Sappho E-Book

Alphonse Daudet

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Fanny Legrand is one of the great female characters in literature. Nothing could be more shocking to Jean Gaussin, a serious young student from the provinces, than the moral swamp his mistress has been living in before they met. Sculptor's model, poet's muse, Fanny Legrand has seen and done it all in the twenty years since her first lover, Caoudal, cast in bronze the girl from the Paris gutter and named her Sappho. But revulsion is no match for lust; and little by little, despite continual outbreaks of rage and jealousy, Jean is able to live with Fanny's disgraceful past, to find a certain pleasure in the degraded domesticity of their life together and even to feel a degree of pride in his new connections with famous men. The arrival on the scene of a marriageable young girl seems to offer Jean the escape route he needs...

Leseprobe

The Author

Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) novelist, playwright and journalist is mainly remembered for his depiction of Provence in Lettres De Mon Moulin and his novel of amour fou: Sappho.

He suffered from syphilis for the last twelve years of his life, recorded in La Doulou which has been translated into English by Julian Barnes as The Land of Pain.

The Translator

Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the book pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph. As a translator, he has developed versions of French plays, both classic and contemporary, for the NT and the Gate Theatre, with performances both here and in the USA. Publications include The Figaro Plays (Beaumarchais) and A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau). His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.

CONTENTS

Title

The Author

The Author

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

COPYRIGHT

I

‘Now then, look at me properly… you’ve got nice eyes, I like the colour… what are you called?’

‘Jean.’

‘Just Jean?’

‘Jean Gaussin.’

‘And from the South, it’s in your voice… age…?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Artist?’

‘No, madame.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

These scraps of conversation, barely intelligible amid the music, shouts and laughter of a fancy-dress party, were exchanged, one night in June, between a bagpiper from the Italian mountains and an Egyptian peasant woman, in the glazed plant house – palms, tree ferns – that formed one end of the studio of Déchelette.

The pointed questions of the Egyptian were answered by the bagpiper with the simple directness of his tender years, and with all the relief of a Southerner who has remained silent for too long. A stranger in this crowd of painters and sculptors, he had been brought here by a friend but lost contact with him the instant they crossed the threshold. For two hours, fretful and ill at ease, he had edged round the room, never suspecting how his golden sun-tanned face, his short fair hair, in curls as tight as the sheepskin of his costume, had been winning looks and whispers on all sides.

Dancers’ shoulders jostled him roughly, artistic types made jokes about his bagpipes, carried all askew, and his mountaineer’s get-up, heavy and cumbersome on this summer’s night. A Japanese woman with street-wise eyes, her hair piled up and pinned in place with steel blades, irritated him by humming: ‘Oh, the pretty postboy, ain’t he sweet?’ And a Spanish bride in white silk lace, passing by on the arm of an Apache chief, violently thrust under his nostrils her bouquet of white jasmine.

He could make nothing of these advances. He believed himself the object of extreme ridicule and took refuge in the cool shadows of the conservatory, where a large divan ran along one wall beneath the greenery. Suddenly this woman had come and sat down next to him.

Young? Beautiful? He couldn’t have said. From the long sheath of blue wool encasing a full, supple figure, emerged two finely rounded and sculpted arms, bare to the shoulder; and the small hands glinting with rings, the wide-open grey eyes, seeming all the larger for the strange metal ornaments at her brow, made a most harmonious composition.

An actress, probably. Lots of actresses went to Déchelette’s. The thought made him still more uneasy; persons of that sort frightened him greatly. She had seated herself very close to him to speak, balancing her elbow on one knee and resting her head on her hand, her voice gentle, serious, a little weary. ‘You’re from the South, really…? With a blond head like that…! Isn’t that extraordinary!’

And she wanted to know how long he had been living in Paris, if it was difficult, this exam he was working towards for the consular service, if he knew many people and how he came to be at Déchelette’s fancy-dress ball in rue de Rome, so far from his Latin Quarter.

