The cheerful reception and the tempered light brighten my heart as I emerge from the smelly fog, and I exclaim in a gush of affectionate happiness:
“Hello!
I’m going on tour, you know!”
“On tour?
How come? When?”
Without dwelling on the element of curtness and inquisition that my admirer’s tone reveals in spite of himself, I roll up my gloves and remove my hat.
“I’ll tell you everything at dinner.
Both of you must stay: it’s practically a farewell dinner, already! . . .
Be calm, continue your little game. I’ll send Blandine out for some cutlets and I’ll put on a robe: I’m so tired!”
When I get back, lost in the folds of a pink flannel kimono, I find that both of them, Hamond and Dufferein-Chautel, are wearing that excessively nonchalant look of people who have hatched some scheme . . . what does it matter?
Tonight my admirer is reaping the benefit of an optimism that embraces all of nature: in order to drink to the tour, I invite him to offer us the nearby grocer’s Saint-Marceaux, and he dashes off hatless, returning with two bottles under his arms . . .
Restless and a little tipsy, I give my admirer a long, defenseless look he has never seen on my face.
I laugh out loud with a laugh he’s never heard from me, I throw my wide kimono sleeve back on my shoulder, revealing an arm that’s “the color of banana pulp,” as he puts it . . . I feel obliging, kindly; for two cents I’d hold out my cheek to him: what does it matter?
I’m leaving!
I won’t see that fellow again!
Forty days?
No doubt we’ll all be dead before they’re over!
Poor admirer, how mean I’ve been to him, after all! . . .
I find him affable, clean, well groomed, prepossessing, like a man I’ll never see again!
Because when I get back, I’ll have forgotten him, and he’ll have forgotten me, too . . . for little Jadin, or for some other woman . . . Probably little Jadin.
“What do you say? That little Jadin!”
I’ve blurted out that exclamation aloud, finding it immensely funny.
My admirer, who’s having trouble laughing tonight, looks at me, knitting up his charcoal burner’s eyebrows:
“What about that little Jadin?”
“You found her to your liking the other night, didn’t you? At the Emp’-Clich’?”
Intrigued, Dufferein-Chautel leans forward.
His face moves into the full light of the lamp, and I can make out the exact shade of his brown irises, tawny and speckled as certain agates from the Dauphine . . .
“You were in the audience?
I didn’t see you!”
I empty my wineglass before replying mysteriously:
“Ah! There, you see? . . .”
“So! You were there? . . .
Yes, little Jadin is nice.
You know her?
I find her very nice.”
“More than me?”
I deserved to have him reply to that thoughtless, idiotic phrase, so unworthy of me, in some other way than by an astonished silence.
I’d like to kick myself! . . . Bah, what does it matter?
I’m leaving! . . .
I tell them my itinerary: all over France, but only the big cities! Posters as if for . . . for Madame Otero!
And the lovely regions I’ll see, and the sunshine I’ll find in the south, and . . . and . . .
The champagne—it doesn’t take more than three glasses!—finally makes my merry chatter sluggish.
Speaking, what an outlay of energy for a woman who keeps mute for days at a time! . . .
My two friends are smoking now, and they’re growing more and more distant behind their curtain of smoke . . .
How far away I am! I’m already gone, diffused, safe from harm on my journey . . . Their voices become muffled, move off, mingled with the rumble of trains, whistles, the lulling surge of an imaginary orchestra . . . Oh, how sweet it is to depart, how sweet this slumber, which carries me off to some invisible shore! . . .
“What?
Six o’clock?
Good, thanks . . . Oh, it’s you?”
I was sleeping and dreaming of my journey: a bellhop was pounding at the door in my dream, shouting that it was six o’clock . . . And I find myself sitting up with a start in the hollow of my old couch, on which my weariness and my slight intoxication knocked me out.
Standing opposite me, the Big Ninny is blocking the room to its full height.