This Woman, This Man E-Book

George Sand

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus European Classics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

George Sand's fictionalised account of her notorious affair with the poet Alfred de Musset caused a sensation on its publication two years after his death, in 1859. It also prompted a volley of claim and counter-claim: two more novels rapidly appeared in the following months, Lui Et Elle, by Musset's brother, defending his reputation; and Lui, by Louise Colet, Flaubert's former mistress and briefly Musset's. Then the journalists and commentators of the day joined in, with Eux, by Gaston Lavalley, and Eux Et Elles, by Adolphe de Lescure, satirising the whole sordid business.

Leseprobe

Dedalus European Classics

General Editor: Timothy Lane

THIS WOMAN,THIS MAN

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First published in France in 1859

First published by Dedalus in 2022

Translation & Introduction copyright © Graham Anderson 2022

The right of Graham Anderson to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

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THE AUTHOR

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–1876), best known by her pen name George Sand was a novelist, memoirist, and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era.

In 1880 her children sold the rights to her literary estate for 125,000 francs (equivalent to 36 kg worth of gold, or 1.3 million dollars in 2015). During her lifetime her novels set in the French countryside were her most popular works.

This Woman, This Man (Elle et Lui) is not only unlike any of her other novels, but also the most autobiographical work of one of the great female trailblazers in French literature.

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 CSA. Publications include The Figaro Plays (Beaumarchais) and A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau).

For Dedalus he has translated Sappho by Alphonse Daudet, Chasing the Dream and A Woman’s Affair by Liane de Pougy, This was the Man (Lui) by Louise Colet and This Woman, This Man (Elle et Lui) by George Sand. His translations of Grazia Deledda’s short story collections The Queen of Darkness and The Christmas Present will be published by Dedalus in 2023. He is currently translating Marianna Sirca by Grazia Deledda for Dedalus.

His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

TO MADEMOISELLE JACQUES

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

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INTRODUCTION

On 17th June 1833, at a restaurant dinner in Paris organised for his contributors by François Buloz, director of La Revue des deux mondes, the novelist George Sand met the poet Alfred de Musset. By the end of the following month, Sand, just turned twenty-nine, and Musset, not yet twenty-three, were lovers. The improbable liaison rapidly developed into a consuming passion on both sides, to the surprise, disapproval and sometimes mirth of those who moved in literary circles. In August of the same year, the couple escaped the prying eyes for a week of romantic solitude in the forest of Fontainebleau. There, Sand witnessed some of the young poet’s extremes of behaviour, in particular a hallucinatory episode during a night spent out in the open. In December, the day after the poet’s twenty-third birthday, the pair set off on a working tour of Italy. They stopped at Genoa and Florence before arriving in Venice at the turn of the year. Sand had fallen ill in Genoa and was still recovering when they established themselves in an apartment in what is now the Hotel Danieli. Musset’s predilection for nocturnal wanderings continued even while his mistress spent the first fortnight of January bed-ridden. The relationship, which had always swung between highs and lows, fierce arguments and impassioned reconciliations, was put under further strain when Musset, in turn, fell ill. He was nursed devotedly by Sand. She secured the professional attendance of a Dr Pietro Pagallo, who diagnosed a kind of typhoid fever. As Musset grew stronger, it became clear that Dr Pagallo had fallen for his patient’s charming and distinguished companion. By March, his physical health restored but his emotional health in ruins, Musset abandoned a lost cause and sadly returned to Paris. This however was not the end of the affair, which, after the Pagallo interlude, continued on and off for a further twelve months.

A generation later, in 1859, George Sand published Elle et Lui, the present volume. It is the most autobiographical of her works, being a fictionalised account of the notorious affair. Alfred de Musset had died two years earlier, aged 46, weakened by alcoholic excess and a failing heart. His elder brother, Paul de Musset, incensed by her portrayal of the poet and anxious to preserve his reputation, wrote an immediate riposte, Lui et Elle. Louise Colet, a woman of letters and once Flaubert’s mistress, who had herself formed an attachment with Musset in his later years, produced her own novel, Lui, also in 1859. There followed something of a feeding frenzy among contemporary literati, with a hack writer, Gaston Lavalley, publishing a mocking Eux, and a series of more or less scathing articles appearing in both the newspapers and the gossip sheets.

