Marquiseaux, 2
IT IS A BATHROOM. The floor and the walls are laid with glazed ochre-yellow hexagonal tiles. A man and a woman are kneeling in the bath, which is half-full of water. They are both about thirty years old. The man has placed his hands on the woman’s waist, and he is licking her left breast whilst she, with slightly arched back, clasps her companion’s sex organ in her right hand and caresses her own with her left. A third character is present at this scene: a young cat, black with bronze flecks and a white spot under the neck, is stretched out on the rim of the bath and seems to express utter astonishment in his yellow-green gaze. He wears a plaited leather collar bearing the regulation nameplate – Petit Pouce – with his RSPCA registration number, and the telephone number of his owners, Philippe and Caroline Marquiseaux; not their Paris number, since it would be most unlikely for Petit Pouce ever to go out of the flat and get lost in Paris, but the number of their country house: Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines) 50.
Caroline Marquiseaux is the Echards’ daughter and has taken over their flat. In 1966, when she had just turned twenty, she married Philippe Marquiseaux, whom she’d met a few months earlier at the Sorbonne, where both of them were history students. Marquiseaux was from Compiègne and lived in Paris in a minute room in Rue Cujas. The newly-weds thus moved into the room in which Caroline had grown up, whilst her parents kept their bedroom and the lounge-dining room. Within a few weeks, all four found such cohabitation unbearable.
The first skirmishes broke out over the bathroom: Philippe, Madame Echard would howl in her sourest voice, preferably when the windows were wide open so that the whole building could hear properly, Philippe spends hours in the WC and purposely leaves the lavatory pan in a mess for others to clean up after him; the Echards, Philippe riposted, quite intentionally forgot their false teeth in toothmugs he and Caroline were supposed to use. Monsieur Echard would intervene as peacemaker and succeeded in preventing such conflicts from escalating beyond verbal insults and offensive allusions, and a bearable status quo was established on the basis of some gestures of good will on both sides and some agreed measures to facilitate shared domesticity: a timetable for the use of sanitary facilities, rigid separation of space, elaborate differentiation of towels, face cloths, and bathroom accessories.
But if Monsieur Echard – a retired librarian with a bee in his bonnet about collecting evidence that Hitler was still alive – was bonhomie itself, his wife was an untamed shrew whose endless recriminations at mealtimes caused hostilities to be re-engaged: every evening the old woman harangued her son-in-law, on a different, made-up pretext almost every time: he would be late, or he would come to table without washing his hands, he hadn’t earned what was on his plate but that wouldn’t stop him being particular, my word no, he really ought to help Caroline now and again to lay the table or wash the dishes, etc. Usually Philippe bore this incessant nagging with phlegm, and sometimes even tried to joke about it; for example, one evening he brought his mother-in-law a present, a cactus, “as it so suits your character, mother dear”, but one Sunday, towards the end of lunch, for which she had made the dish he most detested – French toast – and which she was trying to force him to eat, he lost control of himself, seized the cake-slice from his mother-in-law’s grasp and with it banged her head a few times. Then he packed his cases calmly and went back to Compiègne.
Caroline persuaded him to come back: if he stayed at Compiègne he would jeopardise not just his marriage but also his studies and his chance of competing for a teaching scholarship which, if he did land one, would allow them to have their own flat the very next year.
Philippe allowed himself to be talked round, and Madame Echard, yielding to her husband’s and daughter’s intercessions, also agreed to tolerate for a while longer the presence of her son-in-law under her own roof. But soon her natural nastiness reasserted itself, and a hail of harangues and prohibitions rained down on the young couple: no using the bathroom after eight in the morning, no going in the kitchen except to do the washing up, no using the telephone, no visitors, no coming in after ten in the evening, no listening to the radio, etc.
Caroline and Philippe bore these rigorous conditions heroically. In truth they didn’t have any option: the miserly allowance Philippe got from his father – a wealthy trader who disapproved of his son’s marriage – and the few pennies Caroline’s father secretly slipped into her hand added up to barely enough to pay for their daily travel to the Latin Quarter and for meal tickets in the student cafeteria: sitting on a café terrasse, going to the cinema, buying a copy of Le Monde were, in those days, almost luxurious events for the two of them, and in order to buy Caroline a woollen overcoat which a very cold February rendered indispensable, Philippe had to decide to sell the only really precious object he’d ever owned to an antique dealer in Rue de Lille: it was a XVIIth-century mandola on the belly of which were etched the silhouettes of Harlequin and Columbine in domino costumes.
This hard life lasted nearly two years. According to her mood, Madame Echard was by turns sympathetic, going so far as to ask her daughter if she would like a cup of tea, and bad-tempered, laying injury upon annoyance, for example switching off the hot water precisely at the moment Philippe went to shave, or turning up the volume on her television to maximum from morning to night on the days the two young ones were studying at home for an oral examination, or having combination padlocks fitted to all the cupboards on the pretext that her stocks of sugar, dry biscuits, and toilet paper were being plundered systematically.
The conclusion of these hard years of apprenticeship was as sudden as it was unexpected. One day Madame Echard choked on a fish bone; Monsieur Echard, who’d been waiting for that day for ten years, retired to a tiny shack he had put up near Arles; a month later Monsieur Marquiseaux killed himself in a car accident and left his son a comfortable inheritance. Philippe hadn’t got his scholarship, but he’d completed his first degree and was planning to do research for a doctorate – Wetland Allotments and Arable Farming in Picardy Under Louis XV – but gave it up gladly and with two friends founded an advertising agency which is now a flourishing business, specialising in selling not detergents but music hall stars: The Trapezes, James Charity, Arthur Rainbow, “Hortense”, The Beast, Heptaedra Illimited – to mention only some – are amongst the best runners from his stable.