The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette
From that phase, I relapsed once more into childhood, for a feminine creature has to make several attempts before it finally hatches out. I reveled in being a Plain Jane, with my hair in pigtails and straight wisps straggling over my cheeks. I gladly renounced all my finery in favor of my old school pinafores with their pockets stuffed with nuts and string and chocolate. Paths edged with brambles, clumps of bull-rushes, licorice “shoelaces,” cats—in short, everything I still love to this day—became dear to me again. There are no words to hymn such times in one’s life, no clear memories to illuminate them; looking back on them, I can only compare them to the depths of blissful sleep. The smell of haymaking sometimes brings them back to me, perhaps because, suddenly tired, as growing creatures are, I would drop for an hour into a dreamless sleep among the new-mown hay.
It was at this point there occurred the episode known for long afterward as “the Hervouët will affair.” Old Monsieur Hervouët died and no will could be found. The provinces have always been rich in fantastic figures. Somewhere, under old tiled roofs, yellow with lichen, in icy drawing rooms and dining rooms dedicated to eternal shade, on waxed floors strewn with death traps of knitted rugs, in kitchen-garden paths between the hard-headed cabbages and the curly parsley, queer characters are always to be found. A little town or a village prides itself on possessing a mystery. My own village acknowledged placidly, even respectfully, the rights of young Gatreau to rave unmolested. This admirable example of a romantic madman, a wooden cigar between his lips, was always wildly tossing his streaming black curls and staring fixedly at young girls with his long, Arab eyes. A voluntary recluse used to nod good morning through a windowpane and passers would say of her admiringly: “That makes twenty-two years since Madame Sibile left her room! My mother used to see her there, just as you see her now. And, you know, there’s nothing the matter with her. In one way, it’s a fine life!”
But Sido used to hurry her quick step and pull me along when we passed level with the aquarium that housed the lady who had not gone out for twenty-two years. Behind her clear glass pane the prisoner would be smiling. She always wore a linen cap; sometimes her little yellow hand held a cup. A sure instinct for what is horrible and prohibited made Sido turn away from that ground-floor window and that bobbing head. But the sadism of childhood made me ask her endless questions.
“How old do you think she is, Madame Sibile? At night does she sleep by the window in her armchair? Do they undress her? Do they wash her? And how does she go to the lavatory?”
Sido would start as if she had been stung.
“Be quiet. I forbid you to think about those things.”
Monsieur Hervouët had never passed for one of those eccentrics to whom a market town extends its slightly derisive protection. For sixty years he had been well-off and ill dressed, first a “big catch” to marry, then a big catch married. Left a widower, he had remarried. His second wife was a former postmistress, thin and full of fire.
When she struck her breastbone, exclaiming, “That’s where I can feel it burning!” her Spanish eyes seemed to make the person she was talking to responsible for this unquenchable ardor. “I am not easily frightened,” my father used to say; “but heaven preserve me from being left alone with Mademoiselle Matheix!”
After his second marriage, Monsieur Hervouët no longer appeared in public. As he never left his home, no one knew exactly when he developed the gastric trouble that was to carry him off. He was a man dressed, in all weathers, in black, including a cap with earflaps. Smothered in fleecy white hair and a beard like cotton wool, he looked like an apple tree attacked by woolly aphis. High walls and a gateway that was nearly always closed protected his second season of conjugal bliss. In summer a single rosebush clothed three sides of his one-storied house and the thick fringe of wisteria on the crest of the wall provided food for the first bees. But we had never heard anyone say that Monsieur Hervouët was fond of flowers, and if we now and then caught sight of his black figure pacing to and fro under the pendants of the wisteria and the showering roses, he struck us as being neither responsible for nor interested in all this wealth of blossom.
