A gentle warmth filled the room; the curtains had been drawn, Désirée had put an old handtowel under the door to stop drafts and a great sense of well-being, a warm drowsiness overcame them. Désirée prepared some hot wine in a pan and Vatard, happy to think that he wouldn’t be obliged, like the Testons, to get up and dash through the streets to get home, looked with visible satisfaction at his friend, whose coat and boots were giving off clouds of smelly steam.
No one said a word. Vatard was beaming with happiness, Ma Teston was thinking about her ruined bonnet, her husband about his wife’s murderous mood, Céline about her lover, her mother about nothing at all, and Désirée about the wine, which she had over sweetened.
Then tongues began to loosen. The men talked between themselves, the women spoke to each other about their friends at the bindery.
Madame Teston affected a boundless delight on learning that Désirée would no longer be paid piecework but by the hour, insinuating that if only she’d been a bit more cunning, she’d have been able to get a rate of thirty centimes instead of twenty-five and a half. She went on about it so much that the young girl, who had previously been delighted by her success, agreed that perhaps she’d been stupid and she ended up feeling completely dissatisfied with the raise she’d been given.
And while the women were chatting away, Vatard, brandishing his pipe at each word, was shouting:
‘A wife is the saviour of the working man, that’s what I say,’ then he spoke pitifully about Tabuche, who had separated from his wife. Now that he was ill, he stayed at home, alone, like a poor dog. He had an abscess on his finger, a nasty infection as everyone knows, and he was going to be reduced to having himself looked after by the nuns of Saint-Thomas on the Rue de Sèvres, who could cure it without operating.
Teston’s wife also knew a man who’d had a bad infection on his thumb. He’d stuck it into the backside of a frog and the pain had diminished the further his thumb went in; he was cured now, but the frog was dead.
Vatard didn’t think much of this particular remedy; he even maintained that it was a joke, but the old lady swore on the head of her mother that she had this story from the very person to whom it had happened.
The upshot of this discussion was that it was always better not to call a doctor when you were sick. Tabuche was right to go to the nuns. Doctors lanced these kinds of abscesses only on the poor. As for the rich, if they couldn’t be cured without being butchered they wouldn’t send for them, and then they’d lose their practices.
Céline then came up with the novel idea that families who are comfortably off are happier than those who own nothing.
Everyone agreed. After a short silence, as if it had some connection with his friend Tabuche’s abscess, Vatard resumed the conversation: ‘I was on the Rue de Rennes today and I met the Thomassins’s former maid. She has a position now in the house of an engineer and she buys him brandy at six francs a bottle…’
‘For a bottle? Unbelievable!’ exclaimed Teston’s wife.
‘That’s how it is,’ replied Vatard, and he shook his head, not listening to Céline who was laying into one of her companions who she’d met in a dive in Montparnasse, cavorting around, legs in the air and arms dangling.
‘A girl who respects her family can go and dance at the Banquet d’Anacreon or the Mille-Colonnes, but she doesn’t go to the Grados dance hall. What a notorious pick-up joint that is!’
But old Teston was describing the discovery of a little girl of nine who had been found, raped and murdered, at the bottom of a well. Then all their conversations blended into one, and everyone briefly bewailed the unfortunate child’s fate.
As for Vatard, he doubted that the story was true. ‘It’s the police,’ he said gravely, ‘they want to distract public opinion.’
‘Or it was the Jesuits,’ murmured Madame Teston, who was an anticlerical. As for the girls, they believed it had happened.
But what moved Teston’s wife the most, and what made the story more horrible and more fascinating, was not so much the slashed throat of the child or the outrage she’d endured, it was the fact that her knickerbockers had been ripped by a brutal hand and had exposed her poor little naked belly. She went into transports over these knickerbockers, saying that she was obviously the daughter of someone rich, a prince or a duke, those kind of men were so depraved, you only had to read novels to know that.
Désirée put a spoon in each glass and poured the wine, a fringe of pink foam forming round the rim. They all clinked their glasses, and between two mouthfuls Ma Teston added: ‘And to think that we were exposed to that kind of thing when we were children…’
At that moment the rain began to fall again, and the windows groaned under the force of the wind. ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ said Teston, ‘we should be going.’ His wife put on her barely dry things, laced up her shrivelled boots, and, cursing the weather, she kissed the girls and said she’d see them the next day at the workshop; then as they disappeared to view, splashing and grumbling into black squalls of rain, Céline said to her sister:
‘He’s not so bad is he, Colombel?’
