Her fortune squandered by her husband, her brother cadging from her, her attorney robbing her, and her servants stealing from her, Margot has built herself a fortress of funereal calm, consisting of incurable kindness and silent contempt.
An old habit of exploitation leads those around her to go on diminishing her annuity income, and she lets it happen, except that she sometimes flies into a sudden rage and fires her cook for gypping her out of ten francs too flagrantly.
“I consent to their robbing me,” Margot exclaims, “but I want them to show me some consideration!”
Then, for many days, she relapses into her contempt for everyone.
While I was married, I hardly knew Margot, who was always aloof, gentle, and incommunicative.
In her reserve, she never sought my confidence.
Only on the day when my breaking off with Adolphe looked like a certainty did she politely show my astonished husband the door of her home, never to see him again.
Then I knew I had an ally, friend, and supporter in Margot, since it’s she who supplies the three hundred francs a month that stand between me and destitution.
“Take it, go ahead!” Margot had said to me. “You aren’t causing me any loss.
It’s the ten francs a day that Adolphe always cheated me out of!”
It’s certainly not at Margot’s that I’d find consolation, or that healthful cheerfulness prescribed for me like a diet.
But at least Margot loves me after her fashion, her discouraged and discouraging fashion, while she predicts the most awful doom for me:
“You, my girl,” she said to me only today, “will be lucky if you don’t get caught up again in some love affair with a man like Adolphe.
You were born to be devoured, like me.
I’m a fine one to be preaching to you! Instead of being a cautious, ‘burnt child,’ you’ll head right back to the fire, take my word for it!
You’re one of those women for whom one Adolphe isn’t enough of an experience!”
“But really, Margot, you’re too much!
Every time, you accuse me of the same thing!” I laughingly reproached her. “
‘You’re this, you’re that, you’re one of those women who, you’re one of those women whom . . . ’ At least wait until I’ve sinned, that will be the time to get angry with me!”
Margot gave me one of those looks which make her seem ten feet tall, which seem to be coming from such a height!
“I’m not angry with you, my girl.
Nor will be I more angry with you after you’ve sinned, as you put it.
Only, you’ll have a lot of trouble keeping yourself from committing the folly, because there’s only one: starting over again . . . I know what I’m talking about . . . And, besides,” she adds with a peculiar smile, “I didn’t have senses! . . . ”
“Then what should I do, Margot?
What do you find fault with in the life I’m leading?
Should I shut myself up like you for fear of a worse disaster and, like you, love only little short-haired Brabancon terriers?”
“Make sure you don’t!” Margot exclaimed with childish urgency. “Little Brabancon terriers!
There’s nothing so ill-natured!
There you see an animal,” she said, pointing to a little russet female similar to a shorn squirrel, “an animal that I tended for two weeks while she had bronchitis.
When I take the liberty of leaving her at home alone for an hour, the little monster pretends she doesn’t recognize me and growls at my heels as if I were a hobo! . . .
But, aside from that, child, are you feeling all right?”
“I’m very well, Margot, thanks.”
“Your tongue? . . . The whites of your eyes? . . . Your pulse? . . . ”
She turned up my eyelids, she squeezed my wrist with a sure, professional hand, exactly as she’d do with a little Brabancon.
Because Margot and I know the value of good health and the sorrow of losing it.
You manage all right to live alone, you get used to it; but to lie ill, alone and feverish, coughing all the endless night, wobbling over to the window on buckling legs when rain is beating at the panes, and then returning to your rumpled, sagging bed—alone, alone, alone! . . .
For a few days last year I knew the horror of being a bedridden woman with mild delirium, afraid, in her semilucid mind, of dying slowly, far from everyone, forgotten . . . Since then, following Margot’s example, I’ve been taking care of myself and worrying about my bowels, my throat, my stomach, and my skin with the slightly neurotic stringency of a landowner concerned for his estate . . . Today I’m thinking about Margot’s odd words.
She “didn’t have senses . . . ” What about me?
My senses . . . It’s true. I feel as if I hadn’t thought about them for quite some time.
The “matter of the senses” . . . Margot seems to think it’s important.
Both the best and the worst literature tries to teach me that every other voice falls silent when that of the senses has spoken.
What is one to believe?
Brague once said to me, speaking like a doctor:
“You know, your way of living isn’t healthful!” And, like Margot, he added: “Anyway, it will happen to you exactly as it happens to all our pals. Remember what I’m telling you!”
I don’t like to think about it.
Brague is fond of making pronouncements and playing the infallible prophet . . . It doesn’t mean a thing . . . All the same, I don’t like to think about it.
In the vaudeville house, without the least pretense of prudishness, I join in conversations about “the matter of the senses” with a statistical and surgical preciseness, and I take the same detached and respectful interest in it as if I were reading in a paper about the ravages of the plague in Asia.
I’m willing to be apprehensive, but I’d rather remain only half-convinced.
All the same, I don’t much like thinking about it . . .
And then, there’s that man—the Big Ninny—who’s intentionally living in my shadow and walking in my footsteps, with the obstinacy of a dog . . .