When Mademoiselle Matheix became Madame Hervouët, the ex-postmistress lost none of her resemblance to a black-and-yellow wasp. With her sallow skin, her squeezed-in waist, her fine, inscrutable eyes, and her mass of dark hair, touched with white and restrained in a knot on the nape of her neck, she showed no surprise at being promoted to middle-class luxury. She appeared to be fond of gardening. Sido, the impartial, thought it only fair to show some interest in her; she lent her books, and in exchange accepted cuttings and also roots of tree violets whose flowers were almost black and whose stem grew naked out of the ground like the trunk of a tiny palm tree. To me, Madame Hervouët-Matheix was an anything but sympathetic figure. I was vaguely scandalized that when making some assertions of irreproachable banality, she did so in a tone of passionate and plaintive supplication.
“What do you expect?” said my mother. “She’s an old maid.”
“But, Mamma, she’s married!”
“Do you really imagine,” retorted Sido acidly, “people stop being old maids for a little thing like that?”
One day, my father, returning from the daily “round of the town,” by which this man who had lost one leg kept himself fit, said to my mother: “A piece of news! The Hervouët relatives are attacking the widow.”
“No!”
“And going all out for her, too! People are saying the grounds of the accusation are extremely serious.”
“A new Lafarge case?”
“You’re demanding a lot,” said my father.
I thrust my sharp little mug between my two parents.
“What’s that, the Lafarge case?”
“A horrible business between husband and wife. There’s never been a period without one. A famous poisoning case.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed excitedly. “What a piece of luck!”
Sido gave me a look that utterly renounced me.
“There you are,” she muttered. “That’s what they’re all like at that age . . . A girl ought never to be fifteen.”
“Sido, are you listening to me or not?” broke in my father. “The relatives, put up to it by a niece of Hervouët’s, are claiming that Hervouët didn’t die intestate and that his wife has destroyed the will.”
“In that case,” observed Sido, “you could bring an action against all widowers and all widows of intestates.”
“No,” retorted my father, “men who have children don’t need to make a will. The flames of Hervouët’s lady can only have scorched Hervouët from the waist up since . . .”
“Colette,” my mother said to him severely, indicating me with a look.
“Well,” my father went on. “So there she is in a nice pickle. Hervouët’s niece says she saw the will, yes, saw it with her very own eyes. She can even describe it. A big envelope, five seals of green wax with gold flecks in it . . .”
“Fancy that!” I said innocently.
“. . . and on the front of it, the instructions: ‘To be opened after my death in the presence of my solicitor, Monsieur Hourblin or his successor.’”
“And suppose the niece is lying?” I ventured to ask.
“And suppose Hervouët changed his mind and destroyed his will?” suggested Sido. “He was perfectly free to do so, I presume?”
“There you go, the two of you! Already siding with the bull against the bullfighter!” cried my father.
“Exactly,” said my mother. “Bullfighters are usually men with fat buttocks and that’s enough to put me against them!”
“Let’s get back to the point,” said my father. “Hervoüet’s niece has a husband, a decidedly sinister gentleman by the name of Pellepuits.”
I soon got tired of listening. On the evidence of such words as “The relatives are attacking the widow!” I had hoped for bloodshed and foul play and all I heard was bits of gibberish such as “disposable portion of estate,” “holo
All the same, my curiosity was reawakened when Monsieur Hervoüet’s widow paid us a call. Her little mantle of imitation Chantilly lace worn over hock-bottle shoulders, her black mittens from which protruded unusually thick, almost opaque nails, the luxuriance of her black-and-white hair, a big black taffeta pocket suspended from her belt that dangled over the skirt of her mourning, her “houri eyes,” as she called them; all these details, which I seemed to be seeing for the first time, took on a new, sinister significance.
Sido received the widow graciously, took her into the garden, and offered her a thimbleful of Frontignan and a wedge of homemade cake. The June afternoon buzzed over the garden, russet caterpillars dropped about us from the walnut tree, not a cloud floated in the sky. My mother’s pretty voice and Madame Hervouët’s imploring one exchanged tranquil remarks; as usual, they talked about nothing but salpiglossis, gladiolus, and the misdemeanors of servants. Then the visitor rose to go and my mother escorted her. “If you don’t mind,” said Madame Hervouët, “I’ll come over in a day or two and borrow some books; I’m so lonely.”
“Would you like to take them now?” suggested Sido.
