TRANSLATION BY SYLVIE GAUTHERON
NOTES BY REBECCA JEYES
The house was empty; the shutters had been closed to shut out the sun and it was dark. On the first-floor landing, Françoise was standing close up against the wall, holding her breath. Earlier on, the steps of the staircase, then the old floorboards, had been creaking, and the glass panels of the bookcase had been shaking slightly; now there was not a sound to be heard. The door to my bedroom, the door to the bathroom, Grandma’s bedroom, Papa and Mama’s bedroom. It was funny to be there all alone when everyone else was in the garden; it was funny and frightening. The furniture looked as it always did, but at the same time it was completely changed: thick and heavy and secret; under the bookcase and under the marble console lurked a deep shadow. It was not that you wanted to run away, but it felt creepy.
The old jacket was hanging over the back of a chair; Anna had probably cleaned it with petrol, or else she had just taken it out of camphor-balls and put it there to air. It was very old and it looked very worn out. It was old and worn, but it could not complain as Françoise complained when she had hurt herself; it had no soul; it could not say to itself: “I’m an old worn jacket.” It was strange. Françoise tried to imagine what she would feel like if she could not say: “I am Françoise, I am six years old, I am in Grandma’s house”; if she could not say anything at all to herself. She closed her eyes. It was as if you did not exist, and yet other people could come here; they could see me and talk about me. She opened her eyes; she could see the jacket; it did exist but it was not aware of it: this was both irritating and slightly frightening. What is the use of existing if it doesn’t know it? She thought about it; “Maybe there is a way out of it. Since I can say ‘I,’ what if I said it for it?” This was rather disappointing; no matter how long she looked at the jacket, seeing nothing else while saying very fast: “I am old, I am worn,” nothing new happened; the jacket was lying there, indifferent, completely foreign, while she was still Françoise. Anyway, if she became the jacket for a moment, then she, Françoise, would no longer know about it. Everything began to spin in her head, as when she went into a rage and ended up lying on the floor, having cried and screamed until she dropped. She went into her mother’s bedroom, took the book she had come to get, and rushed back into the garden.
On the following days, while playing under her mother’s guard, she often felt a bit uneasy. There she was, making mud cakes or flower rings; was she not also somewhere else, or did she not also exist somewhere else without knowing it, like the old jacket? This was like a pitch-dark night that was terrible to imagine. I cannot remember anything from before I was born; this is exactly what it must have been like; it is the same for the little children who have not been born yet: they do not know, they will not remember anything; what if one of them happened to be myself? She stood stock-still in the middle of the lawn, trying to catch one of these opaque little souls as they flew by in the air in order to illumine it from inside briefly, so that it might at least remember something later on. There was no use; all she could do was say “I am Françoise” and that was all; she could say “I” for no one else.
She could play at being another. She could say: I am in a hovel, I am hungry, I have got to beg for a few coins, and she felt very sad and stunted; she had turned into a poor, starving orphan. But it was only a game; for real, she always remained Françoise.
Françoise knew perfectly well who she was; sometimes at night, she could hear her parents talk about her when they thought that she was asleep. “She is a precocious child,” her father said, satisfied; her mother replied: “Yes, she has a good nature, is very upright, and she tells me everything.” Françoise flushed with pleasure and turned over in her bed. She told her mother everything, never lied, liked reading, did well at school, and went into terrible spells of rage when she was denied a treat, but she was never disobedient. She had beautiful chestnut brown and naturally curly hair. She was proud of her curls, her good marks, being a precocious child and having a good nature. She would not have liked to have a mother with rings on every finger like Madame Malin, nor a mother always dressed in black like Madame Lemoine; no flat looked as pretty as hers did, with its beautiful carpets, its bay windows, its huge mirrors; and above all, it would have been terrible to be stupid like Jacqueline and Marthe, or grumpy like Jeannette, or again timorous and sickly-sweet like Mireille. She was really lucky to be this very little girl and no other.
This little girl was Françoise; she looked at her in the mirror in contentment and she said to herself “it’s me!” But she was not always this little girl; when she is alone, there sometimes happen strange things, and she is not too sure whom they happen to; they are nonsense. To be troubled by an old jacket is nonsense; to tickle oneself at length in that place where the skin is so soft and sticky when in bed at night is nonsense. Françoise told her mother everything, but nonsense does not exist; it is nothing, and there are no words to talk about it; these moments counted for nothing in Françoise’s life.
At other moments, on the contrary, she felt very strongly that she was Françoise. This was the case one morning when Françoise was ten, sitting in the garden at a metal table with round, club-shaped and diamond-shaped holes in it. She was doing a problem, and while thinking about it, she was running a finger along one of the bars of the table, scraping small soft lumps of brown paint from it. It was one of her fascinations that year; she would scratch the trickles of congealed wax on the smooth surface of candles, the rough bits of straw that wrinkled the pages of old books, the scabs from her scrapes, and the small pimples on the back of her neck and on her forehead. She looked up; she could see the blue cedar, the huge terra-cotta pots, the sandy paths; she looked down again and traced a few words in her notebook. As she would every year, Françoise, the studious little girl, was doing her summer homework in the garden. She was writing neatly—it was fun; she could feel every single movement of her hand, she could hear the pen creaking, the garden was present all around her, and there she was, very zealous, infinitely studious, willing, attentive . . . She stopped suddenly; it was like a story one tells oneself, when one says: “I am a poor orphan” and one feels very sad and starved inside; the garden was truly a garden, the nib a real nib, and there was the real Françoise; and yet she felt as if she was playing; just as she would sometimes play at being another, she was playing at being herself. She remained puzzled for a moment. What am I, for real? There were still the blue cedar, the roses, and the brown table with its pattern of clubs and diamonds; but she felt she was no longer anything at all.
Suddenly she saw her mother next to her: “You aren’t doing anything, Françoise. Are you daydreaming?” Madame Miquel was smiling slightly reproachfully, under her flowery bonnet. “I’m almost finished, Mama,” Françoise said hurriedly, and she dipped the nib in the inkpot. Françoise was never idle and she was never daydreaming; it was not like her to let her mind wander, like a scatterbrain; she resumed her work zealously.
After lunch, Françoise went for a walk in the woods; she took a slice of bread and cheese and a volume of the Petite Illustration with her; her father had marked the titles of the plays she was allowed to read: Les bouffons by Zamacois, Barbe-Bleue by Madame Rosemonde Gérard.1 As soon as she had pushed the white gate open, she started running toward the woods with a beating heart. In the shade of the tall pines, she was going to feel that joy again, that anguish which she never experienced in the garden that was open to the broad daylight for everybody to see.
There was a path disappearing under the trees and she slowed down the pace of her walk; at the end of the path, there was a sort of glade where she came to sit every day. The bushes and the pines had been burnt down in a fire four years earlier, and a large circular clearing was left in the middle of the wood. Françoise wished to sneak in there one day, silently, as she had done once in the deserted house. When she was not there, the white rocks, the burnt stumps, the bushes with pointed leaves, everything must look different; but the clearing could never be caught by surprise. She stood motionless for a moment, holding her breath, behind a clump of ilexes; then she moved the branches aside; she had missed it once again.
She sat at the place she had chosen at the beginning of the summer, in the shade of a rock; she swept away some pine needles and uncovered a heap of apples. Françoise was not allowed to eat in between meals, and Françoise was obedient, but here, rules no longer counted; she bit into an apple and opened the book on an unmarked page. When she had eaten the apple and finished reading the first act of Maman Colibri, she stripped a small branch of its bark and gently rubbed this sticky sprig between her thighs: she found it disgusting to touch the damp flesh with her fingers. The image of her mother came to her and she dismissed it without shame; it was like another existence where one had no more parents, no future, no longer even a name. There was a scent of scrub; there were pine needles, a taste of apple, a gentle and mysterious sensation that turned the whole body, from head to toe, into a shivering piece of tissue paper; and all this was neither good nor bad. It existed, indifferent, and Françoise no longer existed anywhere.
The evening bell rang, and Françoise jumped to her feet. Spots of sunlight were shining on the stones of the path, but at the end of the pine border, the grass was thick and black. She stepped forward cautiously; a branch snapped and she leaned close to a tree trunk. Silent, invisible, she looked in the distance, as far as the end of the path, trying to make out these surroundings for which she was still absent. She could see only indistinct and dark shapes. She resumed her walk; she stepped forward on tiptoe, and yet, as she went along, spots of sunlight appeared on the sparse grass, the leaves rustled as birds fluttered away, the rocks and the clumps of myrtle quickly took on their familiar aspect. The secret was receding further and further away in front of her. At the end of the path she turned around: at the back of the pine border, the grass was thick and black; the bushes and the rocks had returned to their solitude and had become themselves again.
Françoise shuddered; if she remained all her life in the wood, she thought, she would end up being no one; it was a bit frightening. She started running. What am I for real? The house was closer and the afternoon spent in the wood was beginning to seem like a dream. She went through the park and slipped into the dining room. The light was on, the table was set; she saw her china plate with a big blue butterfly painted on it, the egg cup bearing her initials; from the drawing-room, her father called: “Is that you, Françoise?” So she smiled, reassured.
In the streets in Paris, and on the lawns of the Ranelagh, nothing reminded Françoise of the burnt clearing; she never happened to lose herself in it. In Paris, Françoise had only one existence, and each of her actions left a mark that could either tarnish or enhance her image; she carefully controlled all her moves and when she happened to act carelessly, she at once begged forgiveness from her mother, who erased it with a kiss. She did not make any fuss anymore, she came first in all the school tests, she read all the books that her father recommended to her, and she was admired by her friends for inventing new games. To make her image more dazzling day by day was an absorbing task, and she had time for nothing else.
