Paul Morand: Tender Shoots

When I criticise you, you reply:

“I haven’t the time. There are more interesting things to do.”

This indifference is not a pose, for one sometimes finds you making concessions to fashion (especially in evening dresses), and one is sorry you should have made them.

You are not unaware, however, of what people wear, since you yourself design for others what should be worn, and you like the company of eccentrically attired women and well dressed young men.

I have sometimes succeeded in making you discard dresses that are fifteen years out of date for those of thirty years ago. And when you want to please me, you arrange your hair in a fringe, and you wear a black velvet ribbon around your neck, “ à la Dégas ”.

From the first day I was extremely curious about you, and I have remained so. Only your rebellious character has prevented me from loving you.

Your face is interesting. There is a great mystery in your taut lips, a great deal of sensuality in your nose with its restless, broad nostrils, and attractiveness in your yellow eyes, hypersensitive, generally rather hard, listless at times, and restricted at the corners by a mauve vein.

Without being well-educated, you know a great deal. You know nothing about history, but you know the past and you understand it better than a scholar, when you hold a piece of embroidery, or an old slipper, in your hands.

You do not like books. I have never seen you read a novel. In your library there are only pictures, documents and catalogues.

I know you will never grow old, will never end. When I feel like dying, I come and call on you when you are getting ready. You do not stop what you are doing, but as you continue to polish your nails or lace up your boots, you exclaim:

“Live! Tell yourself: ‘I’m alive’, my friend, and that’s all you need! To be able to run, stop, to be in good form, to feel weary, to be able to spit, to spit in the fire, in the water, spit out of your window on the heads of passers-by, how good and wonderful all that is!”

And you really are like that — you rejoice in your good health, in the beating of your pulse, in the use of your limbs, in all these good fortunes, which for us are negative, with lucidity; when you wave your arms about, you experience the pleasure one would feel knowing there is only one hour left before they are to be amputated; when you use your legs, the joy of a paralytic who is suddenly able to move again. You take possession of a room, of a pavement, as if they had long been forbidden to you. You give the singular impression of a people’s feast-day when the crowds, pressed into the clutch of run-down streets, spill out over the grass like laundry.

Life is so much a part of you that one would have to be very determined to take it away from you. Dentists do their very best and cannot even manage to loosen one of your teeth. You pay no heed to illness. You stand up to English doctors.

I find Clarissa in her drawing room, her hands and face black, her clothing covered in dust.

“I’m tidying up,” she says.

Clarissa claims to like open spaces, bare walls, polished floors in which they are prolonged, clear tables. But she succumbs, a victim of her liking for trinkets; she yields to successive solicitations of form, colour, feeling, and soon the glass cabinets, the occasional tables, the mantelpiece, are not enough; without her realising, the knick-knacks pile up in wooden chests, beneath the furniture; the drawers will no longer close, even access to the room becomes improbable. One day, Clarissa reacts; in sorrowful severance, she tears herself away from all these beloved trifles, banishes them to the attic where, having forgotten them, she discovers them years later and puts them back in their place, for the time being.

All day, she roams around the suburban antique dealers, the second-hand shops of the Hebrew districts, the clothes vendors. Basket in hand, she sets off, with her long strides, to the scrap merchants and, unconcerned about fleas, approaches the dealers, rummages around with her rag-and-bone man’s instinct and returns home, her pockets and muff laden with new trinkets. She accommodates them all, from the rarest object to screws, doorknobs, nails, old coins.

“I’m like a magpie,” she says.

And like a magpie, she pounces on shiny objects and buries them away in hiding-places that she alone knows, jumbled up with other things found in the street. When will they be put on display, Clarissa? Her bedroom is full of coloured goblets, of bits of broken glass, of decanter stoppers, of crystal-ware, of fragments of chandeliers or mirrors, of spun-glass animals.

“How lovely it is to touch all these!”

And she runs her fingers over the corners, the surfaces and, going over to the window, she holds them against the light, rejoicing in their reflections. From the pavement, you can recognise her balcony by some crystal globes; from her ceiling she hangs glass balls in which the entire street’s truncated and multifaceted images are reflected, in which the clouds swirl, slowly, the buses, rapidly.

Clarissa keeps up with the sales rooms, all the sales rooms, assiduously.

In London, there is no one large market through which everything that is for sale passes from hand to hand, but a series of auction houses, each with its distinct appearance, its customs, its own clientele. It is more than a difference of neighbourhood, a social hierarchy. But Clarissa sees it merely as a short or a long trip to be made from one to the other.

First she will go to the pretentious sales rooms, with monumental staircases, with liveried porters, where they deal with museum pieces, with precious goods forfeited by royalty, with large inheritances, under the watchful gaze of ennobled experts, of titled critics.

Just around the corner, it will be a caricature of these same rooms — the same porters, but older, their livery threadbare; exhibitions of unknown grand masters, brazen Rembrandts, indecent Corots, sold to a gang of shifty dealers and racketeers.

Others will specialise in jewellery; pieces of gold are passed around the dirty hands of Armenians with black woollen beards; Jews sniff out the pearls.

She also frequents the sales rooms in the working-class districts where the crowds of those made wealthy by the war pounce on pianos, suits of armour, music boxes, thick woollen Indian rugs, silver- or gold-plated ware, plush armchairs.

Sometimes she sets off to the source, goes to the docks where ships from the Far East unload their merchandise that is sold on the spot, at the warehouse.

But what Clarissa likes best are the sales in the provinces where the entire house is being emptied, after death or distraint, from the wines in the cellar down to the door handles, guided by a very sure instinct for these shipwrecks of life, these forfeited items.

Clarissa does not acquire without qualms. And for each purchase she must have a reason:

“It will make a lovely wedding present; instead of giving something horrible …”

“The children need one …”

“It’s not for me, I’ve been asked to buy it …”

“I let the same thing go last year, today you can’t get hold of it anywhere …”

For every happy occasion, Clarissa buys herself a little something, as a memento; for every sad one, she buys herself a little something, so as to forget.

Once I have described Clarissa’s love for yesterday’s cast-offs, half-opened her cupboards full of collections of old shoes, dolls, marionettes, braided waistcoats rescued from oblivion, formal dress-wear, military uniforms, tawdry stage costumes, glittering old rags, tatters, a whole array of trash that not even a taste for antiques can excuse, I shall still not have clarified fully all that I want to explain.