The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette
I replied by complimenting him on the beauty of the cock and the liveliness of the hen; I added that I also knew the little girl who brings her big tortoise out to “play” in the afternoons, and the man with the fox . . .
“That’s no one for me to meet,” said the chicken man.
But chance was to bring the master of the fox and the master of the chickens together on one of those paths sought out by those who, in a solitary mood, are led there by fear of the park officials and the whim of a dog, a fox, or a hen. At first, the man with the fox did not come forth. Sitting in the thicket, he held his fox in a fatherly way, around the middle of his serpentine body, and felt sorry for him when he felt him stiffen to attention. The fox’s nervous laugh bared his sharp canines, slightly yellow from soft living and soft food, and his white whiskers, pressed flat against his cheeks, had the look of makeup about them.
A few feet away, the cock and the hen, sated with grain, were taking their bath of sand and sun. The cock passed the feathers of his wings over the iron of his beak, and the hen, puffed out in the shape of an egg, feet invisible and neck ruffled, was powdering herself with dust as yellow as pollen. A faint and discordant cry, let out by the cock, roused her. She shook herself off and walked uncertainly over to her spouse as if to ask, “What did you say?”
He must have signaled a warning to her, for she did not argue and stood with him right next to the sack—the sack, a prison but not a trap . . .
However, the chicken man, astonished by this behavior, reassured his animals with “There, chick, chick, chick!” and familiar onomatopoeias.
A few days later, the fox man, who believed he was doing the right thing in giving his wild little animal this tantalizing pleasure, decided to be honest and reveal his presence and that of his fox.
“Oh, they’re peculiar animals,” said the chicken man.
“And intelligent,” added the fox man. “And not an ounce of mischief in him. He wouldn’t know what to do with your hen if you gave it to him.”
But the little fox trembled, imperceptibly and passionately, under his fur, while the cock and the hen, reassured by the sound of friendly, low voices, pecked and clucked under the fox’s velvet eye.
The two animal lovers became friendly, the way people become friendly in the Bois or at a spa. They meet, they chat, they tell their favorite story, they give away two or three secrets, not shared with their closest friends, to the unknown ear—and then they part near the No. 16 tram stop—having given neither the name of the street they live on nor the number of the house . . .
A little fox, even when tamed, cannot be near chickens without suffering serious upset. The fox grew thin, and dreamed aloud in his yelping language all night long. And his master, watching the fox’s fine, feverish nose turn away from the saucer of milk, saw coming toward him, from the depths of a green thicket at Auteuil, a wicked thought, indistinct, its moving figure pale but already ugly . . . That day, he chatted good-naturedly with his friend the chicken man and absentmindedly gave out a little play to the fox’s chain. The fox took a step—shall I call this gliding, which neither showed the tips of his feet nor crushed a single blade of grass, a step?—toward the hen.
“Hey there!” cried the chicken man.
“Oh,” said the fox man, “he wouldn’t touch her.”
“I know, I know,” said the chicken man.
The fox said nothing. Jerked back, he wisely sat down, and his twinkling eyes betrayed no thought whatsoever.
The next day, the two friends exchanged opinions about fishing.
“If it was cheaper,” said the chicken man, “I’d get a license for the upper lake. But it’s expensive. It makes carp more expensive than it is at Les Halles.”
“But it’s worth it,” replied the fox man. “You should have seen this one guy’s catch the other morning, on the little lake. Twenty-one carp and a bream bigger than my hand.”
“You don’t say . . .”
“Especially since, without meaning to brag, I’m not so bad at it myself. You should see me cast . . . It’s the way I flick my wrist . . . here, like this . . .”’
He stood up, let go of the fox’s chain, and reeled his arm masterfully. Something red and frenzied streaked through the grass, in the direction of the yellow hen, but the chicken man’s leg shot out sharply, blocking the swift red streak, and all one heard was a muffled little bark. The fox returned to his master’s feet and lay down.
“Any closer . . .” said the chicken man.
“You can’t imagine how surprised I am,” said the fox man. “You little rascal, don’t you want to say you’re sorry to the man, right now? What is all this now?”
The chicken man looked his friend in the eye and there he read his secret, his dim, unformed, and wicked thought . . . He coughed, suddenly choked with hot, angry blood, and nearly jumped on the fox man, who at that moment was saying to himself, “I’ll knock his brains out, him and his whole hen house . . .” Then both of them made the same effort to return to everyday life, lowered their heads, and moved away from each other, forever, with the common sense of good men who have just come within a hair’s breadth of turning into killers.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Judge
When Madame de la Hournerie returned home, after half a day devoted entirely to the hairdresser and the milliner, she quickly tossed aside her new hat to get a good look at her new hairstyle. Urged on by Anthelme, who declared himself to be the “last word” in hairdressing, she had just abandoned her 1910-style chignon, the bouffant waves of beautiful chestnut hair befitting a woman in her fifties, as well as the wave and curls which had covered her forehead and ears. She came home with her hair still brown, but pulled back and pressed down Chinese style, brilliantined, knotted into a varnished shell at the nape of her neck, and pierced through, like a heart, with a little arrow set with diamonds.