At thirteen, Françoise was an accomplished young lady; even Maurice, her cousin who was two years older and such a remarkable young man, said that she was brilliant. Maurice had no parents, and he often came to the house after dinner to chat with his uncle about Edmond Rostand, or Victor Hugo, and sometimes Françoise took part in the conversation.2 She liked her cousin very much and her heart would beat with emotion when she recognized his ring at the door. One evening, she was already in bed when she heard his voice and rushed into the study, wearing her nightgown; Madame Miquel blushed and said she was too old to make an appearance dressed like that; she sent her back to her room with an angry look. Upon reflection, Françoise felt embarrassed too and thought proudly and anxiously that she was no longer a child; she wore tights, her pretty curls had been cut, and her chest was swollen by two little hard stones that were a bit painful. She never slipped her hand beneath her nightgown anymore; she had read from a book that it was an unhealthy habit that bore an awful name.
Three months later Françoise had her first period; as her mother had not forewarned her, she thought that she was suffering from a disgusting infirmity and she spent part of the night trying to clean off the brownish stains from her underpants. But in the morning her mother told her that all women went through this slight inconvenience every month, and she took from the wardrobe a rubber belt and a towel that were specially meant to deal with it. She looked vaguely gratified, and in the afternoon, while her mother was serving tea, it seemed to Françoise that Madame Miquel’s friends were looking at her in a funny way. From then on, Françoise’s feelings toward her mother were never quite the same anymore.
At the end of the school year, Françoise got the prize for being first in her class as well as twelve nominations. There was a round of applause as she went to the dais, stiff in her new raspberry-colored silk dress adorned with golden embroideries. Her father gave her a wristwatch as a present, and her mother gave her a fountain pen made of pink enamel with silver rims. In the afternoon, there was a big tea party in her honor, and she drank a little champagne, Aunt Louise sat at the piano, and Françoise danced with Maurice and also with M. Perrier, who looked so young although he had a twelve-year-old son, and who treated her exactly like a grownup. Uncle Charles asked Papa: “What are you going to make of this young lady?” and Monsieur Miquel put his hand on Françoise’s shoulder and said that she would go to college like a boy and maybe she would become his assistant. That very evening, Françoise left for the South with Anna, and on the train she was completely sullen. Leaning her head on the blue cushions, she remembered the afternoon party; at these times, it was as if other people no longer counted, even in their own eyes. She was more important to them than themselves, something that should never end. When I get married, this will last for days on end, but that is a long time from now, she thought with a sigh.
She felt no joy showing her Grandma the pink fountain pen, the wristwatch, the brand-new books, and she went for a stroll in the park. She felt completely stunted; neither Maurice, nor M. Perrier, nor Uncle Charles were thinking anymore of the little girl in the raspberry-colored dress who danced so gracefully after receiving all the prizes. Everyone was thinking of themselves again and she did not count for anybody anymore but herself. The two months that she was to spend in the country seemed endless to her.
Carrying a book, Françoise made her way to the woods. The glade was bathing in the sun, and the pointed leaves of asphodels cast sharp black shadows onto the dry white ground. Françoise was overcome by the hot smell of the junipers and the myrtles and she slumped, overwhelmed, at the bottom of a rock. The fountain pen, the wristwatch, the raspberry-colored dress, and all the people were suddenly of no importance any longer. She crushed a sprig of lavender between her fingers, she leaned her cheek against the warm ground, and her eyes brimmed with tears. Nothing had changed: the craggy stones, the burnt and contorted trunks. Had they not missed me during all this time when there was nobody to look at them?
She propped herself up on her elbow. Until today, nobody smelt the scent of charcoal and scrub; nobody knew that these white rocks and the black bare remains of the trees existed; they did not know it themselves; it was as if they had not existed at all. But now, I am here, and I will come every day, she whispered passionately.
She came back every day. She ran through the wood and perched on the flat top of a rock; the white ridge of a hill stood out against the sky. Her gaze made the scrubland undulate gently, and the dark spot of a pine forest appear among the clumps of ilex. Françoise was exhilarated by the feeling that she was necessary to this countryside that she loved; in her absence, the scents, the light were plunged in a torpor that could not be conceived of; one might as well try and imagine oneself dead. Françoise smiled at the thought of her childish attempts to take the solitary glade by surprise; it was ridiculous. There could be no secret since the black stumps and the white stones could neither see themselves nor talk to themselves; each was lying there, huddled upon itself, inert and shapeless.
Françoise was sitting still in her rocky retreat, and, her book open in her lap, she looked at the shadows spread and darken on the ground. If one was distracted for just a moment, one suddenly saw that the horizon had become mauve: the grays and pinks had crossed the sky in vain. Smitten with remorse, Françoise stared at the hills as they were turning pale, and when she stood up to leave, she felt as if she was committing a betrayal; only she could alleviate the secluded sadness of these woods. From the moment she pushed open the stained-glass door, the shadows and the scents were swallowed in impassive night.
Françoise spent whole days lying on the stone, while the scorching heat of the sun devoured her bare legs and arms. Sometimes, however, she got to her feet and started running; she ran through the thickets, where the thorns of the brambles and the sharp branches of cystus and gorse scratched her legs; she climbed rocks, and she rolled down to the bottom of gullies; her gaze wrenched dry riverbeds, walls of rock, and bare plateaus bristling with straight and sharp blades of grass, from their unconsciousness. “When I’m grown up, I’ll be an explorer,” she decided, tumbling to the ground, exhausted and overcome with her sense of potency. Behind her, the thicket and steep gullies could go back to sleep; it would never be the same again.
One evening, Françoise stopped, exhausted, on the side of a hill; the ruins of a deserted village were lying at her feet; the big red disc of the sun was sinking behind the mountains. She paused: if she went a bit further up, she would discover the whole valley; on the other hand, the deserted streets of the village in the dusk were full of mystery. A brief anguish wrenched her heart; she could not be everywhere at once. She threw herself down and stretched out on the dry grass. The world was so wide that she could never live long enough to travel through all of it.
She spent a long time lying there, her mind blank. She no longer even felt her body: she could feel the warm air, she could smell the scent of the grass; in the valley wrapped in mist, two red spots shone. Suddenly, Françoise was no more than this mist, these bright spots, and there was nothing else left in the world. A pure and bright joy was shining without beginning or end. Time had stopped.
An image went through her mind; a dining room, some faces; it went by, tranquil at first, like the mist and the grass; then it suddenly pinched her heart and stirred her body. Françoise found herself on the edge of a valley over which constellations were glimmering; nine o’clock, dinner. She started running.
“What time do you call this?” said her father harshly. She just stood silent in the middle of the drawing room. A few moments ago, she was a deserted village, a black sky, and that extraordinary joy; now, she was a little girl who was being scolded. At that minute, there were thousands of little girls in houses.
“You could at least apologize,” Madame Miquel said. “We’ve finished dinner. Where have you been? Did you get lost?”
Other houses, other furniture, other people; why was she in this precise drawing room? These faces were strangers to her and, for the first time in her life, reproaches had no effect on her. It seemed to Françoise that she might equally have been anywhere else.
“Answer me,” Monsieur Miquel said angrily, “have you lost your tongue?” “I lost track of time,” she said vaguely. All the villages in the valley had lit up, crickets were droning in the dilapidated houses, and there she was, playing out this absurd scene. The lamp, Monsieur Miquel, the workbasket, nothing seemed real.
Words still reached Françoise’s ears and from time to time, her lips uttered an answer; she had no idea why she lent herself to this ridiculous game. Then she heard her mother’s voice: “you won’t set a foot outside the park again.” She gave a start; these words were truly addressed to her and they made her wince.
“But Mama . . .” she said; her voice faltered. She wished she could scream: “Let’s start again; I didn’t know it was for real.” But there was no excuse. Madame Miquel had a closed and obdurate expression. Françoise had not responded to the reproaches, she had refused to give any explanation, and she had to be punished. That was what had truly happened, and there was no way of effacing it. The whole scene was reality itself.
Françoise did not go beyond the park the next day; she strolled around the sandy paths, boiling with anger. Monsieur and Madame Miquel were chatting peacefully outside the house, unaware that their blind commands had annihilated all the scents of the scrubland. Françoise cast a hateful look at them; they never went to lie down under the pines; they feared the coolness of the evening, the noonday sun, fatigue, and dust. Their whole life was spent in surroundings that were made just for them, and they were always exactly themselves. Françoise was their daughter, but she also had a life that depended on no one; that this life might be affected by thoughtless words was monstrous.
In the evening, Françoise was so tense that, when her mother kissed her, telling her that her punishment was lifted, she shed a few tears; she felt shame for it, but Madame Miquel was very touched and said that they should be real friends to each other. From that day on, she told her some childhood memories, asked her questions about all the books that she saw her read, and when school started again, she often took her with her to go shopping. Françoise did not like it very much when her mother asked her questions in a confidential tone, but on the other hand, she was proud of having tea like a young lady at the Marquise de Sévigné’s or at Colombin’s. She started taking dancing lessons and some evenings her father took her to ice-skate at the Palais de Glace; he said jokingly that she was not too ugly for a girl entering the awkward age. He told her a bit about his work and about the advance of science. He was a great and very famous doctor who was doing cancer research, and Françoise began venerating her father.
She was very busy and very happy; yet, in the evening, she often felt miserably dejected. She recalled the wide white desert of Provence and it seemed horrible to her that she should be a mere imperceptible spot in a city swarming with people, where she was not needed; she thought with anguish that, one day, she would die and nothing would be changed.
