“Madame! Madame! I wanted to know whether you like flowers. And which ones.”
“Sir! Sir! Leave me in peace!
I’m not asking you who your favorite poets are, or whether you prefer the seashore to the mountains!
Go away!”
“I’m going, Madame!
Good evening, Madame!”
Whew!
That big ninny of a man cut short my fit of the blues: there’s that much gained.
For three years now, that’s what my amorous conquests have been like . . . The gentleman in orchestra seat eleven, the gentleman in stage box four, the gigolo in the second balcony . . .
A letter, two letters, a bouquet, another letter . . . that’s all!
My silence soon discourages them, and I must confess that they aren’t very persistent about it.
Destiny, henceforth sparing of my strength, seems to be brushing the stubborn lovers from my path, those hunters who track a woman even after she’s escaped into the water like a stag and is swimming away . . . The men I tempt don’t write me love notes.
Their letters—hasty, brutish, and awkward—reveal their desires, not their character . . . I make an exception of one poor youngster who rambled on for twelve pages, revealing a talkative but humbled love.
He must have been very young.
He dreamed of himself as a Prince Charming, the poor kid, as being rich and mighty:
“I’m writing all this to you on the table of the tavern where I live, and every time I raise my head I see my ugly mug opposite me in the mirror . . . ”
That young lover with the “ugly mug” was still able to dream about someone, amid his blue palaces and enchanted forests.
No one is waiting for me on a road that leads neither to fame, wealth, or love.
Nothing—I know—leads to love.
Love must spontaneously fling himself across your path.
He obstructs it forever, or, if he departs, he leaves the path battered and caved in . . .
That which remains of my life reminds me of one of those jigsaw puzzles consisting of two hundred fifty oddly shaped and multicolored pieces of wood. Must I put the original decor back together piece by piece: a tranquil house amid the woods?
No, no, somebody has mixed up all the lines of the gentle landscape; by now I couldn’t even rediscover the wreckage of the blue roof embellished with yellow lichen, or the Virginia creeper, or the deep, birdless forest . . .
Eight years of marriage, three years of separation: that’s what constitutes a third of my existence.
My ex-husband?
You all know him.
He’s Adolphe Taillandy, the pastelist.
For twenty years he’s been painting the same feminine portrait: against a murky golden background, borrowed from Levy-Dhurmer, he poses a woman in a low-cut dress whose hair, like a precious padding, forms a halo around a velvety face.
The skin at the temples, in the shadow of the neck, on the swelling of the breasts, is iridescent with the same impalpable effect of velvet, blue as the velvet of those beautiful grapes which tempt one’s lips:
“Potel and Chabot paint no better than this!” Forain said one day, viewing one of my husband’s pastels.
Aside from his notorious “velvet effect,” I don’t think Adolphe Taillandy has any talent.
But I readily admit that his portraits are irresistible, especially to women.
In the first place, he definitely sees them all as blondes.
Even the hair of Madame Guimont-Fautru, that skinny brunette, was adorned by him with red and gold reflections, which he found God knows where and which, spread over her lusterless face and over her nose, turn her into an orgiastic Venetian courtesan.
Taillandy did my portrait too, in the past . . . No one recalls any longer that she’s me, that little Bacchante with a shiny nose, the middle of her face lit by a sunbeam as if she were wearing a mother-of-pearl mask, and I still recall my surprise at finding myself so blonde.
I also recall the success of that pastel and those which followed it.
There were the portraits of Madame de Guimont-Fautru, the Baronne Avelot, Madame de Chalis, Madame Robert-Durand, and the singer Jane Dore; then we come to those, less famous because the sitters are anonymous, of Mademoiselle J.
R., Mademoiselle S.
S., Madame U., Madame Van O., Mrs. F.
W., and so on.
Those were the days when, with that cynicism which is characteristic of handsome men, and which suits him so well, Adolphe Taillandy used to proclaim:
“I want only my mistresses as sitters, and only my sitters as mistresses!”
For my part, the only genius I found in him was one for telling lies.
No other woman, none of his women, can have had my opportunities for gauging, admiring, fearing, and cursing his rage to lie.
Adolphe Taillandy lied feverishly, sensuously, tirelessly, almost involuntarily.
For him adultery was merely one of the ways—and not the most pleasurable—of lying.
He thrived on lying with a power, variety, and prodigality that increasing age has failed to exhaust.
At the same time that he was perfecting some ingenious treachery, planned ever so carefully and enlivened with all the skill of his masterly cunning, I’d see him squandering his crafty energy on vulgar impositions, needless ones, caddish ones, on childish and all but idiotic fairy tales . . .
I met him, married him, lived with him more than eight years . . . and what do I know of him?
That he does pastels and has mistresses.