The Collected Stories of Colette (94 page)

Mademoiselle Devoidy, living in cramped quarters, worked in the front room and slept in the back one, next door to the kitchen. A double door, at the entrance, made a minute hall. When a visitor knocked or rang, Mademoiselle Devoidy would call out, without getting up: “Come in! The key turns to the left!”

Did I feel the beginnings of a friendship with this fellow native of my own province? I most certainly liked her professionable table, covered with green baize, with a raised edge like a billiard table, and scored with parallel troughs along which her fingers ranged and graded the pearls with the help of delicate tweezers, worthy to touch the most precious matter: pearls and the wings of dead butterflies.

I also had a friendly feeling for the details and peculiarities of a craft that demanded two years’ apprenticeship, a special manual dexterity, and a slightly contemptuous attitude toward jewels. The mania for pearls, which lasted a long time, allowed the expert stringer to work in her own home and do as much as she chose. When Mademoiselle Devoidy told me, suppressing a yawn: “So-and-so brought me
masses
last night, I had to compose till two o’clock in the morning,” my imagination swelled these “masses” to fairy-tale size and elevated the verb “compose” to the rank of creative labor.

In the afternoon, and on dark mornings in winter, an electric bulb, set in a metal convolvulus, was switched on above the table. Its strong light swept away all the shadows on the workbench on which Mademoiselle Devoidy allowed nothing to stand; no little vase with a rose in it, no pin tray or ornament in which a stray pearl might hide. Even the scissors seemed to make themselves perfectly flat. Apart from this precaution, which kept the table in a permanent state of pearl-decked nudity, I never saw Mademoiselle Devoidy show the faintest sign of wariness. Chokers and necklaces lay dismembered on the table like stakes not worth picking up.

“You’re not in a great hurry? I’ll clear a little place for you. Amuse yourself with what’s lying about while I rethread you. So it refuses to get any fatter, this string? You’ll have to put it in the hen coop. Ah, you’ll never know your way about.”

All the time Mademoiselle Devoidy was teasing, her smile was busy reminding me of our common origin, a village ringed with woods, the autumn rain dripping on the piles of apples on the edge of the fields, waiting to be taken to the cider press . . . Meanwhile, I did, indeed, amuse myself with what was lying about on the table. Sometimes there were huge American necklaces, ostentatious and impersonal; Cécile Sorel’s pearls mingled with Polaire’s choker, thirty-seven famous pearls. There were jewelers’ necklaces, milky and brand-new, not yet warmed into life by long contact with women’s skin. Here and there, a diamond, mounted in a clasp, emitted rainbow sparks. A dog collar, a fourteen-row choker, stiffened with vertical bars of brilliants, spoke of wrinkled dewlaps, an old woman’s sinewy neck, perhaps of scrofula . . .

Has that curious craft changed? Does it still fling heaps of treasures, defenseless fortunes into the laps of poor and incorruptible women?

When the day was drawing to a close, Madame Armand sometimes came and sat at the green baize table. Out of discretion, she refrained from handling the necklaces over which her bird-like gaze wandered with glittering indifference.

“Well, so your day’s work’s over, Madame Armand?” Mademoiselle Devoidy would say.

“Oh, me . . . mine doesn’t have to be fitted into the day like my husband’s. My dinner to warm up, the studio to tidy, little things here and there . . . it’s easily done.”

Rigid when she was standing, Madame Armand was no less rigid seated. Her bust, tightly encased in a red-and-black tartan bodice with braided frogs, visible between the stiff half-open flaps of a jacket, made me think of a little cupboard. She had something of the fascination of a wooden ship’s figurehead. At the same time she suggested the well-mannered efficiency of a good cashier and various other sterling virtues.

“And Monsieur Armand, what nice thing’s he up to at this moment?”

“He’s still working. He’s still on his last Saturday’s wedding. You see, he has to do everything in a little business like ours. That wedding procession on Saturday is giving him a lot of trouble, but it means quite a good profit. The couple in one picture, a group of the bridesmaids, the whole procession in four different poses, goodness knows what all. I can’t help him as much as I’d like to.”

The photographer’s wife turned to me as if to apologize. As soon as she spoke, all the various stiff and starchy phenomena of the close-fitting bodice, the jacket, the imitation gardenia pinned in her buttonhole melted in the warmth of a pleasant voice with hardly any modulations in it, a voice made to recount local gossip at great length.