One evening, her parents were out to dinner in town, and, sitting in a leather armchair in the study, she was tired of reading and bored; she took a few steps across the room, opened the drawers of the desk, and closed them again without disturbing anything. Then she took the field glasses from their hook next to the mantelpiece and went onto the balcony. It was mild, and yet all the windows along the avenue Mozart were closed. There were few people on the street, and they walked by quickly, heads lowered. She amused herself looking at them though the magnifying glasses; she explored the black fronts of the buildings, and she spied on young people dancing behind a lit-up bay window. Suddenly, facing these houses full of people, she felt as alone as in the burnt glade. No one saw the chimney pots standing out against the sky, no one was looking at the trees, the lit-up windows, the reddish mist above the roofs. Behind one of the windows, a maid was patting the cushions of a sofa flat; the maid could see the pillows and the sofa, but only Françoise could see her movement. Through the circular magnifying glasses, this stood out as on the stage of a theater; if she looked away, it had no more existence for anyone. Two young people went by in an embrace; each could see the other’s face, but only Françoise could see them both. “They are lovers,” she thought, and their tentative gait took on a romantic grace and disappeared around the street corner. Françoise’s heart swelled: the people on the street, the people in the houses, all the people needed her; when she abandoned them, their movements and their faces disintegrated like a deserted landscape.
From then on, Françoise spent hours leaning her forehead against her bedroom window, and in the evening, she often watched through the field glasses until the dead of night. In these moments, she felt she was the center of the world; she and nobody else had the mission to make as many, as beautiful and varied things as possible come into existence. Her parents never raised the curtains from the windows; her friends never lingered around the streets, and their attention was never caught by anything around them; when they described a theater set, a place in Paris, a shop display, Françoise felt that they had not seen it; she had to look at them with her own eyes.
As Françoise grew up, her mission became more pressing, and soon she considered it her only duty. There were rules, however, in her life as a brilliant pupil and as an accomplished young lady; it was a matter of winning the game, and even cheating was allowed provided no one noticed. Françoise seldom cheated and would not have tolerated accomplices. She never let any dancing partner kiss her, nor her friends engage in dubious conversation. It was only in solitude that she read forbidden books; in solitude, no action was of any importance.
One Sunday afternoon, she copied her Greek translation without any qualms from a Guillaume Budé edition of Monsieur Miquel’s.3 She always got the best mark at translation from Greek, but this kind of work took her a lot of time and she wanted to have the afternoon to herself to read Chéri.4 Within half an hour, the work was finished; it was not a slavish copy, and she had scattered a few words and phrases of her own in it. With a light heart, she returned to the study to lie down on the carpet in front of the crackling fire. She breathed in with delight the smell of the leather armchair against which she was leaning her head and the smell of burnt wood that was reminiscent of Provence. “How can anyone be unhappy?” she wondered with surprise. If one was poor, or ill, one was unhappy, but these were accidents; people who were unhappy through love, boredom, or unsatisfied ambition, that was inconceivable. To read a novel by the fire would always be possible; what more was needed?
The week went by, and on Friday evening, Françoise came across her Greek teacher in a corridor. Mademoiselle Vaisson often praised her translations in class for their style, but she never talked to her outside the classroom; she stopped, however.
“Françoise Miquel, you have given me an excellent Greek translation,” she said. She looked at her in the face, with a singular expression. “Did you do it on your own?”
Françoise felt her cheeks redden. “Yes, Mademoiselle, on my own,” she said firmly.
Mademoiselle Vaisson stared at her. “That’s fine, then. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow in class.”
She went away and Françoise stood petrified; her heart was beating hard: Mademoiselle Vaisson knew. For a moment, Françoise stood stiff, repeating with all her strength: it is impossible; such disasters could happen, but not to her. She could not survive it, yet she knew that she was not going to die. Then she went off and wandered around the streets. The next day, Mademoiselle Vaisson would put the papers on her desk and say: “Françoise Miquel has plagiarized her translation.”
Françoise wrung her handkerchief. It was awful; it was unfair; she did not mean to plagiarize, she just wanted to gain two hours. It was merely a small personal arrangement, a harmless action that lasted only a few moments. Suddenly it had become a hideous flaw that would remain attached to her person for years to come; it existed forever and it was still going to amplify: the next day the whole class would know, as would the headmistress, Papa and Mama. Françoise leant over the bridge over the Seine; it would be easier to destroy oneself than to erase this fleeting act that had not really been committed. She rushed into a broad black avenue; in a detective novel she had read, a man suddenly vanished at a dark street corner; but it was a novel, and anyway, he was back at the end. Even if she walked along the barracks all night, there would come the time when the school bell would ring on the playground at eight o’clock; and she would hear it. There was no way of stopping time, nor of taking a detour to avoid the fateful moment.
Françoise managed to control herself at dinner, but she had a dreadful night. She dreamt that her father caught her in the act of reading Nana;5 then she found herself in her nightgown sitting on her cousin Maurice’s lap, and Madame Miquel arrived, snickering, arm in arm with Mademoiselle Vaisson. She woke up, covered in sweat. Dawn was coming, and there was no chance of salvation unless Mademoiselle Vaisson got run over by a car; Françoise imagined the crash against the big truck, and the small crushed body; the chief supervisor would come into the classroom. “Children, there’s been a terrible accident,” and Françoise would weep a bit because she liked her teacher. She repeatedly imagined the scene so intensely that she almost came to believe in it. Mademoiselle Vaisson could die; but that Françoise should be humiliated in front of the whole class in a few hours’ time was impossible.
As she went through the school main door, she felt her knees give way beneath her. She considered for a minute going to tell Mademoiselle everything and beg her to keep the secret, then she rejected the idea with horror; if she admitted, the unfair nightmare would irreparably become real; she must deny at all costs. She sat at her desk. Mademoiselle Vaisson came in and put the papers on the desk.
“Françoise Miquel, you’ve handed in the best translation,” she said, and the corners of her mouth went down. “But the thing is that you did not do it; you shamelessly plagiarized. I did not expect this from you,” she added in an infinitely sad tone.
Françoise stood up and exclaimed violently: “It isn’t true, I did my homework on my own.” She stifled a sob: “Ask Mama, I spent the whole Sunday afternoon on it.”
“Unfortunately, I use the Guillaume Budé translation,” Mademoiselle Vaisson said dryly. “At first, I didn’t want to believe my eyes, but then, I had to bow to facts.”
In the second row, Jacqueline Hézard and her friends were snickering.
“Translations may happen to be very similar,” Françoise said desperately. “Why should I plagiarize? I give you my word of honor.”
“She is always first in the class; she doesn’t need to plagiarize,” Marthe Sabran said, and some other voices agreed. Mademoiselle Vaisson hesitated for a minute. “Go through the word-for-word translation,” she said.
Françoise blew her nose and started translating; before going to bed, she had learnt the text almost by heart and her translation was excellent. Some murmurs could be heard.
“I’ve made my decision,” Mademoiselle Vaisson said, “however, you’ve given your word of honor, and I don’t want to run the least risk of injustice. I will just not give this homework a grade.”
The class came to an end in complete silence; Françoise was thinking very hard. This was not sufficient, she could not stand the fact that Mademoiselle Vaisson believed she could lie or take a false oath. She wanted to convince her; and whatever she wanted, she would generally get. At the end of the class, she went up to the desk: “Mademoiselle, I beg you to believe me; I am not a liar,” she said with emotion. Mademoiselle Vaisson looked at her coldly: “This is now a matter between you and your conscience,” she said, and she walked out purposefully. Françoise’s eyes followed her with astonished hatred as she went away; she went along the school corridors and tranquilly went on with her life, harboring this hostile and stubborn thought over which there was no hold from the outside; it was frightening and nearly monstrous.
Over the following weeks, school was distasteful to Françoise; she avoided Mademoiselle Vaisson’s gaze; she felt ill at ease with her friends. Her mother had advised her not to frequent the girls who did not belong to her social circle, and she was intimate only with Marthe Sabran. They both went out a lot that winter. Marthe told her dancing partners that Françoise was very intelligent and quoted her opinions on shows and books; but she said that, as for emotional life, Françoise was still a child and she advised her on her outfits. Françoise let her mother choose her clothes for her and did not spend much time looking at herself in mirrors; she did not envy the magnificent dresses that Marthe, Rosine Guerdan, or Lucette Porteret wore. They were all very coquettish and very jealous of one another. They often teased Françoise for her shyness with boys; Françoise danced well and she was often invited out, but she had no regular admirers, whereas her friends competed over many a boyfriend. Françoise looked amusedly at their little games; they were elegant and beautiful, and when they danced, their eyes sparkled with passion; yet, as she looked at them, Françoise was overwhelmed with a peaceful and powerful joy. She would not have let herself be enclosed like the others in little personal affairs; she successively lived all the affairs of other people, Rosine’s and Marthe’s, as well as those of the tired musicians who waited for the end of the night to come, those of the shy high-school boys, those of the weary mothers; and sometimes, while all the people around her were engrossed in their triumphs and their worries, she had the exhilarating impression that the lights, the jazz, the sparkling dresses created these revels only for her.
Never to hear Françoise’s little secrets in exchange for her own sometimes annoyed Marthe.
“You never dream about the future, do you?” she said impatiently. Françoise smiled. On many occasions, when she strode around the lakes, she thought about the future, but she dreamt neither of a handsome young man, nor of little fair heads, nor of precious jewels. She never worried about what would become of her. For her, the future was an ever wider world: it was Venice and Athens, the cure for cancer, the life of the stars in the sky, and the complete works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky; to possess such a world equaled happiness.