There can be little doubt that George Sand was, and deserves still to be considered, a remarkable woman. Although not widely read nowadays in Anglophone countries, her literary output was vast: over a hundred published works, mainly novels, but also including stories, novellas, memoirs, poetry and plays. But over and above these works, Sand’s life was a statement of intent and a beacon for generations of women who followed.

She was born in Paris on 1st July 1804, and christened Amande Aurore Lucile. Her father, Maurice Dupin de Francueil, was an officer in Napoleon’s revolutionary army, and she spent the fourth year of her young life travelling with him on his campaigns in Spain. Her mother, Sophie Victorine Delaborde, came from different stock: her father was a sometime innkeeper and seller of birdseed. The two were married a month before Aurore’s birth, despite the efforts of Maurice Dupin’s widowed mother, Madame Dupin de Francueil, to prevent the alliance. Shortly after the couple’s return to the family home, the Château de Nohant, in the Berry region, Maurice Dupin died in a riding accident, leaving young Aurore’s upbringing and education to be contested between the mother and grandmother.

The spirited – if feckless – mother lived in Paris, abandoning Aurore to her grandmother’s care for long stretches. The child’s loyalties were miserably torn between the two older women. Eventually she was sent to a convent school run by English nuns in Paris. She emerged after three years, aged sixteen, to be tutored at Nohant. When her grandmother died a year later, Aurore became heiress of the Château de Nohant while still a minor. She was sent to stay with family friends near Melun, where she met and married, in 1822, François Casimir Dudevant, a former soldier like her father and now a lawyer. Their first child, Maurice, was born in 1823, but the marriage proved unhappy. Casimir Dudevant, as the husband, had full control of the Nohant property, but his tastes and sensibilities in no way matched those of his young wife. Their life at Nohant was turbulent: Casimir drank, was rude to the servants, pursued the prettier female ones. Aurore, on her side, formed a friendship with a neighbour, sufficiently closely to cast doubt in local minds on the paternity of her daughter, Solange, born in 1828. By then, husband and wife were sleeping in separate rooms.

Aurore began to chafe for her independence, for the right to manage her own possessions. She had already written a number of private travelogues, and when she met the young novelist Jules Sandeau, her ideas turned towards a life of letters in Paris. She finally made the break in 1830, after coming across her husband’s Will and finding in it malicious and disparaging remarks about his wife. Divorce was impossible at the time, and legal separation a long and arduous process (her case was not finally resolved until 1836). Encountering Jules Sandeau again just after Les Trois Glorieueses, the three days in July 1830 when the Bourbon monarchy was overthrown by the Parisian uprising, she resolved to join him in the brave new world which seemed to thrive among the young artists and writers of the Latin quarter. They both began to write for the new newspaper Le Figaro, combining on a number of projects which ended, in the autumn of 1831, with a jointly written novel, Rose et Blanche. This work, a success, was attributed to the authorship of J. Sand. When Aurore produced a novel, Indiana, in which Sandeau had no hand, he declined to take any credit and instead, to preserve a sense of continuity, and at the publisher’s suggestion, the book was attributed to G. Sand. In choosing George, a male name, in its English spelling, Aurore Dudevant was offering the world, and herself, an intriguing new identity.

A further novel, Valentine, published in 1832, advanced her reputation, and improved her financial position. She moved to a better apartment in Paris and the editor of La Revue des deux mondes contracted her to write for his journal for an annual fee of 4000 francs. The writer George Sand was launched.