When he mentioned the name of the student who had brought him – La Gournerie… related to the writer… she knew of him no doubt – the expression on this woman’s face changed, suddenly darkened; but he took no notice, being at an age when the eyes shine bright and see nothing. La Gournerie had promised his cousin would be here, that he’d introduce him. ‘I really love his poems… it would be marvellous to meet him…’

She met his guilelessness with a smile of pity, a graceful straightening of the shoulders; parting, at the same time, the frail leaves of a bamboo to look into the room and see if she could pick out his great man.

The party was just then at its most dazzling, a swirling fairy-tale of enchantment. The studio, or dance hall, for it hardly ever served as a workroom, spanned the full height of the building in one vast space. Over a décor of lacy hangings, pale and summery, of blinds in gauze or finely-woven straw, of lacquered screens, of stained glass panels, and over the yellow rose bush standing in a tall renaissance fireplace, there played the varied and bizarre lights of Chinese, Persian, Moorish and Japanese lanterns, some of iron with openwork arches like a mosque doorway, others of coloured paper in the shapes of fruits, of flowers spread like fans, or cut in the outline of birds or of serpents. And then sudden beams of electric light would launch darting blue shafts over the throng, turning a thousand lanterns pale and frosting with moonlight all the faces and the bare shoulders. They cast their icy brilliance over the whole phantasmagoria of materials, feathers, sequins, ribbons crammed together in the dancing mass and spilling up the staircase with its broad balustrade that led to the upper gallery; they picked out in silhouette above the throng the necks of the double basses and the fevered baton of the conductor.

From his place the young man could see all this, watching through a screen of green branches and flowering lianas that became part of the décor, framed it and, by optical illusion, cast garlands over the whirling dancers, a swag of wisteria setting off the silvered train of a princess, dragon-tree foliage wreathing the little face of a Pompadour shepherdess. And his pleasure in the fascinating spectacle was doubled when his Egyptian woman told him the names of the people, all famous, all glorious, hidden under such amusing, fantastical disguises.

That kennel boy, his short whip slung on his back, was Jadin; whilst a little further off that country priest in his threadbare soutane was old Isabey, taller than usual thanks to the deck of cards stuffed into each shoe; Grandpa Corot was smiling beneath the huge peak of an army veteran’s cap. And she pointed out for him Thomas Couture as a bulldog, Jundt as an officer of the law, Cham as an exotic bird.

And here and there, some serious historical costumes, worn by noticeably younger painters – a plumed Murat, a Prince Eugène, a Charles the First – showed the clear distinction between the artists of two generations: the newcomers, hardheaded, cold, with expressions like stockbrokers prematurely lined by preoccupation with money, the others much more boyish, laughing, noisy, unfettered.

Notwithstanding his fifty-five years and his academic laurels, the sculptor Caoudal, dressed as a comic hussar, his bare arms revealing Herculean biceps, a painter’s palette swinging against his long legs in place of a sabretache, was executing a solo quadrille like a refugee from the old Montparnasse dance-halls while opposite him the composer de Potter, as a muezzin on his night off, turban slipping sideways, was attempting a belly dance and shrieking ‘la Allah, il Allah!’ in a series of piercing screeches.

Round the joyful performers stood a large circle of resting dancers, and in their first rank, Déchelette, master of the house, screwed up his little eyes under a tall Persian headpiece, wrinkled his Kalmuck nose, frowned in his greying beard, pleased at his guests’ pleasure, enjoying himself enormously and allowing no trace of it to show.

Déchelette, an engineer, a figure in Parisian artistic circles from some ten or a dozen years before, a good man, very rich, a supporter of the arts, was known for the free and easy ways, the scorn for others’ opinions which result from a life spent in long voyages overseas and in confirmed bachelorhood. At this time he was building a railway from Tauris to Teheran, and every year, to recover from ten months of fatigues, of nights under canvas, of fevered gallops over dunes and marshes, he came to escape the great heats in this house on the rue de Rome. It was a house built to his own design, furnished as a summer palace, where he brought together fine minds and pretty girls, calling on the civilised world to give him, for a few short weeks, the essence of all it offered that was elevating and savoury.

