the most glacial, flat manner imaginable. “What do you think you want?”
The sweat clinging to Séverine’s temples was witness to the effort it had been for her to satisfy the ghastly rending demands that drove her. It had been such an effort that once she had rung the bell she wanted nothing more. But Mme Anaïs’ manner cured her indifference. Was she to be forbidden entry into that sordid paradise? Where would she be able to feed the hunger she had thought dead but which now—close to the taste of its corrupted source—seemed more insatiable than ever?
“I’d like, I’d like,” Séverine stammered, “to see if I could.…”
“Start work again here? And disappear the minute you feel like it, without a word? Oh no, dearie, I’m not interested in amateurs. There’s the street for that.”
Séverine would have done anything for a glimpse of Mme Anaïs’ usual affable expression then. Her whole body begged, pleaded, not to be sent off to seek out some other scummy sanctuary. This one she knew; her own imprint was on it already, as if she’d stepped in soft mud.
“Please,” she murmured, “please.”
Mme Anaïs pushed her into her private sitting room and said, “Listen, dearie, you’re damn lucky I’ll still talk with you at all. Anyone else and I’d have shut the door in their face, but there’s something about you … well, you make me feel like a sort of godmother and you take advantage of that, don’t you.”
She looked at Séverine with genuine affection.
“Now then, Belle de Jour,” she asked, “what was it? Didn’t we treat you right here? Didn’t you feel at home with us?”
Still unable to answer Séverine nodded her head. She gave a scared smile. It was true, the work-table now looked like a familiar piece of furniture.
“Please may I?” She made a movement to take off her hat. Then without waiting for Mme Anaïs’ permission, she put it in the closet. Only then did any peace return to her features.
“It goes without saying,” Mme Anaïs stated simply, “that if I take you back you’ve got to be serious.”
A violent resistance gripped Séverine.
“Oh yes, yes. But only every other day, please,” she implored humbly. “I promise you, I can’t.…”
“O.K.,” snapped Mme Anaïs after a brief thoughtful silence. “In a little while you’ll be begging me to come every day.”
Then in a voice so happy it made Séverine tremble she called out:
“Charlotte! Mathildel Here’s Belle de Jour.”
Nude and incredulous, the two girls ran in. As they cried out their astonishment Séverine felt her knees quiver. Their bare bodies, so close to each other and so immodestly different in color, caused her an only too pleasant sense of weakness. Softly, half-regretfully, she asked: “Won’t you catch cold?”
“Oh, we’re used to it,” answered Charlotte. “Anyway the apartment’s heated. Mme Anaïs is very good about that.”
Her white teeth flashed in an ambiguous smile as she added, “Come on, try. Feels good, doesn’t it, Mathilde?”
Séverine put up no resistance at all as Charlotte undressed her. But when all her clothes had been removed by those quick hot hands she was filled with a confusion that clouded her vision.
The sudden silence brought her to her senses. Despite the professional indifference of the women around Séverine they were all three strangely moved, almost embarrassed. This firm, healthy body was almost too virginal, too aristocratic.
Mme Anaïs recovered first. Two feelings rose in her, pride in her house and care for her interests.
“You really couldn’t be better built,” she stated with respect.
Charlotte was warmly kissing Séverine’s shoulders when the bell rang. Séverine went pale, but it turned out to be one of Charlotte’s customers.
“If you want to take it easy a while,” said Mme Anaïs, “Mathilde will show you your room. I have some work to do. If there’s a ring at the bell put on your dress. We have to be respectable here.”
Belle de Jour’s room was smaller than the one in which she’d met M Adolphe, but in all other ways just like it: the same dark wallpaper, the same dark-red, almost black pattern in the curtains, on an armchair and on the quilt, and the same toilet articles behind a screen.
“It’s dark already,” she murmured. But without switching on the light she went to the window. The rue Virène was a narrow old street, but the men and women she saw walking along were free. Mathilde, who had followed her, watched the passers-by with her for a while and then asked cautiously: “Unhappy to be here with us, Madame Belle de Jour?”
