Tender Shoots

CLARISSA

I KNEW YOU, Clarissa, in happy days. Those days, filled so easily with our petty cares, recalled your glass cabinets, too narrow to contain the thousand pointless and precious knick-knacks that you loved. We used to meet every night in the best lit, most sonorous houses in town, where we would dance. Sleep would later carry me far into the day and often the ringing of the telephone would wake me up:

“Look out of the window,” you would say, “I am sending you a beautiful cloud!”

I scarcely had time to put down the receiver (for our houses were next door to one another), I ran barefoot to the window and I saw coming towards me, trailing across the sky, the pink or grey mass you had told me about, heavy and as if weighed down with the welcome it brought me.

I would go and collect you in a great hurry — for these winter afternoons are short — to haggle over a piece of silk, yet another useless item, at some antique dealer’s in Ebury Street where we arrived late, while across the shop floor already wreathed in shadow a last glimmer of light shone on the gold of the lacquers, on the steel of the weapons and on the false teeth of the antique dealer who amused you.

Those were happy days.

When I immerse myself in their memory, two visions loom up.

It is nighttime; a clear night, one of very few in a rain-filled spring whose warm, blue humidity it continues to exhale. The windows are open; we are standing on the balcony, our elbows on the parapet. You are leaning over to breathe in the smell of the newly mown grass that wafts up from Kensington and mingles with the animal perfume of the dance; the green acid of your Longhi cloak hangs down over the bright orange colour of the hump-backed Japanese bridge; pressed against the railings by the masks is a woman with bare breasts who laughs as she tosses bread to the carp. While the Venetian Bauta mask sets your face in shadow, allowing only a curious chemical-red mouth to be seen, the night girds all this feasting in a rich, velvety shade, illuminated only by the upturned wheels of the big dipper, which tumbles vertically above us in a motionless fall.

Now it is daytime, in the countryside.

The tennis court seems to have been cut into the truncated hilltop, from where the county rolls down to the sea in gentle undulations, like sumptuous, unused parkland. A young man dressed in whites accompanies the ball which he tosses up, and which his opponent is expecting, in an elongated action, gathering his movements and his shadow around him. On a mound of blue grass some young women dressed in cherry, yellow, green, cherry jumpers gather around the tea, which is served on a rattan table. And the centre of all brightness, of this glistening jollity, the luminous axle of this circle of women who are surrounded in turn by the still vaster ring of countryside and sky, is the silver teapot which sings like the wasps on the tart — reflected in the lid is a convex image of the sky, the shadow of the trees; in its ribbed body, the attenuated shapes of the figures, and, in narrow streaks, the jumpers, cherry, yellow, green, cherry.

But how can one detach oneself for a single second from the present moment?

Here is a muddy moor where the sparse grass oozes like a sponge, over which the rotting green light of dusk falls; nothing restricts it except the sky and, to the left, the white wooden shacks from which the smell of rancid butter reaches my nostrils. In the puddles of water the image of an aluminium moon sends back its reflection into the washed sky, emptied of its rain. On the disintegrating roads, the faceted wheels of heavy artillery create vertebrate potholes filled with mauve water.

Then up the steep-sided road that connects the arsenal to the barracks, climb soldiers in battledress. In the mud, beneath the low sky, ammunition wagons sway, drawn by brewers’ horses, driven by soldiers with gentle, inscrutable faces. Behind them, the plain runs down towards the leaden river, covered as far as the eye can see with tents, wagons, naval guns without mounts, shaken apart with layers of violet earth, as regular as mole-hills, the trenches of the New Army.

Lastly, set against the sky is the city with its rearing chimneys, its squat gasometers, the lattice-girder railway bridges, the shiny rails, the signal discs, the masts of the sailing ships, the heavy smoke of the vessels under steam, and the arsenal dipping its pink steps in the river’s rising tide.

You did not believe in the war. You used to say:

“Anyway, it won’t last long.”

“It would be too awful …”

Or:

“It’s impossible, I’ve been to Munich.”

But the Germans made war on France in order to be able to come to the Café de Paris in uniform. They made war on England because they were convinced that English tailors made badly cut clothes for them deliberately.