By the time of her infatuation with Musset in the summer of 1833, she had ended her liaison with Sandeau (because of his infidelities), endured a brief and hurtful episode with Prosper Mérimée, begun a deep friendship with the actress Marie Dorval, written what is now perhaps the best remembered of her books, Lélia (published in August) and proved to herself that she could both earn a living – the husband still had control of the Nohant estate’s revenues, although the property itself belonged to the wife – and find the means to express her ever-growing commitment to the idea of what would now be called women’s rights. Lélia, a novel which argued that monogamous marriage was an unnatural state and that the opprobrium heaped on women who stepped outside it, whilst men seemed to be granted licence, made a mockery of love, as well as of justice, provoked sharp divisions in a society already in social ferment. By the time of its publication, she was already a distinctive figure in the world of Parisian letters. Having received dispensation from the authorities in Berry to wear men’s clothes for the practical purpose of moving more easily about the Nohant countryside, she had access to places and events in the capital where unaccompanied women would not normally be seen. She smoked in public, even (which was worse) when dressed as a woman. And she was known to be in effect, a single mother who had her two young children living with her as often as arrangements with Casimir allowed.

Far from being an angry firebrand it is perhaps worth observing that the people who met her at this time were impressed by the calm serenity of her manner, her hard-working discipline, her apparent self-assurance, her kindly-directed if sometimes forbidding intelligence. Although no great beauty by contemporary standards, she seemed to exercise with her great dark eyes and lustrous black hair a magnetic effect on all who came to know her.

The young Alfred de Musset certainly fell under her spell. Born in Paris in December 1810, the same year as both Chopin, with whom Sand had an equally famous and much longer-lasting relationship, and Louise Colet, author of Lui, Musset came from an upper class but by no means rich family. His father worked in a number of positions within the French administration, while his mother, similarly placed socially and financially, managed to sustain a role as a society hostess. Alfred, their younger son, was sent to the distinguished Lycée Henri IV, where he was a classmate of the son of the future constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe. His excellent connections and his precocious literary talents earned him an invitation to join, at only seventeen, the literary salon known as Le Cénacle, hosted by Charles Nodier, director of the library of the Arsenal. His first poetry collection, Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie, appeared as early as 1829. After abandoning a number of potential career paths, he secured a position as librarian at the French Ministry of the Interior under the July monarchy, and set about an enthusiastic private life as a dandy and haunter of brothels. A rising star, he was already well-known by the time of his meeting George Sand at the restaurant Lointier on 17th June 1833.

There could hardly have been two more different characters, with such different experiences of life. From the very outset, those differences both excited the new lovers (Musset moved into Sand’s apartment on quai Malaquais at the end of July) and brought them much grief. Musset could not or would not abandon his dissolute habits. The incident in Fontainebleau forest, when Musset believed he had been visited by his own double, was striking enough to be recorded, in different fashions, by Sand, Louise Colet and the poet himself. There is a passage towards the end of Colet’s Lui in which the character representing Musset describes four or five such uncanny apparitions or premonitions. After four months of turbulent co-habitation, the two lovers embarked in the late autumn of 1833 on their Italian adventure. The overland journey south passed well enough, but Musset proved no sailor and in a foretaste of things to come, the stronger-stomached Sand had to nurse a stricken companion through the sea voyage from Marseilles to Genoa. It is here that, in Sand’s novel, the lovers’ difficulties come to a head. In Colet’s, the short spells in Genoa and Florence are only a prelude to the three months the couple spent in Venice. In this respect, as in many others, Colet’s Lui follows known events far more closely than Sand’s Elle et Lui. For Sand, the objective is to capture the atmosphere of a relationship, the shifting layers of feeling which bind lovers together or force them apart. It does not matter that she makes the two lovers artists rather than writers; it does not matter that she makes no mention at all of Venice, concentrating the action on Genoa, Florence and Portovenere, near La Spezia; it does not matter that the third party in what becomes a battle for her favours is presented not as a young Italian doctor but as an older American family friend. The woman’s right in any relationship is to be respected, to hold her own views, to belong to nobody but herself. She may give herself to a man, but the giving subtracts nothing from her essential independence of action and thought. It is rather, whether briefly or permanently, an expression of her power to choose.