‘Déchelette’s back!’ was the news that ran from studio to studio as soon as anyone had seen, like a theatre curtain, the great canvas blind being raised behind the windowed façade of the house. It meant that the festivities were about to begin, and there would be two whole months of them, music parties and feasts, dances and revels, cutting through the silent torpor that gripped the European quarter at this season of holiday departures and bathing expeditions.

Personally, Déchelette took no part in the bacchanalia that filled his house day and night. The tireless seeker of sensations approached his pleasures with the cold passion, the distracted eye, the smile of a man on hashish; but the reality was he took it all in with unruffled calm and clarity. As a friend, he was loyal and generous. Women, whom he held in a sort of oriental contempt, he treated indulgently and politely. Of those who visited his house, attracted by his enormous fortune and the joyful atmosphere, none could claim to have been his mistress for more than a day.

‘A good man all the same,’ added the Egyptian fellah who was telling Gaussin all this. She suddenly interrupted herself: ‘There’s your poet.’

‘Where?’

‘Right in front of you… the rustic bridegroom.’

The young man could not prevent an ‘Oh!’ of disappointment. His poet! That fat, shining, sweaty man, clumsy in his dance steps, ridiculous in his peasant’s pointy false collar and flowered waistcoat. The great despairing cries of The Book of Love came to his mind, the book he could never read without a little shiver of fever. And without thinking he murmured aloud:

‘To bring your body’s marble pride to life,

Sappho, I emptied my own veins of blood…’

She turned abruptly, rattling the metal ornaments.

‘What did you just say?’

They were lines of la Gournerie. He was surprised she didn’t know them.

‘I don’t like poetry,’ she said shortly. And she stood, looking out at the ball, frowning, crumbling in her fingers the heads of lilac that hung beside her. Then, deciding with an effort, and at some cost, she said: ‘Goodnight…’ and disappeared.

The poor bagpiper was left in confusion. ‘What’s the matter with her…? What did I say?’ He cast his mind back, found nothing. The best thing he could do, he decided, was go home to bed. He glumly gathered up his instrument and plunged back into the party, troubled less by the departure of the Egyptian woman than by having to make his way through all that throng to reach the front door.

The sense of his own obscurity among so many illustrious names made him more timid than ever. Most people had stopped dancing, apart from a few couples determinedly treading the last measures of a fading waltz, among them the splendid giant Caoudal, head erect, whisking a little tricoteuse with dishevelled hair through such vigorous turns that his tawny arms lifted her from the floor.

The tall windows at the end of the room had been thrown open, and gusts of pale morning air were rustling the palm fronds and flattening the candle flames, as if to blow them out. A paper lantern caught fire, some candle-holders cracked, and meanwhile all around the room servants were setting out little round tables, like those on café terraces. At Déchelette’s they always had supper this way, in fours and fives, and it was the point in proceedings when the like-minded sought each other out and formed groups.

People called out, there were ringing shouts, suburban helloos answering the ululating cries of oriental damsels, private conversations in hushed voices and the voluptuous laughter of women being led away in an embrace.

Gaussin was taking advantage of the commotion by sliding towards the exit when his way was barred by his student friend, dripping sweat, eyes bulging, a bottle clutched under each arm. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I’ve got a table, I’ve found some women, that Bachellery girl from the Opera Bouffe. She’s come as a geisha, how about that? She sent me to find you. Come on, quick…’ And he ran off.

The bagpiper felt thirsty. The intoxication in the air was tempting, as was the pouting face of the little actress who was making signs at him in the distance. But a serious and gentle voice murmured in his ear: ‘Don’t go with them.’

The woman from before was there, standing right beside him, tugging at him to go outside, and he followed her without hesitation. How did that happen? It couldn’t have been the woman’s attractiveness; he had hardly looked at her, and the other one over there, calling him, adjusting the steel skewers in her hair, appealed to him much more. But he obeyed a will that was stronger than his own, and the impulsive power of a sudden desire.