When I telephoned to tell you that Germany had declared war on Russia, you replied:

“I was in the garden, I was cutting some roses …”

You were upset thinking about all your relatives, your friends of France, but you could not rid yourself of that sense of security of those who live in a place surrounded by water.

This country awoke slowly to the war. The evidence came from outside, on seeing the German Jews from Commercial Road closing their shutters, those from the West End hiding away their pictures, the slump of consols in London, the collapse of wool in Sydney, the Americans fleeing in their nickel-plated motorcars, and gold, more fearful still; on hearing that arthritic diplomats were leaving the spas, that kings were returning to their capitals, that other countries were closing their frontiers like bolted doors. Then it was the departure of the French hairdressers and chefs, going down to the stations carrying a flag.

Warships could be seen sailing from Portsmouth as they did every year, for the regattas, but the stoppers had been removed from their guns and the German yachts did not come. The sea reacted first, then the coasts where the coastguard reservists climbed up to the semaphores with their kit folded inside a green canvas bag. And the fever eventually spread from the edges to the centre.

All this took place imperceptibly. England did not experience that sleepless August night when millions of men kissed their wives with dry lips and burned their letters. She paid no attention to the commotion, did not close her portholes, did not slip her moorings.

Just one policeman was put on duty outside the German embassy.

And when they realised, some barracks were built.

But could it be realised other than slowly, in this unscarred country, where children have never discovered cannonballs from previous wars embedded in the walls of houses?

Would you hope to see at a given signal the streets empty themselves of their cars, of their passers-by? The lawyers in gowns, the ushers in amaranthine robes, the judges in wigs, the bookmakers in putty-coloured overcoats with mother-of-pearl buttons, setting out on foot to the railway stations, making their way to the inland garrisons, and the peers keeping watch on the bridges over which no packed trains were yet passing, towards our frontier?

I hear you coming, Clarissa. You walk on your heels, with big, decisive footsteps; your dress makes no silken rustling noise; you are whistling a ragtime tune.

You are tall, broad-shouldered; a lovely figure and red hair. You are not vain about your beauty, but you like to draw attention to your hair.

You say:

“I adore redheads. As soon as a redhead appears anywhere, I notice her.”

You loathe the indirect compliments that dark-haired women aspire to, affirming hypocritically that only blondes know how to please; you say:

“I’m a redhead. Like all redheads, I’m bad-tempered.”

At first, you are not pleasant, especially when someone meets you socially for the first time, without your house, without your friends, without all that explains you, with a hat and gloves. You glance around you disdainfully, you purse your lips, you hold your head high and you seem to be saying to people:

“I’m taller than you.”

You are so badly dressed! Yet in the very best taste. Your shoes are pointed at the toe; one expects to see flat heels; your dresses are simple, short, with pockets; you wear them for a very long time and from morning till evening. One imagines that your toilette is complete once you get out of the bath, when you are clean. Rising at seven o’clock, you come down to breakfast at eight, fully dressed. You have stray wisps of hair and you tuck them under your hat with your finger, in the motorcar.

When I criticise you, you reply:

“I haven’t the time. There are more interesting things to do.”

This indifference is not a pose, for one sometimes finds you making concessions to fashion (especially in evening dresses), and one is sorry you should have made them.

You are not unaware, however, of what people wear, since you yourself design for others what should be worn, and you like the company of eccentrically attired women and well dressed young men.

I have sometimes succeeded in making you discard dresses that are fifteen years out of date for those of thirty years ago. And when you want to please me, you arrange your hair in a fringe, and you wear a black velvet ribbon around your neck, “à la Dégas”.

From the first day I was extremely curious about you, and I have remained so. Only your rebellious character has prevented me from loving you.

Your face is interesting. There is a great mystery in your taut lips, a great deal of sensuality in your nose with its restless, broad nostrils, and attractiveness in your yellow eyes, hypersensitive, generally rather hard, listless at times, and restricted at the corners by a mauve vein.

Without being well-educated, you know a great deal. You know nothing about history, but you know the past and you understand it better than a scholar, when you hold a piece of embroidery, or an old slipper, in your hands.

You do not like books. I have never seen you read a novel. In your library there are only pictures, documents and catalogues.

