Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE - Le Printemps
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
PART TWO - L’Été
CHAPTER 17
PART THREE - L’Automne
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
PART FOUR - L’Hiver
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
PART FIVE - Plus tard...
CHAPTER 25
Translator, Trader
Copyright Page
À mes parents
PART ONE
Le Printemps
J’ai fait la magique étude
Du Bonheur, que nul n’élude.
— Arthur Rimbaud
I’ve probed the magic of Bliss,
A path that no one can miss.
CHAPTER 1
She opened her eyes. A brisk little breeze had impudently slipped into the bedroom. Already it had turned the curtain into a sail and bent the flowers in their tall vase on the floor, and now it had set its sights on her sleep. It was a spring wind, the very first one, and it smelled of thickets, forests, and soil; it had swept unchallenged through the faubourgs of Paris, through their streets choked with traffic fumes, and now it was arriving softly but brashly at dawn in her bedroom, intent on reminding her, even before she emerged from her drowsy state, of the pleasure of being alive.
She reclosed her eyes, flipped over onto her front, and with her face still buried in her pillow, groped around on the floor for her alarm clock. She must have forgotten it — she always forgot everything. She carefully rose from bed and thrust her head out the window. It was dark, and the windows across the way were shut. This breeze should have known better than to go blowing at such an hour! She lay down again, wrapping herself tightly in her sheets once more, and spent a little while pretending to be asleep.
But it was of no use. Now the cocky breeze was strutting about her room, and she sensed its irritation with the limpness of the weak-willed roses and the obsequious swelling-up of the curtains. It was sweeping over her coquettishly, urging her with all the power of its rural fragrances: “Come out, come out — come stroll with me!” Her sleepy body just wouldn’t go along, though. Little shards of dreams kept returning to fog up her brain, but ever so slowly a smile started to form on her mouth. Dawn, the countryside at dawn… the four plane trees on the terrace, their leaves so crisply outlined against the pale sky… the crunch of gravel under some dog’s paws… eternal childhood…
Was there anything left in this world that could still imbue childhood with some charm, after all the sad wailings of novelists, the obscure theorizings of psychoanalysts, and the fatuous outpourings of random souls encouraged to vent themselves on the theme “When I was a child”? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren’t gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible.
This last thought made her again get out of bed. She scanned the room for her dressing gown but didn’t find it. Someone must have stuck it somewhere, but where? She opened the wardrobes with a sigh. There was no way she could ever get used to this bedroom. Nor to any other bedroom, for that matter. Decor in general left her completely indifferent. Even so, this was a lovely room, with its high ceiling, its two big windows opening onto a small rive gauche street, and a grayish-blue rug that was easy on the eyes and on the feet as well. The bed struck her as an island flanked by two reefs — the nightstand and the low table between the two windows — and both of them, according to Charles, were in the finest classic style. And then her dressing gown, which finally she’d spotted, was silken, and all this luxury was, truth to tell, very appealing.
She walked into Charles’ bedroom. He always slept with the windows shut and the nightstand lamp on, and no wind ever bothered him. His sleeping pills were carefully placed next to his pack of cigarettes, his lighter, his bottle of mineral water, and his alarm clock, which was set for eight o’clock sharp. Only Le Monde was lying around on the floor. She sat down at the foot of the bed and looked at him.
Charles was fifty years old and had pleasant features, slightly soft, and an unhappy look when he was asleep. This particular morning, he looked even sadder than usual. He had dealings in real estate, and thus a great deal of money, but his relationships with other people were rather uneasy, thanks to a certain blend of politeness and reserve that at times made him come across as remote, even cold. They had been living together now for two years — if “living together” was the proper term for occupying the same apartment, seeing the same people, and once in a while sleeping in the same bed.