Don’t go with them…!

And suddenly they were both out on the pavement of the rue de Rome. Cabs were waiting in the morning pallor. Road-sweepers, labourers on their way to work stared towards this house from where the party could still be heard, from which it overflowed, spilling out this couple in fancy dress, a Mardi Gras in midsummer.

‘Yours or mine?’ she asked. Without knowing quite why, he thought it would be better at his, gave his distant address to the cabman. During the journey, a long one, they exchanged few words. But she held one of his hands between her own and he could feel how small they were, and cold; and without that chilliness, that nervous holding-on, he might have thought her asleep, lying back in the cab, the blind throwing a shadowy blue light across her face.

They stopped in rue Jacob, outside a student lodging. Four storeys up, a long hard climb. ‘Do you want me to carry you?’ he said, laughing, but keeping his voice down because of the sleeping building. She looked at him steadily, a look that mixed contempt with tenderness, born of experience, weighing him up and plainly saying: ‘Poor boy…’

Upon which he, with fine bravado, born of his youth and the South, hefted her into his arms, bore her off like a child, for he was solid and robust for all his maiden’s fair skin, and he took the first staircase in a single breath, enjoying the weight which two cool and beautiful bare arms attached round his neck.

The second flight was longer, and free from enjoyment. The woman relaxed and held him more loosely, so that, by degrees, she began to feel heavier. The edges of her metalled headdress, which seemed at first mere tickling caresses, pressed gradually further, and painfully, into his flesh.

By the third, he was panting like a piano-shifter. He fought for breath, whilst she murmured, eyes half closed: ‘You sweet boy, this is good… oh, it’s lovely…’ And the final set, which he scaled one by one, seemed to belong to a giant staircase whose walls, handrail and narrow windows twisted upward in an interminable spiral. It was no longer a woman he was carrying, it was something heavy, horrible, strangling him, and which at every moment he was tempted to let go, to throw down angrily, at the risk of brutal damage.

Once they were on the narrow landing, she opened her eyes and said: ‘Here already…’ ‘At last!’ was his thought, though he couldn’t have spoken it, white as a ghost, his two hands clapped to his exploding chest.

And their entire history was in that ascent of the staircase in the grey sadness of morning.

II

He kept her for two days. Then she left, and there remained only an impression of soft skin and fine linen. He had learned nothing about her except her name, her address and the information: ‘When you want me, call me… I’ll always be ready.’

Her card, an elegant, perfumed little rectangle, said:

FANNY LEGRAND

6, rue, de l’Arcade

He stuck it in the frame of his mirror, between an invitation to the latest Foreign Office function and the whimsically illustrated programme for Déchelette’s party, his only two social occasions of the year. And his memory of the woman, which lingered for a few days as a delicate fragrance over his mantelpiece, evaporated along with it. Not for a moment did Gaussin, serious-minded and conscientious, distrustful above all of Paris’ alluring distractions, entertain the notion of repeating his night of indulgence.

The ministry exam was set for November. He had only three months left to prepare for it. After that would follow a probationary period of three or four years in the offices of the consular service. Then he would set off for some foreign field, far away. The idea of exile did not worry him: it was the tradition of the Gaussins of Armandy, an old Avignon family, that the eldest son should follow this career, guided by the example, the encouragement and the moral protection of those who had preceded him in the same path. For this provincial, Paris was merely the first port of call on a very long voyage; and he could not consider forming any deep attachment, either in love or in friendship.

A week or two after Déchelette’s fancy-dress ball, one evening when Gaussin, lamp lit, books spread on his table, was settling down to work, a timid knock came at the door. Opening it, he found a woman, smartly dressed in a light summer costume. He failed to recognise who it was until she raised her short veil.

‘You see, it’s me… I’ve come back.’