Musset left Italy dejected, at the end of March 1834. Sand stayed on with Dr Pagallo until August. She returned to Paris, still with Pagallo, in the middle of the month. A desperate Musset sought an interview, which was granted. Each party acknowledged its own faults, but there the reconciliation ended. It was decided they were better apart: Musset retired to the spa of Baden while Sand retreated to Nohant (Pagallo remaining in Paris, something of a fish out of water in this highly-charged drama between two prominent literati). The separation lasted two months. Musset besieged Sand with pleading letters and finally, in October, she yielded. This time it was a dejected Pagallo who returned home. The renewed relationship rapidly ran into the old problems, and a few weeks later it was Musset who broke with Sand. When he persistently refused to respond to her letters she sent him instead a parcel containing a quantity of her famous hair, which she had cut off in a dramatic gesture of appeal. It was at this time that the painter Eugène Delacroix, commissioned by Sand’s publisher Buloz, made his first portrait of the writer, showing her in man’s clothing with her shortened hair, wearing on her face an expression of deep sadness. The final act came in January 1835, when the bruised pair made a third attempt at getting an impossible relationship to work. Sand was initially triumphant, writing to Musset’s friend and confidant Alfred Tattet (who appears in Colet’s Lui as Alfred Nattier): ‘Alfred is my lover again.’ But complaints and verbal abuse on his side – he disapproved amongst other things of her strict working regime, which would see her settle at her desk at midnight and write until morning – and hectoring and recrimination on hers (she disapproved equally strongly of his lack of self-discipline), disfigured the mutual passion as catastrophically as before. In early March, George Sand made the definitive break.

Of the two parties, Musset was the more affected. Nothing, for him, was ever quite the same again. In literary terms however, his experience bore significant fruits. A burst of creativity saw Musset produce some of his best work: Fantasio (1834), Les Nuits, and in 1836, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle. The Confession, a novel, deals with the Sand affair in the much wider context of the mal du siècle, the yearning for an unrealised ideal which characterised the post-1830 era. The character representing Sand was treated with kindness and respect in this work, and Musset’s former mistress was not at all displeased by it.

Meanwhile Sand continued her prolific output (it was after all her means of support), writing Mattea, Leone Leoni, André, Jacques and the first of her Lettres d’un voyageur while still in Venice with Pagallo in the spring and summer of 1834. Her work began to take an increasingly political and socialist turn under the influence of various thinkers: l’abbé Lammenais, the lawyer Michel de Bourges and the philosopher Pierre Leroux. Only after her disappointments following the uprisings of 1848, which saw the fall of Louis-Philippe, and a few years later, the coup d’Etat in which the second republic was usurped by the self-proclaimed empire of Louis Napoleon, did her active engagement start to fall away. In the meantime she had broken with her daughter Solange over the latter’s marriage to the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, against her mother’s wishes. An unhappy period in her life, which coincided with the ending of her long relationship (1838–47) with Frédéric Chopin, found some relief when she met, through her son Maurice, a little-known engraver and playwright called Alexandre Manceau. Although thirteen years her junior, Manceau remained her lover, confidant and secretary from 1852 until his death from tuberculosis in 1865.

Her later years were enriched by a friendship with Gustave Flaubert, to whom she wrote in praise following the publication of his novel Salammbô in 1862. A long and warm correspondence ensued, which may seem ironical in the light of Flaubert’s earlier association with Louise Colet, who had portrayed Sand in critical terms in her own account of the Musset affair, Lui.

George Sand, by now a grand figure – she refused the legion d’honneur in 1873 – was to spend increasing periods of time at Nohant, entertaining a wide circle of friends, thinkers and artists, and still producing one or two novels a year. It was there that she died in June 1876, aged seventy-one. (Louise Colet had died in March of the same year.) She remains today a prominent and significant personality, as much for her bold engagement with contemporary issues and for her high-profile love affairs as for her many and varied writings. She was nevertheless, quite possibly, the first truly professional woman writer in nineteenth-century France.

For interested readers, Louise Colet’s novel, Lui, is also published by Dedalus Books under the title This Was the Man, while Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle is available in English translations elsewhere.

TO MADEMOISELLE JACQUES

My dear Thérèse – since you permit me not to address you as Mademoiselle – I have an important piece of news from the world of the arts, to use the phrase of Bernard, a fellow close to our hearts. Look, that rhymes! Although what I have to tell you contains neither rhyme nor reason.

