For a Night of Love (4 page)

Thérèse didn’t even lose her temper. When he was hidden, he could see her coming and going with her royal demeanour, and when he forced her to see him, she maintained the same
attitude, only even more haughty and frigid. He never caught her losing her self-control. If her eyes happened to encounter him, she made no haste to look away. When he heard people in the post office say that Mlle de Marsanne was deeply pious and charitable, he would sometimes protest violently to himself. No, no! she was completely irreligious, she loved blood for she had blood on her lips, and the pallor of her face came from her contempt for the world. Then he would weep for having insulted her, and beg her for forgiveness, as if she were a saint enfolded in the purity of her wings.

Throughout this first year, day followed on after day
without
bringing any change. When summer returned, he
experienced
a peculiar sensation: Thérèse seemed to him to be walking in another atmosphere. There were the same little events as before, the shutters were pushed open each morning and closed again in the evening, there were the regular appearances at the usual hours; but a new spirit emanated from her room. Thérèse was paler, taller. One feverish day he took the risk of blowing her a third kiss from his fevered fingertips. She looked at him fixedly, her gravity disconcerting, without leaving the window. He was the one to withdraw, his face flushed.

There was only one new development, towards the end of the summer – one that shook him to the depths of his being, even though it was the simplest little thing imaginable. Almost every day, at dusk, Thérèse’s casement, which had been left half-open, would be violently slammed shut, making the wooden panels and the window catch clatter. This bang would make Julien jump in painful trepidation; and he was left tormented with anxiety, his heart bruised, without being able to say why. After this abrupt detonation, the house relapsed into such a deathly quiet that the silence made him afraid. For
a long time, he was unable to make out whose arm it was slamming the window shut like that; but, one evening, he caught sight of Thérèse’s pale hands; she it was twisting the window catch to with such impatient fury. And when, an hour later, she reopened the window, but slowly this time, with a dignified deliberation, she seemed weary, leaning for a
moment
on the window sill; then she would walk up and down in her immaculate room, attending to girlish little occupations. Julien was left standing vacantly, and the continual scrape of the window catch echoed in his ears.

One grey, mild autumn evening, the catch gave a terrible squeal. Julien shuddered, and involuntary tears fell from his eyes, as he looked over at the gloomy house immersed in the shadows of twilight. It had rained that morning, the half-bare chestnut trees were giving off an odour of death.

But Julien continued to wait for the window to reopen. And suddenly it did reopen, just as violently as it had closed. Thérèse appeared. She was completely white, her eyes wide open, her hair hanging loose round her neck. She stood there at the window, she put her ten fingers to her red lips, and blew Julien a kiss.

Distraught, he pressed his fists to his chest, as if to ask whether this kiss was meant for him.

Then Thérèse thought he was withdrawing. She leaned out further, again set her ten fingers to her red lips, and blew him a second kiss, and then a third. It was as if she were returning the young man’s three kisses. He stood there gaping. It was a clear evening, he could see her distinctly outlined in the window’s shadowy frame.

When she thought she had won him, she glanced down into the small square. And, in a strained voice: ‘Come,’ she said simply.

He came. He went downstairs, walked over to the house. As he was looking up, the front door half opened, that door which had been locked and bolted for perhaps half a century, and whose hinged leaves had been bound together by moss. But he walked along in a stupor, no longer surprised at anything. The moment he went in, the door closed behind him, and he was led along by a small icy hand. He went upstairs, along a corridor, across a first room, and finally found himself in a bedroom that he recognised. It was paradise, the room with the pink silk curtains. The daylight was dwindling away slowly and gently. He was tempted to fall to his knees. But Thérèse was standing bolt upright in front of him, her hands tightly clasped, so full of resolve that she managed to repress the shudders that were running up and down her.

‘Do you love me?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘Oh yes! Oh yes!’ he stammered.

But she signalled him not to waste his breath on useless babble. She resumed, in a haughty tone that seemed to make her words natural and chaste as they came from her girlish lips: ‘If I gave myself to you, you’d do anything, wouldn’t you?’