She caught him casting an anxious, embarrassed glance at his work. ‘Oh, I won’t disturb you. I know you have important things to do.’ She unpinned her hat, picked up a copy of Le Tour du Monde and settled down in a chair, not moving, apparently absorbed in the magazine. But each time he looked up he met her eyes.

And in truth, it was only by dint of great self-control that he didn’t immediately clasp her in his arms. She was so tempting and alluring, with her small head and narrow brow, snub little nose, full and sensuous lips, and all the ripeness of her figure in that impeccably correct Parisian dress, so much less alarming to him than her Egyptian fellah’s flimsy get-up.

She left early the next morning. She returned several times that week, always entering with the same pale face, the same cool, damp hands, the same emphatic way of speaking.

‘Oh, I know I bore you!’ she would say. ‘I know you find me tiring. I should have more pride. Don’t think… every morning when I leave I vow I won’t come back. Then in the evening, it comes over me again, it’s like a madness.’

He would look at her, his normal indifference to women ruffled, amused by such tenacity in a lover. The women he had known until then, girls met in bars or at the skating rink, some of them young and pretty, always left him feeling mild disgust. They had stupid laughs, they had hands like kitchen maids’, their instincts were coarse and their conversation crude: he felt obliged to open the window when they had gone. He believed, naively, that girls of this sort were all alike. He was therefore surprised to find in Fanny a genuinely feminine sweetness and reserve, with the additional advantage – over the respectably middle-class provincial ladies that he met at his mother’s – of a smattering of art, a familiarity with topics of every kind, which lent their discussions interest and variety.

On top of that, she was a musician, and would play and sing at the piano, her contralto voice a little frail and uneven, but accomplished: some romance by Chopin or Schumann, or folk songs from the Berry or Burgundy or Picardy, she had a whole repertoire of them.

Gaussin adored music, an art that spoke to the Southerners’ fondness for the leisured outdoor life. He listened with delight when labouring over his papers and sank into its delicious embrace when at rest. And what thrilled him more than anything was to discover all this in Fanny. He was amazed she wasn’t on the stage, and learnt in this way that she had indeed sung at the Lyric. ‘But not for long. I got bored.’

She had none of the conventional affectations of the theatre, not a shadow of vanity or untruth. Only a certain air of mystery, concerning her life beyond his door: a mystery that remained unbroken even in their lovemaking, and which the lover made no attempt to investigate, feeling neither jealousy nor curiosity. He left her to turn up at the agreed hour without fretting or watching the clock, ignorant of what it means to wait, to feel in one’s chest the pounding that signals desire and impatience.

From time to time, as the summer was very fine that year, they went out for the day, to explore one of the many pretty spots outside Paris that she seemed to know so well. They joined the crowds of day-trippers at suburban railway stations, lunched at some hostelry on the edge of a forest or on the riverbank, keeping clear only of a few locations that were overrun. One day when he suggested going to Vaux-de-Cernay, she replied: ‘No, no… not there. Too many painters.’

And this antipathy to artists, he recalled, had shown itself once before, on the night their love affair began. When he asked her why: ‘They’re all mad,’ she said. ‘They’re complicated people who always say far more than needs to be said. They’ve hurt me a great deal…’

He protested: ‘But art is beautiful. What else can make life so much grander and richer?’

‘Listen, my sweet, what’s beautiful is to be simple and straightforward like you, to be twenty and to love each other.’

Twenty! And you would not have said she was any older, to see her so full of life, always enthusiastic, laughing at everything, finding it all good.

One evening at Saint-Clair, in the Chevreuse valley, they arrived the day before the local fair and couldn’t find a room. It was late and the nearest village lay three miles through the woods, in the dark. They were eventually offered a spare camp bed at the end of a barn being used as quarters for a team of stone masons.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, laughing. ‘It’ll remind me of the bad old days.’

So she had known hard times.

They groped their way between the occupied beds in the big whitewashed room, where a nightlight smoked in a niche set into a side wall. And all night, squeezed tightly against one another, they stifled their kisses and their giggles as they listened to the snores and exhausted groans of their companions, whose coarse shirts and heavy work shoes lay inches from the silk dress and dainty boots of the Parisian lady.