He turned towards the wall and groaned a little. She thought yet one more time that she surely must make him unhappy, but her very next thought was that he would have been unhappy with any woman twenty years his junior who had a flair for independence. She took a cigarette from the nightstand, lit it noiselessly, and resumed her musing. Charles’ hair was graying on top, the veins stood out on his graceful hands, and his mouth was losing a bit of its youthful color. She felt a sudden surge of tenderness for him. How could anyone be so kind, so intelligent, and so unhappy? Yet she could do nothing for him; you can’t console someone for having been born and being doomed to die.
She started coughing — it was a mistake to smoke on an empty stomach in the morning. One should never smoke on an empty stomach, nor for that matter should one partake of alcohol, drive fast, make love too often, tax one’s heart, spend one’s money, or do anything else. She yawned. She was going to get in the car and follow that spring breeze a long way out into the countryside. She wouldn’t work today any more than she did on other days. Thanks to Charles, she had gotten very accustomed to not working.
Half an hour later, she was spinning down the autoroute towards Nancy, with a piano concerto on her convertible’s radio. But was it by Grieg, Schumann, or Rachmaninoff ? Certainly some romantic, but which one? This uncertainty annoyed her and pleased her at the same time. The only cultural icons she liked were ones that she knew by heart, and to those she was very sensitive. “I remember hearing that piece of music twenty times and I know I was miserable in that period of my life, and it stuck to my suffering like a decal.” Already, though, she had forgotten who had caused her this sadness; already she must be growing old. But that was of little import to her. It had been ages since she had thought of herself, seen herself, even defined herself in her own eyes; it had been ages since she had run alone, with only the present beside her, in such a fine fresh dawn wind.
CHAPTER 2
The noise of the car in the courtyard woke Charles up. He heard Lucile humming as she closed the garage door, and he wondered, in a daze, what time it could possibly be. His watch said it was nearly eight. It briefly crossed his mind that Lucile might be sick, but hearing her carefree voice down below reassured him. For a split second, he felt tempted to open the window and to yell down to her, “Stop!”, but he refrained. He knew this euphoria of hers: it was the euphoria of being alone. He shut his eyes for a moment. This was the first of a thousand impulses he would stifle today in order not to inhibit Lucile, not to get in her way. If he’d been fifteen years younger, he
would doubtless have been able to open the window and shout down, “Lucile, come back up, I’m awake!” in a slightly bossy yet casual tone. And she would have come upstairs and had a cup of tea with him. She would have sat down on his bed and soon he’d have had her in stitches with silly off-the-cuff remarks. But he shrugged his shoulders at this fantasy. Even fifteen years ago, he wouldn’t have made her laugh. He had, in truth, never been funny. He’d only discovered how to be lighthearted a year ago, thanks to Lucile, and it seemed to be one of the slowest and hardest traits to acquire, if one isn’t born with it.
He sat up in bed, noting with surprise an ashtray beside him. At its center was was an extinguished cigarette, and he wondered if he might have forgotten, last night, to dump it into the fireplace before retiring. Impossible. Lucile must have come in and smoked in his room. Also, there was a little hollow on his bed, indicating she’d been sitting there. He himself never disturbed anything while sleeping. The various cleaning women who had overseen his bachelor’s existence had often praised him for this quality. It was, in fact, something people had always complimented him for: his calmness, whether he was awake or asleep; his composure; his good manners. Some people were always being praised for their charm, but that had never happened to him, or at least never in a truly disinterested fashion, which was a pity: he would have felt instantly endowed with a marvelous, sparkling, beautiful set of feathers.
Certain words always made him suffer, cruelly and quietly, like a blurry memory one can’t quite retrieve: the words “charming”, “easy-going”, “casual”, and also, God only knows why, “balcony”. Once he’d told Lucile about this ineffable nostalgia. Not about the other words, of course, but just this last one. “ ‘Balcony’?”, she’d said with astonishment. “Why ‘balcony’?” She repeated it: “Balcony, balcony”, then asked him if he thought of it in the plural. He said yes. Then she asked if there had been balconies in his childhood, and he said no. She looked at him with fascination and, just as occurred every time she looked at him with something other than mere friendliness, a crazy hope would start to flutter inside him. But then she mumbled something about Baudelaire’s balcons du ciel, his balconies in the sky, and that’s where things remained. Nowhere, as usual.