Unable to reply, he folded his hands together. For a kiss from her, he would sell his soul.

‘Well, I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

As he remained dumb, she broke out into sudden violence, feeling utterly exhausted and sensing that she might soon run out of courage. She cried, ‘Look, we’ve got to swear to it first… I swear to keep my side of the bargain… Go on, you swear too!’

‘Oh, I swear! Oh, whatever you want!’ he said, in a moment of total self-abandonment.

The pure clean smell of the room made his senses swim.
The curtains round the alcove were drawn to, and the mere thought of her virginal bed, in the soft shadow of pink silk, threw him into a religious ecstasy. Then, with her suddenly brutal hands, she tore apart the curtains and revealed the alcove, into which the twilight shed a sinister gleam. The bed was in disorder, the sheets trailing down, a pillow that had fallen to the ground seemed dented by tooth marks. And, in the midst of the crumpled lace, lay the body of a man, barefoot, sprawling sideways.

‘There,’ she explained in a choked voice, ‘that man was my lover… I pushed him, he fell over, I just don’t know. Anyway, he’s dead… And you’ve got to take him away. Do you
understand
?… That’s all, yes, that’s all. That’s what you must do!’

While still a little girl, Thérèse de Marsanne took Colombel for her stooge. He was barely six months older than she was, and Françoise, his mother, had ended up bottle-feeding him, so as to give her own milk to Thérèse. Later on, having grown up in the household, he took on a vague position somewhere between servant boy and playmate for the little girl.

Thérèse was an
enfant terrible.
It wasn’t that she was a noisy tomboy. She maintained, on the contrary, a singular gravity, which led to her being considered a well brought-up young lady by the visitors to whom she would curtsey so charmingly. But she had strange whims: she would suddenly burst out into inarticulate cries, and stamp her feet in a wild tantrum when she was alone; or she would lie on her back in the middle of one of the garden paths, and stay there, stretched out, obstinately refusing to get up, despite the punishments they sometimes decided to mete out to her.

No one could ever tell what she was thinking. Already, in
those big childish eyes of hers, she extinguished every spark of life; and, in place of those clear mirrors where the souls of little girls can be seen so clearly, she had two dark holes, deep and black as ink, in which it was impossible to read.

At the age of six, she started to torture Colombel. He was small and puny. So she would lead him to the bottom of the garden, under the chestnut trees, to a place well hidden by the shade of the leaves, and leap on his back, forcing him to carry her. She straddled him for hour-long rides round a wide clump in the middle. She clasped him round the neck, digging her heels repeatedly into his ribs, giving him no chance to draw breath. He was the horse, she the fine lady. When,
overcome
by dizziness, he seemed on the point of collapse, she would bite his ear until she drew blood, squeezing him so fiercely that her small fingernails pierced his flesh. And on they galloped, this cruel six-year-old queen riding through the trees, her hair streaming in the wind, on the back of the boy she was using as her steed.

Later, when they were with her parents, she would pinch him, and forbid him to cry out, under the permanent threat of having him thrown out onto the streets if he said anything about their little games. In this way they led a sort of secret life, a shared existence, which changed when they were in
company
. When they were alone, she treated him as a toy, often feeling the urge to break him open, curious to find out what was inside. Was she not a marquise, did she not see people at her feet the whole time? Since she had been given a little man to play with, she was at perfect liberty to do with him what her fancy dictated. And when she got bored of tyrannising Colombel far from people’s eyes, she would give herself the added and even more intense pleasure of dealing him a hefty kick or sticking a pin in his arm in the midst of a big group of
visitors, while hypnotising him with her dark eyes so he would not so much as flinch.