Looking into the mirror framed by two harsh lamps, she gave a little start at the sight of the sloping forehead, which she rarely saw and had concealed more carefully than a breast, and at the hard glare of her eyes, skillfully made up, but which the light reached and robbed of their mystery, like the sun on a forest spring after the woodcutter has been through. She picked up a hand mirror and admired the big knot of polished hair and the glinting arrow at the back of her neck.
“What is there to say? It’s the style,” she said out loud, to reassure herself. “Besides, Emilie de Sery just now swore to me that I was a real revelation . . .”
But faced with this lady with the lacquered skull, the broad and slightly sunken cheeks, thin lips, and thickening nose, she did not recognize herself and felt uneasy. With the art of a painter who enhances the color of a landscape suddenly inundated by unobstructed sunlight, she added some rouge to her bare ears, her temples, and underneath her eyebrows, and then covered her entire face with a shade of pink powder she hardly ever used.
“That’s better,” she decided. “It’s obviously a daring hairstyle! After all, why shouldn’t I wear my hair in a daring style?”
She rang, received the ambiguous compliments of her maid: “Everything that changes Madame enhances her!,” took off her town clothes, and went downstairs to dine alone. Her elegant widowhood, dating back five years, was undaunted by a few hours’ solitude, and Madame de la Hournerie frequently dined or lunched alone, as a form of hygienic and agreeable mortification, just as she would have eaten yogurt or gone to bed at five o’clock in the evening.
Marien, in evening dress, was waiting for her, arms at his side, in front of one of the sideboards. The pride of the maison La Hournerie, he stood six feet tall, with strong features, fair hair and fair skin, and the black eyes of a fanatical Breton. When he was thirteen, Madame de la Hournerie and her husband had taken him from the fifty cows he was tending in the fields. Promoted to “little servant” and provided with a sleeved vest and a white apron, Marien quickly earned his stripes. He overcame his fear of the telephone, demonstrated a flair for arra
Madame de la Hournerie entered the dining room briskly, sat down, and shivered.
“Serve me quickly, Marien. You wouldn’t exactly say it’s warm in here, would you? Well then, my dear, didn’t I say something to you?” said Madame de la Hournerie familiarly, at times still openly treating Marien like a “little servant.”
“But the oven isn’t hot enough yet,” replied an uncertain voice at last.
Madame de la Hournerie, who was feeling the cold in two recently exposed and sensitive places—her forehead and her ears—looked up at Marien, who seemed to lose his composure, poured a full ladle into the soup bowl, served Madame de la Hournerie, and resumed his traditional place, facing his mistress. The butler’s dark eyes, wide with surprise, contemplated, with an indescribable expression of horror and shame, the huge naked forehead, white as marble, and the dome of waxed hair, which matched the red mahogany of the Empire furniture. Unsettled, Madame de la Hournerie pushed her soup away from her.
“Bring the next course, Marien. I’m not very hungry. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a touch of the flu.”
Marien removed the soup, ran toward the kitchen as if in flight, and brought out a shrimp soufflé. As he was serving it, he chipped the edge of an old plate, spilled a few drops of red wine on the tablecloth, then returned to the sideboard and resumed his shocked contemplation.
“The flu’s going around,” continued Madame de la Hournerie uneasily . . . “You be careful in the kitchen . . . Henrietta was complaining of aches this morning. Take this soufflé away, the shrimp are dried up . . . You don’t seem to have your mind on your work tonight . . .”
“It is flu season,” said the same uncertain voice.
But Marien’s black eyes, merciless and truthful, cried out between each course to Madame de la Hournerie: “No, it’s not the flu! It’s this shocking forehead, this pale steppe, this too-small skull, this heavy fruit: an old woman’s head stripped of foliage where I was used to seeing it blossom! It’s the indignation I feel as an honest thief of a servant, but one attached to the domicile I exploit and care for; it’s the stupefaction of a former little valet who served a beautiful mistress, of a little cowherd devoted to a dazzling memory. It’s just not done, good God, it’s just not done!”
The chocolate trifle, swimming in its thick vanilla cream, was hardly more successful than the lamb chop or the artichoke hearts. Completely exasperated, Madame de la Hournerie wanted to lash out against the importunate and silent disapprobation; a trace of red powder left on the chasing of a fork, a lampshade singed at the edges, gave her the opportunity. But paralyzed by cowardice before she could utter the words of reprimand, she left the table, ordering sharply, “You will send Henrietta up to me,” then ran to her bedroom and sat down in front of the triple mirror . . .
“Is that you, Henrietta? Tomorrow morning, as early as possible, you will telephone Anthelme, yes, the hairdresser . . . I want an appointment before lunch, do you hear? Before lunch.”
