The rest of the evening stretched out, dull and dreary.
Their moments alone together became as pitiful as these social gatherings. They hardly exchanged a word. Some evenings they’d stare at one another for hours, and, to break the silence, Céline would blurt out questions to which he didn’t know how to respond.
He would randomly throw in a yes or a no.
She would begin again, searching for the right words, trying to speak properly; she’d spout innumerable blunders, talking about ‘he who
plays
the piper’, about ‘rose
pips
’ and ‘Lebanon
zebras
’ growing in the garden, about being ‘
beagle
-eyed’, and she’d quote proverbs backwards, she’d enthuse about the terracotta monkeys dressed as lawyers on display in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, and say how she was related to a very talented young man, an artist who sketched portraits in charcoal from photographs, and she’d ask her painter if he could do that as well; then, abruptly changing the conversation, she’d question him: ‘Listen, you know Gamel’s daughter — yes, you do know her, I’ve talked to you about her — well, she’s getting married.’
He merely shrugged his shoulders.
‘You’re not very friendly this evening.’
‘Well, you subject me to a whole load of nonsense, what the devil do you want me to do?’
‘That’s nice, now we can’t even talk anymore. I’m not saying another word.’And, sitting tight-lipped, she tapped her fingers on her knees, staring into space, muttering to herself and chewing her fingernails.
Scenes such as this would be repeated almost every evening. The painter’s rages would begin as soon as Céline walked though the door. For the twentieth time he’d beg her not to drape her bonnet over the corner of a picture frame, and she’d just as stubbornly refuse to hang it on the coat stand or on the back of a chair; the frame would tilt noticeably, hanging unevenly against the wall, and she would insist that it wasn’t important, that her hat wasn’t damaging the gilding, that it didn’t matter if the picture wasn’t straight.
What’s more, she couldn’t do anything right. Sometimes, when she made a graceful movement like some woman nonchalantly getting out of a chair, he’d shout at her to stay still. She’d freeze, bewildered, standing awkwardly. So he’d put his sketchbook back down, saying dejectedly: ‘Go on, you can move now; I’ve disturbed you for nothing.’
Invariably, the argument would turn acrimonious and Céline, becoming more vocal, would hurl all her annoyances, all her grievances, back in his face, reproaching him for not being like he was in the early days of their relationship, and he had the impudence to agree; she’d get more and more carried away and yell insults at him. Then he’d look at her out of the corner of his eye, feeling a growing desire to throw her out, but from want of courage, from fear of being obliged to go in search for sex when he could have it at home, from having grown accustomed to someone moving around in his studio and making a noise, he would hold his tongue, silently swallowing his anger. She was exasperated at having such a lover, but she held on to him despite everything; he intimidated her a little, and she had a kind of respect for his city air, his white hands, the fine linen sheets of his bed. In his apartment she imbibed a certain air of elegance, which made her feel proud. She sincerely considered herself to be better off than all her friends, and she had only a haughty contempt for common love affairs, such as that between her sister and Auguste.
One day at the workshop she had unthinkingly hiked up her dress in order to show off the silk stockings Cyprien had given her, and the silent envy of her friends had delighted her. The only thing was they got their own back by making spiteful comments, joking about her dresses and scarves, which were not exactly new. ‘Should be all or nothing,’ one of them said. ‘What does that say about you,’ shouted another, ‘silk stockings in old boots!’ So Céline kept telling herself, ‘I’ve got to get Cyprien to buy me a dress.’ Oh, it was so exasperating! He really should have spared her the shame of having to ask. Yes, but he no longer even seemed to notice that her clothes were in such a poor state.
One fine evening she gathered every ounce of courage she had and, stammeringly, fumbled out: ‘I’ve waited…I didn’t want to…this is so annoying…but, well look…you see, the seams of this dress are going…it’s splitting at the elbows and under the arm…I’ve been wearing it for so long. But I don’t have any money, it’s the dead season, there’s been no work for weeks.’
He led her over to his desk, opened the drawer and split the thirty francs he had left with her. She flung her arms around his neck and went into lengthy explanations about her new dress. Taking everything into account, she couldn’t afford one like those she had seen at the Bon Marché, they were too expensive; she’d simply buy some alpaca at forty-nine sous a metre; she’d need a piece 8 metres long by 1.2 metres wide; to avoid the expense of braid and trimmings she’d make do by fashioning pleats from the same material; and she gaily began counting on her fingers, staring up at the ceiling with a contemplative, idiotic expression.
