CÉCILE OPENS HER EYES. IN THE DAWN, HER EYES are gray as the dawn, gray as the dew, gray as the morning fog that stretches itself over the earth, and then rises lightly upward, only to vanish in a few moments with the arrival of the sun.
With the arrival of the sun, Cécile’s eyes will no longer be gray. They will turn blue. Of course, her eyes are blue, says Myette, who ought to know. But her friend Anette declares that Cécile’s eyes are yellow, yellow as corncobs dried in the sun.
It’s dawn again, still another dawn that has been given her. Cécile doesn’t budge; her eyes—gray, blue, yellow—are as unblinking as the eyes of a cat. She listens. The garden is barely awakening, under her window; this is the hour when the plants speak and the birds still cry out in their sleep; if one listens well, one may hear the snails gliding along the humid leaves.
And this is hers, hers alone. Cécile always awakens all of a piece, instantaneously; life takes hold of her with open hands, and in a single movement she is sitting up in bed; throwing back her heavy braid with an impatient toss she looks out the window to see what time it is; the rosy ray making only the tiniest rent in the sky is enough for her—it’s time. She lifts two long, thin arms toward the low ceiling of her room, stretching her narrow bust, while two small breasts, pointed and hard, rise up beneath her nightgown.
In another single moment she now flings her legs out of the bed. Uncovered by her nightgown riding up to her thighs, they might well be the legs of a boy, bronzed, excoriated, with knees as distinctly carved as the features of a face. There is nothing round or soft in these knees, glossy-skinned, all tendons and bones—unusual for a girl. Cécile’s legs lash the air like a pair of leather thongs, and she’s on her feet on the red flagstone floor, shivering under her nightdress. She is always easily cold—she loves the sun and heat. Quickly, she seizes hold of an old turtle-neck sweater flung over the nearest chair, insinuating herself into it with an undulating movement of her neck, shoulders, and back, like some shivering salamander. Picking up a pair of denim trousers trailing on the floor, she manages, even while sticking one leg after another into the jeans, to get over to her window. Outdoors, the dawn is still gray, and Cécile’s eyes are two little dawns of exactly the same shade.
These eyes are quite handy as a subject of conversation—their mysterious changeability has already on many an occasion saved the situation, when the common remark about “an angel passes” was not enough to break an awkward silence and restore some animation to Myette’s salon. With an impatient movement, Cécile has thrust the tails of her nightgown into her canvas trousers; spitting on her index finger, she slicks her eyebrows, while with the five spread fingers of her other hand she combs the hair tangled all around her head.
What else does she need? On all fours on the floor, she fishes her espadrilles from under the bed, then she seizes a basket from the table, and a pair of garden shears from the top of her dresser.
With tiger bounds, she descends the stairway. All is still asleep in the house; this is the hour that belongs to her alone. The cat sleeps, rolled into a ball on the rocking chair that doesn’t rock, even the birds are still asleep in the trees; the plants sleep in the garden, beneath the dew. Cécile closes the kitchen door gently behind her. Because everything still sleeps, it seems to her suddenly, at this hour alone, that she is bigger, stronger, wiser in her freshly wakened awareness, she is no longer merely a simple gamin of nearly eighteen. This feeling fills her with joy, a special joy grown out of her solitude and freedom; she knows that she belongs to herself, that she is she, that everything awaits her. Everything? What, then? She doesn’t know what—the important thing is to be ready. During the day, when she is in the midst of her school friends, or in the village, or in the house, there are too many distractions for her to constantly stay ready. During the day, what awaits her may so easily escape her.
But at dawn, in this solitary silence, in the midst of nature itself, nature all one and single, she can listen, and she can awaken one more day for herself, and tell herself, “I am here, here I am, life, I am ready for everything you want to bring me, oh you marvelous life! All your delights, all your loves, all your tastes and scents and feelings! All, because I am so entirely virgin, and so impatient to live …”
Bending over the rosebushes, stooping to the strawberry plants, she fills her basket; from the lettuce leaves she pulls off the snails—they are tinted a beautiful pale yellow like newborn chicks—and she replaces each tenderly on some other leaf, more handy than the lettuce. She licks the dew from a pear, breathes the exhalation of the grass, smiles to the flower buds as to a row of babies.
Something warm has just rubbed against her leg; it’s Minou, up at last, come to join her. Cécile lifts her, hugs her to herself, scrutinizing the golden eyes of the cat, unblinking eyes like her own.
Beyond this garden—this fortification—people keep killing each other; the full-grown adults are killing or finishing with their killing of each other. It’s the summer of 1944, and the Germans have been driven from Paris, but they still put up their fight, some distance beyond. The youth-time of Cécile has known nothing but war—a rather distant war, it has touched this little village only lightly, but it has laid its hand heavily on her family.
During the last four years she has lived with her godmother, Myette, in this village in Gascony, while her parents have been interned in a prison camp. “They’ll come back,” her grandmother tells her, and Cécile solemnly nods her head. The adults have stolen her childhood from her—and will they also steal her grownup life?
Cécile looks around her anew, absorbing the garden, the sky—everything that is hers alone, at the dawn of each day.
And it is only when she is at last again replenished with the acidulous scents, with the tangy bitter flavors of macerated grasses and leaves, when she is at last enveloped in the final shreds of fog, when she is already warmed by the first stroke of the sun on her neck, and invaded by peace and joy, that Cécile can again close her eyes—these gray eyes already turning blue, and that will turn to yellow, presently, when the cocks sing out in the deliverance that every morning brings.
END OF SEPTEMBER, 1944. The summer of deliverance, the warm summer’s end of that year. School has begun again, and after class Cécile hurries over to her best friend, Anette. Anette always put on her white gloves before going home; she is small and round; her hair is short, but her school uniform is a little longer than the fashion. The fashion at a convent school is always one war behind.
“Oh, I’m so hot!” Anette sighs. “The minute I get home, I’m taking off my stockings.” For the convent school requires that gray cotton stockings be worn with the blue sailor dress, the white gloves, and the round felt hat that compose the uniform.
“I—” says Cécile—“I’m taking off my stockings as soon as I’m out, behind the courtyard door.”
“That’s just like Cécile!” thinks Anette. “Cécile isn’t afraid of anything! She’s an anarchist, she doesn’t care at all what people may think, she does whatever comes into her head.”
Anette is desperately envious of Cécile’s free ways, and divided in her soul between jealousy, admiration, and rancor.
An entire battalion of right-thinking, well-established, well-organized folk rises up in her to disapprove of her friend, whom she wants so much to resemble. “It’s just not done!” Anette pronounces this decisive formula, yet she knows that she is beaten in advance, that Cécile will only laugh and say, “All the better!”
Cécile has an irritating way of looking at her, of gazing at everything with her multicolored eyes, and speaking of the present as though it were already in the past. “You remember, yesterday …”
Yesterday is almost today, for Anette, for Louise, for Vincente, it’s part of the present time, it isn’t a period to be remembered and judged. But Cécile speaks of this unfinished time already with a distance, as though it were something in a fable. She seems to find pleasure in pulling out everyday happenings, as though out of a basket, and spreading them before her friends, like a magician turning everything into a trick—the laughter of Louise, the joke played on Vincente, the quarrels of Anette, are spread out and suddenly relived. “You remember,” Cécile says, “when Louise promised us to come to school in silk stockings and when Mlle Mazoyllet—”
Mademoiselle teaches literature, and everyone knows that Cécile adores her. “What’s Louise got to do with—” Anette begins, for Cécile leaps from one thought to another with a logic that Anette can never follow. “Come on!” Cécile commands. She hasn’t put on her gloves—with her, the gloves are always worn inside her pocket! Behind the carriage entrance she bends over; already she’s rolled her stockings down to her shoes, like ankle socks. “I’ve got an idea—but take off your gloves. Anette, you’re ridiculous wearing gloves in the heat—we’ll go swimming—but don’t say a word to anyone, or else they’ll all want to come—let’s run to the river.”
“But,” says Anette, “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
Cécile raises a thin, disdainful shoulder. “What of it, there’s never anyone down there, and besides, it’s much more pleasant to swim in your skin.”
What nerve she has, that Cécile, and what extraordinary things she knows! Anette has never gone swimming in the nude, but this Parisienne Cécile is afraid of nothing.
Cécile laughs as she runs, her schoolbag flung up atop her head, and steadied with one hand, Bedouin-fashion, as though by instinct. If Anette but knew it—neither has she ever been swimming naked anywhere! But the idea pleases her, and it’s just as well to give the impression that she knows all about it, otherwise Anette, with her country-girl timidity, will at once refuse. Besides, Cécile likes to appear more daring, more extravagant than she really is. It’s sort of a role to play, and has become second nature with her. She doesn’t know how she started this role. Was it her arrival in the village at the beginning of the war, and her appearance at the convent—the only girl from Paris—arousing a murmur of astonishment, of stupefaction that has followed her ever since, her advent creating and maintaining a level of wonder to which she herself must constantly rise? Or is it she herself who has created, for her friends, this exciting personage who is afraid of nothing, who has “read everything” and “seen everything” in Paris, and who thereby is entitled to queen it over these little village girls of Gascony?
Once more Cécile has proposed something shocking, and yet here is Anette following her, as always.
As they run, the sun enters into Cécile and Anette through all their pores; it blinds them and leaves them deaf to the world. Anette puffs and blows. Small, rounded, and dark, she quickly becomes hot, and her sweat runs down her back. Already, she has begun to regret having let herself be dragged along. She tells herself that one shouldn’t swim when one is so hot, she’ll surely catch pneumonia and die. And besides—to go swimming altogether naked—it must be even more dangerous!
But Cécile gallops along, laughing.
Luckily, the pathway opening before them is filled with shade, pierced only by strands of light like those that play through the windows of a cathedral. The two girls run, their schoolbags bouncing on their heads, while brambles reach out their fingers to stop them, catching hold of their skirts, and letting go only regretfully, detaching themselves with little cracklings of anger.
And as always, Cécile feels as though she were detaching herself from her own person, that she is moving over while another Cécile begins to run alongside her, and today the second Cécile is pursued by bandits—that’s why she’s running so hard—they want to catch her, they will violate her—hurry! She must flee at all costs!
Cécile throws a hurried look at Anette just behind her. Anette is her maid, following her and carrying the baby—that large, maroon-colored bundle in her arms—the bandits want to kill the baby—the baby is the son of Aga Khan—“Oh, I’m so hot! I’m going to die!” Anette gasps. She lets herself drop to the ground, fat maroon schoolbag tumbling, too, and disgorging books and note papers. Cécile’s dream is interrupted, and she too halts, irritated.
“Come on, then! We’re nearly there!” Cécile cries. “Don’t stop now, when we’re only a minute from the river!” But she kneels for a minute alongside Anette, and her eyes, golden in the shade, crinkle with laughter. “I was telling myself a story while I ran, and you’ve spoiled everything; you interrupted my story!”
“What story? Tell me, while we rest?”
“No, not now—after—tonight …” Disappointed, Anette slowly gets up; strands of hair are still pasted to her cheeks; she bends and gathers her books and her note papers. Cécile’s stories have woven a tapestry through her life, during the three years of their friendship. There are the stories that Cécile reads—for her godmother lets her read whatever she wants, even the authors forbidden on the Index, like Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas. Anette is allowed to read only a few selected works of theirs—expurgated, of course. Mère Stanislas has a predilection for certain stuffy authors like Boileau or Corneille. Three-fourths of French literature is studied without being read—while Cécile, for her part, relates to Anette all sorts of astonishing things that take place in the pages of Baudelaire and Musset, and to which she adds whatever she makes up in her own head—episodes that are even more astonishing! What sort of a story, then, has she just made up?
Anette gathers her schoolbag without realizing that but an instant ago this schoolbag was the illegitimate child of the Aga Khan.
The river is there in the hollow before them, bordered by weeping willows rinsing their hair all along its banks. Not a soul is about—for who would be so crazy as to come under the open sun in this heat?
Without waiting, Cécile flings her bag to the ground, and atop it fall her slippers, her gray stockings, her sailor-blue skirt, and her uniform blouse.
Modest Anette undresses behind a bush, folding her garments one by one as though she were in her room at home.
“Oh! It’s so cold!” cries Cécile.
“It’s cold?” Anette worries. She emerges from behind her bush, still dressed in her white cotton slip with its eyelet embroidery, and she tests the water with the tips of her toes. Then she kneels at the edge of the clear stream, and splashes her face and neck and arms.
Cécile is already afloat in the midst of the river—she has cast off—she is far away—her braid floats on the water alongside her, like a serpent of the sea—her white naked body is imprinted with trembling shadows from the creepers and branches that line the narrow river and form a green roof above it. Floating like that, Cécile’s body has the look of a martyr’s tied with ropes and made ready for torture. Or else—is she Ophelia? Ophelia lost, Ophelia mad, Ophelia dead?
But no, she is neither lost nor dead—happiness penetrates her, through every part of her being; she is turned toward the sky, and at this moment happiness, total happiness, is this roof of living green, pierced by hundreds of suns, all the suns that sing! Happiness is the water, so fresh, caressing her shoulders, her back, her thighs, happiness is the transparency of the river and the marvelous enchanted pebbles that scintillate in the river’s bed.
How is it possible? Here, this peace, this silence, this overwhelming happiness, and there, the war that is not finished, and hunger, misery, and her parents perhaps under torture, perhaps dead. Paris is still plunged in darkness and cold.
It is unjust, it is monstrous, and how can she alone have the right to be so happy at this moment? Isn’t she guilty of a monstrous selfishness?
Cécile begins to feel cold; she shivers, turns over, and swims vigorously toward the shore, presently catching hold of a branch hanging over the river. Anette is still there, her legs in the water, sitting on the bank in her slip, and she looks at Cécile’s naked body with a shocked air.
“If someone should see you!” she mutters under her breath, as though she were afraid of attracting some witness by the sound of her voice.
“Coward!” cries Cécile. “It was wonderful! Go, swim in your slip, if you’re so scared!”
She stretches out on the grass. Her heart beats wildly, she feels the blood running in her veins like so many little streams through her body; she has become the river, her wet hair is a jungle of creepers and seaweed. Her skin has taken on an animal heat. It is like this that Cécile most loves life—when she can feel herself melted away into nature, when she can taste the sand, the grass, the water, feeling herself intimately and sensually a part of the created world around her.
Anette watches her, taking her silence for sadness. “You still haven’t received any word of your parents?” she asks, as she has been asking during the last three years.
“Nothing. But I’m sure they’re alive, and now that Paris has been liberated for more than a month—”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go to Paris, of course,” says Cécile. “See what has become of our apartment, ask our old friends, the concierge. There must be some organizations, from the Resistance, that might know where they were deported to …”
The apartment, the six large rooms, the salon with its windows giving onto the Seine, her mother, whose visage is somehow fading … She had been only thirteen the last time—when they had painted the windows blue because of the blackout—her father, sitting in his invalid chair, in his study, and writing … She only sees him that way, always writing, composing those mysterious manuscripts that no one had the right to read, not even his wife, the thick manuscripts that he then bound in leather, with his own hands, and on which he engraved his titles in letters of gold. Then he would place his books, one after the other, on the highest shelf in the library. For this father of hers wrote neither for glory, nor for money; he wrote for art’s sake alone, pure art.
Paris, before the war … a little girl who was an only child … the voice of her father, singing, her mother’s smile, her scent, the touch of her soft hand, the taste of apricots in the very special tart that she alone knew how to make …
During four years, Cécile had been closing her eyes so as to recapture her memories, so as to keep them from escaping her forever …
Fortunately there is Myette—what would have become of her without Myette? She sees herself again in 1940, in the arms of Myette while a car carries off her parents, taking them back to Paris, to the occupation, to the Resistance …
Myette has never been married; she is about fifty years old, rather fat, but she moves quite lightly. She has the cheeks of a little girl, very rosy and very round, with limpid blue eyes, and curly hair which she twists carelessly into a heavy bun—usually half-undone—that bobs along the back of her neck.