Astonished, Séverine swung around. She had forgotten Mathilde’s presence and, without quite knowing why, her uncertain voice and her shadow a fraction lighter than the darkness (yet so immobile she no longer seemed naked) made Séverine infinitely sad.
“Mind you, I’m not asking why,” Mathilde added quickly, mistaking Séverine’s movement. “We all have our secrets, don’t we. It doesn’t matter as far as I’m concerned because, you see, Lucien—that’s my husband —he knows anyway. It isn’t my fault nor his neither. He’s sick, he has to be in the country. Right?”
She waited in vain for some reply that would give her a hint to go on, then murmured:
“I’m sorry, I bore you with my stories, don’t I? Mme Anaïs and Charlotte aren’t so far wrong when they say I’m a little crazy. I have to talk about … well, it’s natural enough with you, but when I’m with the clients.…”
She’s looking for someone to explain to her why she belongs to everyone when she herself only loves one person, Séverine thought distractedly. The subject failed to interest her. Too easy to classify this wretched existence under the heading of some maladjustment. But she, who would give her the key to the puzzle of why she was in this place when she was rich and had Pierre?
“What about Charlotte?” Séverine inquired abruptly.
“She’s lucky. She was a model, then found out she could make more here. And besides, she enjoys it with just about anyone—with me too. I don’t go for that sort of thing but I don’t argue about it. Might as well do what she wants.”
For a while she was silent, then added hesitantly: “You know, I feel sorry for you, Madame Belle de Jour. The other time I saw just how.…”
A darkness that was not the lack of daylight reigned in the room then, and the red accents turned into marks of night. Mathilde couldn’t see the savage anger on Séverine’s face but a voice heavy with hatred made her jump.
“Shut up. This minute. You have no right.…”
Séverine had to summon all her will-power to keep from bursting into sobs. Suddenly she pulled Mathilde against her and said imperiously:
“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m a little crazy too. And now that we have time on our hands come and show me how Charlotte does it with you.”
Why? Why? Séverine asked herself between teeth clenched despite the jolts of the taxi taking her home. What was there in such joyless prostitution? With disgust she remembered Mathilde’s passive body, the poor girl’s tears, her respectfulness which Séverine didn’t want and which nearly drove her mad. Then she had been allotted to an old man, and hadn’t even felt the shudder of degradation that had made M Adolphe’s caresses bearable. There had been only one moment when she’d found herself moved by a certain nameless pleasure—when Mme Anaïs had divided with her the derisive wages of her body. But this was little enough with which to face the ordeal ahead: Pierre’s eyes.
This time Séverine made no attempt to escape by senseless flight. Her first trial helped her to control her feelings, but it didn’t lessen her terror. It continued to grow, in fact, as she approached her house. Still, this fear was preferable to plumbing the depths of her absurd, monstrous, inscrutable perversion: thinking about that would drive her insane. At the moment, she was faced with the problem of salvaging the only happiness left to her, and she believed she could do it.
Having completed her external purification, Séverine dressed. She had no gift for dissimulation, she wasn’t made that way, but an instinct of self-preservation warned her to avoid the tactics she’d used last time. So she didn’t ask Pierre to take her out, and managed to act natural till dinner-time. But she couldn’t eat. Pierre questioned her in a loving voice that was altogether too much for Séverine. She answered clumsily. She was still too much of a novice in sin to know how to play a role, and she was too self-conscious to carry off her part, as she’d been able to do two weeks ago, out of sheer animal intuition. There was an awkwardness about her movements, a guilty haste in all her words.
Pierre’s face was shadowed by a nameless anguish. He wasn’t exactly worried, but his senses were on the alert, the first step toward suspicion. Petrified, Séverine recognized this. Fortunately, the meal was ending.
“Going to do some work?” she asked him.
“Yes. Coming?” Pierre spoke nervously.