And yet he loved her; he didn’t dare let her know just how much he loved her. Not that she would ever have taken any advantage of it, but just that it would have upset her, saddened her. It was already quite unexpected that she hadn’t yet left him. All he offered her, after all, was security, and he knew that that was the least of her concerns. Or at least maybe it was.
He rang the bell, scooped up Le Monde from the floor, and tried reading. Nothing doing. He could just see Lucile driving too quickly, as usual, in the convertible — a very safe one, but even so — that he’d given her for Christmas. He’d called up a friend at the Auto-Journal to find out what the best sports car was, the one that held the road best, the safest make, and so on. He’d told Lucile it had been the easiest one to find, even tried to make it seem as if he’d ordered it on a whim the night before, “just casually”. She had been thrilled. But if this morning he were to get a phone call telling him that a dark blue convertible had been found by the road, flipped on top of the body of a young woman whose papers… He stood up. He was being an idiot.
Pauline walked in, carrying him his breakfast on a tray. He smiled. “What’s the weather like?”
“A bit overcast. But it smells like spring,” said Pauline. She was sixty years old and had taken care of him for ten years. Poetic reflections were not her forte, however.
“Spring?” he repeated mindlessly.
“Yes, so said Mademoiselle Lucile. She came down to the kitchen before me, and she took an orange and said she had to run, that it smelled like spring.”
Pauline smiled. Charles had been very worried, at the outset, that she would hate Lucile, but after a trial period of two months or so, Pauline’s moral judgment emerged very clearly: Mademoiselle was ten years old, emotionally, and Monsieur, who wasn’t any better, was simply incapable of protecting her against the vagaries of life. It was thus incumbent upon herself, Pauline, to take charge. So she dictated to Lucile, with admirable energy, when to take naps, what to eat, and not to indulge in drinking, and Lucile, quite taken by it all, or so it would seem, did as she was told. This was one of the small mysteries of his household that both befuddled and delighted Charles.
“All she took was an orange?” asked Charles.
“That’s all. And she told me to tell You1 to take a deep breath when You go out, because it smells like spring.” Pauline’s tone of voice was flat. Didn’t she realize he was begging her to tell him more about what Lucile had said?
Pauline occasionally turned away from his gaze. At such moments he felt it wasn’t Lucile that she resented, but the nature of his passion for her, his starved anguish, of which only Pauline caught rare glimpses, and which, despite her common sense and her maternal, slightly condescending acceptance of Lucile’s personality, she was still at a loss to understand. She could have taken pity on him if he’d fallen under the spell of “a nasty lady”, as she would put it, rather than of “a sweet person”. She didn’t realize, though, that things might be quite a bit worse than that.
CHAPTER 3
Claire Santré’s apartment had once been very lavish, when poor old Santré had lived there. It was a little less so nowadays and you could see this in tiny details, such as the relative sparseness of the furniture, the blue curtains that had been dyed and re-dyed twenty times, and the wild appearance of the caterers, who occasionally took just a bit too long to remember which of the main salon’s five doors led to the butler’s quarters. Even so, it remained one of the loveliest apartments in the Avenue Montaigne, and invitations to Claire Santré’s soirées were highly coveted. Claire herself was tall, slender, and energetic — a blonde who could just as easily have been a brunette. She was a bit over fifty though she didn’t look it, and she spoke of love flippantly, in the manner of a worldly woman who is no longer seeking it but who retains good memories of it. As a consequence, women were very fond of her and men pursued her lustily, laughing all the while. She was one of that small, hardy cohort of Parisian women in their fifties who make it alone, not just staying alive but staying in style — on occasion even setting it.