From daybreak, every morning, Cécile can hear Myette addressing herself to the hens that clamber up the wooden steps leading to the garden, and to the neighborhood cats that miaul under her windows, and to the trees in front of the house. Myette speaks to them in all seriousness and with tenderness—in the same voice in which Cécile has heard her talking to the Spanish refugees who, before the war, swarmed over the frontiers all along the Pyrenees and arrived in all the villages and in this village too, stranded, so that when there was nowhere else to put them, they had to be bedded down on straw in the village prison—fortunately always empty. In that period, Myette, as soon as she was up in the morning, and after having twisted up her chignon, fed her cats and her chickens, and watered her plants, would fill every available casserole with well-cooked, steaming provender, and then go off to carry the food to hungry Spaniards.
Cécile was only a little girl on vacation then. Since the beginning of the war, Myette’s house, of course, had become successively the refuge for Jews, for members of the Resistance, for Alsatians, for Communists, for all those who were in flight, in danger. Myette talked very little with them of politics, or of the cause of their flight, or of their resistance. But she listened, without ever interrupting the accounts of their troubles; she found clothing for them, she brought them food, and she sought out guides who would take them across the Spanish border—the same guides who had formerly served, from the opposite direction, to bring Spanish refugees into France.
At the side of her godmother, Cécile quickly acquired a taste for nature, but also for danger. Her imagination fed on the secret drama that enveloped the hounded derelicts who spent a night in Myette’s house and disappeared.
Alone, from the beginning of her stay, and feeling herself so much a stranger, so different from the little girls of her own age—a Parisienne, the daughter of Resistants, burdened with the secret of her parents’ allegiance and the secrets of Myette—she had taken the habit of escaping into the garden, to read, to be by herself. Perched for hours at a time amidst the branches of an ancient fig tree, she read Alexandre Dumas and Jack London, while her fingers became sticky with the syrup of green and black figs. She read through an entire library, in that tree. There were no “children’s books” on Myette’s shelves. Cécile read Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Balzac, varying only her choice of fruit with the titles. Thus, Les Misérables became confused, in her spirit, with the taste of “kakis,” that Japanese fruit with the delicate flavor, also known among the more erudite villagers as persimmons. Balzac came during the apple season, and Tolstoy when the plums were ripe, in their violet skins. The great war of her own days was much farther away, for her, than the retreat from Moscow.
STRETCHED OUT NOW in the grass, alongside the silent Anette, Cécile thinks about the war, and her life during the war. Yes, she has spent these four years peacefully, the Germans have appeared very little here, and the greatest risks she has taken have been limited to listening to the BBC from London, to dreaming of General de Gaulle, to keeping silent about Myette’s “visitors.” She has lived amidst an abundance of fruit, of vegetables, of eggs, in the warmth of the sun of Gascony; her hair has grown very long down her back, she has become bronzed, and taller—but has she really lived? Except in her imagination—has she lived? Hasn’t she remained exactly the same little girl that her parents confided to Myette? Was it right, to be so little mature at seventeen?
There is nothing more difficult than to be honest toward our childhood memories. The child, the young girl that a woman once was, conceals herself so easily behind a screen of clichés. It is so difficult to look back without being engrossed by the glowing images created by our sentimental desire for a perfect past.
Cécile knows this by instinct, and what she wants is to seize her past while it is still almost the present, to examine it fresh-picked, to taste it before it spoils, fades, and becomes discolored. She studies Anette and makes note of her little moue of reproach, or of her embarrassed laugh; she tastes the river in the palm of her hand before the water evaporates.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Anette, who is always made uncomfortable by silence.
“About smells,” says Cécile, motionless in the grass.
“You’re crazy,” says Anette. Then, “What do you mean—about smells?”
“The smells of yesterday, and of today. To begin with, the smell of the convent corridors. There’s a special smell for the summer and for the winter. In the winter, at five—not at five o’clock exactly, but at what the five o’clock period represents, that is—the classes are finished, the afternoon snack is over, and there are the rows of us going upstairs again from the recreation hall. We’re supposed to go and study, and then the corridors smell of disinfectant, and the electric lights make the floors glitter like mirrors, and we’re wearing the house slippers that we have to wear instead of shoes, inside the convent, so all the girls seem to be gliding—skating instead of walking …”
The girls are just coming from their afternoon snack, so the odor of café au lait and of chicory is still mingled, in Cécile’s nostrils, with the odor of disinfectant. The café au lait is steaming in the porcelain bowls that are held in her two hands. No coffee in the world will ever taste as good as this coffee of her adolescence … And then, there are the “sacred” odors, the scents of the chapel, the sweet odor of lilies of the field, the sharp odor of the holy water, the heavy odor of incense, and with all this, the odor of the garments of the nuns—an odor clean and dry.
This makes Cécile think of Vincente, who is the only person whose odor has ever made her uncomfortable. Vincente has an acid, disagreeable odor. Stretched in the grass at river’s edge, Cécile wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Vincente smells like a hare,” Cécile suddenly remarks, and Anette contracts her brows. “It’s not nice of you to say that.” “It’s true,” says Cécile. “You’re right to say that it’s not nice, but it’s true, admit it, isn’t it true?”
“Don’t you like Vincente?” asks Anette.
“But of course, I like her fine, only I don’t like her smell—that doesn’t prevent me from being fond of her.”
Anette can’t quite manage to understand this. Everything is always more simple for her. She is irritated by imperfections only in people she doesn’t like. The critical spirit of Cécile disorients her.
To change the subject, she pulls nearer to Cécile. “Listen, but you won’t tell a soul—you promise me? With you, one never knows.” “Oh!” cries Cécile indignantly, “I’ve never in my life betrayed a secret! You know that perfectly well!”
“All right then, I’ll tell you—” and Anette blushes. “You know Antoine, the son of the pharmacist, you know who I mean … yesterday, after class, I met him in the street, and we went for a walk, as far as the ramparts, and then, at the Fountain of Diana, in those little black streets where there’s never anyone—he kissed me. He kissed me on the mouth.”
Anette’s face, as she offers this confidence—Cécile scrutinizes it carefully, like some lock with a secret combination. What is revealed, in this face, beyond what has been said? A sensuality mingled with shame, yet also with pride—but nothing of love, nevertheless, neither in the dark eyes, that are laughing, not in the red, red mouth. Quite lengthily, Anette now describes the technique of the kiss, the time, and the place. Of Antoine, she says nothing. Cécile, who was just about to ask, “Do you love him?” bites her lips and keeps silent.
A first kiss—she imagines it with so much more solemnity—but can one solemnly kiss a pimply boy of nineteen, whose thick fists hang lumpishly out of coat sleeves that are always too short, and whose badly shaved face is always covered with a grayish shadow?
Feeling suddenly chilly, Cécile seizes her slip, her panties, her skirt, dressing hurriedly. It seems to her that Anette has spoiled her afternoon. It was good in the water, in the grass under the sun. Why did she need to talk in such detail about that kiss? Still, all the girls kiss boys—it’s normal. “So then he said,” continues Anette, “‘We’ll meet again tomorrow—come at four o’clock, behind Mlle Bertha’s shop,’ and he laughed, and he said, ‘Give me another one, you kiss well for a beginner!’”
“And—you’re going?” asks Cécile. It seems incredible to her that Anette, who doesn’t love Antoine, lets herself be kissed, and will go running to their rendezvous tomorrow, and that she talks about it in such a tone.
But it is human nature, that’s what it is—this strange thing called “human nature” which is the answer to all the puzzling sides of adult life.
While they walk slowly back through the heat, back toward home, Cécile is silent again. And coming into her silence, Anette takes form now with her womanly knowing smile and her eyes clouded and her lips partly open. She is walking with a man, not with Antoine this time, with a man, and they are walking in the streets of Paris. Perhaps Anette is a mistress.
She has on an elegant dress, and her hair is piled high on her forehead, she wears shoes with heels, the man raises his hand to call a taxi …
Cécile is dreaming again and Anette is the heroine of a new story, but this story makes her feel sad. Something awful is going to happen to Anette. Is it her own invented tale that brings tears to Cécile’s eyes? But that’s silly, silly—
Cécile virtually jumps out of her dream. She pulls Anette by the hand, she laughs suddenly, she makes Anette race her to the village.
Anette so loves this bursting laughter of Cécile’s.
ANETTE IS ALREADY “going steady” with Antoine. All the girls are going steady with their boys this year, Louise and Vincente and all the rest.
At recess, they gather in their little groups, they troop together. Behind their hands, they choke with smothered laughter. “Well then, our fine Parisienne—what about you—tell us!”
Cécile adopts a mysterious air, and tells them, “It’s none of your affair, and besides, he’s not just some kid, this one—this is a man, you wouldn’t understand.”
Now that Paris has been liberated the entire village has learned that over these four years Myette has been hiding people in her house, Jews, parachutists, Resistance fighters—so that Cécile only has an embarrassment of choice in selecting, among these wayfarers of a single night, a lover worthy of her status.
“Who is it? Who are you talking about?” the girls exclaim, rolling their r’s in the manner of Gascony. “An Englishman?
Tell us, Cécile!”
CÉCILE BURSTS OUT laughing, and runs off to the other end of the courtyard. She climbs up a tree, agile as a cat, and from here she makes faces at her friends, while she starts to sing—
J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris—
Mère Stanislas, espying her from afar, comes running as fast as her long skirts will permit, and commands her, with the sternest of airs, to come down. Cécile is obliged to give ear to a lengthy discourse on young girls of good family, and what is done and what is not done. The rosary of Mère Stanislas clicks with an irritating rattle, Cécile raises her forehead and makes an impertinent reply; from the depths of her skirt Mère Stanislas extracts her little record book, noting several bad points for Cécile, whose reputation is thereby instantly saved: marked wicked and mischievous, she passes before her group of friends, wearing the glorious halo of the incorrigible, the arrogant, of those who are afraid of nothing.
Later, sitting in the empty classroom, Cécile copies a chapter from her history book three times over—a reasonable punishment, she finds, since she is at the same time learning today’s lesson. The third time, she can even make her copy without paying attention to the words, so that her thoughts are free to roam elsewhere …
If Myette would let her leave … but Myette says that the war is still too close to Paris, and that Cécile’s parents have placed her here in her care—“Wait a little more, my dear, you’ve waited four years, wait a few weeks longer …” How can one disobey so gentle a voice? How can one go against the boundless goodness of Myette? Myette, who has such a high idea of Cécile’s innumerable qualities; Myette who admires and adores her with a spinster’s passion.
All the girls of her own age spend their time hunting for flirtations, Cécile reflects, but that is because they have nothing to love. They live alongside their parents, but not with them, they don’t know them, and they don’t let themselves be known by them. For herself everything is different. She has Myette, she has parents whom she adores and who are both heroes, and she has Mlle Mazoyllet; that is quite enough for a girl her age! She has no need of reassurance through flirting with boys.
And for love, she has the flowers, the river, the cat, the dawn. Why should one practice love on the skin of boys, when one may caress a flower, or kiss the leaves of grass, or place one’s cheek against the earth still humid with dew and smelling of sap?
“Punished, my little girl?” asks the voice of Mademoiselle behind her. Cécile raises her eyes toward the youthful face that smiles to her.
Mademoiselle smells good—she must use perfume, there is always a scent of lavender hovering about her. Mademoiselle is blond, she has blue eyes and pink skin. The evil tongues of the village even accuse her of having an English ancestor, for in this area there are numbers of people who haven’t yet had time, after centuries of habitude, to arrive at the idea that it is no longer England that is the enemy but—since 1870—Germany.
“What have you done now, my little girl?” asks Mademoiselle, in a tone of reproach. It is whispered that Mademoiselle would like to take her vows, but that she has been unable to, because of her delicate health. Cécile lives in constant dread of seeing Mademoiselle either dying, or taking the veil, before her eyes. It seems to her that the delicate frailty of Mademoiselle leaves her no other alternative.
Mademoiselle places her white hand on Cécile’s shoulder and Cécile feels herself becoming a river of joy; joy streams all through her body, bubbles in her veins, like the little joyful springs that bubble and jump in the mountains. It is enough for her to feel this hand, she would kiss the palm—but the mere idea alone covers her with a blush of shame.
“I haven’t done anything,” she says, to give herself dignity. “I had climbed into a tree, and Mère Stanislas ordered me to come down, and gave me a lecture. I detest her!”
Mlle Mazoyllet wrinkles her brow. “You must not speak like that. It’s bad to detest anyone, and Mère Stanislas wants nothing—”
“Oh, I know,” says Cécile. “She wants nothing but what is good for me, she wants me to conduct myself like a well-brought-up young girl—” Instinctively, Cécile imitates the voice of Mère Stanislas—so exactly, as she repeats her words, that Mademoiselle begins to laugh.
“Cécile, with you—either you detest or you adore, right off!
You’re so impassioned! Can’t you sometimes feel things a little less violently? And here I’ve come to ask you to recite a poem for the saint’s day of Reverend Mère Clemence—but I think you had a little trouble with her too last week?”
“Oh, but this week I’ve forgiven her!” says Cécile, who is always ready to recite poetry, to act in plays, to dance and to sing. “What poem were you thinking of, Mademoiselle? Will we have no school on her saint’s day?”
Reverend Mère Clemence is the most frequently detested of all the authorities in Cécile’s world, and it is in imitating her that Cécile achieves her greatest successes before her little circle of friends. “The Reverend Mère Clemence and her Discourse on the Duties that Await Us in Life,” or, even better, “The Reverend Mère Clemence, on the Dangers of the Cinema, the Dance, and Cigarettes.”
“What a child you still are, my little one!” says Mlle Mazoyllet, smiling. There is no reproach in her smile, but Cécile nods her head, for she knows that Mademoiselle is right. It’s true that she is too infantile, it’s true that she is nearly eighteen, that this is her last year in school, that she should be serious and tormented at her age, that she should be thinking of the future, thinking of the war, and that she should perhaps never laugh until her parents are found again. She is always reproaching herself for being too impulsive, too gay, too romantic, too childish altogether, and so little prepared for life. But life frightens her, and she cannot admit this to all these people who think her so gay, so carefree …
She is afraid of what awaits her, of the future in a world almost entirely destroyed, in the still-smoking cities where she will perhaps never find her parents. It is so much easier to forget, in laughter, in running to the river, in becoming absorbed in the garden, in Myette, in Myette’s chickens and the cats and dogs, or in composing poems of love, in her heart, to Mlle Mazoyllet—
“You’re sad?” asks Mademoiselle. “Have I saddened you, Cécile? I didn’t mean to. It’s good to remain a child a while longer, you have time enough to become an adult.”
It is the voice of Mlle Mazoyllet that becomes saddened now. Instantly, Cécile forgets her pain, in her worry over the pain she divines in the voice of the one she so loves. What made Mademoiselle say that? Had she herself become adult too soon? Had she suffered, at too early an age? Cécile feels ready to kill whoever it was, man or woman, that brought suffering to Mademoiselle.
But her adored one only responds, “What of the poem, then, Cécile? Do you have an idea? You who read so much—do you have a favorite poem that might be appropriate for this occasion?”
Mademoiselle teaches literature at Cécile’s class at the convent, and they have had long private discussions on the books Cécile has been reading. “Oh!” cries Cécile, “I’ve just read some poems—the most beautiful book of poems I’ve ever read!”