‘Him!’ replied the other, laughing, ‘he’s not much of a looker.’
‘By God, you’re hard to please you are; I’m not saying he’s handsome, but he’s not an ugly boy either,’ and as her sister didn’t respond, she added: ‘So he’s not the one to make you happy?’
‘Definitely not!’ said Désirée. ‘Are you in…I’m blowing out the candle… one… two… three…’And the room went dark.
Céline’s first lover was called Eugène Tourte. Tall, dark and handsome with a sardonic air and winning eyes, he drove her crazy with his wandering hands and suggestive jokes that went too far. It had been hot that night. By the side of a secluded path, near two clumps of trees that faced each other and bowed in the wind like saucy couples clowning around during the quadrille in some cheap dance hall, she succumbed; she didn’t, as was customary, hide her face in her hands, but simply closed her eyes, she fell without hesitation and got up without shame. She was surprised. Now that her curiosity was satisfied, she no longer understood why women became so passionately attached to men. So it was for this, it was for these gropings and these pangs, it was for this momentary agitation, this cry wrenched from a shudder, that they would weep and let themselves be beaten by the toughest of the muscle-bound workmen at the bindery. Oh, how stupid! But then, little by little, she listened to the revelations of her flesh, its mounting desires, irritating and insistent; then she understood the faint-heartedness, the weakness, the furious desperation of a girl. She became insufferable. This explosion of affection, which made her bill and coo and swoon like an idiot, exasperated her lover, who, after having first beat her black and blue with his cane, left her and went to work in another bindery on the Right Bank.
Next she chose Gabriel Michon as her master, a bald shrimp of a man with the chubby cheeks of a cherub and the rheumy eyes of a drunk. This one kicked her backside with his boots from the very first night; then two others replaced him, sharing the temporary night camp of her favours between them, but they left her by common accord after a quarrel that ended in them giving her a cuffing and buying each other copious rounds of drink, while she, nursing her cheek, opened the floodgates and wept. There was a short respite, then Anatole joined the workshop as a press setter, and, after they’d fooled around a few times in dark corners, they became lovers one day when it was raining and he offered to go and get her some tripe for lunch.
In truth, all these impetuous love affairs were ruining her looks and did little to satisfy her. All these comings and goings, these pirouettes with one, these tumbles with another, resulted in a cycle that went from bad to worse and from worse to bad. This one would swindle her out of her money and drink it down with another girl; that one would beat her to a pulp, mocking her, making as if to hit her, making her so scared that seeing him roll up his sleeves she’d squeal like an animal about to have its throat cut. In the end, slaps in the face, kicks in the rear, such was her lot in life: the man was stronger or weaker, the thrashing more or less intense, but that was all. Anyway, it was only to be expected. Céline didn’t have that slutty look that delights a man. She was pretty, if a bit affected, chic, an attractive girl even, with that delicate, almost unsettling thinness of girls who have been corrupted before their time, but the louts at the bindery preferred those enormous sows whose clothes split under the ponderous weight of their flesh, who jeered haughtily with laughs that shook their double chins and made their bellies dance.
To add to her misfortunes, she wasn’t really that debauched and was as astonished as a child when men, talking among themselves, revealed new vistas of depravity she’d never even suspected, and what’s more she was also, to use Eugène Tourte’s expression, ‘a bit dippy’, daydreaming next to her man of tender caresses, imagining an ideal lover who’d embrace her as gently as a young girl and offer her a little cake or a flower on her birthday. Well, that certainly wasn’t Eugène, ‘that disgusting man’ as the other women called him, who wouldn’t give her so much as a ribbon or a glass of wine. His face to kiss every few days, his fists to endure every few hours, and that was all. Wanting to when she didn’t feel like it, not wanting to when she did, he’d made her life miserable. Moreover, Eugène was a bastard of the worst kind. A bad apple, rotten to the core and as cantankerous as a coachman, he had no respect for women and spent his evenings chasing after any that crossed his path, abandoning them as soon as he’d detained them long enough that they had to take a break in a maternity hospital bed. All the book bindery women knew him and despised him, and all managed in some way to let themselves be inveigled by him; though the sensible women and the girls who had some spirit never let themselves be seduced more than once, certain of being abandoned by the end of a week if they were pretty, and in a couple of days if they were ugly. Céline lacked experience when she met him. She couldn’t believe, moreover, that a man would leave a girl who’d given herself to him, just like that. She believed it only on the day Eugène disappeared from the quarter and went off to knock back cognac and make love to the widow of the coalman.