Séverine had forgotten that when Pierre worked on an article, now, she would go with him and read beside him in his study. She had begun to do this since the morning she’d sworn to pay more attention to her husband’s welfare.
Memories of that dawn of fine sweet promises momentarily crushed Séverine, but she didn’t dare retreat. Once she’d sat down in her usual chair, however, she realized that the clumsiest excuse to be alone would have been better than this false intimacy. The watching room, the quiet, bookish atmosphere, the soft light and Pierre’s unusually solemn features—it was impossible to permit them to enter her mind and mingle with images of the rue Virène. Séverine’s misery was so acute that she failed to notice her husband looking at her peculiarly. Suddenly she heard him stand up. Her eyes fled to the book she was holding, and she went pale. The book was upside down; she had no time to reverse it. Pierre made no comment but he forestalled the explanations Séverine was about to stammer out.
“You want to be alone to think in peace, don’t you,” he said. “I guess you’d better be in bed.”
Séverine had never heard him speak with such authority. She got up obediently and in fear.
Pierre took a few seconds to control his voice, then said:
“I hope it won’t bother you to kiss me goodnight.”
Séverine was overwhelmed by his words. That night she would have welcomed any excuse for preventing Pierre from coming into her room, as he always did, to see if she were asleep; but he himself avoided the visit. Did that mean that he had some presentiment of the truth, that perhaps he knew.…
She threw herself on her bed and bit the pillow to stifle the scream. A fervent prayer, vast as her despair, enveloped her: oh God let me escape this time, just this time, and it’ll be the end to these insane, sordid experiments.
The outburst was so sharp and all-consuming that it quieted her. She began to undress. The more naked she became the more clearly the images of two bodies appeared in her memory. Her pleasure in them was muddied when she recognized the obscene forms of Mathidle and Charlotte. She yielded to the fantasy for only a second; but it was long enough to tell her that the promise she’d made in an attempt to appease fate was made in vain. But she refused to admit it, and, to avoid a struggle that threatened her reason and might drive her to seek help by confessing to Pierre, Séverine took one of the sleeping-pills left over from her illness.
The sleep it accorded was brief and brutal. She woke at dawn. Her head hurt. All her senses were like limp leaves blowing in the wind. As she struggled to escape this heavy listlessness Pierre came into her room. The sight of her husband just as she became fully conscious of what had happened dilated Séverine’s eyes with the horror of the damned. If Pierre had been hesitating about speaking, his wife’s look decided him:
“Séverine, we can’t go on like this. I can’t have you being afraid of me.”
She stared at him, motionless. He continued more hurriedly.
“You’re too sincere to play games with me. What is it, darling? You can tell me. Nothing could hurt me more than the way you’ve been acting. You’d be doing me a favor if you told me … but you won’t confide in me, will you, even if I could help you. Listen … maybe—look, I’m speaking to you as lovingly as ever but believe me I’ve been thinking it out all night—what I mean is, maybe you’re in love with someone. You haven’t been unfaithful, I know that, and besides the word is meaningless as far as we’re concerned; but you’re attracted to someone else, it worries you.…”
A queer strident burst of laughter stopped Pierre. It was followed by desperate protestations.
“Someone else! … And you really thought … but I love you, I couldn’t ever love anyone else … my love, my whole life … I’m completely yours … can’t I be a little upset without … I’d rather die than see you unhappy, my darling …”
Séverine’s face had now lost its look of distraction. Her eyes were clear, and shining with such humble adoration that Pierre couldn’t doubt that he had been wrong. Suddenly everything seemed marvellously clear to him. Séverine was right. No one got as close to death as she’d been without an upheaval of their entire organism. What an idiot he was, how happy he felt!
“I should have remembered the expression on your face when you were waiting for me that time at the hospital,” he said.
Séverine interrupted feverishly, “But I’ll meet you there every day … I’ll even … wait, I’ll get dressed in a second and come with you.”
He couldn’t dissuade her, nor could he alter her decision to meet him when he finished work. She even went with him to the clinic where he operated afternoons; when he’d finished working he found her in the waiting-room.