Just imagine: when I got back home yesterday, having bored you enough with my visit, I found an English Lord waiting for me… well, maybe he’s not a Lord; but he’s certainly an Englishman, and this is what he said to me, in his mangled French: ‘You are a painter?’

‘Yes’ (I said in English), ‘my Lord.’

‘You do faces?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘And hands?’

‘Yes, my Lord. Feet too.’

‘Good!’

‘They’re very good!’

‘Oh, I am sure! Well then! Will you do a portrait of me?’

‘Of you?’

‘Why not?’

The why not came out in such a good-natured way that I ceased to take him for an imbecile, especially since the son of Albion is a magnificent specimen. Think of the head of an Antinoüs on the shoulders of… on the shoulders of an Englishman; a head from the best period of classical Greece mounted on the somewhat strangely suited and cravatted exemplar of British ‘fashion’.

‘Well, my word, you are a fine model, that’s for sure, and I’d love to make a study of you for my own purposes; but I can’t do your portrait.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I am not a portrait painter.’

‘Oh…! Do you have to buy a separate licence in France for each specialism in the arts?’

‘No, but the public doesn’t like it if we have lots. It wants to know what sort of thing to associate us with, especially when we’re young. And if I, standing before you now and clearly very young, were to have the misfortune of doing an excellent portrait of you, it would be very difficult for me to succeed at the next exhibition with anything except portraits. And equally, if I only made a very ordinary portrait of you, the public would forbid me ever to attempt any again: they would decree that I did not possess the necessary qualities for such work and that it was presumptuous of me to chance my arm.’

I told my Englishman plenty more similar nonsense, which I won’t bore you with, but which left him wide-eyed. He started to laugh, and it was clear my explanations were inspiring him with the greatest contempt for France, if not for your humble servant.

‘To come to the point,’ he said, ‘the truth is, you don’t like portraiture.’

‘What! Do you take me for a complete barbarian? No, you must understand that I do not yet dare to attempt portraits, and that it would be inappropriate for me to do so, since one of two things must apply: either it is a specialism which excludes all others, or it is the mark of perfection, the crowning achievement of one’s talent, so to speak. Some painters, incapable of actually composing a picture, can copy the living model faithfully and pleasantly enough. They can guarantee a successful career, however little they understand how to present the model in the most favourable way or possess the skill to dress it to its advantage whilst dressing it in fashion. But when one is only a poor painter of historical scenes, very much a beginner and very controversial, as I have the honour to be, one cannot join battle with the professionals. I confess to you that I have never scientifically studied how the folds of a black coat fall and the particularities of a given physiognomy. I am an unfortunate inventor of attitudes, types and expressions. They all have to conform to the idea I have in mind, my subject, the way I envision it if you like. If you were to allow me to dress you in a costume of my choosing and to set you in a composition of my devising… well, there again, you see, it would be pointless, it wouldn’t be you. It wouldn’t be a portrait you could give to your mistress… still less to your legitimate wife. Neither of them would recognise you. Therefore, don’t ask me now to produce what I shall have the skill to do one day, certainly, if by chance I turn into Rubens or Titian, because then I shall have the knowledge to be a poet and creator still, whilst effortlessly and fearlessly capturing reality in all its strength and majesty. Sadly, it is not likely that I shall become anything more than a madman or a beast. Read Messrs This and That, who have said as much in their articles.’

As you may imagine, Thérèse, I did not say a word of all this to my Englishman: one always elaborates when one puts words in one’s own mouth. But of all the things I was able to say by way of excusing my inability to paint portraits, these are the only words which did any good: ‘Why on earth don’t you ask Mlle Jacques?’

