And Brague!
Oh, the expression on Brague’s face at our last rehearsal!
He greeted my arrival in Max’s car with his finest Pierrot grimace, but didn’t say anything yet.
He even displayed an unusual, undeserved courtesy, because that morning I was clumsy, absentminded, and quick to blush and apologize.
Finally he burst out:
“Scram!
Back to him!
Take your fill of him and don’t come back here until you’ve had it up to here! . . .”
The more I laughed, the more he thundered, like a little Asiatic devil:
“Chuckle, go on, chuckle!
If you could see what you look like!”
“What I look . . .!”
“Your puss looks greedy, as if it could never have enough!
Don’t raise your eyes to me, Messalina! . . .
Look at her,” he shouted, calling invisible gods to witness, “she shows those peepers in broad daylight!
And in the Dryad’s love scene, when I ask her to give it all she’s got, and then some, and to shed hot tears over it, she comes up with the little carafe of a girl taking First Communion!”
“Does it really show that much?” I asked Max, who was driving me home.
The same mirror that reflected my boastful “defeated” countenance the other night now frames a thin face with the wary smile of an affable fox.
Yet, some flame flickers back and forth over it, beautifying it, so to speak, with a troubled youthfulness . . .
And so I’ll confess everything to Margot: my lapse, my happiness, the name of the man I love . . . It isn’t easy for me.
Margot isn’t a woman who’ll say,
“I told you so,” but I think that, even though she’ll show no signs of it, I’m going to sadden and disappoint her.
“You’re a burnt child who’s returning to the fire!”
Yes, I’m returning to it, and so willingly! . . .
I find Margot irrevocably the same in the large studio where she sleeps, eats, and raises her Brabancon dogs.
Tall, erect, in a Russian blouse and a long black jacket, she is bending her pale face with its Roman cheeks, and her coarse gray hair cut short above her ears, over a basket in which a little yellow runt is stirring, a tiny dog in a flannel shirt, raising toward her its forehead as knobby as a bonze’s and its lovely, imploring squirrel’s eyes . . . Around me are yelping and fidgeting six impudent little animals which a whip crack sends racing back to their straw kennels.
“What, Margot, another Brabancon?
It’s an obsession!”
“Not at all!” says Margot, who sits down opposite me, cradling the sick animal on her lap. “I don’t like this poor little thing.”
“Was it given to you?”
“No, I bought it, naturally.
That will teach me never to visit the dogseller again, that old crook Hartmann.
If you had seen this Brabancon in his window, with her little sick rat’s face and her vertebrae jutting out like a rosary, and especially her eyes . . . You know, hardly anything touches me any more except the eyes of a dog for sale . . . So I bought her.
She’s half-croaked with enteritis; you can never see that at the dealer’s: they dope the dogs with cacodylic acid . . . Tell me, child, I haven’t seen you for some time: are you working?”
“Yes, Margot, I’m rehearsing . . .”
“I can tell; you’re tired out.”
With her friendly gesture she takes my chin, to tilt back my face and draw it nearer.
Upset, I shut my eyes . . .
“Yes, you’re tired out . . . You’ve gotten old,” she says in a deep tone.
“Gotten old! . . .
Oh, Margot! . . .”
My entire secret is given away in that sorrowful cry, accompanied by a gush of tears.
I take refuge with my severe friend, who pats my shoulder with the same
“Poor little thing” she just used to comfort the sick Brabancon . . .
“Come now, come now, poor little thing, come now . . . It will pass. Here’s some boric acid to wash out your eyes.
I was just making some for Mirette’s eyes.
Not with your handkerchief! Take some absorbent cotton . . . There! . . . Poor little thing, do you really need all your beauty right now?”
“Oh yes! . . .
Oh, Margot . . .”
“ ‘Oh, Margot!’