Mademoiselle laughs gently over her pupil’s enthusiasm. “Les Chansons de Bilitis!” says Cécile. “have you read them, Mademoiselle?”
Mademoiselle reddens a bit. “Good heavens, Cécile, I hope you’re not thinking for an instant of reading Les Chansons de Bilitis before the Reverend Mère Clemence! Good heavens, she would faint!”
Cécile begins to laugh. “I know,” she says, “I know it would be impossible, even though, truly, the songs are very pure, Mademoiselle, and very beautiful. You like them, don’t you? … No, for Reverend Mère Clemence I’ll recite—” and Cécile mounts a chair and begins to recite, in a lugubrious voice:
Je suis un berceau
qu’une main balance
au creux d’un caveau.
Silence! Silence!
And leaping from the chair, she adds, “Verlaine,” while bowing to an imaginary audience. At the same instant, in quite another voice, she continues:
Il m’a dit ‘Cette nuit j’ai rêvé,
J’avais ta chevelure autour de mon cou—
J’avais tes cheveux comme un collier noir
Autout de ma nuque et sur ma poitrine—
Mlle Mazoyllet watches the changeable eyes, blue, green, golden, lifted toward her, and she speaks the rest of the poem of Pierre Louÿs, together with Cécile—
Je les caressais et c’étaient les miens
Et nous étions liées pour toujours ainsi—
But the door opens, and Cécile breaks off, at the same time as Mademoiselle.
It is only the sister doorkeeper, in search of Mère Stanislas; she shuts the classroom door again.
“See what you made me do, Cécile, you’re going to have me dismissed! Les Chansons de Bilitis are not to be recited in a school for young ladies! Come now, we’d better think seriously about Reverend Mère Clemence. What about a passage from Esther?”
Cécile makes a moue. “Oh! Always and eternally Racine or Corneille!”
“‘The Lake,’ then?” proposes Mademoiselle. Cécile sighs. “Oh, that, you can be sure she’ll love that!” and her voice immediately takes on the tone of the Mother Superior. “You have just heard a recitation by one of your young friends of one of the most moving poems in the whole of French literature. I hope that you have all experienced the profound Christian inspiration that alone can render a work of art worthy of that designation.”
In the distance, a bell sounds. It is the bell that regulates the life of the convent, heavily ringing out the hours of awakening, of meals, of classes, of recitation, and of sleep.
The little sister from the kitchen must be hanging onto the long chain, her face all red, framed in her bonnet with its black and white piping, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows to enable her to pull more forcefully.
Cécile listens to the bell with that air of concentration that never fails to astonish Mademoiselle. What can this child really be listening to like that? What is it that she looks at, with her intensity?
And Cécile repeats, within herself, “And the bell, too, I must remember it, the bell, and the sister cook, and the odor of the school at five o’clock, and the smile of Mademoiselle, and her frightened air when I mentioned Les Chansons de Bilitis, I must remember, I must never forget the courtyard of the school, and the girls, and the fog, the sun, the gardener’s black dog, and Anette’s white cat, the mornings and the evenings … But what use will it be for me to remember all this if I can never manage to become an adult?”
“What are you thinking of, Cécile?” asks Mlle Mazoyllet.
Cécile shakes herself and begins to laugh. “Of nothing,” she says.
MYETTE IS HOLDING the letter in her hand when Cécile comes from school.
What at once astonishes Cécile is to see Myette awaiting her with a letter, rather than with a pot of jam or a bowl filled with fruit.
In the four years that Cécile has been coming home to this house, Myette has always been there like some distracted mother cat, almost running to their encounter, smoothing Cécile’s hair, sniffing her, seeming to want to efface from the features, from the hair of her godchild every trace of the hours that have been passed away from herself. Before Cécile can say a word, she has always had to drink a glass of currant juice that Myette has concocted, or taste the pears, or the strawberries from the garden, or the jelly, still warm, just made this afternoon …
Only then will Myette, reassured, draw the girl down onto her lap in the great wicker armchair, and demand, “Now tell me, my fine beauty, what have you done today?”
But this afternoon Myette holds nothing in her hand but the sheet of white paper, on which there runs a writing so miniscule that one might think that there are only light, delicate lines traced across the page, lines that do not form letters, only a series of sea-blue threads marking undulating wavelets on a deserted beach.
It is a serious face that Myette presents to Cécile, but seeing the inquietude awakened in her godchild, she cries out at once, “No, no, my darling, it’s not bad news, not for you—only for me perhaps … but where is my head! I haven’t fixed anything for you to eat! Wait!” And she dashes at once toward her kitchen, with Cécile following her.
“But what is it, Godmamma? From whom is this letter? Oh, nougat! Where on earth did you get the nougat, Godmamma?”
“Eat it! It’s for you! And just do me the favor of tasting this apple! Isn’t it beautiful! Look at the color on it! Mlle Angelique brought me a basketful!”
“Mlle Angelique! Just what does she want to know now, if she’s bringing you gifts of apples, Godmamma? That stingy old crow, I’ll bet she’s complaining about me again!
Myette laughs and becomes angry at the same time. “Cécile! Don’t talk like that! She’s a poor old woman, very lonely!”
But Myette knows that Cécile is right, that the old maid is stingy and evil-minded, and that she turns up at the slightest opportunity to murmur in her unctuous little voice, “Your Cécile—I saw her running again, right in the middle of the street, and without her hat, and without gloves! You permit her everything, it’s not right, she’ll turn bad, she has no respect for anyone, a young girl of her age should stop politely and say good day, and she shouldn’t talk in such a loud voice, or laugh so much, it just isn’t done … perhaps in Paris, but here in the country, thank God, it isn’t done!”
“No, Cécile,” Myette says, “Mlle Angelique is not bad, she’s just full of curiosity, and lonely, and she has nothing to do with herself, so when she saw the postman bringing me a letter—special delivery and registered—naturally she wanted to know—”
“Then what about the letter?” Cécile asks, in her turn.
“Well—it concerns you—it concerns your parents too, but this does not bring news of them yet. Do you know, do you remember—someone named Maurice Henry?”
“Maurice Henry?” Cécile repeats. She has no memory of this name. No face emerges to her from the shadows.
“A friend of your father’s,” Myette insists. Cécile closes her eyes. How difficult it is for her to call them up, or even see herself again as she was; all the friends of her parents, too, have vanished into the fog of her childhood. She shakes her head.
“He was in the Resistance with your parents. You parents were deported, my dear, but they are surely alive, they’ll come back, now that Paris has been liberated, the war won’t last much longer. The gentleman writes that he has only now, at last, found my address, and he thinks that you should come to Paris. Your parents’ apartment is unoccupied, and if you don’t go there it will be requisitioned, and since all your father’s papers are there, his manuscripts, his books, someone ought to take care of it—”
Myette holds out the letter to Cécile, and turns away her head so as not to show her tears. The day has come, the day she feared so much, when Cécile would have to leave her. And Cécile mutely bends her head over the sheet of paper, over the microscopic handwriting, deciphering her name, here and there, inscribed by an unknown hand. The very letters seem to call to her, “Cécile … Cécile … Cécile …”
THAT CÉCILE IS but a child, Myette, of course, knows quite well. But isn’t this normal enough? What need has she already to become a woman? Life will seize hold of her soon enough, and with her sensual and passionate temperament, life will be difficult enough, too!
Going to her kitchen window, Myette looks out smilingly upon the figure of Cécile perched in her fig tree, her hair undone, streaming over her shoulders, while, absorbed in a book, she bites into her apple—a familiar picture, for the last four years.
How much she resembles her father—she has the same eyes, sometimes golden, sometimes gray-green, the same mouth with its fine delicate lips, so quick to tauten, so quick to tremble with chagrin or laughter—a delicate, an infantile mouth. Myette had spent her childhood with Cécile’s father, who was her cousin. And if she had been in love with him, she never told anyone.
He was an artistic soul, and it was in Paris that he had to live. After the war of 1914, invalided on a veteran’s pension, he had married Cécile’s mother, and dedicated his life to writing. It is from him that Cécile has inherited her imagination, her gift for play-acting, for singing and dancing. Myette’s memories are rich with the good childhood days with her cousin who organized plays in the barn, and who told such wonderful stories.
Would he ever return from the present war? What need had there been for him, invalid as he was, to get mixed up with the Resistance? Yet it had been unthinkable that he would not get into it. He had always been of a piece, an enthusiast, courageous—exactly as Cécile is, too. Yes, she must let Cécile depart. Today. She must tell her that what awaits her now will be war, and solitude, and above all, life—a life for which Myette has in no way prepared her. Has she been wrong? Should she send some warning to this Maurice Henry? “Monsieur, I send you the daughter of our friend Royer. She is seventeen. She is still a child—I have kept her close to me for four years, and she knows nothing beyond nature, and poetry, and childish friendships, she believes in everything, she is not ready—”
But ready for what? Is Myette herself much more ready, at fifty? Does she know life any better than Cécile? Is she not herself but a provincial old maid? Should she not write to him, then, “If ever you find that Cécile’s parents have been killed, as all signs would lead us to believe, then I beg you, be good enough to my little Cécile to send her back to me, she will need me, she has never yet suffered—”
No, Myette can write nothing to Maurice Henry; she does not even know who he is. She knows only that this child perched in the tree must come down, and must depart.
MAURICE HENRY … Seated in the train, she rereads his letter, this letter that speaks of the war, the Resistance, the deportation of her parents. “We have no news of them, but this in itself tells us absolutely nothing. The camps in Germany will soon be liberated—” Meanwhile, Cécile must come to Paris as quickly as possible; if not, the apartment will be requisitioned, her father has left all his papers, his manuscripts—someone must take care of all of this—
Yes, Cécile will show him that she may be counted on. She will take care of everything, like a woman. She has too long been held aside from this war; now she has left Cécile-the-child in the arms of Myette, and it is another Cécile, an adult Cécile, who is on the way to Paris, and this Cécile rereads the letter on the train, contracting her brows over the curious handwriting, so strangely miniscule.
In the bespattered washroom of the train, she rolls up her long braid—thick as her arm—coiling the hair atop her head, trying to find a coiffure that will give her a bit more age. In her handbag, Cécile has hidden a lipstick borrowed from Louise, and now she attempts a makeup. In secrecy from Myette, she has undone the hem of one of her skirts, and in the washroom she changes, putting on for the remainder of the voyage a tight skirt that comes down nearly to her ankles.
Satisfied, Cécile examines herself in the mirror above the washbasin. The mirror is as filthy as the rest of the place, so grimy that she can scarcely recognize herself in the grayish face peering out at her. This is really already another Cécile, with painted lips, and with that crumbling pyramid of golden hair atop her head.
Above all, she must not disappoint him; she must not appear provincial or infantile, she repeats to herself, contracting her brows, folding her lips together.
And the train, after interminable hours and hours, with continual halts in the midst of empty fields, at last arrives, emitting sighs and groans of fatigue, in the city of Paris, which Cécile had left in 1940.
It is December of 1944, and Cécile had forgotten that it could be so cold, so gray—the rain hurls itself against the windows of the railway car, the platform is filled with soldiers, with refugees, everything smells of war and fog. All at once the entire war comes down upon her like a black cape falling on her shoulders and covering her entirely, annihilating her.
She stands on the platform, valise in hand, in the din of the station, enveloped in smoke, suffocated by that bitter odor of large cities that she had forgotten. Almost the entire crowd presses past her side, the mass of soldiers, the crowd of repatriates, women with their children coming from the zone that has just been liberated, Parisians who had fled and who now at last may return home; she has remained alone, standing there, repeating to herself with a despair that she has never known, “My parents too will return like this, like all these repatriates, I’ll wait for them now in Paris.” She clutches the valise, she shivers, it seems to her that she is the only one on the platform now. And what will she do if Maurice Henry doesn’t come? Only five minutes ago she had been telling herself how adult she must be, how she must impress him as much by all her knowledge as by her maturity, and already she feels herself as frightened as a child of four lost at a fair.
Then she hears her name called, just near her, “Cécile?” and the joy that floods her is so strong that if she dared she would throw herself on his neck. He is there, she is no longer lost, this is a friend of her parents, she is saved. She looks at him, laughing with joy, and he looks at her with an air at once satisfied and astonished.
He does not look at all like his handwriting. She had expected an old man, as meticulous as his minute, tight handwriting. But the man who studies her is quite robust; he looks to be about forty years old, but despite this age, which seems extremely advanced to Cécile, he doesn’t have the air of an old man. He has the look of an artist—he wears a black, fringe-style beard, a Canadian storm jacket with a fur collar, and a Scotch-plaid scarf is wound around his neck, with its end flapping behind him in the wind of the open platform. He has piercing eyes, a very red mouth; he has the air of a bull, and his voice, too, is very low and strong.
“Well, well,” he says, “here I was, coming to meet a child, a little girl, I almost brought a doll along with me to greet you, but I should have brought a bouquet of flowers! It’s a ravishing young lady that I find! What a wonderful surprise!”
As Cécile extends her hand to him, he bends, his mouth is warm on Cécile’s hand, and it lingers.
“But this changes everything,” he repeats, “this changes everything, I shall reorganize all my plans!” Cécile smiles, amused, not understanding what there may be to reorganize, but flattered at being so admired. For Maurice Henry doesn’t take his eyes from her. “You resemble your father,” he says, “but still—you have your mother’s magnificent hair. And what a color! Let me have a good look at you.” He looks, and Cécile blushes. He has such a way of looking!
To remain on her dignity, Cécile returns Maurice’s stare for stare—yes, he has a refined elegance, the sort of elegance that doesn’t exist in Gascony. Even M. Edouard, the handsomest man of the little village, the banker’s son, with his terrible reputation of being a dreadful Don Juan—even he doesn’t dress like Maurice Henry. That scarf, carelessly thrown around the throat, that beard, that fur collar, the breadth of his shoulders, the sport shoes—everything is pleasing to Cécile, and this must be quite apparent, for Maurice asks, “Well, then—I too pass the inspection? It’s all right? We’ll be friends, I can say tu to you?”
Should she perhaps not have looked at him in the same way that he looked at her? Is it perhaps not done? But she’s a little country savage, she doesn’t have any idea of what is done or not done in Paris. And besides, she is so happy to have found him and not to be any longer alone in Paris! By his simple presence, Maurice Henry has swept away the fog, the cold, the sadness. “Come on,” says Cécile, suddenly happy and filled with hope. She puts her hand through Maurice’s arm, as she has seen the stars do in the movies. The women always have their hands through the arms of the men who escort them, and she is a woman now, that’s decided.
“Come on, I want to see Paris, and besides, I’m dying of hunger.”
“Ah! I see that we’re going to understand each other!” cries Maurice. “I’m hungry too—so hungry that I could eat you up!” Cécile laughs. “Ah, then it’s you—the wolf?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Maurice. “The wolf—it is I.”
In front of the station, a jeep awaits them.
“I HAVE DISCOVERED something sensational!” announces Maurice. “You simply cannot imagine it—an adorable girl, ravishing, amusing, more fresh than anything I’ve seen in the last twenty years, a slender, supple body, small breasts, a lovely mouth, hair that falls all the way to her hips, a gift of mimicry, of storytelling! I had dinner with her last night and I haven’t been so amused since the beginning of the war. I even think I’m in love.”
The painter, sitting opposite Maurice on the terrace of the Deux Magots, raises his shoulders. “You’ll get over it, Maurice. You told me almost exactly the same words last month about a WAC in the American army.”