He exclaimed ‘Oh!’ three times, after which he asked for your address, and off he went without a second thought, leaving me very confused and very cross at not being able to finish my dissertation on portraiture. Because, after all, my good Thérèse, if this fine English animal comes to call on you today, as I think him capable of doing, and if he repeats everything I have just been writing, that is, everything I did not in fact say, on the manufacturers and the leading artists, what will you think of your ungrateful friend! That he ranks you amongst the leading artists and judges you incapable of doing anything except nice pretty portraits that everybody likes! Ah, my dear friend, if only you’d heard all the things I told him about you after he’d left…! You know already: you know that, for me, you are not Mlle Jacques who produces those lifelike portraits so much in vogue, but a superior man who has disguised himself as a woman and who, without ever having attended the academy, divines, and knows how to reveal in a head-and-shoulders, the full truth of a body and of a soul, in the manner of the great Renaissance painters. But I fall silent: you don’t like to be told what people think of you. You pretend to take it as mere compliments. You are very proud, Thérèse.

I am altogether melancholy today, I don’t know why. I lunched so poorly at midday… I never ate so badly before I had a cook. And then one can’t get decent tobacco any more. The state is poisoning us. And then my new boots were delivered and they didn’t suit at all… and then it’s raining… and then, and then what do I know? For some time now the days have been as long as days with no bread, don’t you find? No, you don’t find, not you. You don’t know this kind of malaise, pleasure which bores, boredom which excites, the nameless affliction I was talking to you about the other evening in that little lilac sitting room where I would like to be now. Because this is a hopeless day for painting, and not being able to paint, it would give me pleasure to weary you with my conversation.

So I shall not see you today! You have your unbearable family there, stealing you for themselves and robbing your most delightful friends of your company! I shall therefore be forced to go out tonight and commit some unspeakable folly…! That is the effect of your kindness towards me, my great and dear friend. It makes me feel so silly and useless when I don’t see you that I absolutely have to go off and deaden my sorrows and risk scandalising you. But don’t worry, I shan’t tell you how I spend my evening.

Your friend and humble servant,

LAURENT    11th May, 183…

***

TO M. LAURENT DE FAUVEL

First, my dear Laurent, if you feel some degree of friendship towards me, I ask you not to commit too often follies that might damage your health. I grant you all the others. Now you will demand an example of such a thing, and there you have me; for embarrassingly, as far as follies go, I know very few which are not harmful. It depends on what you count as follies. If they include those long supper parties you were telling me about the other day, I believe they are killing you and I am very unhappy about them. What are you thinking of, good God, to destroy in such a manner, and so light-heartedly, an existence that is so precious and so beautiful? But you don’t want any sermons: I will confine myself to prayer.

As for your Englishman, who is an American, I have just seen him, and since I shall not see you this evening or tomorrow either, perhaps, to my great regret, I have to tell you that you are making a serious error in not wishing to do his portrait. He would have offered you the eyes out of his head, and the eyes out of the head of an American like Dick Palmer amount to a lot of banknotes – which you need, for the very purpose of not committing follies, in other words, not playing poker in the hope of a stroke of luck which never happens to people with imagination, seeing that people with imagination are hopeless gamblers. They always lose, and then have to call on their imagination to pay off their debts, a job which that particular princess does not feel herself suited to, and which she can only undertake at the expense of setting fire to the poor body in which she dwells.

You find me very positive, I expect? Well, that’s all the same to me. In any case, if we consider things on a higher plane, none of the reasons you gave your American and me is worth tuppence. You are not capable of producing portraits: yes, that is possible, even certain, if it has to be done in terms of bourgeois success. But M. Palmer was not demanding such a thing at all. You took him for a grocer and you were wrong. He is a man of judgement and taste, he knows his business, and he is enthusiastic about you. Imagine how I received him! He came to me as a last resort, as was very clear to me, and I was grateful to him. And so I consoled him by promising to do everything in my power to persuade you to paint him. We shall discuss the matter therefore, the day after tomorrow, because I arranged for the said Palmer to come here in the evening to help me plead his cause and ensure that he departs with your promise.

On which note, my dear Laurent, try your best to ease the pain of not seeing me for two days. That won’t be difficult for you; you know a great many lively spirits, and you have your foot in the door of the smartest sort of society. Whereas I am just a preachy old woman who is very fond of you, who urges you not to go to bed late every night, and who advises you to avoid all excesses and abuses. You do not have the right: talent has its obligations.