At daybreak a small panel opened in the great barn door, a shaft of pale light fingered the webbing of the beds, the beaten earth, and a hoarse voice shouted: ‘All right, you people!’ The barn, returned to dimness, began to stir, painfully and slowly, with yawns, stretchings, hacking coughs, the doleful human sounds of a dormitory coming to life. Heavily, silently, the Limousin workmen made their way outside, one by one, never suspecting they had been sleeping in close proximity to a beautiful woman.

She rose in their wake, fumbled for her dress, gave her hair a quick twist. ‘Stay there… I’ll be back.’ In two minutes she was at his side again clutching an armful of meadow flowers dripping with dew. ‘Now let’s sleep,’ she said, scattering over the bed the fragrant freshness of the morning and rejuvenating the musty air around them. And never had she seemed prettier to him than coming into the barn like that, laughing in the first light, her light hair falling loose, arms overflowing with that mad bouquet.

On another occasion they were eating at Ville-d’Avray, beside the water. The mist of an autumn morning blanketed its flat surface and softened the rusty red of the woods opposite. All alone in the restaurant’s small garden, they were eating a plateful of small fish and exchanging kisses. Suddenly, from a rustic hide built in the branches of the plane tree that shaded their table, a loud and sardonic voice called: ‘I say, you two, when you’ve finished smooching…’ And the leonine face and ginger moustache of Caoudal the sculptor appeared in the log-framed opening of his cabin.

‘What I need is a spot of lunch down there with you. I’m stuck up here in my tree like an owl.’

Fanny did not answer, clearly put out by this meeting. Gaussin, however, was quick to accept, curious about the celebrated artist, flattered to have him at their table.

Caoudal, very dashing in a casual outfit that was calculated to the last detail, from the white crepe de Chine cravat setting off a complexion scored with furrows and blotches to the tight jacket setting off his still athletic waist and prominent muscles, Caoudal struck him as older than he had been at Déchelette’s party.

But what surprised and even embarrassed him a little was the intimate tone the sculptor adopted with his mistress. He called her Fanny, spoke to her as a familiar.

‘You see, the thing is,’ he told her, arranging a place for himself on their tablecloth, ‘I’ve been widowed this last fortnight. Maria has run off with Morateur. I was quite calm about it to begin with. But this morning when I went into the studio I felt completely useless. Impossible to work. So I abandoned my group and came to lunch out in the country. Hopeless idea, when you’re all on your own. Any more of it and I’d have been blubbing into my rabbit stew…’

Then looking across at the Southerner, whose downy beard and curly hair glinted as golden as the sauternes in their glasses:

‘Ah, the beauty of youth! No danger of letting that one get away. And better still, it’s catching. She looks even younger than he does.’

‘Liar!’ she said, laughing. And her laughter contained the ageless song of seduction, the youthfulness of a woman who loves and desires to be loved in return.

‘Amazing… amazing…’ Caoudal murmured, busily eating even as he examined her, a flicker of sadness and envy twisting the corner of his mouth. ‘I say, Fanny, do you remember lunching here once… it was years ago, worse luck! The whole gang was here, Ezano, Dejoie… you fell in the water. We had to kit you out like a man, using the fishing warden’s tunic. It suited you terribly well…’

‘Don’t remember it,’ she said coldly, and truthfully. For these changeable, happy-go-lucky women live only in the immediacy of their loves. No memory of what went before, no fear of what might come.

Caoudal, quite the opposite, anchored in the past, drank deep of his memories – of the Sauternes as well – reliving his vigorous youthful exploits: his amorous jousts, his drinking bouts, parties in the countryside, dances at the Opera, troubles in the studio, battles and conquests. But on turning towards them, the light glowing in his eyes from the fires he had rekindled, he realised they were barely listening, absorbed in the task of plucking grapes from each other’s lips.