“I?” cries Maurice, indignantly. “That WAC? What WAC? I don’t even remember her, that was nothing compared to Cécile, and besides, with this Cécile, I’m in a way her guardian, she’s the daughter of some friends of mine who were deported—Royer’s daughter—you must have heard of him, he worked with me on that underground newspaper in 1941, ’42 … No, Cécile is different, completely different—you’ll see her—I’m going to bring her tonight to the Marchands’.” Maurice gets up, making a sign to the waiter. “Leave it,” says the painter, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay, old man, until tomorrow night, and don’t forget to write the review of that exposition, I need it for my paper no later than Thursday.”
Flinging his scarf around his neck, Maurice goes off with a rapid step. He’s in a hurry. He is always in a hurry. He promised Cécile to come by for her at four, he still has to go to his paper, and see Henriette, and telephone that British army captain, a scenario writer in civilian life, who has, it seems, a fantastic subject for a film …
Meanwhile Maurice hurries down the rue de Rennes with long strides.
Toward him, there advances a brunette, highly made up, quite pretty, in a very short red dress with very high heels. Maurice throws a single glance her way, a professional of course. The girl comes toward him smiling—she has a smile of absolute indecency. How does she do it? Is it that tip of her pointed tongue, between her lips? Accompanied by an oscillation of her highly pointed breasts, sure to be naked under that tight red dress? Maurice slows down, to the devil with Henriette, with the captain, the paper will come out late—this girl amuses him. She has halted, in front of him. Her eyes are unbelievably smutty—you would say they were two tiny film screens showing filthy movies.
“Are you coming with me, chéri?” she says; the voice too is lascivious; she has a special tone, for uttering the banal phrase.
“Where to?” asks Maurice.
“To my place,” she says. “Very near here.”
“For how much?” says Maurice.
“That depends on what you want, chéri.”
Five minutes of negotiations on the sidewalk. Maurice has a fertile imagination, and he knows how to bargain. The girl is more and more provocative, her eyes, her lips, her breasts are all in the line of combat and obey her like well-trained soldiers. Finally Maurice comes down to an agreement on the price and the merchandise to be delivered.
“Come on then to my place,” says the girl. Maurice starts off. But something rings a bell in him—what is it? He can’t quite tell at once—but something is out of order. Ah! But of course, it’s the voice. The way in which she said, “Come on then to my place.” The voice had totally changed. The whole lascivious quality of a moment ago had been emptied from it. She had suddenly spoken in a voice that was bored, tired, detached. Maurice examines the girl, and all at once the entire face, beside him, is as altered as the voice. The mouth is no more than a lipstick mouth badly put on, the eyes have gone out, the breasts are no longer pointed under the dress but seem to be falling. Once the bargaining is over, the girl is only in a hurry to finish with the job as quickly as possible, she is deflated in one stroke like a balloon; she has put away her display for the next client, like a street merchant who puts away his merchandise in a suitcase, until the next pitch where he must spread it out again. “Good Lord!” thinks Maurice—“to lose my time for that!” hastily, he pulls a bill from his pocket, thrusts it into the girl’s hand. “Excuse me, I’ve just remembered a meeting that had completely slipped my mind—I’ll come back tomorrow,” and before the girl has had time to open her mouth, Maurice signals a taxi and jumps inside. In the cab, he begins to laugh. What a story! He’ll tell it to Cécile. Cécile? Can he tell it to her? Why not? Cécile is no prude, one can talk about everything to her. It will amuse her. Besides, it is a good scene to use in that next novel, he’ll tell his collaborator, he mustn’t forget …
Maurice takes out a cigar, lights it. Cécile has only been in Paris for two days, but he feels himself younger by ten years. “I wonder whether she’s a virgin—that little one,” he asks himself. “Certainly, yes. No. Certainly, no.”
There is something special in Cécile that Maurice has difficulty in understanding, and his failure to understand attracts him all the more. The boring thing about most women is that one knows everything right off. They are too simple for Maurice and too easy. They let themselves be taken by him as quickly as that girl on the sidewalk. These modern women think themselves so highly developed, they have become so intoxicated with their liberty and their equality, that they fail to realize they have lost all interest for a man like Maurice. The women all walk around advertising their taste for things sexual, and their lack of inhibition. There is no longer a great difference between them and that girl of a moment ago—except that this one in the end would have cost a great deal less. One doesn’t have to take her out, take her to dinner, buy her flowers, one isn’t obliged to waste one’s time in her company.
Cécile doesn’t have that free air about her—yet she has a licentious mouth—and eyes that are pure. This combination is intriguing. She blushes, and at the same time she starts to laugh with the laughter of a complete woman. She has the air of someone disguised at the same time as a woman and an innocent girl. Everything about her disorients Maurice, and he is irritated at thinking too much about her, during the two days that she has been there.
AGAIN, THE ELECTRICITY is off. It happens twenty times a day. Cécile has become used to it, just as she has become habituated to the gray bread, the cold water, the freezing apartment.
Just now, Maurice telephones.
As soon as she hears his voice, Cécile feels herself blushing. This annoys her. She doesn’t understand herself. When Maurice is not there, she awaits him; the moment he arrives, she senses that she is afraid of him. She doesn’t understand why she fears him—he is comical, he jokes, he amuses her, he fascinates her, he treats her like a woman.
“I’ll come for you in half an hour,” he just said. “Tomorrow is Christmas, we’ll have a real Christmas supper. Our last Christmas of the war.”
She waits for him in the apartment, while the darkness comes down little by little. It is only a week that she has been in Paris—a strange week, the strangest of her life.
Cécile raises her head. She stands before her father’s library shelves, and up there, on the highest shelf, is that row of forbidden books, the novels written by her father when she was a little girl, the novels that no one had the right to read.
Now too, Cécile does not feel she has the right to touch them. Alone in the dark icy apartment, Cécile gazes up, and her eyes move from one end to the other, over the dozen volumes which her father himself bound in leather. She can barely make out the titles, whose gilded letters shine like glowworms in the shadows. These titles, which her father engraved with his own hand—what dreams, what romances, what tales, what sacred memories are hidden behind them, in the manuscript pages up there? Is there, in all those pages, an answer to the questions Cécile asks herself?
In one week, it seems to her that her entire life has been totally changed. For Maurice Henry has pulled her at once into the astonishing confusion of his own existence. Maurice is at one and the same time, it seems, a critic of art, of the theater, of music, as well as a novelist, a dramatist, a journalist, and a Parisian celebrity on his own, just like Maurice Chevalier or Mistinguette.
Exactly what he did in the Resistance, Cécile cannot quite understand. It seems that he edited some underground newspapers, together with Cécile’s father. The two of them together would write these papers, and distribute them—as well as brochures, and posters, and appeals. A whole group of young people were their aides, writing at night, in cellars, and distributing the papers at dawn while the city still slept.
With Maurice, Cécile, in the course of a single week, has discovered what four years of war were like. But this war consists not only of the Resistance, the Maquis, the Germans, it consists also of the cafés of St. Germain-des-Prés, where Maurice takes her, and where the discussion of art, of literature, of philosophy, last the whole night. There, odd men who have the air of women sit opposite odd young women who have the air of boys.
Installed in elegant apartments in Passy, there are black market restaurants, where Maurice has her served with thick, juicy steaks such as one has not even seen in Gascony for four years. On the table are huge blocks of butter, and platters of cheeses. The proprietor speaks with a Russian accent. A young man with long hair and tight American blue jeans recites incomprehensible poems of his own composition. A girl with long hair loose on her shoulders gets up to sing in a hoarse voice. And Cécile above all compels herself not to show her surprise or ignorance in front of the sophisticated and brilliant Maurice.
For his opinion of her has begun to count terribly much. For the sake of his view of her, Cécile forces herself always to appear droll and gay—so that she may see flickering in Maurice’s somber eyes, that little glitter of amusement that flatters her.
She knows in advance how it will be when they go out together tonight. First there will be an elaborate dinner in some black market restaurant, with a great many friends crowded around Maurice, for since his arrival for her at the station she has never seen him alone, Maurice lives only in a crowd. He will be surrounded by girls and boys, most of them in uniform, uniforms of liberated France, uniforms of the Resistance, American uniforms, English, Polish, Belgian, Czech, war correspondents, medical men, aviators. And there will be those too young for the armed forces, in their own uniform, the zazous who have sprung up since the liberation, with their long hair, their close-fitting pants, their raucous voices.
At this same hour, down there in Myette’s country, everyone is getting ready for the midnight mass. Even during the war, everyone kept up with the custom of the paper lanterns, walking with them to the cathedral, and the blessed loaves that would be distributed after the third Mass, and there were the sheep, the donkeys, and the cattle that were to be blessed on this Christmas night. There had been no Christmas gifts during the war—except that Myette would prepare a wonderful supper, and under her napkin Cécile would find the most beautiful flower of the garden, with an embroidered handkerchief or a book.
It’s freezing outdoors. The streets are being patrolled because of German parachutists who have recently come down from behind the front lines. Cécile gets up and goes to the window. Beyond the windows, still painted blue and crisscrossed with adhesive paper, she can make out the city plunged in night. And beyond that is war, scarcely a few hours away; only a number of kilometers away there are soldiers and battlefields, shells bursting, and still further, just a little bit further on, there are the prisoners and the deportees in the camps which are spoken of, in Paris, only in lowered voices—the camps where the living skeletons still breathe, but scarcely. And two of these skeletons, perhaps …
And then, there are all the cities in ruins, ruins such as have never been seen before.
“No,” Cécile tells herself, “I don’t want it, I don’t want anything of this icy night here, this cold, this sadness, this death. I don’t want it—” She rushes out of the salon, and through the dark corridor she reaches her parents’ room, she pulls open the closet, her hands feel their way among the fabrics hanging there….
Next to the bed, she remembers, there is a candle. Cécile finds some matches that Maurice gave her the other night, real matches that light—American matches. What a luxury—matches that light instantly when you scratch them on the box.
In the light of the candle, Cécile inspects her mother’s gowns, dresses from before the war, and here is one that her mother wore in those days, a red satin dress, low-cut, magnificent. Cécile smiles, for she feels her pain leaving her, she smiles the way an invalid does as the grip of pain is broken by an injection.
Hastily, she rips off her dress, throwing it to the floor as she pulls her mother’s ballgown over her head. The silk glides down on her bare shoulders, caresses her bust, her hips, her flanks. Cécile turns toward the mirror. At first she sees nothing but the candle trembling in the glass, like a flame reflected in a lake, then she divines rather than sees her own form, so small, so lost in this long gown that comes down covering her feet, and with her braid down her back, and her thin virgin’s arms.
“Like this,” she tells herself under her breath. She undoes the braid, and lifts up the golden mass of her hair, part of which falls over her face. She sticks in a few hairpins and combs, and then hunts in the armoire for high-heeled slippers, also dating from before the war.
It’s Christmas, she’s going to stay up for the réveillon, and it’s absolutely necessary that she should be beautiful and that Maurice should tell her that she is pretty, Paris is liberated, and the war will soon be over and her parents will come back.
For eight days she has been oscillating between this constant state of remorse, remorse at being sad, remorse at being gay, and the conviction that she is at the threshold of her life, she has been opening her eyes so as to see everything, ready to taste everything, her heart beating with curiosity and with joy of life, only to fall back again into self-disgust because there is a war and it seems to her that she has no right to have escaped it for four years, nor to taste this life as long as the war is not yet finished. In the mirror, Cécile gazes at this creature in the red dress that emerges from the shadows, a candle in her hand, and prepares to go out into the noise and the lights, while she should really be dressed in black and remain hidden in this deserted apartment. If Myette were here to talk to her … If Mademoiselle could take her hand and smile to her … It was so simple to remain still a child, life was so simple with Myette—and happy … Cécile presses her cheek against the mirror and closes her eyes. The filmy mirror is as cold on her cheek as the water of the river when she went swimming with Anette. Anette is going to be married soon, surely. Louise and Vincente too. Their lives are marked out in advance. They are the same age as Cécile, and all of them have spent four years together, laughing, playing tricks, whispering secrets, dreaming. Why then is she different? She alone? Because everything had been different for her. She did not belong—neither to Myette, nor to her friends, she had been “adopted,” she had come from outside, she came from another life, the life of a little Parisienne. But in Paris too, in the old days—she remembered the little girl she had been, gravely silent, the only child of elderly parents, with a father suffering from an injury from the previous war. There too she had been different, detached from the life of other girls of eight, of twelve.
Only when she was with her parents—they three had formed a whole, a whole that had never been separated. There was too much warmth between them. Cécile, like a tenderly guarded plant, Cécile like a bird in a nest, with too much attention upon her, her opinion too much asked, too much obeyed—had she perhaps been nothing more than a spoiled child?
She opens the door of the library where her father sits before a blank sheet of paper lying on his desk. He smiles as he sees her standing on the threshold of the room, his mouth smiles, and his gaze is far off, there are sails and rafts and lifeboats in his eyes. … “Cécile,” he murmurs, “I’m going to recite something to you.” He recites. Cécile recalls a number of phrases—how did they go, then?
O longs ennuis des jours semblables,
Ennuis, brouillards, des jours sans histoire—
There was another phrase, come from somewhere, that had remained fixed in her memory: “… les cheveux mouillés collant aux visage, avec une cape qui vole sur les épaules, comme une main qui s’agite pour dire adieu …”
What was he writing, then? Poetry? A novel?
At twelve, she found such lines too romantic in tone. She had told him this, making a moue. “It’s so romantic, Papa, you are too sentimental, too nineteenth-century!” She was already reading modern realistic novels and was constantly ashamed of anything that might be taken for exaggerated emotion. Had she wounded him? Did he hold her childish opinion so high? She recalls his beautiful hand with its long fingers, a hand that had the look of a harp—his hand poised on the white sheet before him, protecting the still unborn work.
“Yes, yes,” he would say, “you are right. Come, give your papa a kiss.”
How she loved him. He was everything for her, warmth, sun, beauty, goodness … She loved him with a total passion, and when at thirteen she had lost him, lost both her parents, she had fortunately found the warm and ample breast of Myette, upon which she might lean her childish head. It seems to her that the difference between herself and other children has been a plethora of love. She has always received love in overabundance, she has always been the only one, both at home with her parents and with Myette. Even with Mademoiselle, who for four years had always repeated to her when they were alone, “My little Cécile, luckily we have each other, the two of us, you are altogether different from the other pupils, my own Cécile.”
For the first time, as she approaches her eighteenth birthday, Cécile is alone, all alone, the war has finally caught her. The war is not only a battlefield, it is a total revolution of life, a tearing out of all the roots, a destruction of all that grows, breathes, palpitates. “The war has caught up with me, the war has caught me,” and Cécile looks at herself in the mirror because what she sees is no longer herself, it is the second Cécile who ran with Anette in the woodpath pierced by whirling suns, it is the second Cécile who listens and who recalls and who is always there to say, “Do you remember?” and to scrutinize every pain as well as every joy, even while the first Cécile is ashamed, and tells her, “Go away, you shouldn’t be here at such a moment, peeking, curious, indiscreet, go away—”
A knocking at the door arouses her.
For once Maurice is by himself. He is wearing his fur-collared coat, and he has the look of a gold prospector, an adventurer, an explorer, or a Russian count. His voice thunders, an animal warmth emanates from his entire, vigorous body. Just short of appearing fat, he is like a thick oak or a bull.
Cécile, who for four years has lived only with women, tells herself, “He is a father, a real father who is afraid of nothing, who can protect you from everything, from the war, from cold, and from childishness.” Why, then, is she still afraid of him? For the last week, he has come everyday to see her, he has given her money to live on, he has sent her flowers as though she were already a woman, he has said marvelous things to her.
“What eyes you have, Cécile, what amazing eyes! Little cat, little tigress, come tell me your stories. What a mimic you are! How comical! I feel so good with you! Do you know, I was supposed to go to a cocktail party at Gallimard’s, Sartre and Genet and all our idols will be there, and I preferred to come for you—let’s go out, we’ll have lunch with some friends of mine, I want them to meet you.”