“No, no, there’s no hurry. Besides, I’ve noted down the titles of some adventure stories. Goodbye for the time being, and thank you.”
As she said this, Madame Hervouët, instead of taking the path that led to the house, took the one that circled the lawn and walked twice around the plot of grass.
“Good gracious, whatever am I doing? Do forgive me.”
She allowed herself a modest laugh and eventually reached the hall, where she groped too high and to the left of the two sides of the folding door for a latch she had twenty times found on the right. My mother opened the front door for her and, out of politeness, stood for a moment at the top of the steps. We watched Madame Hervouët go off, keeping at first very close to the house, then crossing the road very hurriedly, picking up her skirts as if she were fording a river.
My mother shut the door again and saw that I had followed her.
“She is lost,” she said.
“Who? Madame Hervouët? Why do you say that? How d’you mean, lost?”
Sido shrugged her shoulders.
“I’ve no idea. It’s just my impression. Keep that to yourself.”
I kept silence faithfully. This was all the easier, as continuing my series of metamorphoses like a grub, I had entered a new phase—the “enlightened bibliophile”—and I forgot Madame Hervouët in a grand turnout of my stationery shop. A few days later, I was installing Jules Verne between Les Fleurs animées and a relief atlas when Madame Hervouët appeared on the scene without the bell having warned me. For we left the front door open nearly all day so that our dog Domino could go in and out.
“How nice of a big girl like you to tidy up the bookshelves,” exclaimed the visitor. “What books are you going to lend me today?”
When Madame Hervouët raised her voice, I clenched my teeth and screwed up my eyes very small.
“Jules Verne,” she read, in a plaintive voice. “You can’t read him twice. Once you know the secret, it’s finished.”
“There’s Balzac up there, on the big shelves,” I said, pointing to them.
“He’s very heavy going,” said Madame Hervouët.
Balzac, heavy going? Balzac, my cradle, my enchanted forest, my voyage of discovery? Amazed, I looked up at the tall dark woman, a head taller than myself. She was toying with a cut rose and staring into space. Her features expressed nothing which could be remotely connected with opinions on literature. She became aware I was gazing at her and pretended to be interested in my writer’s equipment.
“It’s charming. What a splendid collection!”
Her mouth had grown older in the last week. She remained stooping over my relics, handling this one and that. Then she straightened herself up with a start.
“But isn’t your dear mother anywhere about? I’d like to see her.”
Only too glad to move, to get away from this “lost” lady, I rushed wildly out into the garden, calling “Mamma!” as if I were shouting “Fire!”
“She took a few books away with her,” Sido told me when we were alone. “But I could positively swear she didn’t even glance at their titles.”
The rest of the “Hervouët affair” is linked, in my memory, with a vague general commotion, a kind of romantic blur. My clearest recollection of it comes to me through Sido, thanks to the extraordinary “presence” I still have of the sound of her voice. Her stories, her conversations with my father, the intolerant way she had of arguing and refuting, those are the things that riveted a sordid provincial drama in my mind.
One day, shortly after Madame Hervouët’s last visit, the entire district was exclaiming “The will’s been found!” and describing the big envelope with five seals that the widow had just deposited in Monsieur Hourblin’s study. At once uneasy and triumphant, the Pellepuits-Hervouët couple and another lot, the Hervouët-Guillamats, appeared, along with the widow, at the lawyer’s office. There, Madame Hervouët, all by herself, faced up to the solid, pitiless group, to what Sido called those “gaping, legacy-hunting sharks.” “It seems,” my mother said, telling the story, “that she smelled of brandy.” At this point, my mother’s voice is superseded by the hunchback’s voice of Julia Vincent, a woman who went out ironing by the day and came to us once a week. For I don’t know how many consecutive Fridays, I pressed Julia till I wrung out of her all she knew. The precise sound of that nasal voice, squeezed between the throat, the hump, and the hollow, deformed chest, was a delight to me.
“The man as was most afeared was the lawyer. To begin with, he’s not a tall man, not half so tall as that woman. She, all dressed in black she was, and her veil falling down in front right to her feet. Then the lawyer picked up the envelope, big as that it was” (Julia unfolded one of my father’s vast handkerchiefs) “and he passed it just as it was to the nephews so they could recognize the seals.”