A stream of words gushed from her mouth; she made Cyprien dizzy with her street patter, with the profusion of details she babbled concerning the bodice. After a few days, he almost regretted the generous impulse that had led him to open his drawer; one evening, he couldn’t take it any more, he told his mistress to go to the devil.
Scenes like this were repeated. After numerous trips to the shops and despite merciless haggling, Céline discovered that her dress would cost her a lot more than she’d thought. It was then that she poured her bile over the whole household, on her father, on her mother, on her sister. Her mother didn’t even notice; Désirée, whose mind was elsewhere, was scarcely bothered; only Vatard received the full blast of these ice-cold showers. He summed up the situation like this:
‘I have two daughters; one of them doesn’t want to get legally married to anyone, and she’s even more unbearable than the other, who would like to marry but can’t. It’s so depressing…I don’t know what to do!’
Indeed, what could he have done? Everything was against him. The weather was turning bad. Summer was coming to an end. Autumn was brutally settling in over the smoking city, with its louring skies, its gloomy afternoons, its evenings drowned in rain. At six o’clock he had to light the lamp. Désirée and Céline would come back from the workshop dirtier than a dog’s backside, and immediately start to shake and scrape the mud off their clothes so they could go out again all the more quickly after supper.
Showers trickled down ceaselessly. So Vatard sat for hours on end at the table, not wanting to go out, and Désirée had to wait, head in hands, until he was finally taken with an urge to go for a walk. If by chance he did decide to put on his walking boots, Désirée would dart out behind him, running breathlessly to meet Auguste who, shivering with cold, had been strolling up and down the road for the last twenty minutes.
He took her to the nearest bar and they agreed, now that the evenings were turning bad, to meet there in the back room.
But this dump, which had been almost empty the night the conscript had paid for the drinks, was now overflowing with layabouts and tarts. It became impossible to talk, or even to kiss each other. They changed venues. The bars were full everywhere. They decided to search further afield and to visit, each time they met, somewhere more deserted. Sometimes they unearthed disreputable cabarets almost completely devoid of customers, but little by little even these filled up, and even though they took refuge in dark corners, they were dogged by coarse laughter, by drunken men causing disturbances and getting into fights, by vulgar streetwalkers joking about their pleasures; by common assent they ended up leaving, disgusted, earlier than usual.
After evenings such as these, Désirée would return home unsettled and annoyed, and Auguste, aroused in spite of it all by the filthy comments he’d heard, would act like a beast. Distrusting his urges, he would only go to meet her after he’d satisfied himself; even so, he thought that no man in his place, not even Joseph, would have acted with so much restraint; nevertheless, he tried to convince himself that, loving Désirée as he did, if she had yielded to him things would no longer have been the same; it seemed to him that if he’d already had her, he’d have savoured the kisses she let him have less.
But despite all his precautions and all his rationalisations he still desired her physically, and it was exacerbated by the difficulty of seeing her and talking to her alone.
Désirée was suffering as much as he was, and one evening, her powers of resistance coming to an end, she would have given herself to him if he hadn’t hesitated, if he hadn’t taken fright at the last moment.
He had finally persuaded her, after lengthy pleading, to go to a hotel room he’d rented for two hours. She was still hesitant about going there, fearing some mishap, but it was drizzling and the bars were overflowing. She let herself be dragged there; she wanted to cry as they went up the stairs. When they entered the room, Auguste placed some wine and crackers on a round, marble-topped table. The hotel clerk brought them two glasses. Désirée sat by the hearth and withdrew into herself, hunched over, her head bowed, her feet propped on the rungs of the chair.
At the sight of those four walls which had seen so many transient assignations, so many bestial couplings, so many miserable nights; at the sight of that fire which sputtered and smouldered without drawing, of those paltry flames that flickered round badly laid logs, licking a fireback untainted by ashes, a great shiver ran down their backs.
Like a psalm of lamentation, the sepulchral horror of furnished hotels rose up from this sordid pigsty. It was as if all of Auguste and Désirée’s soulful thoughts of passion and tranquillity had been butchered. The young man poured some wine for the girl, but she wasn’t thirsty; he quickly knocked back several mouthfuls, went over to where she was seated and, his cheeks flushed, his hands trembling, abruptly pulled up her dress. She suddenly realised what was happening. She struggled against him, crying: ‘I don’t want to, leave me alone!’
