Emmanuel Bove - Henri Duchemin and His Shadows

“I see you didn’t go to bed. You should have gone to lie down. Really! You shouldn’t worry so much just because I was held up. You know that if something serious had happened, I would not have left you like this. Naturally I would have telephoned. And since I didn’t, everything was fine.”

Claire was talking volubly. Robert Marjanne did not take his eyes off her. He was filled with immense joy at seeing his wife again, so similar to the way she was every other morning, and at the same time he was overcome with anger. But he controlled his emotions. He was aware that if he reproached her, she would immediately withdraw into silence and what he wanted to know more than anything was what she had done during this interminable night. Still, he couldn’t help asking:

“So what were you doing then?”

Still smiling, she answered:

“I’ll tell you, but wait a bit. I need to get back to my routine. It’s no joy, you know, to have to spend the night at friends’. I don’t know if it ever happened to you, but as hard as they try, it’s still uncomfortable. You just don’t feel at home. But has Irene prepared breakfast? I slept so badly and I’m starved. Come into the dining room. I’ll tell you all about it. You’ll see how odd it is, and sad at the same time.”

Claire had never spoken with such candor before and so Robert Marjanne’s suspicions only grew stronger. It seemed strange that his wife who ordinarily worried so little about what he would think of her was trying so hard to seem sincere.

“Just tell me in a few words what you did last night. Afterwards, we won’t mention it again. It will be over, buried...”

“It’s impossible in a few words. I have to tell you everything. How do you expect me to explain everything that happened in a few words?”

“Well, simply tell me where you slept. That’s all I want to know.”

“Give me time. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. You’ll know everything.”

“What’s the harm in telling me right away? It can’t be that complicated. Just tell me where you slept. I don’t need to know the rest.”

“You should hear yourself! As if I had done who-knows-what!”

“All I’m asking is for you to tell me where you spent the night.”

“I’ll tell you everything or nothing,” Claire said drily.

Robert Marjanne then got the feeling that the story his wife was about to tell had been invented out of whole cloth and that, just like when she had told it to herself, she needed not to break off, not to be interrupted.

“Well then, tell me everything.”

“Now I’ll tell you everything because you are being reasonable. I have nothing to hide. Obviously if I had wanted to do something that was not right I would go about it differently. I’m not a child. Isn’t that so, Robert, that I’d go about it differently?”

She smiled again and continued:

“I told you yesterday, I think, when I left you, that I was going to spend the afternoon at Madeleine’s. So I went to her place, as you know. She was alone. Another girl came a little later, Maud. Have I already mentioned her to you?”

It seemed to Robert Marjanne that his wife was stretching out the true parts so that the lie would blend into the stream of words that preceded it.

“No, you never mentioned her to me. Who is she?”

“Let me finish first. I’ll explain later who she is.”

Claire said these words more gently. The fact that her husband showed interest in a minor point of her story seemed to reassure her. No doubt for this reason she brought the conversation back to Maud.

“All right, I’ll tell you right away. Then you’ll understand better what happened next. Maud is the daughter of an Englishman who has lived in Paris for, I think, twenty years. He’s a real character. He adores France.”

Robert Marjanne surmised that his wife really knew this Englishman and his daughter and that it was because their eccentricity had struck her that she had put them into her story: their exceptional nature would make it easier to accept the exceptional nature of the story she was preparing to tell.

“But why didn’t you come home?”

“Wait, I said. Let me explain everything or I won’t say anything.”

He was suffering so much at the thought that she had spent the night with a man that all he wanted was to be convinced of the contrary. He coaxed her to go on.

“Of course I’ll go on. So the three of us chatted. You know what it’s like when girls get together. We have no idea of the time. We talk about clothes and all kinds of things, and the time flies by. All of a sudden I realized that it was six o’clock.”

Just then Robert Marjanne had such a clear sense that Claire was going to lie that he thought she could feel it. And in fact, she seemed not to dare to go any further into her tale.

“I realize that it’s six o’clock,” she repeated. “My friends are surprised. I leave them at last and then, remembering I had something to buy, I catch a cab to the Printemps department store.”

“It must have been closed!”

“How annoying you are! Will you let me finish already? Don’t you know that the department stores close at six-thirty?”

“What was it that you wanted to buy so urgently?”

“What I wanted to buy? You want to know?”

Claire went to her room and returned a moment later with a small package that she opened in front of her husband. It contained a pair of gloves.

“You see. Nothing to worry about.”

Then, showing him the paper in which the gloves had been wrapped and on which was printed in a modern font “Le Printemps,” she added:

“Here’s the proof.”

“None of that tells me where you spent the night. You had to sleep somewhere, after all!”

“If you interrupt me one more time, I’m warning you I won’t tell you another thing. You think it’s amusing to recount everything in such detail? Listen to me now. So I leave Le Printemps. It was exactly six-thirty and I say to myself, ‘Robert must be waiting for me, I’ve got to hurry.’ But instead of taking a cab in front of the store—you know how crowded it is there, I would have waited for an hour—I go on foot to boulevard Malesherbes. And right then, when I am on the corner of rue du Havre, I run into—you’ll never guess who. Who do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, guess.”

“Maud!”

“No, no. I told you a moment ago that I had left her at Madeleine’s.”

In Monsieur Marjanne’s mind Claire was only trying to give the illusion of truth. To be less alone with her lie, she wanted to make her husband participate in it. But he was determined not to let himself be dragged into it and simply answered: “I don’t know” and “What can I say?”

“Well! I’m going to tell you. I ran into Olga and her mother.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? You have no memory! In Nice, at the Hotel Beauséjour.”

“Of course I remember, but you are not going to make me believe that you ran into them just like that, out of the blue.”

Right after their wedding, Claire and Robert Marjanne had gone on a long trip to Italy. When they came back to France, they had stopped in Nice for two weeks. Mme. Kalinina and her daughter Olga were staying in the same hotel as the Marjannes. They had become acquainted easily, even more so because at first Mme. Kalinina had thought that Monsieur Marjanne was Claire’s father. Claire had sensed, to the point of teasing him about it, how flattered her husband had been—coming as he did from a family where everything was always a question of self-interest and from which he had dreamed of escaping all his life—to make the acquaintance of Mme. Kalinina, who had been admitted to the court of the Czar, who belonged to one of the greatest families in Russia and who now, driven out of her country, had taken refuge in Nice.