When Françoise started the senior-year philosophy class,6 Madame Miquel thought it was time she introduced her to the realities of life, and, one morning, she came and sat down with a slightly pompous air in her daughter’s bedroom. She blushed before opening her mouth, and so did Françoise. Madame Miquel finally stated that Françoise was no child anymore, and Françoise hurriedly said that she was aware of a great many things. Her mother looked relieved but, scolding her gently, said that she should have started asking her questions a long time ago, and that these conversations were perfectly natural between mother and daughter. She left quickly, and the subject was never broached again.
Françoise went back to school with pleasure. Everybody had been charming with her when she had passed her baccalauréat with honors, and Mademoiselle Vaisson, patting her arm, said that it was a deserved success. Françoise looked at her slightly embarrassed, but Mademoiselle Vaisson seemed to have completely forgotten the little incident in the first term. Françoise felt somehow disappointed by this.
Marthe Sabran had failed her exam, and she did not take it again; she was almost engaged. There were a few new faces in the class, but none of them looked nice. Françoise decided not to join any group and sat down at the end of a table, next to Marguerite Georges, a good and completely nondescript friend. A week after school started, Françoise’s curiosity was aroused by a tall red-headed girl wearing a black silk dress with huge leg-of-mutton sleeves. Monsieur Borgeaud mispronounced her name. “Mademoiselle Labrousse,” he called.
The red-headed girl stood up: “Labroux, Élisabeth Labroux,” she said, with a broad smile revealing all of her teeth.7
“Are you a new student?” Monsieur Borgeaud said.
She nodded her head. “Yes, I’m sorry for being a week late, but I’ve been in Paris for only a few days, I couldn’t come earlier.”
Her voice was as odd as the words she uttered; it was too resonant, too vibrant. It was an undisciplined voice, Françoise thought reproachfully. She felt embarrassed, the other pupils were snickering, and Monsieur Borgeaud looked a bit puzzled. “Fine. Try and catch up,” he said quickly.
Élisabeth Labroux sat down and Françoise observed her at length; her hair, which tumbled in disorder across her shoulders, was opulent, almost indiscreet. Françoise was satisfied with this adjective; the voice was indiscreet too, as was that strange dress. The new student took a big child’s nib-holder, which looked exactly like a stick of barley sugar, from a black pencil box with a painted lid. Françoise took her pink enamel fountain pen out of her bag; all her friends had fountain pens, and hers was the most beautiful.
Monsieur Borgeaud was talking about introspection, “These are the objections that Auguste Comte has summed up in a pleasant formula: whoever wishes to look within himself is like a man who would look out of the window in order to see himself walk by in the street.”8 Françoise wrote the quotation down and wondered for a moment: how unpleasant, to think that, concealed behind their windows, other people could see you while you could not see yourself.
The lesson finished at noon, and all the pupils headed for the cloakroom. Élisabeth Labroux went straight to Françoise.
“You’re the best student in the class, aren’t you?” she said politely. Françoise laughed self-consciously. “I don’t know, why do you ask?”
“Could you let me have your notes? I was told you were the best student.” Holding the first page of her notebook, she dangled it from her fingertips. “Look,” she said smiling. The pages were blank except for a few scribblings here and there. “I don’t know how you manage,” she said, sullen. “I’ll let you have them, but not until Sunday,” Françoise said. She looked, amused, at this odd face: above the green eyes, the thick golden eyebrows almost joined; the mouth was too big, and the line of the heavy cheeks was indistinct. Peasant hands with nails the color of dark blood emerged out of the huge sleeves. “She’s quite a character,” Françoise thought, and she decided that she deserved further examination. Élisabeth slipped a yellow jacket on and put a tiny black cap with gold studs on it on her shock of hair.
“What about this gentleman? Is he a good teacher?” she said. “He looks a bit of an old dotard to me. Who’s your favorite philosopher?”
“I haven’t read anything yet” Françoise said.
“I love Nietzsche,” Élisabeth said in a kind of languishing way. “I also like Lucretius. Are you a materialist or a deist?”9
“I’ve got no definite opinion,” Françoise said, slightly perplexed; she added cautiously: “I’ll wait until I know more about it.”
“You will, will you?” Élisabeth said surprised. “It seems to me one can’t wait!” She held out her hand, smiling. “See you later; thanks in advance for the notebook.”
Françoise followed her with her eyes and shrugged her shoulders slightly. Of course, she could have replied that she did not believe in God, but to talk about these things was indecent. The existence of God, or materialism, could be discussed in the classroom, but as for what was said in class, no one took it to heart; it would have been snobbish. What one took to heart, one kept for oneself. “The idea of painting one’s nails red! Especially with hands like hers!” she finally thought, nettled.
In the afternoon, in history class, Élisabeth intentionally sat down next to Françoise. “I’m going to try and see how you go about it,” she said, examining the open notebook that was covered with a neat handwriting. She opened hers at the first page; in wide and round letters, she had written: “History notebook, Élisabeth Labroux”—an illiterate person’s handwriting. At the bottom of the page, in very small print, there could be read:
But the green paradise of childhood loves,
with its romps and songs, its kisses and bouquets.10
Françoise put her finger on the last words and looked at Élisabeth inquisitively.
“Baudelaire,” Élisabeth said. “You aren’t familiar with him?”11 Her milky complexion had turned slightly red.
“I know ‘The Invitation to the Voyage,’” Françoise said.
—My child, my sister,
just imagine the happiness
of voyaging there to spend our lives together . . .12
Élisabeth whispered; she leant her chin on her hand and looked straight ahead of her. What was she thinking about, with this big stubborn face? “The green paradise of childhood loves, it must be symbolic,” Françoise thought. Why had she written this verse rather than any other in her notebook? What would I write? Anything, nothing, there’s no point. She looked at Élisabeth surreptitiously; she did not change her behavior, she ignored the fact that Mademoiselle Castin had just come in, she ignored her fellow students, she ignored Françoise. What link was there between these harsh eyes, Baudelaire’s verse, and the dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves? All the other girls’ faces, clothes, and tastes seemed interchangeable.
“Which way are you going?” said Françoise when they got out of school; there was a funny little lump in her throat that would not go down.
“I live on the rue de la Tour,” said Élisabeth. “And you?” she asked engagingly.
“On the avenue Mozart. I’ll go with you; I like going for a walk at this time. Where did you live, before coming to Paris?”
“Near Privas. Do you know the place?”
Françoise shook her head. “Is there a high school in Privas?”
“No, there isn’t. It’s the first time I’ve been to high school. I wonder if I’ll stay the whole year; I don’t like it too much. But to study philosophy, there’s hardly any other way.”
She spoke as if she was free to live her life as she wanted, and yet, she was not much older than Françoise. Eighteen years old, maybe.
“Did you take the first part of the exam on your own?” Françoise said, slightly skeptical.
“I had a few lessons.” She looked at Françoise in the face with shameless curiosity. “What do you want to do, when you’re grown up?”
“Medicine; or history, I don’t know yet. What about you?”
“I’ll be a painter,” Élisabeth said, “but first, I need to pass my baccalauréat; it could help me find a job.”
They went around the corner and Élisabeth stopped in front of a modest-looking building. “Good-bye, see you tomorrow,” she said. Françoise remained standing on the pavement. Through the glass door, she could see Élisabeth, who stood looking at the mirror in the entry hall: she had taken her cap off and was combing her hair. The comb went down the red locks, and the heavy shock of hair swelled and shivered on the back of her neck. Once, twice, ten times; with a regular movement, the hand with red nails ran the comb through the copper-colored mane; the comb went again and again along the heaving wisps; once again; once again. It was fascinating. Françoise did not feel her body anymore; hair was brushing against the back of a neck, a cheek; she felt only the silky caress brushing against a flesh that was not hers. The comb was gliding slowly; the silky hair was brushing against the white, delicious and cruel flesh, caressing it. Élisabeth pushed the second door open and started walking up the stairs. There existed the stairs, the carpet, and the railing on which the hand with painted nails rested. Françoise had ceased existing.
“Well!” Françoise said loudly. She suddenly found herself standing on the curb. Something had just happened; she was not sure what, but it had been rather painful. Slowly, she walked off and went up the rue de Passy; under her eyes were displayed crates of oranges and grapefruits, crispy croissants, scrubbed meat stuck with green and red rosettes. She stopped in front of the large butcher’s shop; with a blank mind, she gazed at the black and white tiles that were covered with sawdust, the brass scales, and bunches of raw chops in their frilly ruffs on the wooden block. These were here, but somewhere else, where she was not, there were other things. A white skin felt the touch of a silky dress against it, the back of the neck felt the shiver of red hair. One could no longer say: all this does not know that it exists, it is as if it did not exist. It knew. It felt itself existing from inside; it had no need of Françoise in order to be felt; she could only go around it like a stranger. She went on her way. She no longer looked at anything. Things felt themselves existing without her; another thought, other eyes than hers cast a melancholy shadow onto the surface of the sky. It was almost intolerable. “Of course,” she murmured, irritated, “I’m aware that I’m not the only person in the world.” But with other people, it was so different! When one parted with Marthe at a street corner, she faded into nothingness. Élisabeth was real.