Colombel put up with this martyr’s life, despite moments of mute revolt which left him trembling, his eyes downcast, struggling to overcome the temptation of strangling his young mistress. But he himself was sly by temperament. He had no great objection to being beaten. He derived a sour enjoyment from it, and sometimes arranged things so he would get pricked, waiting for the needle to enter his flesh with a
shudder
of fierce satisfaction; and then he would become absorbed in the delightful prospect of getting his own back. In any case, he was already taking his revenge, deliberately falling onto hard stones and dragging Thérèse down with him, unafraid of breaking a limb, and all too pleased when she picked up bumps and grazes. If he didn’t cry out when she pinched him in company, it was so no one would intervene between them. It was their business, that was all, a quarrel from which he intended to emerge the victor later on.

Meanwhile, however, the Marquis was worried by his daughter’s violent manners. People said that she resembled one of her uncles, who had led a life fraught with terrible adventures, and who had died murdered in a den of vice in some out-of-the-way suburb. Indeed, a seam of tragedy ran through the whole history of the Marsanne family; every so often, their members were born with a strange malady, despite their dignified and haughty lineage; and this malady was like an outbreak of madness, a perverse emotional disorder, an upwelling of scum which seemed for a while to rid the family of the impurity. So the Marquis thought it wise to submit Thérèse to a strict education, and he placed her in a convent, where he hoped the discipline would make her more tractable. She stayed there until she was eighteen.

When Thérèse came home, she was very well behaved and very tall. Her parents were happy to see that she had
developed
a profound sense of piety. In church, she would remain deep in prayer, her forehead in her hands. At home, she spread about her an odour of innocence and peace. Only one small failing could be held against her: she was greedy; she ate sweets from morning to evening, sucking them with
half-closed
eyes, her red lips quivering slightly. No one would have recognised the mute and obstinate child who often returned from the garden with her clothes in shreds, refusing to say what games she had been playing to get all torn like that. The Marquis and Marquise, who had lived secluded for fifteen years in the depths of their empty residence, thought it was time to reopen their salon. They laid on a few dinner parties for the local nobility. They even held dances. Their plan was to marry Thérèse off. And, for all her coldness, she went along, dressing up and waltzing, but with such a white face that she unsettled the young men who ventured to fall in love with her.

Never had Thérèse said anything further about young Colombel. The Marquis had made arrangements for him and had just found him a position with M. Savournin the lawyer, after ensuring he had received a basic education. One day, Françoise, having brought her son along, thrust him forward in front of Thérèse, reminding the girl that he had once been her playmate. Colombel was smiling, spotlessly clean, quite unaffected. Thérèse looked at him calmly, said that, yes indeed, she did remember, then turned away. But a week later, Colombel returned, and soon he had resumed his former habits. He came to the house every evening, after work at the lawyer’s, bringing pieces of music, books, and albums. He was treated as if of no importance, and given errands to do, like a
servant or a poor relative. He was a dependent of the family. So no one thought it amiss to leave him alone with the girl. Just as they had done long ago, they closeted themselves together in the big rooms, they spent hours under the leaves of the garden trees. Truth to tell, they no longer played the same games there. Thérèse walked slowly along, her dress
swooshing
gently through the grass. Colombel, dressed like the rich young men of the town, accompanied her, prodding the earth with a supple cane he always carried with him.

However, she slowly turned back into the queen and he into her slave. To be sure, she no longer bit him, but she had a way of walking next to him which, little by little, made him feel even smaller, changed him into a court lackey, holding up his sovereign lady’s robe. She tormented him with her whimsical moods, pouring out words of affection, and then becoming harsh, simply to entertain herself. He, on the other hand, would wait for her to look away and then dart a bright-eyed glance at her, as piercing as a sword thrust, and his whole body would stretch out its depraved young limbs as he watched and waited for the moment to enact the dreamt-of betrayal.

One summer evening, under the heavy foliage of the
chestnut
trees, they had been walking for quite a while when Thérèse, after a period of silence, asked him gravely, ‘I say, Colombel, I’m really tired. What if you carried me, remember, like you used to?’

He laughed a little. Then, perfectly seriously, he answered, ‘My pleasure, Thérèse.’

But she resumed her walk, saying simply, ‘It’s all right, I just wanted to know.’