The Collected Stories of Colette (28 page)

“And what a shaking we had, I felt as if my liver were being torn from my body at every jolt! It might well have been worse, for I laughed the whole length of the way, and that’s always something to the good!

“And when all’s said and done, as Jacquard put it, ‘What are speed and altitude records to the likes of us? Give me a nice little bus ride
Mantes-Paris
on a
Pigalle-Halle-aux-vins
every time! There’s an endurance test quite out of the ordinary!’”

Through half-closed eyes I follow the “Pavane” as danced by the “Great Concubines of History.” Previous to wearing the pearly veiled hennin, the starched ruff, the farthingale, the hooped panniers and knotted kerchief, they have, for the rehearsal, pinned up their skirts like loincloths about their hips, some even discarding their narrow dresses to work in black knickers, bare arms emerging from their brassieres, furry mobcaps on their heads.

They are led by the Roi Soleil, in the guise of a ballet master in shirt sleeves. Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Marquise de Pompadour persist in making mistake after mistake, and inwardly I bless them. They start over again from the beginning. If only they would go on making mistakes!

Seated in the orchestra stalls on a strip of gray dust sheet, I am waiting in the darkened auditorium till the revue rehearsal is over. It is now a quarter to six, my comrades have held the stage since twelve-thirty. There’ll only be three-quarters of an hour left to rehearse our mimodrama piece. But I long for Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Marquise de Pompadour to blunder again: I do so hate the thought of having to move.

The niggard gleam of a two-way “service lamp” acts as substitute for the footlights. These two points of light, hanging in the blackness, prick my eyes and induce sleep. Beside me, invisible, a fellow mime staves off his craving to smoke by chewing an unlit cigarette. “Another day’s work ruined for the rest of us! I should like to see all revue promoters deep in a hundred feet of . . . Just take a look at those ‘Great Concubines,’ I ask you! And to think that they’re toiling away there for the price of air . . . The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!”

The word arouses me. Is the strike, then, a reality? We’ve been talking about it so much among ourselves. There’s been some change of atmosphere in this hard-worked café concert of ours, one of the happiest establishments in the district, always warm and packed to capacity, where, every night, the stormy laughter of the crowd rollicks around the house amid catcalls, whistling, and stamping of feet.

“The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!”

It’s in the thoughts of all, it’s mooted in corners. The chorus girls of the forthcoming revue, the little singing girls on tour, have this word only on their lips, each in her own manner. Some there are who shout in a whisper, “The strike—for paid matinees, and paid rehearsals!” their faces afire, brandishing a muff like a flag and a reticule like a sling.

Once again the “Great Concubines” have gone agley. Splendid, a further ten good minutes in my seat! My Ladies de Pompadour and d’Estrées are “getting it in the neck”! Bending over them, the ballet master lets fly a string of not very strong oaths which the Vert-Galant’s mistress, a short, well-rounded brunette, receives with impatience, facing in our direction, her eyes on the exit.

The other, the Marquise, hangs her head like a child who has broken a vase. She stares at the floor, without saying a word; her breath lifts the heavy lock of blond hair that falls across her cheek. The dismal light beating down from above sculpts her head into that of a thin, hollow-checked boy-martyr, and this Pompadour, in her black knickers with bare knees showing above her rolled stockings, bears a strange resemblance to a young drummer boy of the Revolution. Her whole stubborn little hurt person spells rebellion and seems to cry aloud, “Long live the strike!”

At a standstill for the moment, the Pavane has regrouped around her twenty silent young women at the end of their tether. In the dark their eyes try to pick out the seat from which the manager supervises their movements, while they wait eagerly for the liberating words “That will be all for today” to surge up from some dim spot in the stalls. But they also appear tonight to be waiting for something else: “The strike, oh, Lord, the strike!” Tonight there is something aggressive about their fatigue.

In direct contrast to the men—singers and mimes, dancers and acrobats—who strive to preserve a serious man-to-man tone, courteous and calm in discussion, when they further their claims, the little “caf’ cone’” girls, my comrades, have caught fire immediately. Being emotional Parisiennes, the mention of the single word “strike” makes them imagine confusedly mobs out in the streets, riots, barricades.

The girls don’t make a practice of it. The strict and simple discipline by which we are ruled brooks no infringement. Under the bluish sun of two projectors has been evolved, up till these troubled days, the most rigorous and hard-worked routine for small communities, alleviated in a trice by a word from the manager, “Take it easy, ladies. Do you think you’re in a theater?” or “I don’t like people who bawl at me.” Yes, they don’t make a habit of “refractoriness” or going on strike. That Agnes Sorel over yonder, who stands so tall on her long legs, yawning with hunger, will soon be off and away to her pigeon house, at the back of beyond on the other side of the Butte de Montmartre. She never has the time for a hot meal, she lives too far away, she’s always on the trot.

“It’s not per performance she earns her monthly hundred and eighty francs, but per mile!” says Diane de Poitiers, who wears thin summer blouses in mid-December.

As for the handsome Montespan of the heavy bosom, is it for a moment likely that she acquired her habitual complaints from her husband, a consumptive bookbinder! She has more than enough on her hands looking after her man and two kids far out near the Châteaud’Eau district.

They are so easily regimented, these poor honeyless bees! Any milliner’s apprentice in the rue de la Paix could put them wise on the question of claims. They said in the past, “Great! We strike!” as they would have said, “We’re going to win the big lottery!”—without any conviction. Now that they do believe in it, they are beginning to tremble, with hope.

