To die rather than to go on with my humiliated life, that of a woman “who has everything to be happy about”; to die, yes, to risk poverty before suicide, but never to see Adolphe Taillandy any more, that Adolphe Taillandy who only showed his true colors in the intimacy of our home, the one who was so skillful at giving me warnings without raising his voice, towering over me with his frightening sergeant-major’s jaw:
“Tomorrow I’m starting the portrait of Madame Mothier; please be so good, will you, as not to scowl at her that way any more!”
To die, and before that to risk the worst social disasters, but no longer to intercept the sudden gesture that hides a crumpled letter, or the pretendedly ordinary phone conversation, or the look on the face of the valet, his accomplice—no longer to hear him say to me in a casual tone:
“Weren’t you going to visit your mother for two days this week? . . . ”
To leave him, but no longer to lower myself to walk around with one of my husband’s mistresses for an entire day while he, reassured and protected by me, was embracing another woman!
To leave and die, but no longer to pretend ignorance, no longer undergo the nighttime waiting, the sitting up, when your feet are frozen in the bed that’s too big, no longer to hatch those schemes of revenge which take form in the dark, swell up to the beating of your wounded heart that’s poisoned with jealousy, and then burst at the tinkle of a key in the lock and grow cravenly calm when a familiar voice calls:
“What? Not asleep yet?”
I was sick and tired of it.
You can get used to not eating, to pain in your teeth or stomach, you can even get used to the absence of a person you love, but you don’t get used to jealousy.
And so that happened which Adolphe Taillandy, who thinks of everything, hadn’t foreseen: one day when, in order to welcome Madame Mothier more heartily on the big studio couch, he had rudely thrown me out my door, I didn’t come back.
I didn’t come back that night, or the next, or the ones that followed.
And that’s where my story ends—or begins.
I won’t dwell on the brief, morose transitional period when I responded with the same peevish arrogance to all the blame, advice, condolences, and even congratulations.
I discovered those few dogged friends who rang the doorbell of a tiny apartment rented at random.
In my outrage at their show of defying public opinion by coming to see me—that sacrosanct, sovereign, and despicable public opinion—with a furious gesture I cut off all that still linked me with my past.
What, then?
Isolation?
Yes, isolation, except for three or four friends: obstinate ones, undetachable ones, determined to put up with all my snubs.
How unkindly I received them, but how I loved them, and how I feared, when watching them depart, that they wouldn’t come back! . . .
Yes, isolation.
It scared me, like a remedy that could kill me.
And then I realized that . . . I was merely continuing to live alone.
The training went way back, to my childhood, and the first years of my marriage had hardly interrupted it; when my husband began to cheat on me, it had resumed, austere and terribly hard to take—and that is the most commonplace element in my story . . .
How many women have known that withdrawal into themselves, that patient retreat which comes after the rebellious tears?
I do them this justice, which is flattering to me: it’s usually only in her grief that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity.
Her resistance to grief is infinite; it can be applied, and over-applied, without any risk of her dying, just so long as some childish physical cowardice or some religious hope turns her thoughts away from the suicide that would simplify everything.
“She’s dying of sorrow . . . She died of sorrow . . . ” When you hear cliches like that, shake your head in disbelief, not in pity: it’s rare for a woman to die of sorrow.
She’s such a sturdy animal, so hard to kill!
You think sorrow is eating away at her?
Not at all.
Much more often, even if she was born weak and sickly, it furnishes her with tireless nerves, unbending pride, an ability to wait and dissimulate which enhances her, and scorn for those who are happy.
In her suffering and dissimulation she trains herself and becomes supple, as if in daily physical exercise that’s full of risks . . . Because she’s constantly brushing up against the sharpest, most pleasant, and most appealing of all temptations: that of taking revenge.
Sometimes, when she’s too weak or loves too well, she can kill . . . She’ll be able to present to the astonishment of the whole world an example of that disconcerting feminine resistance.
She’ll tire out her judges, she’ll tax their strength during the endless hearings, she’ll leave them behind worn out, just as a sly animal exhausts inexperienced hounds that are pursuing it . . . Rest assured that long patience and jealously concealed sorrows have shaped, refined, and hardened that woman who makes people exclaim:
“She’s made of steel!”
She’s simply “made of woman,” and that’s sufficient.
Loneliness . . . freedom . . . my pleasing and laborious work as a mime and dancer . . . my happy, tired muscles, the new concern (which relaxes me from the old one) of earning my own food, clothing, and rent . . . all this immediately became my lot in life, but I also acquired a wild mistrust, a distaste for the milieu in which I had lived and suffered, a stupid fear of man, of men, and of women, too . . . A morbid need to be unaware of what was going on around me, to have only very plain people near me, people who would scarcely have original ideas . . . And another peculiarity took hold of me very quickly: I feel isolated and protected from my fellow human beings only when onstage—the barrier of the footlights keeping me safe from everybody . . .
SUNDAY AGAIN! . . . And since the dark chill has given way to a bright chill, my dog and I took our exercise in the Bois de Boulogne between eleven and noon—I have a matinee after lunch. This animal is ruining me financially.
Without her I could get to the Bois on the Metro, but she gives me enough pleasure to compensate for the three-franc cab fare.
Black as a truffle, she gleams in the sunshine, groomed with a brush and a flannel rag, and the whole Boris belongs to her: she takes possession of it with a loud snorting noise, like a pig’s, and barks amid the dry leaves she scatters . . .
A lovely Sunday and this pretty Bois!
It’s our forest, our park, Fossette’s and mine, urban vagabonds with hardly any familiarity with the countryside by this time . . . Fossette runs faster than I do, but I walk faster than she does, and when she isn’t playing at being “the city-perimeter train,” her eyes maddened and bulging and her tongue hanging out, she follows me at an ambling gait, a little disconnected trot-cum-gallop that makes people laugh.
The thin pink mist filters the light of a dulled sun which you can look right into, admiringly . . . From the laid-bare lawns rises a tremulous silvery incense smelling of mushrooms.
My veil sticks to my nose, and my whole body, warmed by my walk, darts ahead . . . Really, have I changed all that much since turning twenty?
On a winter morning like this, in the heyday of my youth, was I sturdier, suppler or physically happier? . . .
I can go on believing this for the duration of my walk through the Bois . . . Back home, my fatigue undeceives me. It’s no longer the same fatigue.
At twenty, without a second thought, I would have enjoyed my temporary weariness in a calm, half-dreamy state.
Today fatigue is starting to become bitter to me, like a sadness of my body . . .
Fossette was born a pedigreed dog and a little ham actress: she’s wild for the stage, and she’s hellbent on jumping into every fancy automobile . . . Yet it was Dancing Stephane who sold her to me, and Fossette never lived with a wealthy actress.
Dancing Stephane is one of my colleagues.