Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“I’ve never been so well waited upon,” she would say, “as I have since I’ve been employed.”

The girl answered the telephone and kept an eye on the house. Reclining on the sofa in the empty office, she leafed through illustrated magazines. To begin with, this office had disappointed her.

“But where’s your antique shop then?” she asked Pierre.

To her astonishment, he showed her his safe.

“There,” he said.

“And here was I thinking you had a very dark shop piled with collections of crocodiles up to the ceiling, with ticketed prices hanging on the end of their tails, and pretty little tea sets, and dalmatic vestments embroidered in gold, all lit by lantern fish! What a disappointment! Are you going out? Be kind, Pierre, bring me back some American cigarettes.”

He came back loaded with supplies.

“How quick you’ve been! I’m flabbergasted. You really are an electric man. It’s wonderful. Where do find the time?”

“Did anyone phone?”

“Yes. A foreign gentleman. I couldn’t catch his name.”

“Try to remember…”

“It was something like Stravinsky… Striesky… something with ‘ski’ in it.”

“It wasn’t Erckmann by any chance?”

“Yes, Erckmann, exactly.”

“He’s the keeper of the Ethnology Museum in Stockholm. I was waiting for him to call.”

“Oh? I rang off. I always ring off, for that matter, when I don’t understand.”

“And what have you done in my absence, Fromentine?”

“I’ve made a mess.”

And she laughed as she pointed to the magazines on the floor and the papers that were scattered around.

“You would make a very poor cleaning lady; a jumble shop cleaner, at best.”

After a week, Pierre re-engaged his former secretary and kept Fromentine for trips to rue Masseran to play tennis on a covered court.

He no longer talked about Hedwige. He was indifferent to Angélique. He never mentioned the Boisrosés. To think that he had almost thrown in the towel. “And now I’m turning over a new leaf,” he often said. Had he done so this time, turned a page without leaving a bookmark, without leaving a dried flower as a memory?

“I loathe things that have been papered over,” he sometimes exclaimed. Regencrantz, who had watched him rushing eagerly for a drink when he wasn’t thirsty, would have said that he had also thrown himself into this business without having the least desire to do so. He had vanished from the Boisrosés’ home just as he always did everywhere, as if through a trapdoor. In the blink of an eyelid he was no longer there; he melted into the crowd like sugar in water; walls absorbed him; he slipped away as people do in dreams; dreams are apartments without doors that one enters through walls.

Pierre had passed through many a milieu in this way without pausing there, doing whatever business he had to do quickly and never coming back. At the casino, he walked into the gaming room and shouted “ banco !” over everyone’s heads; before they had had time to look round, he had grabbed his winnings and disappeared. Disappeared for the season too, for he detested the game and only played it in order to test his luck.

“What a card you are, Quick Silver!” Fromentine said as she passed him the two racquets, which he tucked under his arm. “The things you teach me!” she added with apparent ecstasy.

Pierre was in the habit of leaving Fromentine in the street or in his car, waiting for him like a small dog. She was furthermore wonderfully passive and easily distracted, with, at the same time, a great facility for not doing or thinking of anything for hours on end, like a becalmed sailing ship. When, a moment later, Pierre returned, ready to set off at full tilt, she would follow him with the same easy manner, keeping up the same absolutely neutral appearance, never complaining, and with that marvellous temperament that frivolous, selfish people have.

Coming back from rue Masseran, Pierre stopped in boulevard de Grenelle in front of a shop which, even as a child, used to fascinate him. They had made clocks there since the eighteenth century and the wrought-iron sign hanging outside represented a belfry. Dials in the shop window informed passing travellers from the métro what the time was in every language. The time in Stamboul was in Turkish letters, the time in Calcutta in Bengali, the time in Suez in Arabic, the time in Peking in Chinese characters.

“How many minutes these dials must have ticked off over one hundred and fifty years!” Pierre exclaimed. “Think of it… what human impetus could compete against them? What diastoles and systoles will ever match their range and their mechanism?”

“You’re a philosopher in your own way,” replied Fromentine with shrewd simplicity, “the philosopher of the quarter-second.”

“I’m not a philosophic person,” replied Pierre drily. “I’m a tragic person. You don’t understand a thing.”

“Talk to me more about yourself,” sighed Fromentine as she reapplied some rouge, “it’s fascinating.”

Pierre had not been back to Saint-Germain since the visit to the Louvre. But he would have liked to talk to Fromentine about her sisters. Each time, she found an excuse for not responding to him. And when he was with her, he felt increasingly more alone than he had done beforehand. He would have liked to know how the Boisrosés reacted to Fromentine’s absence, to her returning home late at night, to the presents he gave her — in short, to that sort of artificial household atmosphere brought about by the relationship of a pretty secretary with her employer, where thoughts are dictated on notepads, where the trousseau is replaced by files, the jam cupboards by metal cabinets, kisses by licked envelopes and cradles by desk trays.

Yet this beautiful girl, at his side all day long, did not imply a presence, however. She brought him no relief in his isolation. Even Chantepie, even Placide radiated more warmth. Even the cat did. With everyone else, Pierre felt some resistance and thus some warmth (from the friction). With Fromentine, he felt none at all. She gave way to him on everything.

It was worse than ever.

Since she now brought up his post when she arrived in the morning, he did not even have a relationship with the concierge. When he was with Fromentine, Pierre sometimes thought of Angélique and Hedwige, rather as the owner of a Houdon plaster cast must think of the original; Fromentine was less of a Boisrosé and more a plaster cast of the other Boisrosé girls. He thought of her sisters in the way that one might want to reread a classic in the original, having developed a liking for it from the early pages of a translation. He remembered the little tea party at Saint-Germain, and the more he visualized the polished drawing room, the bedroom with its canopied bed and the black stove with its little red light, the lonelier he felt.

As lonely as if he were in the desert.

The less he was invited the more he felt the attraction of that little provincial place so far away, of that precipitous little town to which Fromentine returned every evening: the side plates stacked inside the larger ones, the financial and economic chatter of the dismal Vincent; the tall figure of Hedwige, reticent, but fiery deep down because of that very reticence, and passionate; their first loving words at the foot of the staircase; Angélique and her attentiveness (when she passed a plate to you, it was more like a caress).

Pierre did, after all, owe her a response. Had he not told her she need not worry, that he had an “idea”, that he would sort out their Mas Vieux business?

“As for the Mas Vieux, I told you that I had an idea. If I have not mentioned it to you again, it’s because that promise…”