To amuse Maurice, Cécile imitates Mlle Angelique, she repeats Discourse on the Morals of the Reverend Mére Clemence, she describes Mlle Mazoyllet and Anette. Maurice listens enthralled, never tired of Cécile’s tales; he parades her among his friends, eccentrics or celebrities alike, with the pride of a collector who has found a rare object of art.
“Jean Cocteau, have you met Cécile, the daughter of my friends the Royers? Just look at that skin, that color, that hair! Have you even seen hair like that in our times? And you should hear her tell stories and mimic people! She’s extraordinary, this child!”
The “extraordinary chills” delighted, lets her imagination run free. The Reverend Mére Clemence becomes more and more of a puritan, Mlle Mazoyllet is more and more beautiful, Vincente and Louise outdo each other with their quaintness, Anette goes beyond herself in her debauchery with Antoine, for Cécile must describe everything in a way that will amuse Maurice and his friends, she must not disappoint his appetite!
And yet she is afraid of him; he studies her in the candlelight, in her red dress, with her coiffure that mounts and then tumbles again in cascades.
Even Maurice, who talks incessantly, is suddenly wordless.
Doesn’t he like this gown? Is she ridiculous? Should she not have dressed up like this?
But something passes in his eyes, and Cécile knows that the gown pleases him. What passes in his eyes causes Cécile to bite her lips with her white teeth, while her heartbeat quickens. She would like to erase that look in Maurice’s eyes, that look that colors her own face and throat the same red as her dress. That look should not be permitted. He doesn’t have the right—he is her father, she has come to him because he is the one who must help her find her parents, for he is the friend of her parents, and he is here because she is only a child who cannot live in Paris by herself.
“Child, child,” it is what her father called her, the name Myette had for her, the name given her by Mère Stanislas, Mademoiselle, and Maurice himself. She can play at being a woman, of course, play at dressing up as a woman, but it is only a childish game.
Then he mustn’t look at her like that!
He has brought a long package out of his overcoat, breaking the silence with a gesture of his hand. He offers her the box without saying anything, and Cécile feels herself saved. A Christmas present. Then all is well, he has re-established the order of things, he has brought Santa Claus between them, and the chimney.
Already laughing, she tears open the silken paper and opens the box.
“Oh,” she says. And again, “Oh.”
She is sitting down on the floor beneath a Christmas tree, and she unfolds the delicate fabric that glides upon her hands. It is a nightgown, the most beautiful, the most astonishing of nightgowns, a gown for a fairy, for a ballerina, or for a harem slave. A pale apricot gown, so transparent that one might watch the dawn being born through the silk. A long, narrow gown over which a magician’s hand has flung a milky way of tiny embroidered flowers, minute white flowerheads alone, springing to life upon the delicate shoulderstraps and flowing in a rivulet to the hem below. Cécile turns and turns this wonder in her hands, incapable of uttering a word, and Maurice suddenly kneels down beside her on the floor and says, “Do you like it, my darling child?”
Then she doesn’t know anything anymore. “My child”—one doesn’t give harem gowns to a child. She watches, as the look that has frightened her returns to Maurice’s eyes. She doesn’t understand anything anymore, nothing at all—she wants to cry, but she wants to laugh with joy. And she wants to understand, at last to understand what she is supposed to do, what she is supposed to be—because she knows that she still doesn’t know what to be—not yet.
He leans toward her, his face is so large, his warmth too inflamed, his arms too strong, and his masculine odor—everything is in excess. It is a man. She knows nothing of men. She knows only a father, and women.
He is going to find her out. If she lets him come nearer, he will find out the horrible secret—that she doesn’t know anything, that she is in truth that very child that she has been hiding away, for the last eight days.
Cécile jumps up, clutching the gown to herself, and with burst of laughter she cries, “Thank you, Maurice, thanks, thanks, it’s too beautiful, it’s a marvel.” Has she said it well? Like a woman? Can he hear her heart clattering? “I’m all ready—let’s go out, I’m so hungry!”
He helps her put on her coat, he smiles and kisses her hand, a kiss that has only a the slightest pressure, but that Cécile would never without shame admit having felt, not on her hand, but down her spine, a kiss as painful as a wound.
“Yes, hurry,” he says, “we’ll be late, there’s a whole gang waiting for us at Mme Brodetzky’s, she has prepared an absolutely sensational dinner.”
“Hurry”—it’s Maurice’s password. What would he do without that word? He repeats it a hundred times a day. Without his “hurry,” what would Cécile do? It has saved her quite a number of times already, during the week.
Below, a taxi waits, and in the taxi, on the way, Cécile embarks upon an animated story. She must keep things in motion with Maurice, she must talk so as not to allow a dangerous silence to establish itself.
“I wonder what Mademoiselle is doing now?” It’s true that her thoughts always return to the two women who have been mothers for her, Myette and Mademoiselle. But Mademoiselle is too young to be her mother. Once again, Cécile describes her to Maurice. “If you knew how pretty she is, so blonde, a white blonde, almost a Nordic blonde—she must have English or Danish blood in her. Her skin smells so good, an odor of lavender, a scent of citronella—do you know what citronella is? It scarcely exists anymore, it’s a perfume of 1900, and it’s unfashionable now, it’s got an acid scent. When we were alone, Mademoiselle would take me in her arms, and seat me on her knees—she began this habit when I was thirteen and had just come to Myette’s house from Paris. I still didn’t have any school friends then, I didn’t know a soul, I was terribly unhappy at the start. Mademoiselle knew that my parents were in the Resistance. She was a real patriot. We used to listen together to the London radio—Maurice Schumann speaking in the name of General de Gaulle, in my school desk, I made a secret altar, with a Cross of Lorraine and a photo of the General. No one except Mademoiselle knew about it.
“At night I used to go to her room, with the excuse of reviewing my lessons, the night would fall, but we didn’t light the lamp. Sitting on her knees, with my head on her breast, I felt so good, I felt myself protected, reassured—she was mine, I was hers—”
Cécile’s voice becomes veiled. It is true that she loved Mademoiselle with a love that was pure and impassioned. But Maurice’s voice too becomes veiled when he asks, “And then? And after that, what happened? Tell me, my darling child, tell me—”
Cécile, suddenly wide awake, stares at him and begins to laugh.
“But nothing, of course! Sometimes we would kiss each other, and then I would go home to Myette.”
They were the most chaste of kisses, but something in Cécile finds amusement in keeping him ignorant.
And besides—whatever it was that was between them—could it really have been so chaste? Les Chansons de Bilitis that they read together … the warm room … the perfume of Mademoiselle … Of course, nothing had ever happened. But something might have happened … something … Cécile herself doesn’t know what. She would not have been able to explain. Something staggering—some loss of herself … tenderness, caresses that she had never even imagined, but that she had divined though reading certain very beautiful poems of Verlaine, of Baudelaire, of Pierre Louÿs.
In the taxi, Cécile feels Maurice’s stare resting heavily upon her. There, in the shadow beside her, she hears him breathing very heavily, as though he were deep in sleep, or in pain.
WHAT ARE YOU thinking of, Cécile, in the month of December, 1944? Of the war that is ending? Of the war that keeps on? Of the past? Of the future?
The days march uniformly by. In the morning, habituated to rise early, you dress, you slip a piece of gray bread into the ersatz coffee, you go out. You must find your Paris again, the streets, the odors, the various tints of the sky—and besides, what else is there to do but walk?
There are her father’s papers, Cécile does not dare touch them. There are the forbidden manuscripts, imprisoned in their leather bindings. But her father alone can authorize her to read them. When he returns from the camps—then Cécile will ask his permission. As for the apartment, it is Maurice who busies himself with having it registered in Cécile’s name; it is no longer to be requisitioned.
Each day, the front stretches a little further toward the German border. From one day to the next, there might come news of the Royers. “Wait a few more days,” Maurice counsels her, “don’t go back yet to Gascony.” The worst is that Cécile has too soon become habituated to the presence of Maurice, to seeing him arrive in a jeep or taxi, always in a hurry, always surrounded by friends, always on the brink of some astonishing idea. Every evening she goes out with him, to films, art expositions, the theater—to the life of Paris, beginning again despite the blackout, despite the German parachutists.
On the Champs Élysées, there is a huge movie theater presenting American films for the armed forces; there is the dancing in the military clubs, new nightclubs are already opening up. After the silence of the countryside, it is exciting to be going out with grownups who are twice your age and who are so amusing and who are Paris celebrities.
But as for the nightgown—Cécile doesn’t tell Maurice that she never wears it. She keeps it at her bedside in its box, wrapped in its silken paper, and before going to sleep she opens the box and looks at the gown, without being able to feel that she has the right to wear it.
The apartment is so big, so empty at night. Another thing that Cécile does not tell Maurice is that she is afraid of sleeping there alone. Once and for all she has established for Maurice this personality that is herself, yes, but is not all of herself—a Cécile filled with drollery, a tomboy who will dare anything at all, who fears nothing at all. At times, Maurice’s gaze rests on her, and flickering in his eyes are the thoughts that upset her, but she has found the way to protect herself from such moments. She laughs, she dances, she makes fun of Maurice, she playacts the child, she play-acts the woman. Maurice himself perhaps becomes so befuddled that he cannot tell which of the two Céciles he really has to do with.
It is the nights that are the worst, the nights when Cécile is alone, entirely alone, alone for the first time in her life. Maurice is not there to encourage her to believe in the return of her parents. Myette is far away, and far too is Mademoiselle, whose presence always fills Cécile with the close exaltation of love. Far away are her classes, with the laughter, and the odors of the convent, the reproaches of Mère Stanislas, the garden, and Myette … a whole frame of life for her, and an entire world in which she might meet that Cécile who is without fear—but here there is nothing but the night. A night so total that Cécile doubles herself up, beneath the covers, in the dark, empty apartment, alone with the changeless thoughts that turn and turn in her head every night. Strasbourg has just been liberated, and it is in that city that they were arrested—perhaps they are still in Strasbourg? Perhaps they haven’t ever been deported from there? Perhaps they are hidden in the city? Suddenly Cécile is sure of it. They are not dead, they are not even in the camps. No one would have deported an invalid of the first war. Her mother would have hidden her husband—she adored him; she would have protected him. They are in Strasbourg, that’s certain. They must be there and she must go to them there. They are waiting for her. Then—she is bursting with joy. She is so certain now! There are no more problems—she has only a few hours to wait—how is it that she had not thought of it sooner? It was because of this that she has never been able to lose her taste for life. She is not all alone in the world, she has always felt it. How changed they will find her, so grown—they won’t be able to recognize her!
But she will know them. She would recognize her mother’s face even after a hundred years of separation—and her father—his calm smile, his patience in spite of the wheelchair that he could never do without, his beautiful hands resting on his knees, his eyes, so dreamy—
But if she opens her eyes in the darkness—then all her joy instantly leaves her. One has only to look at this empty apartment to know that they are dead, that there is only despair, that they will never come back. She has no one, she cannot stay forever as a burden on Myette, she must look for work, she will manage all by herself.
Her throat is so tight it hurts. If she could only cry. In the night, every night, she turns from side to side in her bed, sighing, falling asleep only to sink into a nightmare from which she starts awake, trembling, in perspiration and terror.
Then she awaits the arrival of Maurice as a deliverance.
He arrives, and she already begins to laugh when she hears him ring at the door. When he is there everything seems simple; Maurice knows everything and can manage everything. Cécile lets herself be taken out, Maurice feeds her, covers her with attentions, treats her as a woman, kisses her hand, admires her hair, her dress, and his conversation is always brilliant, filled with colorful anecdotes, with Parisian pleasantries. He knows everybody, he knows with whom each actress sleeps, he can tell her every scandal, and he knows every essential book that is about to appear.
Cécile can never keep track of all the things he is working on. He reads the scripts of films, develops ideas for plays, sends pneumatiques and telegrams in every direction, speaks of novels, of articles—when does he manage to do all that? With Cécile he is attentive, affectionate. If he is courting her it is in the lightest of manners, in a way so discreet that Cécile is never quite sure of his intention. Besides, the idea would not come to her that Maurice, a man of Maurice’s age, could become seriously interested in her. He surely has a mistress. At times Cécile imagines this mistress for herself. It must be an actress—Maurice knows so many of them. She must be famous and very beautiful and very well dressed and very sure of herself. A real woman.
Sometimes he takes Cécile with him to meet one or another of his friends. Cécile has already become acquainted with a woman painter who was the mistress of Pascin and has a strange face framed in a helmet of black hair cut completely round in the style of a monk. She has met a blond dancer of the Folie Bergère who calls herself Linette. And a woman who writes mystery stories. And another who is an aviatress—and another who, Maurice tells her with an apology, is a prostitute. “I hope it doesn’t bother you to come along with me, Bertha is a girl who helped us enormously during the Resistance, I want her to write her memoirs, she has a great deal of talent—I could do something with her story—”
“But of course not, it wouldn’t bother me, what an idea! On the contrary, I have never met any prostitutes, I would be interested.” And it is true that it interested her, like everything that touches on that mysterious and forbidden area—sex. The adult occupation, which children are forbidden to approach, has always intrigued Cécile—always, that is, since she first heard her classmates whisper about it, for this matter of sex which seems to constitute so extraordinary a sin can also be an occupation, she knows, as there are women, prostitutes, who “sell themselves” and there are men who go to certain “houses” where they do “forbidden things.” To meet a real prostitute seems to her something just as fantastic as to visit the North Pole or to fly to the moon.
That this matter of sex could ever have something to do with her own life is altogether improbable. Cécile has been prepared only for love. The one obviously has nothing to do with the other.
“You are so young, my little girl,” Maurice often tells her. “If only I were twenty years younger!” At times he shakes his head in puzzlement while Cécile prattles of Mademoiselle and Anette, and he asks, “Just what do you mean to say? Sometimes you astonish me, Cécile.” But then Cécile changes the subject, feeling herself suddenly embarrassed, and on unsure ground.
“Are you coming? Quick, I’m in a hurry,” Maurice tells her once more. “I have to go to Henriette Arnaud’s—she’s a terrific girl with an extraordinary voice and a sensational talent. She’s still in the army but as soon as she’s demobilized I’m going to start her off. She’ll have a wild success. Come on, Cécile. Besides—it’s odd—you resemble each other—you’ll see.”
In the hotel requisitioned by the army, on the Champs Élyseés, Cécile sees—or rather at first hears—his new sensation. Down the corridor she hears a hoarse, low voice, a voice that sounds like no other, singing some verses of Apollinaire’s:
Elle avait un visage
aux couleurs de France—
des yeux bleus, des dents blanches
et des lèvres très rouges—
“Ah! ah!” Maurice cries. “She’s becoming patriotic, our Henriette, since they made her a corporal.” He knocks. Henriette opens the door; she is wearing a long blue dressing gown, and she hugs a little dog in her arms. But what strikes Cécile first of all is her long straight hair, undone and hanging alongside her pale cheeks, her slender throat. She has very large eyes, somber, angled upward toward her forehead, the eyes of a saddened lioness, Cécile reflects. Even when she smiles, she looks grave. Inside the room, a guitar lies on the floor, while Henriette’s khaki uniform is tumbled over a chair; on the bed there is a scattering of song manuscripts, handwritten, typed, and some of them printed.
“Henriette,” says Maurice, “here’s Cécile.” This seems to suffice as introduction. Already, Maurice is seated on the bed; he pulls off his tie—he has the air of being completely at home. But he always has the air of being at home, with every woman he meets.
“Well,” he says, “have you written the songs?”
“Yes,” says Henriette. “I worked on them. But I don’t know—”
“Let’s see.”
