To prepare for it! It prepares for itself without anybody’s help, and it arrives so quickly . . .”
“Is it a question of marriage, or of shacking up?”
I don’t reply immediately, embarrassed for the first time by chaste Margot’s quite crude vocabulary . . .
“It isn’t a question of anything . . . We’re getting to know each other, we’re learning what we’re like . . .”
“Learning what you’re like!”
Margot studies me, her lips pinched, with a cruel merriment in her little gleaming eyes.
“Learning what you’re like! . . .
I see: it’s the period when you’re showing off to each other, eh?”
“I assure you, Margot, that we’re hardly showing off,” I say, forcing myself to smile. “That game is all right for very young lovers, but neither of us, he or I, is a very young lover by now.”
“All the more reason!” Margot retorts implacably. “You have more things to hide from each other . . . My dear,” she adds softly, “you know that my phobia is ridiculous. Marriage seems like such a monstrous thing to me!
Didn’t I make you laugh when I told you that, in my first days as a wife, I refused to share a bedroom with my husband because I thought it immoral to live so close to a young man who wasn’t a member of my family?
I was born that way, what can I tell you? I’ll never improve . . . Didn’t you bring along Fossette today?”
Like Margot, I make an effort to cheer myself up:
“No, Margot. Last time I was here, your pack of hounds gave her such a bad welcome!”
“It’s true.
My pack isn’t in great form just now!
Come here, cripples!”
They don’t wait to be asked twice.
From a row of kennels there emerge, in a little shivering, wretched flock, half a dozen dogs, the largest of which would fit in a hat.
I know nearly all of them, rescued by Margot from the “dogseller,” snatched from that stupid, evil business which plants in a shop window animals that are sick, gorged or starved, or else doped up . . . Some of them, in her home, have become once again healthy, cheerful, and sturdy animals; but others retain forever a stomach out of kilter, a scabby skin, a hysteria they can’t shake off . . . Margot tends to them the best she can, though disheartened by the realization that her charity accomplishes nothing, and that there will eternally be “pedigreed dogs” for sale . . .
The sick dog has fallen asleep.
I have nothing more to say . . . I look at the big room, which always bears a slight resemblance to an infirmary, with its curtainless windows.
Lined up on a table are drugstore bottles, rolled bandages, a tiny thermometer, and a very small rubber bulb for giving the dogs enemas.
There’s a smell of iodine and cresyl . . . All of a sudden I feel the urge to leave and return immediately—immediately!—to my narrow, warm “hut,” with its hollowed-out couch, its flowers, and the man I love . . .
“Goodbye, Margot, I’m going . . .”
“Go, child!”
“You’re not too angry with me?”
“Whatever for?”
“For being so crazy and ridiculous; in short, for being in love . . . I had promised myself so firmly . . .”
“Angry with you?
Poor little thing, that would be really mean of me! . . .
A new love . . . You can’t be having such a great time . . . Poor little thing!”
I’m in a hurry to get back home.
I feel chilled, frozen, and so unhappy! . . . Whew!
All the same, it’s over: I’ve told Margot everything.
I’ve gotten the dousing with cold water I was expecting, and I hasten to shake it off, get dry, and blossom out by the fire . . . My lowered veil hides the traces of my sorrow, and I hasten—I hasten to him!
*** “Monsieur Maxime is here waiting for Madame.”
Because my maid Blandine says “Monsieur Maxime” now, lovingly, as if speaking about her infant.
He’s here!
I dash into my bedroom and shut myself in: he mustn’t see my face!
Quick!
The rice powder, the kohl, the lipstick . . . Oh! There, under my eyes, that pearly, sentimental furrow . . .
“You’ve gotten old . . .” Fool, going off to weep like a little girl!
Haven’t you learned how to suffer with dry eyes?
Where are the days when my glistening tears rolled down my velvet cheeks without wetting them?
In the past, to win my husband back, I knew how to use my tears as adornments, when I’d cry in front of him, my face raised, my eyes wide open, not wiping away but shaking off those slow pearls which made me more beautiful . . . Poor creature that I am!
“Here you are at last, my darling, my fragrant one, my delicious one, my . . .”
“Goodness, how silly you are!”
“Oh yes,” my friend sighs, with ecstatic conviction.
He indulges in his favorite game, which is to lift me in his arms till I touch the ceiling; he kisses me on the cheeks, on the chin, on my ears, on my mouth.