“No.
Are we doing the pantomime?”
“No pantomime, it’s too serious.
Your dances. And I’ll give them my Neurotic Pierrot.”
I stand up, sincerely frightened:
“My dances! But I can’t!
And, besides, I lost my music at Aix!
And, besides, the girl who accompanies me has moved . . . If we only had two days to get ready . . . ”
“No way!” says Brague, unruffled. “They had signed up Badet, and she’s sick.”
“That does it! That takes the cake!
To go on as a stopgap!
Play your Pierrot if you like, I’m not dancing!”
Brague lights a cigarette and drops two words:
“Five hundred.”
“For the two of us?”
“For you.
I get the same.”
Five hundred!
A fourth of my rent . . .
Brague smokes, doesn’t look at me; he knows I’ll accept.
“Obviously, for five hundred . . . What time?”
“Midnight, of course . . . Hurry up getting your music and hurry with everything, right?
So long. See you tonight . . . Oh yes, Jadin is back!”
I reopen the door he was already closing:
“You don’t tell me!
When?”
“Lest midnight, right after you left . . . What a puss on her! . . .
You’ll see her: she’s back singing at the dump . . . Seventeen hundred, you say? . . .
Terrific.
And dames on every floor!”
He departs, serious and raunchy.
An engagement . . . A private performance . . .
Those few words have the power to discourage me.
I don’t dare say so to Brague, but I admit it to myself as I look at my unhappy face in the mirror and feel the little shiver of cowardice running down my back . . .
To see them again . . .
Those whom I left abruptly, those who once called me “Madame Renee,” with the affectation of never calling me by my husband’s surname . . .
Those men—and those women!
The women who betrayed me with my husband, the men who knew he was unfaithful to me . . . The days are gone when I’d see in every woman a current or potential mistress of Adolphe’s, and men were never much of a threat to the enamored wife that I was.
But I’ve retained a stupid, superstitious fear of the salons where I may meet witnesses or accomplices of my past misfortune . . .
First of all, this private engagement ruins my lunch alone with Hamond, a painter already out of fashion, an old, loyal, weak friend who comes to dine on my pasta dishes from time to time . . . We don’t talk much; he rests his head, that of a sick Don Quixote, on the back of an easy chair, and after lunch we play the game of awakening each other’s sorrow.
He talks to me about Adolphe Taillandy, not to grieve me, but to recall a time when he, Hamond, was happy.
And I speak to him about his young, malicious wife, whom he married in a moment of madness, and who went off with some man or other four months later . . .
We indulge in melancholy afternoons that leave us exhausted, with bitter faces that have grown old, with mouths dry from repeating so many distressing things; and we swear we won’t begin again . . . The following Saturday, we’re back together at my table, pleased to see each other again, and impenitent: Hamond has recalled an untold story about Adolphe Taillandy and, to see my best friend sniff back his tears, I have dug out of a drawer a snapshot in which I am holding the arm of a little blonde Madame Hamond, as aggressive and erect as a snake balancing on its tail . . . But today our lunch isn’t a success.
And yet Hamond, merry though cold, has brought me some fine, dark December grapes, blue as plums, each one of which is a little wineskin full of liquid with no taste but sweetness—that damned private engagement casts a cloud over my whole day.
At fifteen minutes after midnight, Brague and I arrive at the building on the Avenue du Bois.
A fine town house! The people in it must be extravagantly bored . . . The imposing servant who shows us into the “drawing room reserved for performers” offers to help me take off my fur-lined cloak; I refuse harshly: does he imagine I’m going to wait till those ladies and gentlemen are good and ready, dressed as I am in four blue necklaces, a winged scarab, and a few yards of gauze?
Having much better manners than mine, the imposing servant doesn’t insist and he leaves us alone.
Brague stretches in front of a mirror; with his white makeup, in his loose Pierrot smock, he has become thin to the point of being insubstantial . . . He doesn’t like private performances, either.
Not that he misses the footlight barrier between himself and them as much as I do, but he doesn’t have much use for those he calls his salon “customers,” and he repays society spectators with a little of that malevolent indifference they show to us:
“Do you think,” asks Brague, handing me a little card, “that those damn people will ever get my name right? They call me