Maurice stretches out his hand for a bundle of papers, runs his eyes over them, drumming his fingers on the sheets, whistling, humming. “It’s not bad—you have to change the title—it’s old hat—this one is good—I’ll cut off the beginning—the melody has to be changed—you’ll have to rewrite the ending for me—”
“You think so?” asks Henriette, with her solemn air.
She comes closer to the bed and Maurice puts his arm around her waist. Cécile has gotten used to this—Maurice is familiar with the ex-mistress of Pascin, and he kisses the aviatress on her throat, and he calls the prostitute “darling,” and he disappears into the bathroom with the authoress of detective stories. But it is on herself that Henriette’s eyes are fixed, while Maurice distractedly caresses the singer’s hips, and Cécile, uneasy, goes and presses her forehead against the window.
“Who is it?” she hears Henriette ask.
“Special,” says Maurice. “Sacred. This one, you don’t touch.”
What did he mean by that? Or else—perhaps she hadn’t understood? Cécile turns suddenly, astonished. The strange eyes of Henriette still rest on her.
“Mademoiselle,” says Cécile, “is it true that I look like you? Maurice said so—but I don’t see it.”
Henriette comes toward her slowly; she lowers her curtain of black hair toward Cécile, and for an instant her cheek presses against Cécile’s. It burns.
“Is it true, Maurice?” They have asked the same question at the same moment.
“The blonde and the brunette,” he says. “yes, except for the color of your hair. Wait—Cécile—just slip on Henriette’s uniform, and we’ll see.”
Cécile is enchanted by the idea. She adores costumes—and a real uniform is even better. After all, it’s an idea—perhaps she can enlist? It’s true that everybody says the war is almost finished, but all the same, as soon as she is eighteen—the idea of serving General de Gaulle! Cécile has dreamed about him for four years, hanging over the secret radio, listening to the BBC from London, with Myette weeping whenever she heard the voice of Maurice Schumann coming from England: “Today, the four hundred and fiftieth day of the Resistance of the French people …”
Cécile glances at her father’s friend. Isn’t he going to step out of the room so that she can take off her dress?
Maurice doesn’t budge, doesn’t even look away. Henriette is brushing her long hair, in front of the mirror. They seem to find it quite natural for Cécile to undress before them. “All right,” thinks Cécile, “in that case, I’m not going to play Saint Touch-Me-Not.” It is a part that has never suited her.
She steps back a bit, and resolutely pulls her dress over her head; her upswept hair falls down her back when she straightens herself.
All the same, it’s a much more uncomfortable moment than when she went swimming nude with Anette. Cécile is wearing only a tiny brassiere and her white panties are too small. Luckily she is still tanned by the summer sun, and her tan covers her with an even, golden sheen. She stretches out her hand for the khaki skirt just as Maurice approaches and says, “Look at yourselves in the mirror, the two of you.”
It’s true—they resemble each other. But couldn’t he have waited until she put on the uniform to say so?
“I’m cold,” says Cécile, and she hurriedly pulls on the skirt and the shirt.
“She’s too quick for you, Maurice,” says Henriette, smiling.
In the taxi that takes them back a little later, Maurice suddenly says, “You have a ravishing little body, Cécile. A Tanagra—that’s what you look like, a blond Tanagra. But why are you afraid of me?”
How does he know this? Cécile feels herself blushing.
“You prefer your Mademoiselle and your Anette to your old Maurice, eh?”
Cécile doesn’t answer him.
“And Henriette—do you like her?”
“Yes, she’s beautiful. She looks sad. I’d like to be her friend,” says Cécile.
“Her friend?” repeats Maurice. “Really?”
His hand comes in search of Cécile’s, and as he often does, he raises the square little hand to his mouth, and presses his lips into Cécile’s palm.
Cécile’s heart beats quickly. She doesn’t know what to do, what to say, it’s always the same when it’s like this—what is one supposed to do when one is afraid and when one doesn’t know why one is afraid? She looks at this man’s head, bent over her hand, she looks at him without budging, without drawing back her hand, startled to find, mingled with the fear that contracts her, something else, something new, something pleasurable and painful at the same time, like a shiver going down her back, while the whole inside of her mouth seems to become dry. She is thirsty. Suddenly she is devoured with thirst.
SINCE THE MONTH of January, Maurice has seems preoccupied, and several times he speaks of Cécile’s parents almost in the past tense.
“There is terrible news from the camps. Some of them have been liberated—the Germans gassed all of the older people, the sick, the children—” Is there something that he knows? He says not, but then why does he seem to have the air of preparing Cécile for the worst?
And yet during this same period, hope had revived in Cécile. She writes long letters to Myette. “I am certain that they’ll come back.” Each night she falls asleep telling herself, “Tomorrow there will be news.” It’s snowing in Paris, but Cécile doesn’t even feel the cold, she has already become habituated to a Paris of both luxury and hunger, to being crushed in the crowded métro, to the curious fashions of the Liberation, with its wooden soles and its pyramidal hairdo, to the failures of electric current, the gray bread; Paris seems to her more severe and more extravagant and more beautiful than all that she had dreamed. When her parents return, how she will busy herself with them! How she will take care of them, how she will make them forget all of their suffering! How good it will be to have them. To have a father again. A father—that is what she has missed most, in these four years.
“I’ll come at four o’clock,” Maurice said, and once more she waits for him, ensconced in her parents’ big bed, her favorite place of refuge, where she reads, writes letters, and munches on walnuts sent to her by Myette.
BUT MAURICE HAS arrived, and not alone. He is accompanied by Henriette and a large young man who has the air of a painter or a writer; his hair is too long, and he has the look of so many of the young people who surround Maurice, writing books or painting abstract pictures which Maurice encourages and criticizes in the same breath.
Cécile brings them all into the salon. They have a solemn air. Maurice coughs. Henriette looks angry. Cécile brings her walnuts, and offers them around, but no one accepts any and the silence stretches on between them. What do they want, then? Maurice looks at Henriette, and it is she who turns to Cécile.
“Cécile,” she says finally, very quickly, and in a single burst, “you mustn’t go on hoping, there has been news, they are dead.”
SINCE THE MOMENT when the blow fell, it seems to her that she has run the whole way to Myette. She doesn’t remember having cried. She went into her room and packed her valise. Maurice, Henriette, and the young man—all of them were talking, but she heard what they said only through the other Cécile, the shadow who listened and took note.
“… She ought to cry, it would comfort her … Give her something to drink, Maurice … What are you going to do? … Where is she going? … We can’t leave her …”
Without knowing how, she was in the train and Maurice was saying at the door, “My dear, my dear child, Myette will be waiting for you at the station—you’ll write to me? I’ll come to see you, as soon as I have a minute—you promise me, you’ll go and see the doctor with Myette? I don’t like to see you so pale, so tense.” Hours and hours in the train without a thought. The train said, “All alone, all alone, never again, never again—” She would never see them again, then. But weren’t they already dead for four years? Hadn’t she lost them forever, four years ago?
At the station there is Myette—her arms, her warmth, the arms closing in again around Cécile. Then her house, a large bed, the bed of Myette, piled so high with a red eiderdown, and Cécile dressed in a long nightgown of Myette’s, of rough linen, like the country nightgowns of long ago.
Only then, in Myette’s arms, in Myette’s bed, in her gown—only then had she been able to release the flood of tears, without danger of dying. For one night, one night alone, she had dared to show her weakness to Myette.
From the next morning on, it was finished. She had come to breakfast combed, dressed, serious, and dry eyed. No, Myette should not see her suffer, no one should see her suffer.
“IT WAS CRUEL to tell her like that,” says Henriette. “I hate myself, but I didn’t know how to do it. You gave me the dirty job because you’re cowardly—cowardly like all men faced with sorrow. It was for you to tell her, but no, you keep it for yourself to speak to her of love. Death—that’s for me.”
Henriette rages on; she strides back and forth in the hotel room, throwing her clothes onto the floor, shaking her black mane. “I liked her, that little girl—and so you were jealous and you preferred that that particular memory should always be associated for her with me.”
Maurice says nothing. He knows women too well not to know that when they are in anger, it is best to remain silent. Sitting on Henriette’s bed, he lowers his head with a guilty air, an attitude that is always successful for him.
Little by little Henriette calms herself; she sits down at the table, lights a cigarette. “Have you any news of her?” she asks.
“Yes, but only through her godmother. She’s getting along all right. She’s young and at her age everything passes, all the sorrows … Her birthday is coming in a few days. She’ll be eighteen—can you imagine it? She’s really just a kid. Four years younger than you. That’s not so great a difference, and yet you are a woman, and she is a child. An odd sort of child—I never seem to understand her, I never seem to understand what she knows, what she wants, what she does and what she doesn’t do.”
“That’s what attracts you. You—Maurice Henry, the expert on women—and how he has found a would-be woman that he simply cannot understand.” And she adds in English, “What a challenge!”
“Well, then, what do you advise me? What should I do now?”
Henriette begins to laugh. “But I really don’t know—send her a birthday present, or go see her, or telegraph her to come back. It’s really amusing to see you in such a state.”
“I love her,” says Maurice.
“Love—you don’t know what it is. Love is for women, it’s not for you men, don’t talk to me of love. You wanted her, that’s all. Perhaps I love her, but you, you want her.”
Henriette has got up, and Maurice eyes her, reaching his hand out toward her. “No,” says Henriette, “go on, get out, you disgust me.”
FOR CÉCILE’S EIGHTEENTH birthday, a package arrives from Paris. Once more Cécile undoes the silk-paper wrappings, and the ribbons, to decipher her name traced in the microscopic handwriting. This time it is a luxurious flask of perfume. On the accompanying card Maurice has written, “I remember having heard you say that your dear Mademoiselle smells so good—of lavender. This isn’t lavender, but this smells good, too.”
Cécile smiles each time she touches a drop of the perfume—so precious, so expensive—behind her pink ears. Cécile smiles because she is eighteen, and life has taken hold again. The garden has been given back to her in all its springtime glory, and the birds and the fruit and the dawn have been given back to her. Paris has faded anew into the past—with the war. They are fighting in Germany, they are fighting in Japan, but these are the last attacks of the war. Here life is so calm. Mademoiselle recites poetry. Anette is engaged, Louise is learning stenography and typing, Vincente is in love with a boy in the army. And yet at dawn when Cécile goes down into the garden, a shawl over her shoulders and the shears in her hand, when she bends over a rose, or reaches to a branch of the walnut tree, she seems again to hear the voice calling her, “Cécile, my darling child—”
He had half-opened, in Paris, a door to another life. Cécile remembers the discussions in the cafés, and her success when she mimicked Mére Stanislas, she remembers Henriette and the other girls with their long hair and the faces of poets and painters, and the thundering voice of Maurice, “Quick, quick, Cécile, I’m in a hurry—” She remembers too the thirst that came into her, and the head bent over her palm, the taste of that red avid mouth in her palm—a drop that only makes you thirstier. “No,” she tells herself, “all that is finished, it’s not for me, I belong in the country here, to this countryside, to the woods, to these ramparts, to the dawns of Gascony, my place is with Myette, for always.”
Once again it is dawn. Cécile is happy to have found peace again, the dawn is even more gentle, the flower petals are even more scintillating in the dew. She feels herself buoyant and whole, she marvels in astonishment at how she has been able to come to life again. But she has heard the grating of the garden gate. Cécile senses a presence in the solitude of her garden at this hour. Instantly, without turning, she feels that it is he, through the force of his presence.
And it is he, in a coat with the collar up, smiling, with his round black beard giving him the air of an adventurer. He stretches out his arms and Cécile utters a cry of joy and precipitates herself toward him.
“I’ve thought of you without stopping, Cécile,” he says, and Cécile, with her face hidden against that large, hard chest, tells herself, “He has come for me, he has thought of me, he has missed me,” and she is astonished at feeling so happy.
“Come on,” says Maurice, and Cécile begins to laugh when he adds, “Quick,” for even here, even in the dawn, he is in a hurry. “Come quick, I have a jeep, I’m taking you along.”
“Where to?” cries Cécile, ravished. “But I’m not even dressed, Maurice,” and she pulls her shawl aside to show him her long nightgown.
“And what are you doing in a nightgown at this hour in the garden, eh? Admit it, you were awaiting a lover.”
Cécile wants to respond, “I was waiting for you,” but she halts herself in time and only laughs.
“Then go quickly and get dressed, but the main thing is hurry up—I’m taking you to Toulouse with me, I have a meeting with the editor of a paper there.”
Cécile goes to wake Myette, and dresses in a hurry. In the kitchen she finds Maurice again, with Myette serving him bread and jam and what passes for coffee since the war. They are talking politics, or rather, Maurice is talking and Myette is listening. “You’ll bring her back to me tonight,” she says. “Be careful, my dear—a jeep—isn’t it dangerous?”
“Oh! Godmama! I’m not a baby!” Cécile cries indignantly.
What she hopes as the jeep crosses the village is that all her friends will see her in this vehicle next to this man who has the look of a real Parisian and an artist. She laughs, for she already imagines what Mlle Angelique will say behind her curtain. “Good Lord! Cécile all alone with a man—he looks like an Englishman or an actor—and in a jeep. Where is she going? She’s running away, that’s certain!” And she’ll pull on her shawl at once and hurry to Myette.
How can she again be so happy? Is it a lack of conscience? Is it a betrayal of her parents? And yet how she loves life! How each joy, even the smallest, always fills her entirely, how she feels each joy separately with each of her sharpened senses! Like the joy now of the speeding jeep that makes her hair dance, the joy of the wind burning her cheeks, the joy of seeing the fields on both sides of the road, the fields on a morning of springtime, to breathe the odor of the earth, the odor of the trees, to hear the birds crying in the sky, to feel the sun on the back of her neck, and the warmth of Maurice’s body so close to hers. This is what it means to live! To feel with one’s skin, with one’s eyes, with one’s sense of smell, with one’s hearing, and to know that all this is a gift offered her, that she has only to reach out her arms—
And it is to Maurice that she owes this morning, this happiness of feeling herself so free and young—Maurice, who is the friend of her father, who replaces him twice over, now, who has come especially for her, abandoning Paris and his friends, and his mistresses, and who has told her, “I missed you.” She has been missed by this man, so amusing, so original, so filled with ideas and projects, this man whose life is a perpetual race toward more ideas and more projects, and whose presence at once transforms her peaceful and monotonous life of a little country girl into a tumult of adventures.
Maurice drives at a wild speed and the jeep bounds over the badly paved road, hurling aside a flotilla of bewildered chickens and cats.
“Well, then, my little darling,” says Maurice, “tell me—I’ve missed your stories, too. I often think about your Mademoiselle, I imagine her with you—you’ll have me meet her—and your Anette and the others too—”
Isn’t he still imagining too many things that he shouldn’t? Cécile is a little disquieted without really knowing why. It is true that she has exaggerated all these tales a bit, so as not to seem too provincial, too infantile for this sophisticated man. But isn’t he now taking her for someone far more free than she is? It is true that Mademoiselle sometimes kissed her on the cheek, but has Cécile specified the location of the kiss for him? It seems to her that she has left this detail too vague. Does Maurice imagine for himself that because they read Les Chansons de Bilitis—But no, that would be absurd. Does she have the air of a masculine sort of girl?
Cécile’s notions on the complexities of love and sexuality are vague and confused. With the help of her school friends, and her knowledge of country life, she has constructed for herself an understanding of things in which there is, on the one side, love, pure and romantic, and on the other side, sex, mysterious and forbidden.
Cécile says nothing and Maurice looks at her now and again from the corner of his eyes, as he drives.