Françoise went up the stairs, opened the door to the study and slumped into the leather armchair; she did not turn the light on, she did not pull the curtains. The yellow light of a streetlight filtered through the tulle blinds, shining dimly into the room. At this minute, in a flat in the rue de la Tour, Élisabeth had opened a book, or she was dreaming, wallowing on a sofa and smoking a cigarette. As she brought this book, this dream, the taste of this cigarette to life, she deprived Françoise of them. Françoise stuck her nails into the fragrant leather of the armchair. How could she have imagined that the world amounted to what she grasped of it? It was there in front her, like a forbidden immensity; she had just been given a tiny part of it, which had lost its taste for her. A supple body in a tight silk dress was lying down onto the cushions of a sofa and thick lips were blowing wisps of blue smoke. Each to his own body, each to his little patch of land, his memories and his pleasures. Deep in the leather armchair, there remained just a seventeen-year-old girl called Françoise Miquel, a few pounds of healthy flesh, a series of images and sensations brought together under the same label. This could die, nothing would change around her.
The front door of the flat banged; there were light steps, a scent, and the study was flooded with light.
“What’s the matter, dear, are you tired?”
Françoise jumped to her feet; she hated the understanding expression that her mother took on toward her that year—an understanding and eager expression: head forward, eyes bright.
“I was resting for a minute; the streets are so crowded, it’s exhausting.” She examined the shelves of the bookcase.
“Has Papa got Nietzsche’s works? They’re worth reading, I heard.”
“You’re working too hard, dear, you’ve got dark circles under your eyes. Go to bed early tonight, do it for me. I want my daughter to look beautiful tomorrow evening. Did you give José a call to make an appointment?”
“Yes, I did, Mama,” Françoise said, “I’m going tomorrow at half past five, I’ll be back at seven.” She had at last found Thus Spake Zarathustra and took both volumes under her arm.
“Tight ringlets, that is, and the forehead completely bare, exactly the same style as last time; it was perfect.”
“Yes, Mama,” Françoise repeated while fiddling with the door knob.
“Good, go and do your work,” Madame Miquel said in a slightly disappointed tone.
The next morning, when Françoise was sitting next to Élisabeth in philosophy class, she looked her up and down, slightly surprised. She could see an eighteen-year-old girl who was neither plain nor beautiful, rather badly dressed, a high-school student among others, with two eyes and a nose in the middle of the face like everybody. Exactly like Françoise’s, her eyes reflected the walls of the classroom, the bent necks, Monsieur Borgeaud’s pince-nez. There was nothing worrying in this. In the cloakroom, they exchanged a few words: “This is a funny little garment,” Françoise said, smiling amicably, as Élisabeth threw a black cape across her shoulders.
“Do you like it? With all this ridiculous hair, it’s quite in Marie Bashkircheff’s style, isn’t it?13 I’d like to make a portrait of myself dressed like this; it could be delightful.”
Françoise looked at her in astonishment. In the evening, she repeated Élisabeth’s words to Marthe, and they both had a good laugh. Yet Françoise was sullen all evening. Élisabeth simply seemed to think she was the center of the world, and it was time that things were made quite clear. Françoise decided to become close with her and show her who she was.
When Élisabeth invited her over for tea the following Sunday, Françoise gladly accepted and made plans straight away. She would dazzle Élisabeth with her vast knowledge and her sharp mind; she need not fear she would come across as pedantic, as Élisabeth was not sensitive to such nuances. Then, she would ask her questions and make her tell her secrets. As yet, she knew nothing about Élisabeth, except that she had a brother in Paris, that her parents stayed in Privas, and that she lived with her grandmother; but Élisabeth would certainly talk. Marthe said that Françoise had a knack of making people talk. When she knew about her life, Françoise would no longer have this irritating feeling of mystery when facing Élisabeth; she could at last turn her mind to other things.
As she went up the stairs, Françoise felt very confident; she had read one Nietzsche volume, as well as a long article critiquing Baudelaire, whose poems she had read through. Yet, she remained standing on the fifth-floor landing for a long time before she rang the bell. Élisabeth was in there, behind the wood flap, absorbed in unimaginable thoughts and activities, and her face had an unknown expression to it: no sharing of secrets could dispel this mystery. One would have to glimpse Élisabeth through the keyhole, before the bell’s ring would change her face; but nothing could be seen through the keyhole. Françoise rang. Élisabeth came and opened the door with her ordinary face. She still wore the same black silk dress and Françoise noticed that the fabric was worn, and there were some shiny stains on the skirt.
“I made some chocolate,” Élisabeth said. “Go through to the dining room, I’m getting the pan.”
Françoise went through and her throat tightened at the strong smell of smoke. She looked around with curiosity; she had often tried to imagine Élisabeth’s flat, and now suddenly, it was obvious: she must live exactly here, between the black stove with its glowing glass panels, the table covered with a green plush cloth, and the large sideboard full of tarnished silverware. It was dark; the silk lampshade with its ribbed fabric and pearl fringes cast a round spot of yellow light on the table.
Élisabeth came in, holding the pan handle wrapped in a cloth.
“I’ll see if there are cookies,” she said. “My grandmother must have hidden them.” She knelt by a chest of drawers and rummaged through bundles of rags and balls of string for a moment. “She’s locked them away, the old bitch,” she said, opening a tin box, which proved empty. She suddenly said exultantly: “Well, I had almost given up on them!”
Françoise bent forward and saw a big cardboard box full of pictures and toys. Élisabeth put the box onto the table.
“Do you like chocolate, at least?”
“I love chocolate,” Françoise said passionately; she held out her hand. “Oh! what a nice spinning top!” she said, taking hold of a big red and golden metal spinning top. “Where is its little china base?” Élisabeth said. “It must have been lost. We used to make it spin on that little base, which looked as if it was meant for it; and while it was spinning, we’d stick cardboard circles of all colors onto it, you could make a thousand patterns.” She smiled. “I never got tired of it,” she added on a kind of reproachful tone.
She poured the chocolate and Françoise put the beautiful and shiny toy delicately on the table. “Father Bellyache,” she read on the lid of a small box. “What can that be?” Out of the box, she got a doll made of lead, with a cotton hat on its head and a hole in its bottom.
“Ah! Father Bellyache! That was a naughty game!” Élisabeth said. You’d stick in a little white cap, Grandma’d lift a match up to it . . .”; she tossed the tiny doll in her hand. “It’s incredible the number of memories that have come back to me since I’ve been here. Sometimes I can hardly believe that the little girl I used to be is really completely dead. Do you ever feel like that?”
“No,” Françoise said. She cast a searching look at the old tapestries so laden with memories, but she saw nothing but dusty colors.
“So you’ve lived in Paris before?” she said.
“I did, until the age of ten.” Élisabeth brusquely pushed away the lead doll, which rolled on the table. “From one day to the next, one doesn’t realize how much things have changed,” she said sadly.
“Do you think things change? I think it’s rather always the same,” Françoise said. “I can’t wait to leave high school and see new things. I’d like to be older by a few years.”
“Well, I don’t,” Élisabeth said angrily. “When I think of all the time I’ve wasted back there, it shouldn’t count!”
“Is it because of your parents that you didn’t come over to Paris earlier?”
Élisabeth laughed scornfully. “They’d never have let me go; I was the one who left; in the end, I was fed up, you see.”
“You left just like that?”
“I stole the money for the trip from my father. I took the train, and once I was here, I wrote to my mother. She was swell; she asked Grandma to put me up and to enroll me in school. It made my father blow his top; he loves no one but me; he’s a sad boor.”
“You left, without telling anyone?” Françoise repeated, astounded. It was too hot in the room; it was difficult to collect one’s mind: these toys, this red-haired girl, the stories she was telling, it all sounded like a novel. Only in novels do people leave because they are fed up; in life, one’s moods do not count.
“Why not? If one doesn’t do as one likes, there’s no point in living,” Élisabeth said definitively; her face brightened up: “What a trip that was! I spent the whole night leaning out of the window, with the wind lashing at my face. On arrival, I looked like a lunatic!” She plunged her hand through her hair: “What about you? Have you always lived in Paris?”
“Always,” Françoise said bitterly. “I’ve never even moved houses, and I’ve been going to Molière School for ten years.” What else could she have added? Nothing had ever happened to her.
“Tell me about you, instead” she said.
“My father really got screwed,” Élisabeth said with a nasty look, “he thought he’d got a great deal when he joined the Morin family—an old bourgeois family, which impressed him no end. Grandpapa offered no dowry, but he promised great returns and an important position in the stained-glass window business. Poor fellow! He got the position and a twelve-hour-day’s work, but, as for money, he never set his eyes on it. The business was going bankrupt, and when my uncle refloated it, he got rid of all the former staff. So, we were told not to set foot in the firm building, but the old caretaker liked us and she let us sneak into the attic. I was terrified, but I followed Pierre; Pierre was never afraid of anything.”
Élisabeth talked at length about her brother. He was some kind of genius; he had always done as he liked. As a boy, he had decided to become a great man, and now he was an actor in an avant-garde theater; his parts were still small ones, but he would soon be a great actor, a great director, and a great playwright, like Shakespeare or Molière.14
Françoise shook off her torpor: “What about you, don’t you want to be a theater actress?”
“No, I don’t. I want to paint,” Élisabeth said a bit sharply; there was a silent pause. “Do you like Van Gogh,” she added.15 “He’s my favorite painter.”
“I like him very much,” Françoise said; she wondered, slightly worried, who her favorite painter was. The idea of choosing one had never occurred to her.
“I also like Gauguin,” Élisabeth said.16 She jumped to her feet and went to open the window; the atmosphere was stifling and Françoise noticed that her head was buzzing.
“Thank you very much for letting me have your notebook,” Élisabeth said. “Since you’re so kind, I’m going to ask you for another favor. Would you explain some things about consciousness for me? I’m not very good at abstract ideas. How do you manage?” she added, slightly mockingly. “You seem to understand everything.”