‘My stories leave you cold, do they? Yes, yes, I see I’m boring you. Oh, God, it’s stupid being old…’ He stood up, threw down his napkin. ‘Bill for lunch, Père Langlois!’ he called towards the restaurant.

He made off sadly, dragging his feet, as if afflicted with some incurable disease. For a long time the lovers followed his tall figure, stooping as it passed beneath the golden-tinted leaves.

‘Poor Caoudal! It’s true he’s shrivelling away…’ Fanny murmured sympathetically. Gaussin, for his part, was affronted that this Maria, a girl no better than she ought to be, a model, could put her pleasure before his suffering and abandon the great artist, for what…? Morateur, a talentless little painter with nothing in his favour but his youth. Which prompted peals of laughter from Fanny. ‘Oh, you innocent, you poor innocent!’ And pulling his head onto her lap, she nuzzled his face, his eyes, his hair, sniffing him and breathing him in like a bunch of flowers.

It was at the end of this day that, for the first time, Jean slept at his mistress’. She had been nagging him about it for three months. ‘But why not? Why don’t you want to?’

‘I don’t know… it doesn’t feel right.’

‘But I keep telling you, I’m free to do as I please. I’m my own woman.’

And, his resistance lowered by the fatigue of their day in the country, she led him back to rue de l’Arcade, near the station. On the first-floor landing of a respectable and prosperous-looking house, the door was opened to them by an elderly, sour-faced serving woman wearing a country bonnet.

‘This is Machaume. Hello, Machaume,’ Fanny said, embracing her. ‘And look, here he is, my beloved, my king. I’ve brought him. Quick, light all the lamps, make the house pretty.’

Jean was left alone in a tiny sitting room: two low, arched windows hung with curtains of the same humdrum blue silk that covered the divans, and a few articles of lacquered furniture. On the walls, lending a sense of light and air to the dull upholstery, a handful of landscapes, each of them inscribed with a dedication: ‘To Fanny Legrand,’ ‘To my dearest Fanny.’

On the mantelpiece stood a marble copy, half-size, of Caoudal’s Sappho. The same statue, in bronze, is seen everywhere and it had been familiar to Jean since his early childhood from the version in his father’s study. And in the light of the single candle burning near its base he noticed this work of art’s strong resemblance, if more refined and youthful-looking, to his mistress. The line of her profile, the way the body seemed to move under its drapery, the tapering roundness of those arms as they clasped her knees, all these were intimately known to him. His eye drank them in, along with the memory of some exquisite sensations.

Fanny, finding him standing contemplating the piece, remarked offhandedly: ‘I know, there’s a resemblance, isn’t there? Caoudal’s model looked quite like me.’ And she led him straight off to her bedroom, where Machaume was sulkily laying two places at a little table. With all the candles glowing, even on the wardrobe’s mirrored doors, and the flames of a new log fire making an eager blaze behind the fireguard, it felt like the bedroom of a woman dressing for a ball.

‘I wanted us to have supper in here,’ she laughed. ‘Not so far to bed.’

Jean had never seen such pretty, stylish furnishings. The Louis XVI lamps and pale muslins of his mother’s and sisters’ bedrooms could not have given him the least idea of this cocooned nest, where any bare wood was hidden under soft satins, where the bed was merely a divan wider than the others, floating on a sea of white furs at the end of the room.

It was delicious to be caressed by light, by warmth, by the flickering blue reflections dancing in the bevelled mirrors. All the more so since their route home through the fields had been so long, rain showers dampening them, mud filling the sunken paths, the light steadily fading. If anything was preventing him from relishing these unexpected comforts like a true provincial, however, it was the ill temper of the servant, her suspicious stares, to the point where Fanny eventually said: ‘Leave us, Machaume. We’ll serve ourselves,’ and sent her away. And as the woman banged the door behind her, explained: ‘Don’t pay her any attention, she’s cross with me for being too much in love with you. She says I’m throwing my life away. These country people are so money-minded! Her cooking, it has to be said, is a different matter… try some of this hare terrine.’