“We’ll make a little stop on the way,” he says. “I know a wonderful inn not far from here, we can have lunch there, you can rest, we can talk a bit—”
And without knowing why, Cécile feels the same fear taking hold of her. Maurice’s voice has suddenly become strange—a bit choked—and his body leans against Cécile, from time to time, with an insistence that troubles her.
As always, she detaches herself from herself, to watch. She sees Cécile laughing and pointing out the countryside to Maurice, and hears Cécile questioning him about Paris, about Henriette, and her parents’ apartment, while that girl who is being watched, that other Cécile, is at the same time contracted with fear. How can there be two of her like this in a single body?
The jeep halts before an elegant inn, a real wayside inn for tourists—a sort of Trianon of Gascony. There is a thatched roof, quite new, white walls, geraniums. It is said that during the war the Germans came here with their mistresses, that there was real butter served, and white bread and ham, all through the occupation. Now, from the doorway, one hears a voice singing in English. The uniforms have changed, and another set of officers stands around the bar, perhaps with the same girls.
Here too the owner has an air of recognizing Maurice—or does he simply recognize in him the habitué of all the world’s fashionable inns?
“What would you like to drink, my little darling—a glass of port? Champagne?”
“At this hour?” Cécile exclaims. “No, I’d rather have a glass of cold milk.”
Maurice laughs, orders a cognac for himself and milk for Cécile.
And while she slowly drinks her milk, she feels Maurice’s eyes scrutinizing her. “Cécile, come back to Paris with me,” he says suddenly.
“Myette wouldn’t want it,” says Cécile, “and besides, what would I do in Paris, Maurice? I have to finish my school year, it’s the last.”
“You can live in Paris with me, in my place,” says Maurice. “You needn’t be afraid—why are you blushing?” But it is he who has blushed. “Cécile, since you left I’ve been thinking of you without a stop, incessantly. You are so young. I could be your father and still I don’t love you like a daughter. Do you know that? Do you sense it? Cécile, let’s go upstairs, I’ve reserved a room, I won’t do anything to hurt you, I simply want to be alone with you. You are made for love, Cécile, with your youth, your laughter, your enthusiasm. Let me teach you—it will be better than with Mademoiselle—you’ll see—”
Cécile has said nothing. Her face is afire. Her heart thumps, her knees tremble. What frightens her is not so much the words of Maurice but his face, this masculine desire on his face, in his eyes, on his lips—this desire that she has never yet encountered so totally, so brutally naked. This cannot be love, it can only be that other thing, the mysterious and forbidden thing, and Cécile feels herself falling back as from a dark pit whose bottom she cannot see.
There is but one thing to do and that is to flee. What is there that she can say, in answer to Maurice? She feels herself ridiculous, inexperienced, she wants to cry, when instead she ought to know what one should say and how one should behave in such a situation. Henriette certainly would have known, or Linette from the Folies Bergère, or any other of Maurice’s woman friends.
She gets up, then, and runs out of the room—but where should she go? She hasn’t any money, she doesn’t know how to drive—
“Cécile,” Maurice cries behind her. “Look—my darling little girl—have I offended you? But after all, you’re not a little white goose—you’ve got too much intelligence for all that, you certainly know that this trip to Toulouse—it was only an excuse to see you, to be alone with you. It’s months now that I’ve wanted you, that you’ve been driving me crazy, you know it well enough, but after all, I’m not a brute, surely you don’t believe I’m going to rape you! Look at me, Cécile, lift your head, look at your old Maurice!” He is all at once so nice, his voice is no longer frightening at all, he has regained the reassuring voice of a grownup talking to a child. Cécile raises her head and sees that even Maurice’s eyes, the black, glistening eyes, are no longer frightening, but smiling. She smiles, too, and lets him take her hand. “Then you’re coming with me, upstairs? No, don’t escape again—look, what are you afraid of, tell me? You were alone with me a thousand times in Paris, in your apartment, what difference is there? Did I ever try to violate you? Don’t act like a child, it’s ridiculous at your age, Cécile, we’re friends. I only want to be alone with you, we’ll spend a nice day together chattering, we’ll have a wonderful meal brought up to the room, you’ll tell me stories, we’ll make plans—what’s wrong with it?”
“No,” says Cécile, “no.”
“All right,” says Maurice, “you see, I don’t insist. I thought you were less provincial, that’s all, more courageous, too, more of a woman. Let’s go on to Toulouse.”
Is he angry? Has she offended him? Has she behaved badly? A woman would surely not have refused to go up to the room with him, it’s true that after all Maurice would not have forced her into anything. She must have seemed awfully stupid. In silence, Cécile follows Maurice toward the jeep. How can she get him to forgive her? How can she show him that she is so fond of him, that she has missed him, too, that above all she doesn’t want to offend him? They drive along in silence now in the jeep, and all of Cécile’s joy has vanished.
Can Maurice then, like a magician, bring her joy and also remove it? No one until now has had this power over her. Cécile feels herself empty and alone and abandoned; she places her hand on the seat between Maurice and herself—in that space so vacant, so large and empty, when just a little while ago there was no space at all between their two bodies.
THE ASTONISHING THING is that on the way back Maurice again becomes gay and even seems to want her forgiveness. He no longer appears angry. He chatters on about Paris. The war will be finished a month or two from now, he has come across a really sensational subject for a novel and discovered a young writer who will collaborate with him on it, he is going to begin a new gossip column in a new paper that is soon to be launched, he has a buyer for Cécile’s apartment, but what should be done with the furnishings and all the papers?
“Are you already going back to Paris tonight, Maurice?” Cécile asks, disquieted. My God, how sad she will be without him.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asks at once.
“Of course,” says Cécile, “you know very well that I’m glad when you’re with me.”
“Is that true?” Maurice stops the jeep, and takes Cécile’s hand. “Then, Cécile, if it’s true, at least you’ll let me kiss you?”
Can she still say no and lose him again, now that she has begun once more to live?
She extends her cheek toward Maurice, but Maurice only sniffs the cheek and instantly his mouth is on Cécile’s mouth, his arms encircle Cécile’s shoulders, his body is pressed against hers. It is so rapid, so powerful, too, that Cécile doesn’t have time to think, or even to let herself be observed by that other Cécile. She feels a slight burning on her mouth, and already Maurice has moved apart and her mouth has been abandoned and the wind that grazes her lips no longer has the same taste.
It was a scarcely deposited kiss, and yet for Cécile it is the first kiss and it seems to her that a red-hot iron has been imprinted on her lips.
“No,” says Maurice, “it is better not to. You excite me too much. I’ll just say some more stupidities, and you’ll take flight again. Let’s move on.”
And all at once Cécile retrieves her delirious joy. If he has moved aside of his own will, then it means that he loves her, it is not that terrifying sex, it is pure love. He has marked her with this kiss, and then he has moved aside from her body, and therefore she can give him her soul.
It is she who then throws her arms around him, and who hides her face with happiness against his neck, so strong, so reassuring.
MAURICE HAS TAKEN a room in the village hotel; he has decided to stay a few more days, so as to work on his idea for a novel. And no sooner is Maurice installed in the hotel than it seems that the entire little town awakens from a long sleep. To begin with, at the hotel, the telephone is now busy all day long. Maurice is called from London, from Paris, from Geneva; he sends off and receives the most peculiar telegrams, upon which the postmaster, when he takes his anisette on the café terrace, delivers his comments.
One of them reads: AFTER KILLING CHANTAL DE ROUGEMONT WHAT DO I DO?
“In my opinion, she must have been a collaborator,” says the postmaster to his friend the telegraph operator. Another message is even more curt: FINISHED STOP SEND TWO THOUSAND FRANCS.
As soon as Cécile comes from school, Maurice has her go to the post office with special delivery letters and packets of papers. His room is filled with newspapers, books, manuscripts that have come bursting out of his valise. The entire little town talks about him, quoting his clever remarks, which are spread by the hotelkeeper. Mme Sabathé, who operates the restaurant, discusses his clothes. The stationer has placed a dozen books in his display window, all by Maurice Henry, and Maurice has consented to autograph copies of his works.
At the table at Myette’s, Maurice keeps up an endless flow of stories which Cécile is never tired of hearing. What Sartre said to Camus a week ago, and the secret life of Danielle Darrieux, and the recipe given him by the aging and famous writer Colette, who lives in an apartment in the Palais Royal, and the forthcoming books at Gallimard, and the announced return of Charles Boyer, and the next Picasso exhibition—Maurice leaps from painting to literature to fashions and to cookery, to music, and from music to politics …
Only Myette, when she is alone with Cécile, does not have the air of approving him. She never speaks badly of anyone, but simply keeps silent, puckering her brows and sighing.
When Cécile asks, “Isn’t he amusing and intelligent, God mother?” Myette murmurs something incomprehensible, and lets drop a plate that breaks on the stone squares of the kitchen floor.
Seated at the table, her braid over her knees, Cécile listens like a good girl, but Maurice lets his black eyes rest on her and she blushes; she thinks of the things Maurice said to her, and of the kiss, and she blushes, and she knows that Maurice knows what she is thinking, and it is a secret between them.
After dinner Maurice always says to her, “Will you walk back with me as far as the hotel, Cécile?” He has a horror of being alone even for a moment—this, Cécile has realized. She likes to walk beside him. For a man of his age and corpulence, Maurice has great agility. He walks quickly, he always has the air of an animal in excellent health, with his powerful torso, his shirt open at the throat, his silken scarf fluttering, his white teeth gleaming.
She has introduced her school friends to him, Anette with her little round face, Louise, timid and dark, Vincente with her flirting eyes. But Maurice, who at once exerted his charm for them, told Cécile as soon as he was again alone with her, “They are very nice, but they’re ordinary little girls, they don’t have your vitality, your spirit, your air of a doe …”
The one he wants to meet is Mademoiselle, and Cécile is not very eager to introduce her to him. With all the ridiculous ideas he has made for himself, she knows he will only be disappointed—disappointed in her, too, perhaps.
She has not seen Mademoiselle alone a single time since Maurice has been there, and she feels guilty, for until now Cécile has gone to see Mademoiselle almost every evening.
Maurice has gone back early to the hotel today to work, and on leaving him, Cécile decides to take a walk on the ramparts. It is only ten o’clock and there is a great pale full moon. Mademoiselle loves to walk in the moonlight; perhaps she will be there.
But as Cécile walks in the narrow little streets built during the time of the Roman occupation, the silent, empty little lanes with their houses linked from one wall to another by light arches, it seems to her that someone is following her. A step resounds now and again behind her, yet when she turns there is no one. She is somewhat frightened and walks more quickly. Here are the ramparts, and sure enough the familiar silhouette is there, seated on the great ancient stones, enveloped in a cape. Cécile makes out the blond hair looking white in the night, and at once feels her heart filled with a pure joy at seeing Mademoiselle alone again.
“Cécile! How odd it is, I was just thinking of you.”
The gentle hands come to rest on her shoulders, and all at once Cécile knows for certain the identity of that shadow hiding at the entrance of the lane—it can only be Maurice. What has suddenly come over her? Is it to make him forget the way she was the other day at the inn, so terrified, with her infantile fear, is it to prove to him that she is not at all such a child, and that the things he believes of her are true, that she is more complicated, more ripe than her age, and that the tales she tells him are real?
For Cécile finds herself seized by a little demon of malice. What harm can there be in playing the game? Since Maurice after all is so fond of her tales and her fantasies, what harm is there in playing out such a story, in writing with her hands and her mouth, for him the writer, a story entitled “Cécile, or How to Impress Maurice.”
Cécile puts her arms around Mademoiselle’s shoulders, and places her head against her neck. “I’m cold,” she murmurs.
“What’s wrong, my little one? Don’t you feel well? Is something troubling you?” Mademoiselle opens her cape, enfolding Cécile within it, and presses the girl to herself. From a distance they make a single shadow on the ramparts, a shadow with two blond heads pressed cheek to cheek. And in a clear voice Cécile begins to recite:
Elle entra et passionément
les yeux fermés à demi, elle unit
ses lèvres aux miennes et nos langues se connurent—
un basier comme celui-là—
“Oh, Cécile,” murmurs Mademoiselle, “not so loud! Someone might hear you! You have no idea what you’re reciting!” But her arm presses Cécile a little more strongly against herself and Cécile, forgetting the game, feels herself strangely moved.
“Excuse me for interrupting you, mesdemoiselles, will you permit me to join you? Cécile, won’t you introduce me to your friend?”
Then it is all right, and he has been caught in her little game as by a trap. Cécile detaches herself from Mademoiselle. How brightly Maurice’s eyes shine in the dark. Suddenly Cécile feels sad, and terribly guilty.
“I MUST GO home, it’s late,” she says.
“I’ll walk with you,” Maurice says at once.
Mademoiselle, who lives just by, in the convent, descends the huge stone steps running lightly. She turns back once and smiles; her hands are white in the shadow of the cape that opens behind her when she runs like that.
Cécile follows her with her eyes until her hand, her blond hair, her cape have all disappeared through the little doorway behind the convent. Then Cécile goes homeward with Maurice, in silence, passing along the empty lanes with their closed shutters. Maurice doesn’t speak. He only takes Cécile’s hand into his, and Cécile leaves him her hand.
On emerging from the narrow lanes, one may come home to Myette’s through the main street, or by way of the public garden called the Bastion. It is through the deserted Bastion that Maurice takes her, this garden where Cécile, long, long ago, when she was hardly more than a baby, used to play, sitting on the ground with her little pail and shovel, scooping up the chestnuts that fell from the trees. There are benches in the garden, and Maurice, still without saying anything, sits down on one of the benches, facing a round platform encircled by a grill, the platform of the Sunday concerts. The orchestral kiosk is empty behind its wrought-iron balustrade. Cécile sits down beside Maurice. In the darkness and the silence she seems to hear an orchestra playing as in a dream, invisible behind the bandstand’s ornamental grill.
She knows that Maurice is going to kiss her once again, and this time she awaits the kiss.
He has put an arm around her shoulders. It’s strange that he isn’t in a hurry. Maurice silent, Maurice stirring slowly—it’s so extraordinary.
But he doesn’t kiss her. Not yet. He speaks. He begins to tell her stories of his travels, stories of his youth, he talks of a book that he has dreamed of writing and that he hasn’t yet written. And then, only afterward, he places a single finger against Cécile’s cheek, and turns that cheek toward him, very gently, like a hypnotist beginning his spell. Cécile offers her mouth closed and her eyes open. She feels herself already experienced, this time. It is her second kiss. It’s agreeable no longer to be afraid. Little by little her eyes close, her lips half open. The invisible orchestra has stopped playing its music, she hears no more than the jerky breathing of Maurice.
And he says, “Don’t be afraid of anything, stay like this, don’t move, give me your hand …”
He guides Cécile’s hand to his own body, and despite the clothing, Cécile feels, beneath her hand, something warm and hard. It is strangely like touching a little cat, a little bird. She has no fright from this strange contact under her hand, for she has caressed so many kittens, so many starling, that her hand curves of itself in tenderness. But suddenly she looks at Maurice and her hand stops. It is Maurice’s face that frightens her, it is not his unknown body.
Maurice is not there with her; he is so far away, he has departed elsewhere. His face is a mask, without eyes, without a mouth. This hard mask, this figure that is seated at her side and has taken the place of Maurice—what is it that could so have detached him from her? What is it that could have taken him away and replaced him by this mask that little by little immerses itself in some solitary enjoyment, totally solitary, an enjoyment that brings a sigh from the mask, such as she has never heard. A solitary enjoyment that spreads over this mask like a blush that suffuses a face with shame. “Maurice!” Cécile cries, in terror.
The mask makes no reply. Then the mask seems to dissolve slowly, the face of Maurice reappears. The eyes reappear, and the mouth. Maurice has returned to her side, on the bench in the garden, and Cécile, astonished, watches this metamorphosis as Beauty must have watched the fading away of the Beast.