Séverine would have liked to make herself Pierre’s servant; but she couldn’t get herself to welcome him to her bed when, moved by so much affection, he desired her.
But the physical desire that for a moment had beautifully hardened Pierre’s face, Séverine, sleepless, transferred despite herself to foul faces lurking in dubious surroundings. When daylight came she had no desire for these images, but she knew now that soon enough she’d feel a pressing need for them. If she didn’t go to Mme Anaïs’, the door would be closed to her for good. The fear of being denied food for her sad sensuality sent her running there as soon as she’d left Pierre at the clinic, where even on that day she had accompanied him.
That was the beginning of Séverine’s true addiction. Routine took the place of pleasure. She was no longer uncontrollably hurled toward the rue Virène; she found herself going there in a lethargy which each time made her less and less responsive. During this period, she no longer expected the joy she’d hoped for at first; but she found it pleasant to enter the over-heated apartment and take possession of her questionable room. She now heard Mme Anaïs’ interminable conversations, as well as those of the girls, without displeasure—as if listening to some dim lullaby. She herself talked. In order to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about her she invented a past which conformed to both Mathilde’s and Charlotte’s conjectures: she’d had a lover who had seduced her as a girl. She had adored him and he’d left her. Now she was mistress to another man, not so nice, but she humored him along. That was why she had to be so careful, and why she could give so little time to Mme Anaïs.
From then on Belle de Jour had no need to go unsatisfied. The house lived chiefly off a few regular customers. They jumped at the chance for something new. Séverine submitted to their desires without annoyance and without pleasure. She often yearned for the terrors she’d known at first, as an intractable animal; but even M Adolphe, who came occasionally to possess her, couldn’t revive them. It amazed her that such a ludicrous individual could ever have affected her so much.
However, she was forced to study the tricks of her trade, even the most intimate. And her apprenticeship was revolting enough, made her feel sufficiently like some soiled love-machine, for her once more to shudder with perverse humiliation. But carnal excess has limits quickly reached unless a mutual passion extends them. Séverine realized this and once more became numb. Her sense of shame was worn out, and horror also began to die. She could now be taken by a man while others watched; Charlotte or Mathilde or both together could engage her in bouts that meant nothing to her; in fact, nothing meant anything to Séverine any more. All that remained was a faint shiver when Mme Anaïs called her to be looked over, and she went forward obediently. She could feel a certain relish in submission.
At times now, when Séverine remembered the pride she’d clung to for so long, she felt there was an emptiness within her. It was this emptiness that tormented Pierre. He couldn’t seem to recover the absolute simplicity, the marvellous ease of the life he had once known with Séverine. For a while he was protected against his own perspicacity by his happiness at finding false a fear which had all but exploded his existence. Yet soon he began to wonder about his wife’s persistent, abnormal humility. A nervous breakdown might explain her odd quirks of humor; but that scared, mournful tenderness of hers, that eagerness to be of use to him, her total lack of private life—it was hard not to be alarmed by such symptoms in a woman who, a month ago, had been lovable for her self-will and for a pride so natural it seemed as much a part of her as her heart.
Pierre’s anxiety found no satisfactory answer. He couldn’t doubt Séverine’s love for him; in fact, he’d never been more sure of it. But what redoubled his uneasiness was that this didn’t make him feel any happier. There were moments when he half-consciously remembered the day Séverine had first seemed really disturbed, when she told him about that little business of Henriette … and whore-houses. He immediately abandoned the train of thought. Séverine wasn’t the kind of woman who could be caught up by the idea of sensuality—especially that kind.
So Pierre suffered also. Each morning he hoped to see in Séverine’s face what he needed for his own happiness; and each morning he met a submissive being who constantly tried to anticipate his wishes. Séverine herself realized that the servile character her love was assuming was the opposite of what he sought; but she couldn’t help herself. She looked at Pierre, and from the depths to which she’d fallen he seemed to be living on an overwhelmingly high plane. At the same time he became even dearer to her. She developed a respectful adoration for his cleanliness and youth, qualities that had once been hers also (she now felt terribly old). And the more she loved him the more she hated seeing him racked by pain which she inflicted.
