Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

Although Angélique had also married, and had also gone through her crisis of growing up, her conscience was clear: in her, there was nothing to exorcize. Her sorrow was thus tinged with disapproval. As for Fromentine, she harboured a host of small demons, silly, grimacing creatures that teased her like a thousand needling irritations caused by uric acid, and they made her envy, loathe and adore Hedwige simultaneously. Secretly, she admired her for becoming self-sufficient and she was half upset and half delighted at the thought of the wave of melancholy that had so troubled the Boisrosés. Being a better person than her, Angélique felt sorry for her mother and she had settled herself on the chaise-longue at Saint-Germain in a bedridden attitude entirely in keeping with this disaster. She looked after Bonne de Boisrosé, massaging her, and carrying her from one part of her bedroom to another just as Aeneas carried his father on his shoulders, while Monsieur de Rocheflamme took his part in the family grief and jealousy as uncle, old man and antique dealer.

Only Vincent Amyot, intrigued by Pierre’s achievement and dazzled by this inexplicable marvel — a Boisrosé girl living away from the nest — allowed his delight to show; disregarding the general inhibition, he mentioned the name of the missing girl purely for the pleasure of doing what was forbidden and for the spectacle of a mother-in-law in a state of distress. He took pleasure in teasing, from which he derived flimsy revenge, informing Fromentine that Hedwige was wearing new fox furs and that she would not lend them to her; telling Angélique that Hedwige had confessed to making Creole dishes for Pierre; letting Bonne know that from the moment she was first married her daughter had not once spent a night away, that is to say she had slept with her husband, and that there was therefore no point in keeping her room and her bed untouched unless it was to do so for a beloved person who had died. The family allowed him to drone on; secretly, they had not entirely given up hope of seeing an end to the profligate daughter’s lawful vagrancy. But for the time being Hedwige was in love. Hedwige loved someone outside the permitted perimeter, and her love was remarkable for the time it had lasted; Hedwige had disappeared; the family waters had closed over Hedwige’s plunge.

The doorbell rang, but the ring was not unfamiliar; that succession of light, delicate trills that was like music, everyone knew that ring, it was her . She came in, as tall as the door, with that sumptuous air that all tall women have, even the poorest, wearing a white scarf round her neck like a flag of truce.

“Hedwige!”

She made her way over to her mother’s outstretched arms, mounted the steep folds of the eiderdown and the snowfield of drapery, and collapsed onto the beloved breast like someone returning to their homeland. Bonne de Boisrosé, at the risk of spoiling the triumph that was unfolding, took Hedwige’s head in her hands and gazed into the velvety white face pitted with golden, dutiful eyes. No blemishes? Yes, two wrinkles, the first, at the corners of her mouth. They were scarcely wrinkles; they began like small lines, but at each side of the small aperture and contracted by the muscles of the mouth, there were the beginnings of a slight furrow, a fissure that no transversal line would stop as it made its way to the crevice and the gully.

At a glance, Madame de Boisrosé had seen all she needed to see: Hedwige was unhappy, Hedwige was pregnant. Two things which often go together, that need to be explained to men so that they understand, but which a mother can decipher like an open book. Her perfect nose had become translucent and taut due to repeated bouts of sickness. Her fine features had softened and faded; skeletal bones were pushing the flesh from behind and stretching it, making her eye sockets hollow and revealing the depths of her soul in the prison of her eyes, which had acquired a distracted, distant expression, a sort of aversion to the outside world, as the eyes of those who are very ill do.

For Bonne, the hour of battle had finally struck; she was going to begin her struggle against this weak and meticulous adversary, so full of ideas that they made him seem foolish, so fearful that he found safety in flight — in a word, her struggle against the man. In snatching his booty from him, Bonne proved to be a surprising and totally immoral bandit, with a speed of execution that Pierre would have admired; but Pierre suspected nothing, had not sensed anything, and anyway, if he had been forewarned, he would not have understood.

“Angélique, your sister looks tired; go and make her bed,” ordered a radiant Bonne.

Hedwige would return to the obeisance of Saint-Germain. She could certainly go to Pierre’s house, lend him her presence, accept the written rule of conjugal life and even give birth to a child, but it would make no difference. It was now certain that no new law would stipulate attachment to the mother and that an obligation all the more powerful for not being contracted would always bind the child first and foremost to its own family. There would simply be another human being on earth and, if it was a girl, one more Boisrosé.

“I’m fine,” Hedwige repeated, without letting her mother go, “I’m absolutely fine…”

She gazed at her mother’s bedroom as though she were returning to it after a long journey, just as the traveller who has been all over the world and endured deserts, shipwrecks and revolutions is amazed to see the white porcelain owl still perched on top of its box. She recognized the strong smell of oranges studded with cloves in the Creole manner. She was returning to her native soil, to the body of her mother which, in spite of its shapelessness and caducity, had a strange grandeur about it, blameworthy and comical perhaps when seen from outside, but which had the wild beauty of those passionate landscapes where selfishness is rated so highly that it is impossible to distinguish it from love.

Half past seven. Hedwige is not back.

Pierre, who had arranged to leave work early, is astonished. Nowadays, when he returns to his home, to their home, he hates finding his house empty. When it is said of a parcel that it is “awaiting delivery”, no one realizes how painful it is for a parcel to be unclaimed.

Hedwige is not there and it is as if the pictures had been taken down and the furniture sold in her absence. Where can she be? She had set off to visit her mother at about four o’clock and she should have left Saint-Germain to return to Neuilly at about six. The road via Marly is direct: branch off at Abreuvoir, uphill, then down to Saint-Cloud, through Garches. She had done it many a time. Unless she had gone through the forest and had broken down in the woods?

“People will say that I shall always, always, always be waiting! Waiting, hoping. Driven to despair, waiting again. Being on the lookout, yet still within these four walls! How well I understand that caged animals die prematurely! It’s appalling to be on your own once you have been a couple. And on one’s own at seven in the evening without anyone for company apart from that idiot whose name is ‘me’. The lack of imagination of mirrors is astounding. When I was a child, I longed for a looking glass in which I could see movements other than my own.”

Pierre presses his nose against the window so that he can see the street better. But his nose creates several large blotches that soon prevent him from seeing a thing. In any case, there is nothing to see other than a view of Paris that looks diminished through the mist. It is pretty chilly. In modern houses, all the benefit of radiators is lost because the walls are so thin. Moping around, feeling gloomy: these words quite appropriately link feeling cold with waiting. Expectancy is a blockage in which all our plans find themselves frozen.