Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“I won’t give up anything,” exclaimed Pierre, his brush in one hand, his comb in the other. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m absolutely determined to have Hedwige to myself alone. And what’s more, it’s already happening: she dresses in her own clothes and none of her sisters wear her shoes any longer.”

“One question,” asked Amyot. “Has Hedwige kept her bed at Saint-Germain?”

“Er… I think she did, just in case of a breakdown… or fog… it would be better than sleeping in a hotel.”

“My poor fellow!” said Amyot, squeezing his brother-in-law’s hand affectionately.

“I’m not disturbing you?” said Hedwige as she opened the door.

“You’re only disturbing yourself, my beloved darling, for I was with you.”

“With me?”

“Yes, I was thinking of you. I was thinking that you are relaxation.”

“That’s not very flattering.”

“Yes, when I say it, it’s high praise.”

In fact Pierre, whose long strides make the house tremble during his soliloquies, is standing still, relaxing and pressing his lips to his wife’s wrist in the way one drinks spa water from the place where the water is warmest.

“You’re here,” he said, filled with joy, “it’s good.”

He takes her in his arms.

“When I come close to you, not only do I feel your body, but I am in touch with all bodies. Before knowing you, I lived in isolation as though on a glass shelf in an electric machine. But now the current passes through me.”

Hedwige snuggled up to him for fear of being looked at from a distance and so that he wouldn’t notice her disappearing waist when standing in front of her, or her convex belly from the side. But by clasping her to him, he can imagine what his gaze might not have noticed, closes his eyes and says:

“It’s beginning to show, and seriously so.”

“Too bad,” Hedwige replies, torn between the pleasure of appearing beautiful and pride at being a mother.

“So much the better.”

Hedwige closes her eyes, happy to feel her two children pressed one against the other, because Pierre, who used to seem so strong, so Zeus-like, so striking in the early days, has, through their living together, become her child. “He’s a funny boy,” she says tenderly, almost with compassion, feeling indulgent and full of pity, like most women, for the incomprehensible side of their male partner, for their mysterious obsessions — for they all have one — be it gardening, civic duty, curing illnesses, war or any other mission they believe they have been given; just like those elderly retired colonels who, in order to give themselves the illusion of being busy, indulge in having imaginary mobilization orders sent to themselves. Every male thus creates a curious structure for himself in which he pays homage to a god, a demi-god, a folly. Any altar, however peculiar it may be, can be used to inspire a new zest in someone and give them a reason for living. Hedwige was not trying to delve into Pierre’s motives; he was a man: that was explanation enough. Her husband’s frantic pace, this invariable way he had of changing his mind, this need to take not just an overall view of things, but to see the same thing from every angle by skipping from one point of the compass to another, like our present-day landscape artists who follow the sun with their canvases in their motor cars, with that enthusiasm for seeing everything and considering nothing, for doing everything and not completing anything, for running from an occasion to an event and from a situation to an occurrence — all this was tiring, certainly, and pointless, but it was the other side of the coin to a husband who was kind on the whole, gentle, delightful at times, but devoid of any self-control.

“Poor Pierre!” Hedwige would murmur simply whenever her sisters discussed him; Pierre’s name made everyone itch to speak and they even preferred to say good things rather than not talk about him. Mamicha, raising her white fringe and her august chin, added some perfidious proverb from the West Indies, a land scarcely filled with serpents, and called her daughters to come closer.

“You’re too far away, I can’t hear half of what you’re saying.”

“Here we are; we’re climbing onto the bed.”

And gathered together under the eiderdown, resembling on a large scale those families of dogs, cats or mice in cartoon drawings, they embarked delightedly on the agenda for the day: Uncle Rocheflamme’s affair with a second-hand goods dealer of his own age (“For an old lady friend, ring out the bells,” Mamicha said with a smile), the choice of carpet for the drawing room, Fromentine’s new hairstyle… Hedwige was totally happy. Had she been more honest or more experienced in self-analysis, she would have realized that saying “Poor Pierre” expressed her regret at not really being able to love him. For her, amusement and variety were to be found in Neuilly, but happiness had never stopped residing at Saint-Germain.

People’s separations or their lack of feeling for one another are no doubt the work of superior powers who have arbitrarily forced us into avoidable encounters, then snatched us away and cast us aside. The same oppressive and blind force which, in Bonne de Boisrosé’s games of patience, prevented the kings from emerging by covering them with sevens and ruining her future prospects, also intervened to separate Hedwige from Pierre and brought her back irresistibly into her mother’s little game. There are unions that the fairies, either out of laziness or through a subtle form of cruelty, allow to be fruitful yet are not blessed by them.

In any case, the fairies were not the only ones to blame; they had, exceptionally, given Pierre a brief reprieve in the course of his destiny, an hour during which, by initiating Hedwige into the pleasures of the flesh, he might have made himself master; he had allowed this moment to pass. Hedwige, disappointed by Pierre, whose clumsiness in matters of love increased day by day the more he became aware of it, was filled with all the inhibitions that Bonne, through long and patient methods of suggestion, had impressed upon her daughters as a precaution against men: man was a social necessity, a fastidious and repulsive physical burden. The beautiful, adorable Hedwige was ruined for love.

The baby brought her even closer to her mother than to her husband. Secretly, on her child’s behalf, she feared this fiery and untidy father, whereas at Saint-Germain it would be pampered and cosseted: “He’s a Boisrosé, he’s got his grandfather’s eyes.” “No, she’s a Rocheflamme one hundred per cent.” The shoot born of Hedwige would prosper well in the warm and humid Boisrosé climate, shielded from those drying desert winds that Pierre left in his wake. In that sweet atmosphere of animal-like tenderness, in that pastoral home life, in that manger where gods could be raised, Hedwige was already imagining her mother and her sisters passing round a magnificent little baby.

In the large room with its blinds lowered so as to protect the young woman’s weary eyes, a ray of sunshine filters in, caresses Hedwige’s neck, a powerful and flexible column that disappears into the darkness of the feathery black hair with golden tints, and proceeds to split in two the body of Pierre who, with much waving of arms, is trying to explain what his son will be like. On this subject, he is as loquacious as his wife is laconic. The still invisible child is constantly present between them; an expression of that subconscious and frenzied imperialism of the self that constantly drives us to extend our fleshly frontiers, it stimulates Pierre and excites his avid impatience.

“Will he ever be born,” he wonders, “this lazy creature, this troglodyte? For the time being, he is withdrawing like a hermit, ‘feeling his life (and not his death) imminent’, he confines himself to his pool, like a fish, but without the nimble flick of the tail and the rapid fins that fish have. It’s inconceivable that someone born of me should be so slow! What a silly invention pregnancy is! Nature goes on its way like a doddery, elderly childminder and the doctors are unable to invent anything to speed up the event… Five months still!”