The only place she could forget the vicious situation was in the rue Virène. As soon as she’d stepped over Mme Anaïs’ threshold she forgot Pierre; that she did was, in fact, a sign of her love for him. And this very love now inflicted such intolerable suffering on Séverine that it drove her to Mme Anaïs not three times a week, but daily.
Daily prostitution only increased her lassitude and misery, from which she escaped only in returning home to face her husband’s mental anguish. Continually flung from one agony to another, Séverine wondered more than once, as she walked the now familiar quays, whether the Seine’s cold grip would finally hold her long enough for her to give herself to its depths. Perhaps the boatmen would someday find her drowned body: unless she were granted some other martyrdom.
Séverine was brought in to him one evening when, dirtied and again disappointed, she was about to leave Mme Anaïs’. The bell stopped her just as she was reaching for her hat. The girls could tell that something unpleasant was in store by the way the madame called them. And they were right.
The man waiting to look them over was drunk. Wearing the short canvas coat of a market laborer, he alternately stared at his muddy shoes and around the room—which obviously pleased him. Two strong hands rested on his knees.
“That one,” he nodded at Belle de Jour, “and a shot of rum.”
She undressed while he drank. He watched her without a word. Then he took her without a word. His body was heavy. Everything about him, even the rheum in his eyes, seemed thicker than in an ordinary man. And Séverine, suddenly recognizing coarse fury and bestial sensuality, groaned from the depths of her being. The desire slaking itself on her body was no careful, refined thing: it was an aspect of that trinity which had led her to this bed. The man in the blind-alley, the man with the obscene neck, the bargeman: they were all three satisfying themselves on her body in the person of this man whose weight crushed her, whose knotty limbs quartered her. An undefinable flood of feeling coursed through her. Both surprise and fear appeared on her face. She ground her teeth; then, suddenly, her expression become so relaxed, so happy and young, that anyone but the man whose prey she was would have been amazed. He put a folded bill on the bedside table and left.
Séverine lay sprawled there for a long time. An urgent duty called her, but she ignored it. She felt that from now on she had nothing to fear. She had just received a gift upon which no one else had the right to look. She had reached the end of her dreadful race and her finish-line had turned into a new beginning. The sense of joy she felt now was even greater than the physical joy which had shuddered through her with such unspeakable ecstasy. All the drives that had ruled her since her convalescence were justified for Séverine now, whereas before they had seemed a disgusting, impossible madness. She’d conquered what she had sought so blindly; and this conquest, won through hell, filled her with an enormous, strange, stunning pride.
Charlotte asked her sympathetically, “That animal give you a hard time?”
Séverine didn’t answer; she only chuckled richly. Charlotte and Mathilde looked at each other in surprise. They realized that till that minute they’d never heard Belle de Jour laugh.
That evening Pierre, too, was astonished by Séverine’s behavior.
“Let’s go and eat out in the country. Quick, go and get the car.” She spoke in a radiant voice that brooked no contradiction.
Séverine made no attempt to analyze the elements of her sudden sensual revelation. She was afraid that introspection might sully the integrity of her discovery. She didn’t even wonder how to reactivate the wonderful lightning that had struck her. Now that she knew her body could accept it, she was sure she couldn’t prevent it from striking again. But none of the men who picked Belle de Jour in the next few days managed to reawaken the flame, and a feverish, impatient Séverine vainly sought the bliss she had captured once and which now escaped her again. She sensed that she could only recapture it under special circumstances, but what those circumstances were she didn’t know. Soon an incident occurred that gave the answer to her question.
Early one afternoon a tall young man with a package under his arm appeared on Mme Anaïs’ doorstep.
“I’ll keep it with me,” he announced at once. “Much too fond of it to let it get away.”