She left the dining room to get her philosophy notebook and Françoise cast a slightly anguished look around her. She understood everything; she liked anything. She envied so much the strong resistance that she felt Élisabeth could show!
“You know, I’m happy to have found a friend,” Élisabeth said graciously. She paused for a minute. “All the other girls look like such fools.” Françoise opened the notebook without answering; as for her, it was not a matter of friendship.
An hour later, Françoise was back in her room and looked around her with disgust. It was the room of anybody, her dress was imposed on her by the seamstress, and her hairdo had been chosen by her mother. “What am I?”
My favorite painter. I want to paint. I left. Françoise took her head in her hands. What am I worth? What do I like best? Nothing. There was nothing in her that could decide or choose. It was like a formless swamp where ideas and images sunk in without any obstacle. There was no story—just a jumble of swarming memories. If the memories and the images were put aside, only nothingness remained. She closed her eyes. Nothing existed any longer, either around her or inside her—nothing but the sharp consciousness of this nothingness.
Françoise hardly opened her mouth over the whole dinner, and she was extremely sullen the following days. Her mother kept asking her what she was thinking about, but she took a sudden dislike of Madame Miquel’s smooth voice, her distinguished manners and sober elegance, and she was disappointed by her father: he was ignorant of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Van Gogh. The easy and orderly life that was led there, on the avenue Mozart—a life without any quarrels, without any creditors, without any tears—seemed horribly dull to her. She had no pleasure anymore at dancing or skating, and she told Marthe Sabran that she was going through an awful fit of the blues.
The only times of her life that remained remotely worthwhile in her eyes were when she was with her cousin Maurice. Maurice was studying law and political sciences, he was interested in literature, in the arts, and in social issues, and Monsieur Miquel said jokingly that he had very progressive ideas. Maurice was not superficial like other young men and, unlike them, he did not behave stupidly with Françoise. He treated her like a friend, he called her “buddy,” and he put his hand on her shoulder in a familiar way; he often took her for a drive to the Bois de Boulogne. They only talked about trivial matters, but there was a particular feel in his voice or in his handshake that showed that he and Françoise were truly friends. One evening, as Françoise was coming back from school, the sight of Maurice’s car parked outside the door set her heart beating, and she realized that she was in love with him; they were so well suited for one another that she was immediately sure that one day she would be his wife. They would live in the little townhouse on the rue de la Pompe, they would entertain lots of friends, and there would be a bar in the American style in the sitting room; the decoration would be very original and Françoise would dress in her very own way; she would write books. She confided to Marthe that she was starting to crave independence and that her mother did not understand her at all. Marthe said that the style of the clothes Madame Miquel bought her was too classic and that Françoise should try to bring out her own physical personality. Françoise agreed that these matters had their importance, and they spent a whole afternoon looking in fashion magazines for the style that defined Françoise’s type. It was agreed that, from then on, she would wear dark tube sweaters and coil her hair in a net at the back of her neck. Marthe advised her not to wear blusher on her cheeks, but to use a dark powder, and they agreed that one could varnish one’s nails but not lacquer them. Françoise went straight to Guerlain’s and bought a compact of dark-rachel face powder with geranium scent, and she decided that geranium would be her perfume; she also decided that she would smoke only Cravens and that her letter-writing paper would always be cream colored with untrimmed sides.
Madame Miquel was very angry when Françoise came back from the hair-dresser’s; she took her in front of the mirror and begged her to look at herself impartially. Françoise thought that she looked interesting and said she did not so much want to look pretty as to be truly herself. Madame Miquel got irritated; she told her she did not approve of Élisabeth’s style at all, that Françoise had not gone to play tennis for a month, that she was becoming horribly withdrawn, and that she was losing all her charm. Françoise held her ground ironically, but once alone in her bedroom, she shed a few tears; things were no longer as easy as when she was a child, and she did not know why. Previously, there was a secret life and a public life, and in the latter there were clear hierarchies where she had to come in first; in the former she could do exactly as she wished because she was completely alone in the world. But now, Françoise was no longer alone in the world, and there was no position that was indisputably first; every choice was also a sacrifice: one could not have both Élisabeth’s striking originality and the discrete balance that Madame Miquel liked. Françoise saw it as an outrage [scandale] that she should have to give up one or the other of these attractive images that she felt capable of embodying.
Élisabeth congratulated Françoise on her new hairdo.
“It suits you, and, at least, it looks less bourgeois than your rolls,” she said; she inspected Françoise from head to toe and started laughing. “You always look immaculate; it’s quite something!”
“I don’t like sloppy-looking women,” Françoise retorted sharply.
“Yes, you like what Pierre and I call tissue-paper women; I find it sad: I always feel like scratching to see if blood will come out.”
She negligently coiled a wisp of hair around her finger and Françoise cast a vindictive look at her. “Your nails are too red; they aren’t pretty,” she said.
Élisabeth looked at her hand and had a charmed and mysterious smile; she was not put off by mocking or critical remarks; on the contrary, she looked pleased to be the only one who knew and loved herself. This delighted complicity with oneself sometimes brought Françoise to the verge of tears; she could find nothing in herself that she could love as deeply.
Françoise was desperately jealous of Élisabeth. She did not take her father’s field glasses off their hook anymore; she did not lean her forehead against the window anymore; it was Élisabeth’s privilege to make things truly exist. Françoise read Baudelaire and Nietzsche’s complete works; she asked Élisabeth about her brother, her childhood, her paintings; she needed to know everything Élisabeth knew. When she rang the doorbell of the flat on the rue de la Tour, she felt such keen and painful curiosity that her hands were shaking.
Élisabeth’s voice or the smell of coal made envy and vindictiveness fade away. Sitting in the tapestry armchair, near the stove, Françoise gave up her pride, her past, and any desire at once. She looked at Élisabeth’s red hair, and as she listened, she forgot her own existence. Then everything became easy; there was no obstacle left between Élisabeth and herself; she had no other story than Élisabeth’s story; and Élisabeth was nothing else but the story she was telling.
There was an attic with high windows; the sun filtered through lead-rimmed medallions, and Saint Radegonde’s and Saint Odile’s dresses cast blue and pink spots of light onto the dusty floor;17 sitting on stairs, a small red-headed girl and a little boy without a face were listening intently to any noise from the first floor. They slipped through the corridors; they ran across a street; some doors banged in the small badly heated flat; a hurried pace shook the floorboards, and, huddled against the stove inlet, a little girl was crying. Monsieur Labroux had a yellow face with a black moustache across it; a wide overall was flapping around his ankles; he was dipping a wide brush into a pail of paint and he was daubing the garden fence with paint; his face was distorted and a horsewhip lashed against the cheek of a tall, impassive young man; among the yews, which were clipped into animal shapes and the laurel bushes, some shirts and underpants were hanging in the wind from a line . . .
“It’s getting late,” Élisabeth said suddenly. “I’ve got to go; Pierre is expecting me at the theater at seven.” Françoise tried to imagine a dark young man with a scar across his face; but Élisabeth did not say anything else, and words had suddenly lost their power; they evoked a pale indefinite face and in a moment, Élisabeth would shake a warm hand that was alive; she would step onto floorboards that were hard. Françoise got up. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “See you tomorrow,” Élisabeth said, smiling kindly. She had stopped playing; she was leaving Françoise behind as one leaves an inanimate doll aside and was hurriedly putting on her coat and her gloves before getting back to her real life. Françoise went down the stairs with a heavy heart; her mind went again through the tales Élisabeth had just told her and she realized disappointedly that they had taught her nothing. Élisabeth kept talking about her childhood; she shamelessly described her father’s bouts of anger, her mother crying, but what counted for her was something else about which she said nothing. While talking, she often stared at the stove, and her voice took on a regretful tone. Françoise wondered what kind of lost happiness she was evoking when she described the slaps in the face, the poverty, the chilblain. This was the secret that she would have liked to take by surprise; Françoise felt that once she had come to know Élisabeth completely, she would feel either scorn or love for her, and in any case, she would be relieved. She tried stubbornly to penetrate to the heart of this life that was barred to her. One day, she arrived early at the flat on the rue de la Tour; Madame Morin let her into Élisabeth’s bedroom; it was a small, bare, and untidy room; a pair of stockings, a hat, some brushes, and a bottle of cologne were lying on the mantelpiece; the desk was covered with notebooks; the pencil box was lying next to an ink bottle. Françoise looked around, agitated; this was where Élisabeth spent her hours of solitude, where she was truly herself: all these objects bore her mark; when she had got up, she had pushed the armchair away from the desk, she had opened Sophocles’s plays, which she had been reading; she had brusquely flung the yellow woolen jacket that was lying across the bed. Françoise sat down in the armchair; she skimmed through the scene from Antigone that Élisabeth had just stopped reading; she examined the pictures on the wall at length; she thought hard about Élisabeth while looking at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Staring at the Sunflowers, she called Élisabeth’s face to her mind, and it seemed to her that, looking at the yellow flowers, she would grasp the vision Élisabeth had had of them; she did it time and time again, and time and time again she was on the verge of a discovery that never came to completion. Then, she opened the drawers of the desk; she found a notebook of excerpts and a kind of diary; but the quotations that Élisabeth had written down, her reflections on painting and feminism, were again only indecipherable clues; beyond the words written in blue ink, Élisabeth’s real thought escaped.
Soon afterward, Françoise tried again; she came to tea at her friend’s, but after an hour’s talk, Élisabeth got up from her armchair. “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave you,” she said importantly. “Pierre’s asked me to come to a rehearsal; it’s an adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes that he wrote himself.”18 She pouted. “I proposed a project for the set that I find charming, but they haven’t made up their minds yet.”