“My husband gets tired, because he’s starting this exophthalmic goiter, I call it his exo for short. The year’s been too bad for us to take on an assistant cameraman. The tiresome thing is, I haven’t got a steady hand, I break things. A pot of glue here, a developing tank there, and bang, there goes a frame on the floor. You can see a mile off what a loss that means at the end of a day.”

She stretched out a hand toward me that was, indeed, shaking.

“Nerves,” she said. “So I stick to my own little domain, I do all the housework. In one way it seems to be good for my nerves, but . . .”

She frequently paused on a “but,” after which came a sigh, and when I asked Mademoiselle Devoidy whether this “but” and this sigh hid some melancholy story, my fellow countrywoman retorted: “What an idea! She’s a woman who tight-laces to give herself a slim waist so she has to fight every minute to get her breath.”

Madame Armand, who had regular features, remained faithful to the high military collar and the tight, curled fringe because she had been told she looked like Queen Alexandra, only saucier. Saucier, I cannot honestly say. Darker, definitely. Heads of blue-black hair accompanied by white skin and a straight little nose abound in Paris and are usually of pure Parisian origin with no trace of Mediterranean blood. Madame Armand had as many lashes as a Spanish woman and a bird’s eyes, I mean black eyes rich with a luster that never varied. The neighborhood paid her a laconic and adequate tribute by murmuring, as she passed, the words “handsome brunette.” On this point, Mademoiselle Devoidy’s opinion allowed itself one reservation.

“Handsome brunette’s the word . . . Especially ten years ago.”

“Have you known Madame Armand ten years?”

“No, because she and little old Big Eyes only moved into this place three years ago. I’ve been in the house much longer than they have. But I can very well imagine Madame Armand ten years ago. You can see she’s a woman who’s devouring herself.”

“Devouring herself? That’s a strong expression. You’re not exaggerating?”

An offended look, the color of spangled iron ore, passed under the lamp and met my eyes in the shadow.

“Anyone may be mistaken. Madame Armand may be mistaken too. Just fancy, she’s got it into her head that she leads a sedentary life. So every evening, either before dinner or after, she goes out on foot to take the air.”

“It’s a good healthy habit, don’t you think?”

Mademoiselle Devoidy, as she pinched her lips, made the little colorless hairs of mustache at the corners of her mouth converge—just as diving seats do when they close their nostrils to the water.

“You know what I think of healthy habits. Now that the photographer’s wife has got a bee in her bonnet that she has breathless fits if she doesn’t go out, the next thing will be she’ll be found on the stairs one day, dead of suffocation.”

“You very seldom go out, Mademoiselle Devoidy?”

“Never, you might say.”

“And you don’t feel any worse for it?”

“You can see for yourself. But I don’t stop other people from doing what they fancy.”

She darted her malicious gaze, directed at an invisible Madame Armand, toward the closed door. And I thought of the tart, ill-natured remarks the women herding the cattle in my native countryside exchange over the hedges as they slap the blood-swollen flies under the heifers’ sensitive bellies.

Mademoiselle Devoidy bent her head over the threading of some very tiny pearls; at the edge of her forehead, between the cheek and the ear, the chestnut hair ended in vigorous down, silver, like her little mustache. All the features of this Parisian recluse spoke to me of downy willows, ripe hazelnuts, the sandy bottom of springs, and silky husks. She aimed the point of her needle, pinched between the thumb and forefinger that rested on the table, at the almost invisible holes in the small, insipidly white pearls that she spitted in fives, then slipped on to the silk thread.

A familiar fist banged at the door.

“That’ll be Tigri-Cohen. I recognize his knock. The key’s in the door, Monsieur Tigri!”

The ill-favored face of Tigri-Cohen entered the little arena of light. His ugliness was now gay and ironical, now sad and imploring, like that of certain overintelligent monkeys who have equal reason to cherish the gifts of man and to shiver with fear at them. I have always thought that Tigri-Cohen took tremendous pains to appear crafty, reckless, and unscrupulous. He adopted, perhaps out of guilelessness, the style and manner of a moneylender who charged exorbitant rates. As I knew him, he was always ready to part with twenty francs or even a “big flimsy,” so much so that he died poor, in the arms of his unsuspected honesty.

