Ah, how I dislike seeing myself with this discouraged mouth and these slack shoulders, my whole gloomy body crooked as it rests on one leg! . . .
Look at that bedraggled hair which has lost its curl, and which I’ll presently have to brush for ages to restore its shiny beaver color.
Look at those eyes, which retain a blue pencil ring, and those nails, on which the red polish has left an irregular line . . . I won’t get away with less than fifty long minutes of bathing and grooming . . . It’s already one . . . What am I waiting for?
A little whiplash, nice and smart, to make the headstrong animal get moving again . . . But no one will give it to me, since . . . since I’m all alone!
How evident it is, in this tall frame that embraces my image, that by now I’ve grown accustomed to living alone!
For an indifferent caller, for a tradesman, even for my chambermaid Blandine, I’d straighten up that drooping neck, that hip off at an angle, I’d clasp these empty hands together . . . But tonight I’m so alone . . .
Alone!
I really seem to be pitying myself for it! “If you live all alone,” Brague has told me, “it’s because you’re willing to, right?”
Of course I’m “willing to,” and I even just plain want to.
Only, there it is . . . There are some days when solitude, for a person of my age, is an intoxicating wine that makes you drunk with freedom, other days when it’s a bitter tonic, and still other days when it’s a poison that makes you bang your head on the wall.
Tonight, I’d really like not to choose. I’d like to be satisfied with hesitating, with being unable to tell whether the shiver that will come over me as I slip between my cold sheets will be one of fear or one of comfort.
Alone . . . and for so long.
Because I’m now yielding to the habit of soliloquizing, of talking to the dog, to the fire, to my reflection . . . It’s a mania that befalls hermits and long-time prisoners; but I am free . . . And if I talk silently to myself, it’s out of a writer’s need to give his thoughts a rhythm and a form.
Before me, in the mirror, in the mysterious reflected bedroom, I see the image of “a woman of letters who has gone to the dogs.”
People also say of me that “I’m in the theater,” but they never call me an actress.
Why?
It’s a subtle nuance, a polite refusal, on the part of the public and my friends themselves, to assign me a rank in this career which I have chosen, after all . . .
A woman of letters who has gone to the dogs: that’s what I must remain for everyone, since I no longer write and deny myself the pleasure and luxury of writing . . .
To write!
To be able to write!
It means that lengthy reverie over the blank page, that unconscious scribbling, the antics of the pen as it makes circles around an ink blot, as it nibbles away at an incompleted word, scratches it out, makes it bristle with little arrows, adorns it with antennae and legs until it loses its legible appearance as a word and becomes metamorphosed into a fantasy insect and flies away like a fairy butterfly . . .
To write . . . To have your eyes caught up, hypnotized by the reflection of the window in the silver inkwell, to feel that godlike fever rising to your cheeks, your forehead, while a blissful death freezes the writing hand on the paper.
To write also means to forget what time it is; it means that lazy spell in the hollow of the couch, the riot of inventiveness that leaves you aching all over and mentally numb, but already rewarded: the bearer of treasures that you slowly unload onto the virgin sheet of paper, in the small ring of light that is sheltered beneath the lamp . . .
To write!
To pour out all your sincerest feelings rabidly onto the tempting paper, so quickly, so quickly that your hand sometimes fights back and jibs, overtaxed by the impatient god who guides it . . . and to discover, next day, instead of the golden bough that broke into miraculous blossom in a shining hour, a dry bramble branch, an aborted flower . . .
To write!
The pleasure and pain of those with time on their hands!
To write! . . .
Every so often, I feel the need, as strong as thirst in summertime, to note down my thoughts, to describe what I observe . . . I take up my pen anew to begin that dangerous, disappointing game, to seize and hold the iridescent, elusive, thrilling adjective with my flexible double nib . . . It’s only a passing fit, the itch from a scar . . .
It takes too much time to write!
And then, I’m no Balzac . . . The fragile story that I’m constructing crumbles when the tradesman rings, when the shoemaker presents his bill, when the attorney phones, or the trial lawyer, when the theatrical agent summons me to his office for “a private performance in the home of people who are of the finest quality but who aren’t accustomed to pay high fees” . . .
Now, ever since I’ve been living alone, it’s been necessary, first to live, then to get a divorce, and then to go on living . . .
All of that calls for an incredible amount of activity and obstinacy . . .
And where does it get you?
Is there no other haven for me than this commonplace bedroom furnished with cheap imitation of Louis XVI; any other resting place than this impenetrable mirror which I run up against, forehead to forehead? . . .
Tomorrow is Sunday: matinee and evening performances at the Empyree-Clichy.
It’s already two A.M.! . . . It’s time for bed, for a woman of letters who’s gone to the dogs.
“SHAKE A LEG! Come on, shake a leg!
Jadin hasn’t showed up!”
“What do you mean, hasn’t showed up?
Is she sick?”
“Sick? Yes—from whooping it up! . . .
And it affects us: we go on twenty minutes sooner!”
The mime Brague has just left his cell as I was walking by, frightening in his khaki-colored foundation makeup; and I run to my dressing room, alarmed at the thought that, for the first time in my life, I might be late . . .
Jadin hasn’t showed up.
I rush, trembling with nerves.
Because our neighborhood audience doesn’t fool around, especially at Sunday matinees!
As our stage manager (in his own way an animal tamer) says, if we let it “go hungry” for five minutes between two acts, the howls, cigarette butts, and orange peels will go off spontaneously.
Jadin hasn’t showed up . . . It was only to be expected, one day or another.
Jadin is a young songstress, so green in vaudeville that she hasn’t had time yet to bleach her chestnut hair; she landed from the slums at the edge of town onto the stage in one bound, flabbergasted to find herself earning two hundred ten francs a month for singing.