“To think that I haven’t seen a single of your paintings,” Françoise said. “You always say that you’ll show me some.”
“The thing is that I fear your judgment,” Élisabeth said in a soft tone. “I fear you might feel disconcerted. You see, I haven’t found my technique yet, and because I want to convey all my sensibility in each painting, the finished works are so dense that it is difficult to detect my abilities.” She closed the entrance door and put on her silk mittens. “I’ll bring one or two of the most restrained of my sketches for you to see; for the moment, everything is on the rue de la Grande-Chaumière.”
“Can’t you even tell me what they look like?”
“It’s difficult. In any case, it isn’t feminine painting.” Élisabeth scornfully stressed the word. “I’d hate to be a Marie Laurencin.19 I can’t understand how talented women, intelligent women, can debase themselves because of their sex.”
“I’ve often resented not being a boy,” Françoise said; “they are free.”
“Oh! a woman can have exactly the same life as a man, nowadays,” Élisabeth retorted briskly; “the thing is that nine out of ten of them are just drips. As far as I’m concerned, I see no difference whatsoever between my brother and myself, for instance.”
She went down the stairs to the Passy metro station, and Françoise leant her forehead against the iron grillwork. The show was over, Élisabeth had taken on her real face again, and she was rushing toward this life that Françoise would never enter. Françoise took a few steps; where could she go now? Dolls that have been left behind become mere pieces of wood again, but in Françoise, there was left a kind of empty consciousness that vainly sought something to grasp. She went along a street and through the Trocadéro gardens. There was nothing; the houses, the trees, the Seine were mere shadows. Françoise held up her hand; “Taxi!” she shouted, and the taxi stopped. “Place d’Italie.” Élisabeth had gotten off the metro; she was crossing the square; she was going into the theater. Françoise could not go in, but she could at least walk around and watch. The taxi stopped around the corner of a wide avenue, and Françoise slipped along the houses with a beating heart; she feared she might come upon Élisabeth. The trees, the streetlights, the green trailers parked along the pavement looked hostile. Suddenly Françoise saw a wooden shed of a blue-gray color just ahead of her; there was a black and red farandole on the wall, and above the door large white letters read: THE TRESTLES. It was all there, so simply, so evidently that Françoise stood in a daze for a moment. The white letters were slightly faded; to the right, a red light of a window was shining. She slowly went around the shed; she pressed her hand against the painted wood and she stripped a splinter of wood, which she split into small pieces; then she stopped, hesitating outside the door. She thought: “Élisabeth is in there, with her real face, among her real friends, and between her and me there is only this blue partition of rough wood”; but the images that she had so often tried to evoke did not become any clearer or more lively. She went around the theater again; there it was; but it was of no avail.
Françoise went off straight ahead of her. She had better give up the battle; she would never know anything about Élisabeth’s life but the outside, the reverse side of it; she felt very sorry for herself.
Suddenly, as she went by a general store, she stopped and bought a notebook covered with oilcloth; she pushed open the door of a cafe, sat at a table and ordered a cassis.20 Onto the first page of the notebook, she wrote decisively: “My thoughts.”
The waiter brought a glass full of a shaky and sticky liqueur. Françoise was holding her pink enamel fountain pen and looking at the blank page with emotion; it seemed to her that a great change had just been accomplished within her. On the back of the cover, she wrote: “You must become what you are,” and underneath, in smaller print, she wrote the name of Nietzsche. Then, holding her pen in the air, she tried to put her view on life, on the world, into words. It was not easy; her mind went suddenly blank. She thought that the seats were red, that these men sitting behind their Pernods laughed in a vulgar way:21 these were not thoughts; she concentrated. During the day, what had she been thinking? That she would like to have a job and money problems; that Élisabeth sometimes reasoned without any logic; that there was an abyss between the image one had of an object and the real presence of it. These were not truly thoughts either; they were truths that suddenly occurred and were then forgotten. What she wanted to put down in this notebook were her ideas, ideas that she would draw only from herself. She could not find anything. She closed the notebook angrily and got up.
In the evening, before going to bed, Françoise opened her notebook again. “I spent the early afternoon at Élisabeth’s,” she wrote. “When she left me, I got a taxi to the Place d’Italie, and I saw The Trestles theater; it was a nice little theater. Then I walked around; and suddenly, as I walked around those streets, it seemed to me I found myself again, I, who had abandoned myself for so long. Élisabeth loves herself more than anyone else, but if I don’t love myself more than anyone else, nobody will.”
Françoise paused; it was nice; as the blue letters appeared on the paper, a story was born, which was her story. She started describing in detail the cafe where she had stopped, the cashier with a purple shawl, who was dunking a croissant in her café crème, and the streetlights that were reflected by the red tables. Rereading the description, what appeared was not the cafe, but, in the middle of the cafe, a touching figure that was the figure of Françoise.
Every evening, Françoise wrote in her diary; she looked for details that she could add to it, from Paris streets, from dancing parties, from books: every new page made the image that it reflected more qualified and complex. Françoise wanted a notebook for excerpts too; she chose the first ones haphazardly: a few lines of Verlaine, some sentences by Dostoevsky that sounded good;22 the next ones she chose because they expressed the same tastes and the same concerns as the first ones. When she read through her notes, she was pleasantly surprised to discover the sign of a strong and coherent personality.
Around that time, Françoise began to like recalling childhood memories. She told Élisabeth about the bouts of anger she went through when she was little: she would roll onto the carpet and scream for hours, and she had to be given a cold bath to calm down. She also told her about her walks in the scrubland, and the stir she caused when she was late for dinner. This social life was so vain; she had always hated all constraints. Élisabeth listened to her talking with polite condescension, but Maurice and Marthe did not care for it at all.
Madame Miquel often reproached Françoise for her infatuation for Élisabeth, and of course, Françoise could not tell her the truth. Françoise patiently searched for futile and convincing arguments. “She is so intelligent,” she said, “she likes philosophy so much; and she has very good manners, you know”; but Madame Miquel made no secret that she did not approve of this friendship. When Françoise asked for permission to go to the dress rehearsal of Philoctetes with Élisabeth, her mother flatly said no.
“If you were going with somebody else, I’d let you go,” she said. “I’m not so narrow-minded. But I’m not at all eager for Élisabeth to introduce you into that circle. You have no reason to adopt her way of life.”
“It isn’t a question of getting into any circle or adopting any way of life,” Françoise said. “It’s a question of going to the dress rehearsal of Philoctetes.”
“That’s not the only thing,” Madame Miquel said. She stopped Françoise with a gesture. “Don’t insist; there’s absolutely no use.”
When she happened to take on this definitive tone, it was not decent to argue. Françoise looked at her slightly amused; she did not care about the image her parents had of her anymore: an image that was very hollow compared to all the pleasures they wanted to deprive her of. “I’d better warn you that I’ll go at any cost,” she said calmly. “You’re only giving me vague reasons on principle, and that’s not enough.”
“My decision should be enough,” Madame Miquel said; suddenly her face flushed. “Is it you talking like this? Ask your father; you’ll see what he’ll say to you. Lucien, have you got a minute?” she cried, trying to steady her voice.
Her lips were trembling; there was nothing but a void in her head, and yet, her lips were trembling, and blood was flowing to her cheeks. Monsieur Miquel’s voice rose, harsh and sharp, like in a debate about politics; he was all empty inside too. Françoise looked at the tips of her shoes absentmindedly; how heavy was the little bluish gray theater on the surface of the earth!
Monsieur Miquel’s voice became louder; Madame Miquel had tears in her eyes. The next day, Françoise could say: there was a scene at home, Mama cried, Papa shouted, and I was standing in the sitting room, without answering a word. And yet, it was not a real scene, like those that Élisabeth had experienced. There was no strength, no depth to it; it was only a bit of vain agitation.
Nothing that happened to Françoise was quite true. Sometimes, when she looked back, she could see something that looked like an act or an idea, and other people could be mistaken about it; but she never caught herself in the process of acting or thinking. On Friday at five, when leaving school, she called home: “Could you tell Mama that I won’t be back,” she said to the maid. “I’m going to the theater with Élisabeth Labroux.” She hung up. Presently, Élisabeth would say to her: “That’s good, you’ve been forceful,” and she would let her talk, but it would be a lie: she was never anything at all; she had simply said some words into a telephone.
It was a beautiful May day; Françoise went across the Champ-de-Mars and along the boulevard Montparnasse. She had been in a bar with Marthe and her fiancé one evening, and she had promised herself to go back alone to that room with its low ceiling lit up by some kind of circular windows. She sat down in a leather armchair, at a varnished barrel, and she lit up a Craven; her hand was shaking a bit; she had never disobeyed her parents so seriously. “What will this evening bring me?” she wondered with a heavy heart. She felt that, when she set her eyes on Pierre Labroux in the flesh, the whole of Élisabeth’s life would be revealed. Would he have a liking for her, or would he be scornful? Fear and hope made her throat dry.
Françoise sucked with a straw the golden drink that filled her glass: the bottom was sweet and a bit viscous: at the surface, it tasted acid and sharp. The varnished wood of the tables and the copper staves of the barrels flashed in the sunlight. Françoise had put her jacket on the back of the armchair and the silk blouse was caressing her breasts gently; she was comfortable. She leant her head against the leather cushions; after all, what were Madame Miquel’s anger, Pierre Labroux’s esteem, and even Maurice’s love, to her? Anger, esteem, love, words could be exchanged one for the other, this made no difference to the shine of the copper staves, or to this taste of lemon and honey. One should always remain enclosed in the present moment, Françoise thought. She straightened up; comfort was already turning into boredom; she was already waiting for this evening that did not yet exist but made her palms perspire slightly. It seemed as if the instants were not sufficient unto themselves.