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Omelette
The singing of a bird insinuated itself, with a grotesque sweetness, into the dream—trains in the night, revolving platforms, and red signal lights—which was bouncing Pierre Lasnier along on poorly tied rails. The pearly song contended with the whistling of locomotives and, victorious, woke the sleeper, lying on his back, in whose half-open eyes was the image, set against a background of dazzling sky, the inadmissible image of a slender branch on which a small bird was singing. Shocked, Pierre Lasnier closed his eyes again and covered them with his right forearm, which felt cold and damp. A bird . . . his cold, damp arm . . . He sat up and recognized his arm, the strong, tanned arm of a tennis player, bare to the elbow, coming out of a rolled-up shirt sleeve. Overhead, the slender branch which the bird had just left was still bobbing up and down . . . Then the delicious odor of half-dried hay caught his attention. Pierre Lasnier had just woken up, not at home in the rue d’Aumale, but up against a hedge in a meadow still marked by the soft parallel waves made at haymaking time. He yawned, stretched his arms out behind him according to the Muller method, peeled his shirt from his back, soaked with the abundant dew of the early June morning, ran his fingers through his hair, and smiled vaguely at the clouds, still pink, in a sky the color of bluish milk. A fiery red shaft pierced through the hedge, across the ground, the first sign of sunrise.
“How beautiful!”
Thoughtfully, he put his hand to his cheek and gave a start at the feel of his five-day-old beard . . . no, four . . . Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday . . . his five-day-old beard. For five days, the body of a woman, knocked down on the rug and looking as if broken in the middle, had been lying there motionless, in his apartment, rue d’Aumale . . .
He stretched out his legs. His tennis shoes, stained with dirt, water marks, and cow dung, had grown old in four days, and one of the rubber soles had split. In just four days the light-gray flannel pants, the white socks and linen shirt, the whole sporting outfit, looked like old castoffs, splattered with stains and streaked a vegetable green. His jacket, rolled up in a ball and tied with a string, doubled as a pillow at night, and held several hundred francs—the money Pierre Lasnier had in his pocket at the time of the crime—and a watch.
Fettered horses jangled their leg chains and whinnied off toward some invisible farm. Swallows darted out from some hidden and inexhaustible place, draping the meadow with a curtain of long, whistling cries. The wind carried the mooing of cattle and another, steady, pleasant noise which must have been a waterfall; in the distance a little herdboy sang like a muezzin and the bright light of daybreak rose a shade toward yellow.
Pierre Lasnier, a city dweller, let himself be taken in by it all, indulging himself in it.
“Ah, the country . . . It’s a beautiful life!”
He caught himself mentally and said, “It was a beautiful life . . .” and realized that he was speaking of everything in the past now.
“I could just as well have let the poor thing live, but in Paris you get so nervous . . . And the truth is, she’d been getting on my nerves for too long.”
He lowered his head, the memory of his insufferable mistress casting a shadow over him, still deafened as he was by all the threats, all the jealousy, the insults and recriminations, by all the insectlike maliciousness which knew neither fear nor rest. It all came back to him, the gesture which had changed his frantic hands into criminal hands, the body doubled over on the rug; waiting there in the apartment with the shutters closed; escaping at just the right time, when the second-floor maid asked the concierge to open the front door and stole out with a handsome young man, going with him as far as the sidewalk across the street.
“I’ve been stupid,” thought Pierre Lasnier. “I should have gone right to the police and told them, ‘There she is. She had such a horrible temper . . . We fought for the thousandth time. I’m not guilty of premeditation, or of . . . of . . . I’m not a bad person. I gave her two thousand francs a month. And the day it happened we’d only come back from the country to look for some tennis rackets in my apartment’ . . . That’s what I should have done . . . but they’ve found her by now.”
He thought back over his four days as a tramp, and no longer dared congratulate himself for not having run into any rural poli
“But I’m starving. That’s what’s wrong. That’s what’s getting me down.”
He stood up, grabbed the staff he had cut the night before and which completed his vagabond’s outfit. Last night’s dinner—cold meat and bread, eaten on the road—left him with the wild hunger of a healthy man. He strode across the ditch, and set off down the white road, which cried out for rain and crunched under his feet like broken glass.
“Why did I eat that meat and bread on the road? Who was stopping me from going to an inn and ordering some meat and coffee and eggs?”
He shrugged his shoulders and lengthened his stride. The thought of hot coffee and an omelette sizzling in the pan made his mouth water. Nonetheless, he wisely passed up the isolated farmhouses, bright with chickens, the farmers’ wives in white bonnets, and the red fireplaces where the cooking pot hung from the hook of the hearth crane. Around seven o’clock he passed through a large village and stopped at the last house where COEUVRE, RETAILER lodged travelers on foot or horseback and offered to cook “the best food in the world.” On seeing him, a young woman, with her hair in a braided bun, set her child down on the ground and wiped her hands. Pierre Lasnier sat down.
“I suppose you want a bottle of wine. White or red?”
Pierre Lasnier pounded the table, as he had seen the peasants in the movies do.
“White! Do you have any bacon?”
“Bacon? Yes.”
“And eggs?”
“I haven’t been out to gather them yet,” she said, annoyed. “And at the price . . .”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got money. Enough to treat myself to a nice big omelette!”
The young woman brought a bottle of wine, a dull little glass with thick sides, and inspected Pierre Lasnier uncertainly. He was dirty, but refined, and his overall appearance lacked the aggressive mystery, the unbreachable indifference which marks the true vagabond.