Céline became depressed. She seriously thought of throwing herself into the Seine, but then she reflected that she’d already suffered at the hands of this monster of a man, so it was pointless to suffer even more by giving herself up to a watery grave. With a heavy heart and tears in her eyes, she whined on and on, until, dining at a friend’s house, she got such a bad case of indigestion that, unable to stop the cancan in her stomach, it was accompanied by the music of her hiccups and belches. Feeling bad enough as it was, after a week with neither appetite for food nor desire for drink, she was terribly sick, her sunken chest throwing up everything she swallowed. When her stomach had finished its frolics and all was back in order, the pleasure of being able to eat her fill of the grub she was mad about, such as pigs’ trotters, celery salad, and boiled beef and mustard, helped make life sweeter, and the only thing she retained from this first bout of unhappiness was a certain listlessness which disappeared at the breath of the first kiss she received on the mouth.
Nevertheless, she vowed to be prudent. Her break with Eugène hadn’t been achieved without a prolonged caress of his fists, and for five days afterwards her shoulders had been marbled with blue bruises, like the skin of a turkey mottled with azure spots, but even so, she was defenceless against the passions that her first lover had aroused in her; Michon had his way with her and left her; his successors made her dance to their tune, she became the partner first of one, then another; the habit took hold, she’d have stripped, alone, before a broom.
After all, what else could she have done? She was like the majority of women. She had a lover? It was a bore! It was a trial! She didn’t have one? It was a tragedy! It was a disaster! It wasn’t any kind of life to be young and attractive and not have anyone interested in your fine looks or be the apple of your eye. She was torn between not wanting to serve as a sex object to the first man who came along, and the joy of being desired by someone when night fell.
Previously, when she returned to her room, feet aching, her groin throbbing beneath her skin, she undressed as quickly as possible, buried herself under the covers, and, loins sore, sweating, a burning pain in her belly, she would dream about her lover and their rendezvous for the next night. Now she came home early, dragged herself from one chair to another, sat looking heartbroken in front of her soup, chewed on bits of thread, spat them out or twisted them between her fingers; she’d press her nose against the windowpane, yawn loudly and return to her place; then she’d go downstairs to the newsagent and buy two sous’ worth of love and murder, she’d doze and get cramps in her calves, and then, finally deciding to go to bed, she’d slowly undo her hair, scratching her head distractedly, collapsing, dull and dejected, onto her unmade bed. After a while she began to look a mess, like a lot of working-class girls who only bother about their personal hygiene when they’ve got a man. An immense indolence gripped her, and, nerves exasperated, she ruminated at great length, recalling her former pleasures, listening under the shifting bedcovers to the hours slowly striking. Oh, it was so boring living like this! And her carnal torments left her drained; she had sudden hot flushes in her hands and her temples, sometimes her eyes blurred when, at the workshop, she overheard words that evoked his image being exchanged by other women, then, as a result of this period of sexual abstinence, she began to get splitting headaches; she tried opium patches on her forehead and quinine drops, but in vain, nothing succeeded in soothing her.
It was at this moment that she met Gabriel Michon, who proffered her his toothless, loutish face and got her to kiss him without repugnance. Then she resumed her former gaiety, returning home at midnight or not coming home at all, tarting herself up in the morning as soon as she jumped out of bed, placing a violet or a rose in her hairnet and covering her shoulders with a gaudy, bright red shawl. Désirée would laugh to see her pomading herself with such care and scrubbing out her ears with soap. But one day, even she was quite impressed. Céline had bought a small flask with a flower painted on the neck at some boutique on the Rue Bonaparte. It smelled of bitter mignonette. Céline liberally doused her hair and cheeks with it, and this luxury fragrance had caused a revolution in the workshop. All the women wanted to have some, and one of the bookbinders, whose brother was a salesman in that line of business, came to work the next day with a crate of little flasks which he sold for five, ten, and fifteen sous apiece. Little work was done that day. The women were amazed at smelling so good and, handkerchiefs under their noses, they swooned with delight, showing themselves off, thinking themselves irresistible, calling one another ‘Mademoiselle’ and ‘Madame’, as if a drop of musk and amber could transform their sluttified looks!