It was half past eight when Françoise arrived at the place d’Italie. The door of the theater was wide open; a yellow poster read: “Philoctetes: A one act play based on Sophocles. Adaptation by Pierre Labroux.” Pierre Labroux had his name printed in large black letters; it was because of him that a smartly dressed crowd was gathering in the illuminated lobby; men were freshly shaven, women had artistically applied shadings of red and ocher on their cheeks. The next day, there would be a report on the play in the newspapers. “I’ll never be somebody,” Françoise thought despondently.
“Hello,” Élisabeth said smiling; she was wearing a dark dress cinched at the waist with a golden cord; under her too-thick eyebrows, her eyelids were blue and her eyelashes were overcovered with mascara. “Pierre’s wound up, Ulysses’s terribly nervous, and, believe it or not, the prompter hasn’t arrived yet,” she said very loud. Françoise followed her into an iron-gray room separated from the stage by a heavy blue curtain.
“I wonder how the audience is going to react,” Élisabeth said importantly; she cast a glance at the rows of seats. “The guy who’s sucking licorice, over to the right, is a critic. These critics! They have colds even in August. Ah, there are my cousins, the Sabrans—the tall blonde with a black hat on.” She had blushed lightly. Françoise turned around curiously. The stained-glass window business belonged to the Sabrans now, and Pierre lived with them.
“She’s awfully well dressed,” Françoise said.
“She’s got nothing else to do!” Élisabeth said. “The terrible thing about it is that she sees herself as an intellectual and an artist. After all, they’re useful to Pierre, that’s the main thing.”
She took a mirror out of her bag and powdered her face. The lights went off and three strikes on a gong were heard. The stage was empty, and wide lemon, orange, and mauve panels stood out against a harsh blue background. Two men with bare legs and wearing sulfur yellow tunics slowly came on stage and scrutinized the distance; a discordant music punctuated their walk. The music stopped.
“Ulysses, this must be his lair,” said one of the men. Françoise was a bit surprised; the actors acted like ordinary actors, their clothes were made of fabric, the sets were made of cardboard; she had expected something more startling. “This way of evoking Greek landscapes with merely a few bright colors is ingenious,” she decided. She looked at Élisabeth, whose face expressed avid interest. One of the panels slid along and revealed a huge plaster head.
“This is the chorus,” Élisabeth whispered. “A clever idea, isn’t it?” The music started again, punctuating the recitative that seemed to be coming out of the still lips. Philoctetes appeared, wearing black rags with bloodstains on them. “He lacks grandeur,” Élisabeth said. “If Pierre had been given the part, he would have struck a terrific character.”
Françoise was waiting for Pierre’s appearance with anguished impatience; the moment was coming; she kept staring at the back of the stage, nervously holding her handkerchief tight in her sweaty hands.
“Two men are coming toward us,” the plaster head shouted. “One is a sailor and the other is a stranger; who has sent them here?”
At first Françoise could not make out the features of the face, under the curly wig and the makeup; she only knew that he was there. Then she could see black eyes, and a slightly heavy mouth; from now on, she would have to introduce this heavy mouth, these full cheeks, into the garden planted with yews where Monsieur Labroux lashed his whip and into the attic with stained-glass windows, but it was not easy. Monsieur Labroux’s movement, the stained-glass windows, the garden had been tailored for the dark, haughty and romantic hero who had just vanished forever. He swept them away in his death. What was left was this man with a red cloak on, standing against a harsh yellow wall; and he was already going off stage.
“He’s incredibly talented, isn’t he?” Élisabeth whispered.
“Incredibly,” Françoise said; inaccessible to Philoctetes’ sufferings, she remained despondent until the end of the show. She had never grasped anything from Élisabeth’s past; she had made up its images out of her own past.
“You’ll see how fun it is in the foyer,” Élisabeth said, clapping enthusiastically. “The building is so small that the actors haven’t even got a dressing room. Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes, I did!” Françoise said. “Everything is so beautiful, the play, the music, the sets.”
Élisabeth took on a childish and sulking expression: “As for the sets, mine were much prettier.” She took Françoise to the exit. “Will you excuse me for a minute? I’m going to say hello to my cousins and I’ll be back.” She walked to the blond young woman and Françoise noticed that she was twisting the fringes of her cord nervously; the young woman held out her hand in a very kind way, but Élisabeth’s smile looked constrained.
“They don’t like the music,” she said as she got back to Françoise. “They’re so irritating.”
She pushed open a small door and Françoise found herself on the stage. “Let me introduce you to my brother Pierre; this is my friend Françoise Miquel. It worked terribly well, Pierre,” she added with a quavering voice.
Pierre bowed slightly; he had put on his town clothes again and Françoise found him properly dressed, but looking a bit poor.
“I hope you had good seats,” he said with a zealous smile.
“Very good,” Françoise said, “right next to a critic who kept sucking licorice.”
“You know, Pierre, it’s really . . . terrific,” Élisabeth said; her face winced. “It’s got such rhythm, and then, the quality of the adaptation is . . . extraordinary.” She was not talking as easily as usual. Françoise felt ill at ease.
“What are people saying?” Pierre asked.
“The old fossil next to us never stopped grumbling, an old hairless dotard.”
“It must be Gauthier,” Pierre said.
“I don’t think it was Gauthier,” Élisabeth said.
“Why not? You’ve never met Gauthier.”
Élisabeth blushed. “I thought he was more . . . I didn’t think he looked like that.”
“After all, maybe it wasn’t Gauthier,” Pierre said.
Françoise was obviously out of place [de trop] here; Élisabeth and Pierre looked embarrassed by her presence and were just talking hot air to allay suspicion. Françoise looked around her; behind their sequined veils, the women looked like any other women, and their laughter, their affected voices, would not have been out of place in Madame Miquel’s sitting room; it looked as if everyone was waiting for Françoise to leave before taking on their ordinary voices and resuming their ordinary movements.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, “don’t let me disturb you; I’ll find my way out.”
She pushed open the door. Pierre suddenly smiled; his friends were gathering around him and they started talking about all kinds of profound things. Élisabeth had her decisive tone again; women were laughing in bursts, and all their movements became unexpected and charming. It was a beautiful dress rehearsal evening, and the next day, Élisabeth would tell Françoise about it. Françoise had gone into the theater, but again, she had seen nothing. It was as before, along the paths lined with pines; the secret was receding ever further away.
1. La petite illustration was a French performing arts journal; Les bouffons: pièce en quartre actes en verse (1910) was written by Miguel Zamacois (1866–1955); Barbe-Bleue, by Rosamonde Gérard (1866–1953).
2. Edmund Rostand (1869–1918), poet and playwright, was the author of Cyrano de Bergerac; the novelist Victor Hugo (1802–85) is best remembered for Les miserables.
3. Guillaume Bude (1467–1540), a French classical scholar and translator, was credited with reviving classical studies in France after his Commentarii linguae Graecae (Commentaries in the Greek Language) was published in 1529.
4. Chéri, a novel by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954), details the love affair between an older woman and a younger man.
5. Nana, a controversial novel by Émile Zola (1840–1902), tells of a woman forced, through economic necessity, to become an actress and courtesan.
6. The final year of the lycée prepared students for the second part of the baccalauréat exam in philosophy or, for those students following a science track, in mathematics.
7. In She Came to Stay, Elizabeth’s surname has been changed to Labrousse.
8. August Comte (1798–1857) was a French philosopher and founder of “Positivism.”
9. Friedrich Nietzsche (1798–1857) was a German philosopher whose works include Thus Spake Zarathustra; Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 B.C.E.), Latin poet and philosopher, was the author of On the Nature of Things, a lengthy poem outlining the philosophy of Epicurus.
10. The Complete Verse of Baudelaire, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1986), vol. 1, 141.
11. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (1821–67), experimental poet and anarchist, wrote Les fleurs de mal (The Flowers of Evil), which was banned for obscenity in 1857. The book influenced the later Symbolist movement, the Surrealists, and the “Beat” poets of the 1950s and 1960s.
12. The Complete Verse of Baudelaire, vol. 1, 125.
13. Marie Bashkircheff (1858–84) was a diarist and painter.
14. Molière, pseud. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73), actor and playwright, was the author of Tartuffe and The Misanthrope.
15. Vincent Van Gogh (1853–90) was a Dutch postimpressionist painter.
16. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the French postimpressionist painter, was also a sculptor and printmaker.
17. Saint Radegonde (520?–587), founder of the abbey at Poitiers, was known also as Radegonde, Queen of the Franks; Saint Odile (6??–720), or Odila, patroness of Alsace, is said to have been born blind and to have miraculously regained her sight when baptized.
18. Sophocles (496–406 B.C.E.) was the Athenian author of many tragedies, including Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Philoctetes, the latter a play about a man who is made lame by a snakebite and abandoned by the Greeks on their way to Troy, only to be commanded back by Odysseus through a third party.
19. Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), a watercolorist, printmaker, and set designer, was known for a pretty, simple, and distinctly “feminine” style.
20. Cassis is a black-currant liqueur.
21. Pernod is an aromatic French liqueur.
22. Verlaine (1844–96) was a lyric poet known as the leader of the Symbolist movement; Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–81), a Russian psychological, philosophical novelist, was the author of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.
“Deux chapitres inédits de L’Invitée,” in Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 275–331. © Éditions Gallimard, 1979.