SHE STILL FEELS guilty the next morning when—since Myette has no telephone—a message comes from the hotel to her house.
“It’s M. Henry. He asks that Mademoiselle come quickly to the hotel, as he has received a telegram and must go back to Paris.”
Cécile is seated at the kitchen table, doing her Latin lessons; her braid hangs down her back, she writes with her elbows spread out on the table, biting her lower lip, and scratching one leg on the other.
“Right away?” asks Myette. “And your lessons, Cécile?”
But Cécile is already standing. He’s leaving—he’s going away—she can think of nothing else. In the street, she begins to run, without a thought for appearances. To get there more quickly she cuts across a field, leaping over a goat track, rejoining the main street further along. No, after this time he won’t come back, he is going away forever. And the thought of living without him now seems utterly impossible, while the idea of living with him seems even more impossible.
Cécile bursts into the hotel, climbs the stairs four at a time, knocks at the door and opens it without even waiting for an answer.
It’s true that he is leaving—his valise is open on the floor and Maurice is throwing into it, pell-mell, his books, manuscripts, and shirts. He stops, nevertheless, staring at Cécile, framed in the doorway, gasping from having run, her eyes circled, her mouth sad, and now he advances toward her without saying a word, he closes the door behind Cécile. He takes hold of the end of her long braid and draws her gently toward him, by her braid, like a fisherman pulling on the cord of a net in which an imprisoned fish flutters.
And Cécile lets whatever happens happen, she lets herself go completely, hypnotized, emptied of resistance, divided between fear and the desire to be done with it so that she will no longer have to defend herself, no longer have to make any decision. Isn’t it so much simpler, at bottom, to let what happens happen?
Maurice’s hand comes to rest upon her, in one place and another, upon her neck, her face, her knees … like a little animal in itself, quite separated from Maurice, a little animal that comes to touch and sniff her, that glides over her, that descends and remounts, turns about her throat where a single vein beats wildly, stops on the button that fastens Cécile’s white school collar, a little “Claudine collar” that is part of the convent uniform. “No,” Cécile sighs, but Maurice bends over her mouth, once more he drops only the lightest, briefest of kisses on this mouth. “Don’t be afraid of anything, I won’t hurt you, I won’t do anything that you don’t know already—like a woman—believe me—nothing except like a woman—”
She’s caught in a trap then; it isn’t Maurice who is caught in her trap but she herself.
“It will be better than with her, you’ll see—you don’t have to be afraid of me, I love you too much, it will be much better, much better still, my little lesbian, my little lover, let yourself go, let me do it, don’t be afraid of anything—”
She is stretched on Maurice’s bed, watching, very close over her, that bending face, the landscape of this face of a man, the creases at the corners of his lips, the sparkling lakes of his eyes, the black forest of his beard and hair. And it is true that he knows how to make her body vibrate, and his hand can be gentle and his mouth hot, it is true that it could be agreeable if she wasn’t so afraid, afraid of him and afraid of losing him, and afraid of the other Cécile who has got up, who is there, who is watching her, who judges her and who will never forget a single movement, a single detail.
She realizes that she is naked only because of the colder air on her body, and she closes her eyes so as not to see Maurice’s body, terrified of looking at the forbidden place. He has said that he would not hurt her and at first it was true, it was almost agreeable, but now it is frightening, it hurts, it isn’t true that it is like the gentleness of Mademoiselle’s hands, now it is that gasping above her and this heavy body that crushes her and the shame and the realization that perhaps everything is a lie and that life is not beautiful, not filled with flowers, with sunlight, with youthfulness, but a sort of devouring animal. She has betrayed love with this monster posing as Maurice. Never again will she be able to love, she will be enslaved by this monster forever. And already this is true, for she forgets the pain in her astonishment over the taste in her mouth, over that intoxication in her head and that she will never again be able to live without him.
She sighs, but it is no longer the same sigh, and Maurice, hearing this altogether new sighing, presses her even more closely to him, before sinking heavy upon her.
Shortly afterward, Cécile rises, she gets up as for the second act of a play in which she must be the heroine, she sits on the same bed, with her half-undone braid, and her face that is no longer the same, that will never again be the face of a little girl.
SHE HAS FLED, she has gone back running over the same path, jumping over the same stones, taking the same turns. If she could, she would have walked in her very same footprints, as though to prove for certain that nothing has changed.
She does not want to be a woman—a woman is an adult. Cécile wants to remain what she has been until now—a happy child. The adult world has an unknown face that can change into the face of a monster, and the worst of all is that this monster might be pleasing to her; just so, the Beauty ended by being in love with the Beast. She has not changed, it isn’t true—but why, then, did Maurice say vous to her, afterward?
Cécile runs toward Myette’s house; she already sees the wall that encloses the garden reassuringly in its arms. While she dressed, Maurice had talked to her. Cécile can remember nothing of what he said, except that vous. Had she changed so much for him, too, then?
And yet she had not wanted what had happened to happen. He has promised her that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, that it would be “like with a woman.” She had believed that in giving way she would most quickly find herself free again, that nothing serious would happen, that she would recover all her freedom again, afterward, and the solitude of her life in the country.
But what will she say now to Myette? Won’t Myette see the truth at once on her new face, so new that Maurice had ceased to say tu to her?
Here in the garden is the great walnut tree in whose branches Cécile had passed so many hours, in the company of the heroes of her books and the heroes of her own imagination. The walnut tree will not stare at her face, the tree will not ask a single question of her. Tenderly, Cécile takes hold of the familiar trunk, stroking it; she takes hold of the low branches and lifts herself, hiding among the thick foliage.
Only here does her heart cease to thump. Here she can wait, and go over everything, and try to understand what has happened. And her skin shivers, at what she sees anew. She hears the voice of Maurice, she listens to the sighing of Cécile—and it is the other Cécile who is present, there, and who now in the walnut tree whispers to her, remember this, and remember this. And as she remembers, something else is born in her—a strange desire—is it already the monstrous poison circulating in her blood? Why does she think, blushingly, of Maurice’s hands?
The garden gate grinds. Cécile bends her head between the branches. It is he; and in the half-darkness that falls over the garden at this hour, she hears his voice. “Cécile, where are you?”
He knows, then, that she has taken refuge in the garden. He knows with the instinct of a hunter. Cécile does not want to reply, and yet a voice says “Yes,” and Maurice raises his head toward the walnut tree.
He comes closer. Cécile studies him through the branches, from the top down, with the fearful and provoked air of a cat that has taken flight into a tree. Maurice catches sight of the slender, supple body in the old-fashioned convent uniform, of the long honey-colored braid and the oblique eyes observing him unblinkingly. A leg encased in a gray cotton stocking rises toward the bent body, the wide-pleated skirt is spread over the branches.
“Cécile,” says Maurice, “come down, I must speak to you, I’ve already missed my train for Paris. Cécile, we can’t leave each other like this, now look!”
He is answered only by the silence and the night descending on the garden; he feels himself ridiculous and guilty, under this tree, begging this obstinate child to come down and talk to him.
“Cécile, after all, I can’t climb up and join you there in the tree, can I? Do you see me climbing among the branches at my age? What will I look like!”
Cécile begins to laugh. The image that at once appears to her, of Maurice clambering among the branches of the walnut, is too comical, so comical that she instantly forgets all her pain and anger. And then, she must certainly admit to herself that she is glad that Maurice is here, that he didn’t leave.
Slowly, she begins to descend. A slender leg slides toward Maurice from beneath the foam of an embroidered petticoat. How charming she is in her school uniform, with her braid, and how sweet that pliant little body was to hold in his arms, only a while ago. Maurice seizes hold of Cécile’s waist when she comes down to his height, and lifts her to the ground.
“Come to Paris with me, my darling little girl, I don’t want to leave you and I can’t stay here forever.”
“No, I can’t,” says Cécile, “you know perfectly well that I can’t.”
“And if I marry you—can you?” asks Maurice suddenly, and the words have come out even before he knew he was going to say them.
Marry him? But one doesn’t marry unless one loves with real love. How can she marry, when what there is between them is this monster, only sex with the face of temptation?
Cécile is so astonished that she stares at Maurice and begins to laugh.
“I can’t marry you, Maurice! Look!”
She has so convinced an air that Maurice feels offended.
“And why not?” he demands, suddenly fully determined to marry Cécile.
“Why, because, because—” Cécile doesn’t know what to say. How can she explain to Maurice that one gets married in white in the village church to a very pure young man whom one loves only with love?
“I can only be your mistress now,” she says at last, “because what there is between us—it’s only what happened just before.” She lowers her head, and Maurice doesn’t understand at all. This child is astonishing him, but the desire in him returns, and more strongly than before. Because he has tasted of Cécile, he is only the more hungry for her now, and he is certain that he who has never been faithful to a woman cannot love without this one. And how envious all his friends in Paris will be of him for having a young wife of eighteen, so strangely beautiful and fresh and droll. After all, if he has to get married one day, it is just as well to marry Cécile.
“Cécile, I’m going straight to your godmother to ask permission to marry you, you’re not going to refuse?” He placed his hand on Cécile’s throat. This animal hand that Cécile recognizes at once—this time it brings a shiver through her entire body. There is it, she is enslaved to this hand, she knows it, she has been enslaved, she has tasted the poison, and she cannot do without it.
“Oh!” cries Maurice. The sudden physical reaction of Cécile seizes and upsets him, too. This hand of his—has it really acquired such a power over the body of another being? Desire swells through his body to the point of pain. He wants Cécile instantly and for always.
And the door of the house opens. Myette appears, lighted from behind as in some Flemish painting. Her worried voice calls, “Cécile, is it you in the garden?”
“Yes, Godmother,” cries Cécile, “I’m coming.” Maurice follows her, and in the shadows, he takes her hand.
ON THIS NIGHT the electric current in Myette’s house is cut again, as so often in the beginning of 1945. Cécile undresses in the light of a candle. Naked in her cold room, Cécile shivers and reaches out her hand for her pajamas, when suddenly she has a change of idea. She goes to the armoire, the ancient armoire whose wood has been polished by the years, she opens it, and from beneath a pile of linen she takes out a packet wrapped in silken paper.
Now she may. Now she has the right for the first time to wear this nightgown meant for a woman. The transparent gown slides from her shoulders to her ankles, and clings to her body with a living pliancy.
Slowly, Cécile advances toward the mirror; she studies herself for a long while. Is this really she? In truth, isn’t this really she? With one hand she lifts her heavy braid, rolling it at the top of her head.
“Mme Maurice Henry,” she says to the young woman in the mirror. “How are you, Mme Maurice Henry? Have you been living in Paris long? No? You are only just married? To the famous Maurice Henry himself! What an exciting life you must lead, madame, how I envy you!”
THE NEXT MORNING Maurice has gone back to Paris, leaving behind with Myette a little fiancée who no longer knows whether she should rejoice or weep. But Myette, for certain, does not rejoice. All the refugees have gone from the village, returning to their homes; Myette has no more Spaniards, or Jews, or Communists, or Gaullists to shelter, to nourish, and now Cécile too will leave—and leave with a strange man who creates too much noise around himself, whose profession is rather difficult to define, who is twenty years older than she and who has a doubtful moral reputation. But what can be done? Cécile has declared that she wants to become a woman, and he has declared that he wants to marry her.
Myette does not feel she has the right to interfere. Cécile is eighteen, she must make her own life decisions, and besides, isn’t it better for her to go to Paris and to live there in the world of artists and intellectuals than to remain in this sleepy little village perhaps only to inherit a life as solitary as that of Myette herself? Cécile has too many gifts, Myette knows. Her eyes are too lively, they see everything, they note everything. She could become so many things, in Paris. Isn’t she the best actress in her school theater? All the parents, all the teachers, at every festival, are ceaseless in their admiration of her grace, her expressiveness, her natural way, in her mimicry, her dancing. She is also the best pupil in French composition, and this is hardly astonishing, as she had a father who wrote novels. Novels that have not been published, but all the same, entire novels, and her mother too spent her youth among painters and musicians, and was gifted, like Cécile. Cécile is so full of life and of ideas. No, it would be a crime to stand in the way of this marriage. It is necessary that she leave, that she begin her own real life. Myette says nothing, sighs a great deal, and feeds Cécile as though she would never again in her whole life have anything to eat.
At dawn she sends Cécile into the garden to hunt for the most excellent frogs, good and green, for Cécile is delirious over fried frogs’ legs scented in garlic. Every day, there are succulent omelets aux fines herbes, with salads from the garden, there are snails cooked by Myette as no one else how to cook them, she prepares homemade paté and boudin with applesauce, a crusty blood sausage the color of burgundy wine. “Good Lord, Godmama!” cries Cécile, her mouth full, “you’ll make me so fat that Maurice won’t want to marry me anymore—that’s what you’re plotting, I’m sure!”
But Cécile has never been able to resist a good, copious meal. She loves to eat, as she loves to swim, to warm herself in the sun, to pick flowers, to play with Myette’s cats. So much energy, so much joy of life—if only that man, that stranger from Paris, will not use it in vain, if only he will not spoil this young girl, so fresh, so happy with life, that Myette is letting him take away, against the counsel of her own heart.
Already, since her engagement, Cécile has changed. Maurice went off the next morning, but Myette senses that Cécile is no longer the Cécile of yesterday. There is something imperceptible in her—a shadow in her multicolored eyes, a crease at the corner of her delicate lips, a different stance suddenly taken by that pliant, catlike body. “He’s already changed her for me,” think Myette, resentfully.
Maurice is to come back in a month for the marriage, and these weeks pass slowly for Cécile. She no longer has any desire to gossip with Anette, she no longer wants to go walking with Mademoiselle. If Mademoiselle lets a hand fall on her shoulder, Cécile now finds herself uneasy, and she draws away.
At night, each night, just as she has done for the last four year, Myette brushes Cécile’s long hair before the girl goes to bed. Seated in her pajamas, Cécile closes her eyes and gives herself to Myette’s ministrations, completely letting herself go. Sometimes Myette tells stories of her own childhood, in the time of gas lamps and diligences. At that period, Myette lived for several years in Paris. She had known Sarah Bernhardt and Pierre Louÿs, Apollinaire and the beautiful Otero. A whole epoch passes by in her tales, and epoch of courtesans, of painters and poets whom Cécile watches passing by for the last time under her closed eyelids.
THEY HAVE RECEIVED the blessings of the village mayor and of the church, and Maurice clutches in his own hand the square little hand of Cécile, still stained with wild berry juice, still bearing the scratches of country roots, the little hand that at last legally belongs to him—the hand, and the arm gloved in white silk, and the whole light body in the long wedding dress.
And Cécile has forgotten her fears, in the joy of seeing Maurice again after these four weeks of separation. It’s true then that she is his wife and she is leaving at once with him for Paris. She is the wife of a famous author, of a literary critic, a journalist, a film producer—for Maurice is so many things at one and the same time! A hero of yesterday, a celebrity of today—it’s strange, nevertheless, to be his wife or the wife of any man, since until now she has not belonged to anyone. In the midst of the reception Maurice comes whispering to Cécile, “Quick, my darling little girl, the car is waiting, let’s leave without anyone seeing us.”
And Cécile has time only to catch her cat, who is leaving with them. She laughs like a schoolgirl escaping from class, while she follows Maurice down the corridor and they flee through the kitchen door, with Minou clutched in her arms.
AND THE FIRST night, in a hotel on the road to Paris, Cécile tells herself that now everything will be different. Now they are married, and so her love-making will be with love, it will not be that other thing. She is his wife, and besides, she knows everything now, she is no longer afraid.
She repeats this to herself while she undresses with trembling hands.