I had known him in the wings and dressing rooms of music halls, where Tigri-Cohen spent most of his evenings. The little variety actresses used to climb on his shoulders like tame parakeets and leave wet-white all over this black man. They knew his pockets were full of small jewels, flawed pearls and gems just good enough to make into hatpins. He excited his little friends’ admiration by showing them badly colored stones with beautiful names, peridots, chalcedonies, chrysoprases, and pretentious zircons. Hail-fellow-well-met with all the girls, Tigri-Cohen would sell a few of his glittering pebbles between ten p.m. and midnight. But to the rich stars, he presented himself mainly in the role of buyer.

His taste for beautiful pearls always seemed to me more sensual than commercial. I shall never forget the state of excitement I saw him in one day when, going into his shop, I found him alone with a small, unremarkable, expressionless little man who drew out of his shabby waistcoat a sky-blue silk handkerchief and, out of the handkerchief, a single pearl.

“So you’ve still got it?” asked Tigri.

“Yes,” said the little man. “Not for long, though.”

It was an unpierced pearl, round, big as a fine cherry, and, like a cherry, it seemed not to receive the cold light shed from the even-number side of the rue Lafayette but to emit a steady, veiled radiance from within. Tigri contemplated it without saying a word and the little chap kept silent.

“It’s . . . it’s . . .” began Tigri-Cohen.

He searched in vain for words to praise it, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Can I have it a moment?” I asked.

I held it in the hollow of my palm, this marvelous, warm virgin, with its mystery of tremulous colors, its indefinable pink that picked up a snowy blue, then exchanged it for a fleeting mauve.

Before giving back the glorious pearl, Tigri sighed. Then the little man extinguished the soft rays in the blue handkerchief, thrust the whole, carelessly, into a pocket, and went away.

“It’s . . .” repeated Tigri . . . “It’s the color of love.”

“To whom does it belong?”

“To whom? To whom? Think
I
know? To black chaps in India! To an oyster-bed company! To savages, to people with no faith and no feelings, to . . .”

“How much is it worth?”

He gave me a look of contempt.

“How much? A pearl like that, in the dawn of its life, that’s still going about in its little blue satin chemise at the bottom of a broker’s pocket? How much? Like a kilo of plums, eh? ‘That’ll be three francs, Madame. Here you are, Madame. Thank you, Madame.’ Ah! to hear anyone ask
that
 . . .”

Every muscle of his ugly, passionate mime’s face was working, that face that was always overloaded with too much expression, too much laughter, too much sadness. That evening, in Devoidy’s room, I remember he was dripping with rain and seemed not to notice it. He was exploring his pockets with a mechanical gesture, pockets that were secret hoards of necklaces of colored stones, cabochon rings, little bags in which diamonds slept in tissue paper. He flung some ropes of pearls on the green baize.

“There, Devoidy, my love, do me that for tomorrow. And that one. Don’t you think it’s hideous? If you pulled out the pigeon’s feather stuffed in the middle of that nut, you could thread it on a cable. Anyway, change the stuffing.”

From force of habit, he bent over my necklace, with one eye screwed up.

“The fourth one from the middle, I’ll buy that. No? Just as you like. Goodbye, my pets. Tonight I’m going to the dress rehearsal of the Folies-Bergère.”

“Should be a fine evening for business,” said Mademoiselle Devoidy politely.

“That shows you don’t know a thing about it. Tonight my good ladies will be thinking of nothing but their parts, their costumes, the audience’s reaction, and going off into faints behind a flat. See you soon, pets.”

Other visitors, especially female ones, passed through the boltless door into the narrow circle of harsh light. I stared at them with the avid curiosity I have always felt for people I run no risk of seeing again. Richly dressed women thrust out hands filled with precious white grain into the glare of the lamp. Or else, with a proud, languid gesture acquired from constantly wearing pearls, they undid the clasps of their necklaces.

Among others, my memory retains the picture of a woman all silvered with chinchilla. She came in very agitated and she was such a sturdy daughter of the people under all her luxury that she was a joy to the eye. She plumped herself down rudely on the straw-seated stool and commanded: “Don’t unstring the whole row. Just get me out that one, on the side, near the middle, yes, that beauty there.”