Your comrade,

THÉRÈSE JACQUES

***

TO MADEMOISELLE JACQUES

My dear Thérèse, I am leaving in two hours’ time for a country house party with the Count of S… and Prince D… youth and beauty will be present, or so I am assured. I promise and I swear to commit no follies and to drink no champagne… without bitter self-reproach! What else can I do? I would certainly have preferred to wander round your spacious studio, and talk nonsense in your little lilac sitting room. But since you are in retreat with your umpteen provincial cousins, you will certainly not notice my absence the day after tomorrow either: you will have the delightful music of the Anglo-American accent for the whole evening! Ah! He’s called Dick, is he, that good M. Palmer? I thought that Dick was the abbreviation for Richard used between intimates! It’s true that when it comes to languages, French is the only one I know anything about.

As for the portrait, don’t let’s discuss it any further. You are far too maternal, my good Thérèse, thinking about my interests to the detriment of your own. Although you have an excellent clientèle, I know that your generosity leaves you some way short of being rich, and that a few extra banknotes will be much better in your hands than in mine. You will use them to make people happy, whereas I, as you say, will only throw them away on a hand of cards.

Besides, I have never felt less in the way of doing any actual painting. For that, two things are necessary, which you have: a reflective mentality and inspiration. I shall never have the first, and I once had the second. In consequence, I am disgusted with painting. It’s a mad old horseman who’s completely worn me out dragging me across country on the skinny crop of his Apocalyptic nag. I can see quite clearly what I lack: for all the good sense you talk, I have not yet lived enough, and I am setting off for three or seven days with Mme Reality, in the shape of several nymphs from the corps de ballet at the Opéra. I very much hope on my return, to be the most accomplished of men of the world, that is to say the most unimpressed and the most open to reason.

Your friend,

LAURENT

I

As soon as she read it, Thérèse recognised very clearly the deep frustration and jealousy which had dictated this letter.

“And yet,” she said to herself, “he’s not in love with me. Oh, definitely not! He’ll never be in love with anyone, and with me least of all.”

And as she read and pondered, Thérèse feared she might be lying to herself by trying to persuade herself that Laurent was in no danger as far as she was concerned.

“Anyway, how? And what danger?” her thoughts ran on. “Is it possible he’s become infatuated with me, and he’s suffering because it’s not returned? Can an infatuation cause real suffering? I’ve no idea. I’ve never felt one!”

But the clock struck five, and Thérèse, putting the letter in her pocket, asked for her hat, sent her housemaid away for the next twenty-four hours, gave her faithful old Catherine a number of specific orders and took a cab. Two hours later, she returned with a thin little woman, who stooped slightly and was so voluminously veiled that even the coachman did not see her face. She shut herself away with this mysterious person, and Catherine served them an especially succulent little dinner. Thérèse looked after and served her companion, who contemplated her with such profound happiness and excitement that she was unable to eat.

For his part, Laurent was getting ready for the trip to the country which he had announced; but when Prince D… came to fetch him in his carriage, Laurent told him an unexpected business matter meant he could not leave Paris for another two hours and he would join him at his country house later on in the evening.

Laurent had no such business however. He had dressed with feverish haste. He had had his hair arranged with fastidious care. And then he had thrown his coat into an armchair, run his hands through the too symmetrically organised curls, with no thought for how he might now look. He strode up and down his studio, sometimes vigorously, sometimes dragging his feet. When Prince D… had gone, extracting multiple promises from him to leave as soon as he could, Laurent ran to the stairs to ask him to wait and to say he’d forget the business matter and come with him; but he did not call him back, and went through to the bedroom, where he threw himself down on the bed.

“Why is she shutting her door on me for two days? There’s something behind this! And when she tells me to come on the third day, it’s to force me to meet in her home an Englishman or American I don’t know! But she certainly knows him, this Palmer, whom she refers to by the diminutive of his first name! Then what was the purpose of asking me for her address? Is it all a pretence? Why should she pretend with me? I am not Thérèse’s lover, I have no rights over her! Thérèse’s lover! I shall certainly never be that! God preserve me! A woman five years older than I am, maybe more! Who knows any woman’s age, and especially that one, a woman nobody knows anything about? A past so veiled in mystery must be concealing a significant mistake of some sort, perhaps some well-disguised shame. And on top of that, she is prudish, or pious, or philosophical, who can know? She talks of everything with such impartiality, or tolerance, or detachment… does anyone know what she believes, what she doesn’t believe, what she wants, what she loves, or if she’s even capable of loving?”