He had a charming voice, and he pronounced all his syllables as if he were amusing himself by joining them together in words for the first time, and was surprised that they had only one meaning instead of dozens.
Like most women, Mme Anaïs disliked irony; but this young man’s brand seemed much nicer, since it was spoken with enormous courtesy. What’s more, he was slim, broad-shouldered, well-dressed and had a pleasant face that was at once clever, gentle and childish.
“I’ll get the girls for you, O.K.?” she asked.
“An eminently logical suggestion. Tell them my name is André, and I insist they call me that. I suspect they’ll address me familiarly, and familiarity turns into intimacy unless it’s kept anonymous. Please add that they have no right to be ugly, not even plain, since I didn’t choose your house, Madame: I’m here because I shut my eyes and put my finger on a list of ads. So it was fate sent me here, you see. It never fails and if.…”
Mme Anaïs interrupted with a laugh.
“If you weren’t so nice I think I’d be a little scared of you,” she said.
Both Mathilde and Charlotte kept wonderful memories of the hour that followed. An exquisite madness ruled all of Andre’s actions; the girls didn’t know quite what was going on, but they had the feeling that such exploits belonged to a superior world. And they were confused and touched by the fact that this man refrained from using them as pleasure-machines, but instead gave them, so they guessed, the very best of himself.
Only Séverine remained unmoved by these games, whose ins and outs she alone really understood. Mathilde was shocked by her disinterest and whispered to her, “Hey, be good to this kid. You don’t get many like him in here.”
André thought there was something Mathilde was afraid to ask for.
“My friends,” he exclaimed, “you’re not making any demands on me. I must say I’m glad you aren’t, not because I’m avaricious but because it flatters my vanity. Even if I was rich, you know, I wouldn’t make a business of it, but today it happens I’ve a little cash on me and I insist on drinking it up with you in the form of the most expensive wine in the house.”
Mme Anaïs glanced at her girls. They all wore the same look of affectionate hesitation.
“Thank you, ladies,” said André with more gratitude than he meant to show. “But do you really mean me to take my money elsewhere? Do you refuse to drink to my first book?”
“You’re a writer?” cried Charlotte incredulously. She’d often wondered what kind of men could be behind the names one saw in bookshop windows.
André unwrapped his package, which he had put on the mantelpiece, and revealed five books all bearing the same title.
“It’s true,” said Charlotte. “You’re really André Millot?”
The pride in Andre’s smile was so naïve it could almost have been put-on.
“I’d never’ve believed it,” Charlotte continued innocently. “You’ve got to give me a copy.”
“Well, the fact is … they’re first edition.”
“Yeah, honey, so …?
The young man didn’t have the courage to say that he was hoping to sell them. He was moved by the deep sincerity on those price-tagged lips, of words that were usually so false. He gave Charlotte a copy. Having done so he met Mathilde’s timid eyes. He couldn’t resist those, either. After which his honor wouldn’t permit him to ignore Mme Anaïs or Séverine. With a jerk of the head he looked at the last copy he had and slipped it in his pocket; then he inscribed loving dedications for all four women.
The champagne was brought in. Never had it been drunk with such happy innocence in Mme Anaïs’ house.
But the bell rang. A strange annoyance, a sadness, made both Charlotte and Mathilde lower their heads.
“I must go,” said Mme Anaïs, excusing herself.
André could know nothing of the cruel happiness he’d brought into the lives of these cloistered women, and he was surprised at the sudden silence. He looked from Mathilde to Charlotte to Séverine. And Séverine’s eyes, shining most brightly, glowed with the joy of a deliverance.
“Anyway you stay here with me,” André told her.
But Belle de Jour knew that for nothing in the world would she allow pleasant, charming youth to take her in his arms.
So softly that only he could hear she said, “Please excuse me.”
Something passed over Andre’s mobile features. Later, he was often to recall that request filled with a delicacy foreign to a woman of her world; but now he merely gave an imperceptible bow and turned to Charlotte. She kissed him passionately.