“But you weren’t there, Julia, were you?”
“No, it was Monsieur Hourblin’s junior clerk who was watching through the keyhole. One of the nephews said a word or two. Then Madame Hervouët stared at him like a duchess. The lawyer coughed, ahem, ahem, he broke the seals, and he read it out.”
In my recollection, it is sometimes Sido talking, sometimes some scandalmonger eager to gossip about the Hervouët affair. Sometimes it seems too that some illustrator, such as Bertall or Tony Johannot, has actually etched a picture for me of the tall, thin woman who never withdrew her Spanish eyes from the group of heirs-at-law and kept licking her lip to taste the marc brandy she had gulped down to give herself courage.
So Monsieur Hourblin read out the will. But after the first lines, the document began to shake in his hands and he broke off, with an apology, to wipe his glasses. He resumed his reading and went right through to the end. Although the testator declared himself to be “sound in body and mind,” the will was nothing but a tissue of absurdities, among others, the acknowledgment of a debt of two million francs contracted to Louise-Léonie-Alberte Matheix, beloved spouse of Clovis-Edme Hervouët.
The reading finished in silence and not one voice was raised from the block of silent heirs.
“It seems,” said Sido, “that, after the reading, the silence was such you could hear the wasps buzzing in the vine arbor outside the window. The Pellepuits and the various Guillamats did nothing but stare at Madame Hervouët, without stirring a finger. Why aren’t cupidity and avarice possessed of second sight? It was a female Guillamat, less stupid than the others, who said afterward that, before anyone had spoken, Madame Hervouët began to make peculiar movements with her neck, like a hen that’s swallowed a hairy caterpillar.
The story of the last scene of that meeting spread like wildfire through the streets, through people’s homes, through the cafés, through the fairgrounds. Monsieur Hourblin had been the first to speak above the vibrating hum of the wasps.
A loud yelping interrupted him. Before him, before the heirs, there was no longer any Widow Hervouët but a somber Fury whirling around and stamping her feet, a kind of black dervish, lacerating herself, muttering, and shrieking. To her admissions of forgery, the crazy woman added others, so rich in the names of vegetable poisons, such as buck-thorn and hemlock, that the lawyer, in consternation, exclaimed naïvely: “Stop, my poor good lady, you’re telling us far more than anyone has asked you to!”
A lunatic asylum engulfed the madwoman, and if the Hervouët affair persisted in some memories, at least, there was no “Hervouët case” at the assizes.
“Why, Mamma?” I asked.
“Mad people aren’t tried. Or else they’d have to have judges who were mad too. That wouldn’t be a bad idea, when you come to think of it . . .”
To pursue her train of thought better, she dropped the task with which her hands were busy; graceful hands that she took no care of. Perhaps, that particular day, she was shelling haricot beans. Or else, with her little finger stuck in the air, she was coating my father’s crutch with black varnish . . .
“Yes, judges who would be able to assess the element of calculation in madness, who could sift out the hidden grain of lucidity, of deliberate fraud.”
The moralist who was raining these unexpected conclusions on a fifteen-year-old head was encased in a blue gardener’s apron, far too big for her, that made her look quite plump. Her gray gaze, terribly direct, fixed me now through her spectacles, now over the top of them. But in spite of the apron, the rolled-up sleeves, the sabots, and the haricot beans, she never looked humble or common.
“What I do blame Madame Hervouët for,” Sido went on, “is her megalomania. Folie de grandeur is the source of any number of crimes. Nothing exasperates me more than the imbecile who imagines he’s capable of planning and executing a crime without being punished for it. Don’t you agree it’s Madame Hervouët’s stupidity that makes her case so sickening? Poisoning poor old Hervouët with extremely bitter herbal concoctions, right, that wasn’t difficult. Inept murderer, stupid victim, it’s tit for tat. But to try and imitate a handwriting without having the slightest gift for forgery, to trust to a special, rare kind of sealing wax, what petty ruses, great heavens, what fatuous conceit!”