Will they receive full pay for those terrible twice-nightly performances on Sunday and Thursday, and for the fête days sprinkled throughout the calendar? Even better: will they be compensated for the long prison hours, midday to six, while a revue is in production? Would the snack of croissants, bock, and banana they bolt in rehearsal time be buckshee? And Old Mother Louis, our rheumaticky duenna, who plays comic mothers-in-law and Negresses, will her bus fare on Sundays and Thursdays be drawn from some other source than the miserable pin money she earns by her knitting, she who knits, everywhere and every minute, for a knitted garment shop?

As for those rush-hour nights, dreaded above all when the full-dress rehearsal for a revue goes on till dawn, would it no longer be solely “for the honor of the house” that fifty or so “walkers” from the chorus have to go back home in the freezing early hours . . . swollen feet and weak ankles, yawning themselves to death?

It sounds good. It is disquieting. Our little community is at fever pitch. At night, in the wings, someone seizes me by the sleeves, and questions me.

“You’re for the strike, aren’t you?” and someone else adds, in a voice of assurance but with fluttering gestures, “In the first place, it’s only fair.”

Not everybody shares the bitter skepticism of this blond, hollow-cheeked child, Madame de Pompadour, a philosopher of nineteen, whom I have nicknamed Cassandra and who resents it without exactly knowing why. “If we strike, where will it get us? It will only help to fatten the cinema crowd. And while it lasts, what are the two of us going to feed on, Moman and me?”

It must be at least a quarter past six. I am almost asleep, my arms pushed deep in my muff, my chin in my fur. I feel warm on the shoulders and cold in the feet, due to the fact that the central heating is not lit for rehearsals. What am I doing here? It is too late for work today. I have gone on waiting with the fatalistic patience learned in the music hall. I may as well wait on a little longer and then leave at the same time as the tired swarm of day girls who will disperse over the face of Paris.

The ones in the greatest hurry, and those whose job brings them back here at eight, will not go far afield: the slice of pale veal on its bed of sorrel, or the dubious lamb stew, await them in the brasserie around the corner. The others make off at the run as soon as their feet touch the pavement. “I’ve just time to rush home for a minute.”

Rush home to a grumbling “Moman,” for a wash and clean, to retie the ribbon that binds hair and forehead, to make sure that the kid has not fallen from the window or burned himself on the stove, and hoopla! the return journey. They jump on a bus, a tram, the underground, pell-mell with all the other employees—milliners, seamstresses, cashiers, typists—for whom the day’s work is over.

[
Translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi
]

1

“Run, Bastienne, run!”

The ballerinas scurry the whole length of the corridor, brushing the petals of their skirts against the wall, leaving behind them the smell of rice powder, hair still warm from the curling tongs, new tarlatan gauze. Bastienne runs, not quite so fast, both hands encircling her waist. They have been “rung” rather late, and were she to arrive on the stage out of breath, might she not fumble, perhaps, the end of her variation, that lengthy spin during which nothing is seen of her but the fully extended, creamy swirl of a ballet skirt and two slim pink legs moving apart and coming together again with a mechanical precision already appreciated by connoisseurs?

She is not, as yet, anything more than a very young dancer, under a year’s contract to the Grand-Théâtre at X; a poor girl, of radiant beauty, tall, “expensive to feed,” as she says of herself, and underfed, because she is already five months pregnant.

Of the child’s father, there is no news.

“He’s a bad lot, that man!” says Bastienne.

But she speaks of him without tearing out her dark hair, so silky against her clear white skin, and her “misfortune” has not driven her either to the river or to the gas oven. She dances as before and recognizes three powerful deities: the manager of the Grand-Théâtre, the ballet mistress, and the proprietor of the hotel where live, besides Bastienne herself, a dozen of her comrades. However, since the morning when Bastienne, turning deathly pale during the dancing lesson, confessed with a peasant’s simplicity, “Madame, it’s because I’m expecting!” the ballet mistress has spared her. But she does not wish to be spared, and dismisses any special attention with an indignant jerk of the elbow and a “Why, I’m not ailing!”

The weight that swells her waistline she calmly accepts, apart from passing a few rude remarks on it with the inconsequence of her seventeen years. “As for you, I’m going to put some sense in you!” And she pulls in her belt, loath not to display for as long as possible, and above all on the stage, the flexibility of her slim, broad-shouldered figure. She laughingly insults her burden, slapping it with the flat of her hands, then adding, “How hungry it makes me!” Unthinkingly she commits the heroic imprudence of all penniless girls: having paid her weekly hotel bill, she often goes to bed without dinner or supper, and keeps her stays on all night to “cut her appetite.”

Bastienne, in fact, leads the indigent, happy-go-lucky but hardworking life of the little motherless ballerinas who have no lover. Between the morning lesson, starting at nine, the afternoon rehearsal, and the nightly performance, they have next to no time left for thought. Their wretched phalanstery does not know the meaning of despair, since solitude and insomnia never afflict its members.

Impudent and crafty after their fashion, driven to extremes by the ragings of an empty stomach, Bastienne and her roommate—a dumpy little blonde—sometimes spend their last pennies in the Grand-Théâtre Brasserie, after midnight, on a bottle of beer.