“Too bad, honey,” Mme Anaïs said to Séverine. “I would have bet my bottom dollar he’d pick you. Oh well, you’ll have to hurry, M Leon’s waiting and he’s only got a quarter of an hour.”
Belle de Jour knew M Léon, the hurried businessman who had a tannery near the rue Virène. She’d already received his favors, of which she retained a dismal memory. But this time the little man—so impregnated with raw leather you could smell it on his breath —made Séverine shudder with the agony and heat of lust she’d begun to despair of ever finding again. He was so avid to take her quickly.
After lying quietly for a few minutes she went into Mme Anaïs’ room. The madame wasn’t there; Séverine heard her laughing in the room from which came Andre’s refined accents. Séverine sat down by the work-table. Resting her chin on hands still damp with pleasure, she began to consider the secrets of her body.
When she once more became aware of her surroundings, her face was calm and serious. She knew now.
She knew that she’d refused André because he belonged to the same physical and spiritual world as the men she knew in her normal existence. He was of the same class as Pierre. With André she would have deceived the husband she loved so completely. It was not for tenderness, for trust, for charm, that she had sought out the rue Virène. Pierre flooded her with all of those. What she’d sought was what he couldn’t give her: this supreme bestial ecstasy.
Pierre’s manner, his taste, his desire to please, all were poles apart from something in her that had to be beaten and subdued, mercilessly defeated, before her flesh could flame out. Séverine was not disturbed by the recognition of this fatal divorce between herself and he who was her whole life. On the contrary, she felt a comforting sense of relief. After weeks of mental torture that was close to insanity, she had come to know herself; the dreadful twin who had ruled her in darkness and dismay melted away. Strong and serene, she found her soul united again. Since destiny refused to permit Pierre to give her the joy that gross strangers gave, what could she do about it? Did she have to surrender a pleasure which with other women was a part of love? If she’d had their luck would she ever have taken this frightful path in the first place? Who then could reproach her for actions that the very cells of her body, over which she had no control, demanded? It was the right of every animal to know the sacred spasm which each spring makes the earth tremble.
This revelation transformed Séverine. The suffering of her wretched struggle was annulled, so that she was once more her former self. She recovered her self-assurance, together with the serene zest for life she’d previously known. In fact, she felt stronger than ever; for now she had discovered and destroyed the quicksand, teeming with monsters, on which she had so long and so precariously struggled to maintain her life.
Had Séverine been at all disturbed about the path she had deliberately chosen, Pierre’s once-feared eyes would have been the first to confirm her doubts. But as it was, they watched Séverine’s resurrection with touching joy. And they had plenty of time to feast themselves on the spectacle, since she was clever enough to draw out her recovery. Only by degrees did she give up her humility, her timid servitude. She took a daily step in this direction, but only one. Daily she made some new demand on her husband, but one only. She could see how happy he was to obey her, but she knew that if her personality altered too quickly she ran the risk of alarming him and making him suspicious. She didn’t want to do that, nor did she want to give up her visits to Mme Anaïs. She sought for a balance between these two necessities: the balance of her fulfillment.
Very patiently and calmly she reached her goal. Or was even this an act? Séverine could pretend so easily now, she was no longer able to recognize pretense. But she’d never felt so completely and purely Pierre’s as when she now returned from the rue Virène, exorcized. The two hours she spent there every day were a separate, isolated life, hermetically sealed and feeding on itself. And during those hours Séverine truly forgot who she was. Only her body’s secret existed, like one of those strange flowers which open for a moment only to return at once to their virginal repose.
Soon Séverine hardly realized she was leading a double life. Her existence seemed to have been planned like this long before she was born.
She placed the seal on her new life by once more becoming physically Pierre’s wife. She no longer had any qualms about bringing him a soiled body, because she felt that on the way back from the rue Virène she was completely renewed, even to the substance of her flesh. And in her love-making with Pierre she was now more maternal than ever, for without realizing it, she was afraid that some too passionate or skillful movement might reveal the illicit knowledge of Belle de Jour.