Mercourt, a young critic and Laurent’s friend, called by.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘you’re leaving for Montmorency. So I’m just dropping in to ask you for an address, then leaving. Mlle Jacques’ address.’

Laurent started.

‘And what the devil do you want with Mlle Jacques?’ he replied, pretending to look for paper to roll a cigarette.

‘Me? Nothing… or rather, yes. I’d very much like to know her; but I only know her by sight and reputation. I need her address for someone who wants his picture painted.’

‘You know Mlle Jacques by sight?’

‘For God’s sake! She’s very famous just now, and who hasn’t been aware of her? She’s made for noticing!’

‘You think so?’

‘Well, don’t you?’

‘Me? I’ve no idea. I like her very much. I’m not competent to judge.’

‘You like her very much?’

‘Yes, you see, I’m saying so. Which proves I’m not courting her.’

‘Do you see her often?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘So you are her friend… in a serious way?’

‘Well, yes! In a way… why do you laugh?’

‘Because I don’t believe a word of it. No one aged twenty-four is a serious friend of a woman… a young and beautiful one!’

‘Hah! She isn’t as young and beautiful as you say. She makes a good companion, not unpleasant to look at, that’s all. But she belongs to a type I’m not fond of, and I have to forgive her for being blonde. I only like blondes in art.’

‘She’s not that blonde anyway! Her eyes are a soft black, her hair is neither brown nor fair, and she wears it in an odd style. All the same, it suits her, she looks like a well-meaning sphinx.’

‘That’s very good! However, tall women are what you like.’

‘She isn’t all that tall. She’s got small feet and small hands. She’s a real woman. I’ve studied her closely, since I’m in love with her.’

‘Good heavens, what a ridiculous idea!’

‘It can’t matter to you, surely, since she’s not your type?’

‘My dear chap, I’d like her any way she looked. If there were more to it than that, I’d try to be a better person with her than I am. But I wouldn’t be in love; I don’t go in for love. Consequently, I wouldn’t be jealous. Press your case, if you see fit.’

‘Me? Yes, if I find an opportunity; but I don’t have time to look for one, and fundamentally, I’m like you, Laurent, very happy to be patient, seeing that I’m at the age and in a society where pleasures are not in short supply… but since we’re talking of this woman, and you know her, tell me… this is pure curiosity on my part, I insist, if she’s a widow or…’

‘Or what?’

‘I meant, if she’s lost a lover or a husband.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘That can’t be true!’

‘Word of honour; I’ve never asked. To me it’s quite immaterial!’

‘You know what people say?’

‘No; and I don’t care. What do they say?’

‘You see, you do care! They say she was married once, to a rich man with a title.’

‘Married…’

‘As married as you can get: first by the mayor, then by the priest.’

‘Ridiculous! She’d bear his name and his title.’

‘Ah, there you are! There’s a mystery behind the whole thing. When I have the time, I’ll dig about and let you know. They say she has no acknowledged lover, although she lives in a very free and easy way. Besides, you’re the one who must know about that sort of thing, surely?’

‘I don’t know the first thing about it. This is too bad! So you think I spend all my time spying on women or interrogating them? I’m not just some idler like you! I find life short enough as it is simply to get some living and some work done.’

‘Living… I make no comment. It seems you get a great deal of living done. As for work… they say you don’t work enough. All right, what have you got there? Let me see!’

‘No, it’s nothing, I haven’t got anything started here.’

‘Yes you have: that head there… it’s very good, my word! Let me have a look, or I’ll be rude about you in my next review.’

‘Which you’re very capable of doing!’

‘Yes, if you deserve it. But that head though, it’s superb, it’s simply a marvel. What’s it going to be?’