He let her go, ashamed of his violence, and begged her to forgive him, never suspecting that, aroused as she was, she would have given herself to him if only he’d seemed determined to take her.
That evening gave Désirée something to think about. In spite of all her long-held good resolutions, she would have been lost if Auguste had been bolder. She admitted that she’d lost control of herself for a moment, and now she remembered the remark Céline had made one evening: ‘Men are so stupid; if they knew, we’d be undone quicker than they ever thought possible.’ In any case, now that her reason had returned, she vowed never again to expose herself like that, never again to agree to a meeting except in the street or in the crowded room of a bar.
Their relations became strained after this attempt on her virtue. Auguste no longer dared to hold her too close and she held herself back. Nevertheless one night they were able to spend a whole evening together. Vatard had a ticket to the Cháteau-d’Eau theatre and would certainly not be back before midnight. They wandered over to the Gaité quarter, but those pleasures which they’d been deprived of and which they’d anticipated for so long, seemed to them to have died. Not knowing what to do, they went over to Gagny’s, to the Mille-Colonnes dance hall. But the crowds circulating in the narrow strip reserved for dancing just seemed sullen to them.
One of Hervé’s quadrilles started up, a spicy dance, just the thing to make you grab a woman, a fiery music conjuring up rolling, swaying hips, petticoats flung over heads, legs swinging and kicking at the sky.
The dancers moved and turned with a bored air. While the trills of flutes were pirouetting over the blare of the brasses, while the bass drum was stabbing the whip-stitch of its beat over the increasing din of the orchestra, Auguste waited in vain for the whirlwind of arms cutting through the air and spiralling around thighs, around thrust-out breasts, around churning feet skating across floorboards, arms stretching out and tweaking the noses of dancing girls. But the couples barely gyrated at all, moving gently about, trying not to sweat.
The spectators, seated at tables along the sides of the dance hall and up in the gallery, seemed equally downhearted. Entire families stared at each other with a gloomy air, drinking without enthusiasm, coming to life only to cuff some brats who were dancing around and falling over, feet in the air, in the middle of the couples.
Everyone seemed to be in a torpor; you’d have sworn they were all maudlin drunks. In one corner a policeman, still standing to attention, was dozing beneath his helmet, and the man in charge of collecting money was calling the dances in a forlorn voice. Auguste and Désirée went and sat at a table and ordered a bowl of salad. The water the waiter poured on their absinthe was cloudy and their wine bitter. They didn’t have the spirit to shake off their malaise and dance a polka together. They left, disheartened, and walked aimlessly down the Boulevard de Montrouge to the Avenue du Maine.
Four days later, Désirée was suffering for it and had to keep to her room. She had caught a bad cold from her evening tramping through dirty streets. Despite swallowing pills and pastilles, imbibing malva-leaf infusions and herbal tea, soothing syrups and linctuses, her cough wouldn’t go away. She made use of this enforced rest to repair her old clothes and to help her sister tack her new dress together.
But she got extremely bored, especially on Sunday. Céline, however, kept her company; for the past week her lover had been in the countryside, on the lookout for rundown, dilapidated landscapes, and she too determined to profit from this delay and work on her outfit. Seated by the window, they would cut, slash and sew, from time to time looking up and staring through the glass. A late burst of sunlight dappled the road here and there, dousing its pale rays in the bellies of puddles. Parisians were taking advantage of this final bright spell to go out into the countryside one more time. Trains were leaving for Versailles every ten minutes. Open-topped buses, heaving with people, were being buffeted by a wind that whipped women’s faces and ruffled their skirts. Hunched over their seats, eyes squinting, one hand on their hats, umbrellas between their legs, hordes of passengers were rolling along in a cloud of smoke and dust. The whirr of all this activity unsettled the two sisters. That happiness people feel who, after having suffered all week long behind a counter, close their shutters on a Sunday and forsake the pavements where, on warm evenings from Monday to Saturday, they settle themselves on chairs and watch their children; that enthusiasm shopkeepers have for frolicking around in the open air in places like Clamart, that idiotic pleasure they get from carrying picnic baskets slung on poles, from those snacks wrapped in greaseproof paper eaten on the grass, from those return trips holding bunches of wildflowers, from all that cavorting around, all that shrieking and stupid shouting on the way, those unbuttoned jackets, those rumpled clothes, those shirts ill-tucked into trousers, those loosened corsets, those belts let out at the waist by several notches, all those games of hide-and-seek and chase amid shrubberies stinking of the meal’s thrown away leftovers, made them envious.