Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

Although the afternoon had scarcely begun, the only light in Madame de Boisrosé’s bedroom, where all the shutters were closed, came from the tiny flame of a silver night light; in this half-light, Angélique, seated on her mother’s bed, her huge dark eyes ringed like Saturn (and, anyway, she always looked as though she had just come back from some unheard of, if not undreamt of, saturnalian gathering), was gazing at herself in a looking-glass.

“Be careful, Angélique, you’re going to drop it; a broken mirror brings seven years’ bad luck,’’ said Bonne.

Angélique nodded vaguely. Nothing can be more misleading than a woman’s looks: Angélique, the reasonable one, the good housekeeper, always seemed to look distraught, dishevelled and absent-minded, more like a character in a play than a woman. Yet she led the most ordinary of lives and there was nothing unusual about her apart from this amalgam of mother and husband, of free love and conjugal duty. For the Boisrosés, marriage was a necessary but transitional rite and procreation was a sort of impregnation, however contrived, prior to which the male was unnecessary, and after which he was abandoned. Scarcely had the wedding photographer snapped for all eternity Angélique’s white satin dress alongside the morning coat and gaiters of the Polytechnique graduate who had thought naively that he was entering the Boisrosé family (one doesn’t enter this family, one is born into it), than Angélique had returned to the roost and gone back to her mother’s house, a step that so many women threaten and so few carry out. Angélique spent the required regulatory time lying alongside her husband, a period that was further reduced by the telephone which, though it has no power over the body, liberates the soul, allowing the married daughter to maintain nightly contact with her family through the intermediary of obliging neighbours (the Boisrosés had no phone) who didn’t even mind being woken up occasionally, such was the Boisrosés’ gift for having things done for them by everyone. In the morning, barely had the husband selected as the lesser evil had his breakfast, than Angélique went back to her old pattern of life until it was time to go to bed again. This brief nightly absence, a sort of gaseous migration of a body, which did not undermine the family’s integrity or the abiding maternal authority, had no effect on conjugal relations. Angélique had no children.

According to the Boisrosé doctrine, as received from heaven by Bonne and revealed on some unknown mountain in Sinaï, love was the sole betrayal. Angélique had never been guilty of it. Neither would Hedwige ever sink into this quagmire. Never would she, like an unhooded falcon, set off for the open sea with some young male creature without coming back at the set time to sit at her mother’s knee. But they were less sure of Fromentine. The fact that she was eighteen, had a prying and inquisitive temperament, a certain exploratory boldness, and a pride that prompted her to advertise her dangerous beauty to other people, suggested tendencies to cut herself off from her roots and to be drawn to the outside world. She was crazy about dresses, and wealth would have pierced her with its arrows had she ever experienced it; but she knew of it only through a sort of unconscious nostalgia and through that natural inclination that impels beautiful girls in the direction of rue de la Paix and avenue Matignon. The Boisrosé family, it goes without saying, watched over her, each of them taking turns to supervise Fromentine; and it was the suitors who were the losers, as were the matchmaking ladies, to their brief shame, and the jewellers who lost income. Just in case, in the unlikely event that the danger should become real, Bonne de Boisrosé kept a secret and dependable weapon in reserve: fainting and death which, if resorted to, immediately brought about remorse from the sinner, and resurrection. She was unparalleled in her ability to use her weakness in an intimidating manner. Pupils at the Conservatoire working on excerpts from La Dame aux camélias for their exams would have benefited from taking lessons in dying from her. Let us add that she rarely needed to pull out all the stops; the threatening remark, the last paragraph of the Rule, always sufficed: “I shall die”. This graveyard blackmail, with its indulgent description of funerals to come, deciding upon the ceremony, the announcement of the death, the burial, the Mass and the liturgical hymns, not forgetting the invitation cards, the shroud, the procession… had the lugubrious ability to upset the three daughters. Far from familiarizing them with an eventuality that, when all is said and done, is completely natural and even inevitable, this far too frequently evoked prospect had transformed what for normal people is a sad and quickly repressed thought into anguished neurosis.

A ring at the doorbell, hurried footsteps, a cheerful passing remark aimed at the cleaning lady — it’s Hedwige; she enters the room, her body radiating the pure, icy air she has absorbed.

“There you are!” said Angélique lazily. “What time is it? Oh, you’ve brought the cold weather with you; have you had lunch?”

“Yes, I’ve eaten some pistachio nuts. There are a few left over, here, take them,” she says as she empties her bag on the bed. “Quick, Fromentine, relight the stove, I’m frozen. I’ve been dashing around all morning.”

“Tell us, tell us!” Fromentine (on her knees) cried. She is blowing on the embers to revive them. “Have you seen the new perfumes? Where are the samples?”

“Just a moment,” said Hedwige, who was fumbling in her pockets, in her handbag, in her blouse and finally in her brassiere, from which she extracted them. “They’re marvellous, smell how sweet they are. I’ve also brought white nail varnish. You have to put it on first before the red, it stays on better. It’s American.”

A huge sigh from Bonne interrupted this information.

“Mamicha, at least you’re not feeling ill, are you?” Hedwige called out anxiously. “I’m going to make you feel better straight away, my darling. I’ve got some good news for you. Monsieur Pierre Niox is going to sort everything out.”

“Is he going to get us the money?”

“I don’t know, but as he was leaving he said: ‘We’ll sort that out.’’’

“He’ll pay for the Mas Vieux twice to please Hedwige,” said Fromentine straight away.

“I hope, my child, that you didn’t give this stranger the impression that we are arguing over your father’s legacy with a servant. We do not come from such a grand background that we can do such things without any shame.”

“But, Mamicha, I had to talk to him about the sale. We’re not interested in it ourselves, but we need money. He certainly understood…”

“What makes you think that he understood? What did he say to you? Tell us everything.”

Hedwige opened her mouth, searched for the words and realized she had nothing to say. Fortunately for her, Fromentine cut in:

“First, tell us what he looks like. Describe him. Is he handsome?”

“He’s ugly,” Hedwige said slowly. “He’s ugly and he makes one feel dizzy.”

“Dizziness, that’s light-headedness. Did you find him attractive, Hedwige?”

“Be quiet, child,” said Bonne, immediately concerned. “Come now, Hedwige, let’s start again. Repeat to me word for word your conversation with this gentleman, Monsieur Niox.”

“He’s not exactly a gentleman,” said Hedwige (she was groping around trying to find the right description). “He’s a young man. He dresses oddly. His windows were wide open and it was very cold.”

“So he offered you a chair and you said…”

“He didn’t offer me anything; there were no chairs in the room.”