At her elegant dinners, Claire Santré would invariably have one or two Americans and one or two Venezuelans, about whom she warned her friends ahead of time that they weren’t terribly fun people but that she was doing business with them. As for them, they would inevitably be seated next to some fashionable Parisienne whose banter they couldn’t quite keep up with, consisting, as it so often did, of riddles, unfinished allusions, and incomprehensible jokes, all of which one could expect them to recount with great mirth on their return to Caracas. And in exchange for this, Claire received exclusive French rights to Venezuelan fabrics, or sometimes the reverse, and there was never a lack of whiskey at her parties. All in all, Claire was an adroit woman, and she only spoke ill of someone if it was an absolute necessity in order to avoid looking foolish.
For ten years now, Charles Blassans-Lignières had been a mainstay of Claire’s soirées. He had loaned her a great deal of money but he never reminded her of it at all. He was wealthy, good-looking, a man of few but well-chosen words, and every so often he would give in and take on a mistress from Claire’s stable of protégées. It would generally last a year, sometimes two. He’d take them to Italy in August and he’d send them to Saint-Tropez when they complained of the summer heat, or to Megève when they complained of fatigue in winter. Each time, it would wind down with a lovely gift that spelled the death knell for their liaison, although usually no one knew quite why, and then, six months later, Claire would once again “go on the lookout” for him.
But it had now been some two full years that this calm and pragmatic man had been beyond the reach of Claire’s romantic schemes. He had taken a real shine to Lucile, and Lucile was somehow elusive
. She was lively, polite, and often amusing, but she obstinately refused to speak of herself, of Charles, or of her plans in life. Before meeting Charles, she had worked at a modest little newspaper — one of those papers that claim to be leftist so as not to have to remunerate their contributors very lavishly and whose social commitment goes no further than that. She’d pretty much stopped working for it as of late, and in fact, no one had the slightest idea how she spent her days. If she had a lover on the side, he certainly wasn’t in Claire’s entourage, even though Claire had sent several of her most appealing musketeers Lucile’s way. But without success. One day, running out of ideas, Claire had suggested to Lucile that she try one of those Balzac-style affairs that so many Parisian women engage in, and which would at the very least endow her with a mink stole and a check from Charles worth at least as much as a mink.
“I don’t need money,” protested Lucile, “and I hate that kind of playing-around on the side.” Her tone was curt and she could not even look Claire straight in the face. The latter, after a moment of panic, had one of those bolts from the blue that justified her social reputation. Taking Lucile’s hands in hers, she said, “Thank You, mon petit. Please understand — I love Charles as a brother and I don’t know You well. Excuse my indiscretion. In fact, if You had accepted, I would have been concerned for his sake.”
On hearing this, Lucile burst out laughing and Claire, who had been vaguely hoping for Lucile to melt forgivingly in her arms, became quite worried about what Lucile might tell Charles, until the next dinner where, to her relief, she saw he was still just the same old Charles. So Lucile knew how to keep quiet.
Or, perhaps, how to forget.
In any case, this spring had something troublesome up its sleeve. Claire was mumbling to herself while looking over the food the caterers had just brought, and Johnny, who by convention was always the first guest to arrive, was following her all about. He had gone for young men until he was forty-five, but now he no longer had the strength, after a hard day’s work and a dinner in town, to go out on the prowl for a pretty boy at midnight. He settled for tailing them with a melancholy gaze at fancy receptions. High-society living kills everything, even vices. Even the pious will have to give it credit for this. Johnny had thus become Claire’s devoted knight-at-arms. He accompanied her to premières and to dinners, and he played the host at her apartment a bit uneasily but with great aplomb. His name was actually Jean, but as everyone seemed to prefer the jauntier sound of “Johnny”, he had bowed to popular demand, and over two decades he’d even managed to acquire a slight Anglo-Saxon accent.