“You are going?”
“I am afraid I must. I have an appointment.”
“Ah, you resent my speaking to you?”
“No, dear, but--”
“But--?”
“I am afraid I cannot quite agree with you.”
Her face hardened. I made an effort.
“_Belle-mère_, I am doing no wrong. Surely you believe that. These men
are nothing to me, not one of them.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You love no one?” she asked.
“No.”
“That too, is just as I thought.”
“You wouldn’t mind that, I suppose?”
“Mind it? How should I? How would it concern me?”
I was a little taken aback. “It only matters then what I seem to do,
not what I really do?”
She smiled, rather sarcastically, I thought. “Put it that way if you
like, my child.”
“But, _belle-mère_, don’t you really understand at all, that I am
trying to be happy and keep my self-respect?”
She eyed me a moment strangely, then dropped her head.
“We will never understand each other,” she said at last. “We won’t
discuss things any more. It leads to nothing.”
But Claire felt that she, too, must make an attempt to bring me to
reason. She attacked me on the subject of Geneviève. There she was
clever. Was I not neglecting my child a little? No, I replied I was
not. I was out so much, I seemed to take so little interest in her
education. At this I flared up.
“Her education, my dear, is as you know, not in my hands. Her father
has made clear his wishes on that subject. Her mind is confided to
the keeping of Monseigneur de Grimont and you know what he is doing
with it better than I do. What with her prayers, her masses and her
confessions, her priestly tutors who instructed her in Latin and Greek,
Italian and Spanish, and the good sisters who teach her to embroider
altar pieces and to believe every ridiculous miracle in the lives of
the saints, such healthy heathen interests as I can cultivate in her
little ecstatic soul have small chance of flourishing.”
“But Jane, surely she has her dancing, her riding, her music?”
“Yes, of course, she has everything, everything, but no time for her
mother. Her days are as full as a time table. Try as I may, I can
never get more than an hour a day with her. How then am I to make her
my life’s occupation? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it? You said I
neglected her.”
“What I meant was that you seem to have forgotten us all, Geneviève
included, and to have forgotten what we and therefore what she must
stand for in society.”
“On the contrary.”
“You mean--?”
“I mean that I constantly think of it, but perhaps not just as you do.”
“Well, if you want your daughter to take Clémentine as a pattern.”
“I don’t,” and then added with deliberate wickedness, “I wouldn’t have
poor little Jinny attempt anything so impossible.”
“You admire her so much?”
“I do.”
“But she’s grotesque. She goes in for politicians and for journalists.”
“I adore her.”
“She’s shameless--her affairs--”
I cut her short. “I know nothing about her affairs. What I know is that
she has a generous soul, a warm heart and the most brilliant mind in
Paris. No other woman in Paris can touch her for brains.”
Claire lifted her eyebrows. I saw that she washed her hands of me.
At the moment I was glad of it. As for Clémentine, she cared nothing
for what Claire or any one else thought of her. She was a law unto
herself. Her love affairs, of which I knew more than I admitted, were
as necessary to her as her meals. She must have food, and she attached
no great importance to it. An artistic find, an amusing trip or an
exciting debate in the Chamber of Deputies, would make her forget with
equal ease her lunch or a sentimental rendezvous. Her relations with
men didn’t seem to me to be any of my business. There was a certain
recklessness there that I didn’t understand. I left it at that. It was
Fan who told me about Clémentine’s marriage.
“My dear, her husband had unnatural tastes. He kicked her downstairs
a month after the wedding. She can never have any children, and she
hasn’t spoken to him since. Also, she is said to have said that she
would never again have anything to do with a man of her own world. If
she did, well, she has kept her word. Her mother stopped her getting
her marriage annulled. Clémentine never got over that. She’s at war
with the whole tribe of her relations, but of course she can’t cut
loose from them for she hasn’t a son, and anyhow one doesn’t in France.
So her revenge is to do just those things that most irritate them.
They wouldn’t mind a bit how many lovers she had if she would choose
them from her own class, and preserve the usual appearances. What they
can’t bear is her going about with men whose fathers made boots or
sold pigs. And in justice to them you should remember that these men’s
grandfathers cut off their own grandfather’s heads.”
“They prefer, I suppose, a person like Bianca.”
“Of course, a million times.”
“It’s nothing to Clémentine’s credit then that she’s a true friend and
incapable of grabbing a man from another woman.”
“No, as long as she dresses like a futurist picture, and carries paper
bags through the streets and dines with Ludovic at Voisin’s, she’s a
horrid thorn in their sides.”
“Well, I’m sorry, because you know I don’t propose to stop going about
with her.”
“Lord, no, why should you? You certainly deserve a bit of fun. Come to
the Mouse Trap tomorrow night. We’ve a supper party after the Russian
Ballet.”
But I knew what that meant, a troup of theatrical people, and every one
drunk by morning, so I declined. I saw a good deal of Fan these days,
but she had certain friends I _couldn’t_ see. It didn’t amuse me to
watch women get tipsy. Those Montmartre parties depressed me horribly.
And I felt sure of Clémentine and her band on this point. It was just
one of the admirable things about them that they could be so daringly
gay and never verge on the rowdy. I had seen her administer a snub to
a hiccoughing youth. She could be terrible when she was displeased,
and whatever one said of her, for that matter whatever she herself
felt, no one could get away from the fact that she was as proud a lady
as any in France, and perfectly conscious of her privilege of caste.
It was just this consciousness of her lineage, I imagined, that gave
her such a sense of security. She knew that she could do anything she
chose and be none the less privileged for it, and actually none the
worse. If she touched pitch she knew it wouldn’t stick to her fingers.
If she dipped into Bohemia, she did so knowing that she could never be
said to belong there. There was always behind her a solid phalanx of
relatives who would never disown her however much they disapproved.
Always in her maddest escapades there were the towers of the family
castle looming behind her. They cast an august shadow. She might dress
like an artist’s model, never would she be taken for one. She was safe,
perfectly safe and she knew it, and so did every one else.
But with me, as Aunt Clothilde pointed out, it was different.
“There’s nothing to prove what you are but the way you behave, my poor
Jane. If Clem took it into her head to play at being a barmaid, the
de Joignys and all the rest of them would wring their hands and call
it a scandalous idiocy, but if you did the same thing they’d say,
‘Of course, it’s quite natural, she probably was a barmaid in her
own country,’ and they wouldn’t wring their hands at all, they’d be
mightily pleased.”
“So they think my associating with Ludovic is proof of a low mind?”
“Well, what do you find in that old bourgeois?”
“I find a gold mine.”
“A gold mine of what?”
“Information, ideas.”
“Humph!”
“But it’s true, Aunt, he is educating me. He gives me books,
philosophy, history, all sorts of books, then we discuss them.”
“Just like going to school, eh?”
“Very much like that.”
“And it doesn’t bore you?”
“On the contrary.”
“Well, no one will ever believe you. If Philibert comes back, he
certainly won’t.”
She broke off and looked at me closely.
“Ah ha, you still care for him, then?”
“No, no, how could I, I mean how could he? It’s impossible that he
should return now, surely.”
A week later I found a note from him on my breakfast tray, announcing
his return. He was installed in his own rooms in the west wing of the
house, and he would “present his duties” at the hour I chose to name.
And the post that same morning brought me a letter from Bianca. It
said--
“If you blame me for taking away your husband, it is stupid of you. I
did you a great service in doing so. Perhaps that was why I did it. I
can think of no other reason. For myself I regret it, but not for you.
I envy you. Bianca.”
My fingers trembled as I read this strange epistle, and I felt cold.
Actually--it seemed as if the room had gone cold as ice.