I know you will never grow old, will never end. When I feel like dying, I come and call on you when you are getting ready. You do not stop what you are doing, but as you continue to polish your nails or lace up your boots, you exclaim:

“Live! Tell yourself: ‘I’m alive’, my friend, and that’s all you need! To be able to run, stop, to be in good form, to feel weary, to be able to spit, to spit in the fire, in the water, spit out of your window on the heads of passers-by, how good and wonderful all that is!”

And you really are like that — you rejoice in your good health, in the beating of your pulse, in the use of your limbs, in all these good fortunes, which for us are negative, with lucidity; when you wave your arms about, you experience the pleasure one would feel knowing there is only one hour left before they are to be amputated; when you use your legs, the joy of a paralytic who is suddenly able to move again. You take possession of a room, of a pavement, as if they had long been forbidden to you. You give the singular impression of a people’s feast-day when the crowds, pressed into the clutch of run-down streets, spill out over the grass like laundry.

Life is so much a part of you that one would have to be very determined to take it away from you. Dentists do their very best and cannot even manage to loosen one of your teeth. You pay no heed to illness. You stand up to English doctors.

I find Clarissa in her drawing room, her hands and face black, her clothing covered in dust.

“I’m tidying up,” she says.

Clarissa claims to like open spaces, bare walls, polished floors in which they are prolonged, clear tables. But she succumbs, a victim of her liking for trinkets; she yields to successive solicitations of form, colour, feeling, and soon the glass cabinets, the occasional tables, the mantelpiece, are not enough; without her realising, the knick-knacks pile up in wooden chests, beneath the furniture; the drawers will no longer close, even access to the room becomes improbable. One day, Clarissa reacts; in sorrowful severance, she tears herself away from all these beloved trifles, banishes them to the attic where, having forgotten them, she discovers them years later and puts them back in their place, for the time being.

All day, she roams around the suburban antique dealers, the second-hand shops of the Hebrew districts, the clothes vendors. Basket in hand, she sets off, with her long strides, to the scrap merchants and, unconcerned about fleas, approaches the dealers, rummages around with her rag-and-bone man’s instinct and returns home, her pockets and muff laden with new trinkets. She accommodates them all, from the rarest object to screws, doorknobs, nails, old coins.

“I’m like a magpie,” she says.

And like a magpie, she pounces on shiny objects and buries them away in hiding-places that she alone knows, jumbled up with other things found in the street. When will they be put on display, Clarissa? Her bedroom is full of coloured goblets, of bits of broken glass, of decanter stoppers, of crystal-ware, of fragments of chandeliers or mirrors, of spun-glass animals.

“How lovely it is to touch all these!”

And she runs her fingers over the corners, the surfaces and, going over to the window, she holds them against the light, rejoicing in their reflections. From the pavement, you can recognise her balcony by some crystal globes; from her ceiling she hangs glass balls in which the entire street’s truncated and multifaceted images are reflected, in which the clouds swirl, slowly, the buses, rapidly.

Clarissa keeps up with the sales rooms, all the sales rooms, assiduously.

In London, there is no one large market through which everything that is for sale passes from hand to hand, but a series of auction houses, each with its distinct appearance, its customs, its own clientele. It is more than a difference of neighbourhood, a social hierarchy. But Clarissa sees it merely as a short or a long trip to be made from one to the other.

First she will go to the pretentious sales rooms, with monumental staircases, with liveried porters, where they deal with museum pieces, with precious goods forfeited by royalty, with large inheritances, under the watchful gaze of ennobled experts, of titled critics.

Just around the corner, it will be a caricature of these same rooms — the same porters, but older, their livery threadbare; exhibitions of unknown grand masters, brazen Rembrandts, indecent Corots, sold to a gang of shifty dealers and racketeers.

Others will specialise in jewellery; pieces of gold are passed around the dirty hands of Armenians with black woollen beards; Jews sniff out the pearls.

She also frequents the sales rooms in the working-class districts where the crowds of those made wealthy by the war pounce on pianos, suits of armour, music boxes, thick woollen Indian rugs, silver- or gold-plated ware, plush armchairs.

Sometimes she sets off to the source, goes to the docks where ships from the Far East unload their merchandise that is sold on the spot, at the warehouse.

But what Clarissa likes best are the sales in the provinces where the entire house is being emptied, after death or distraint, from the wines in the cellar down to the door handles, guided by a very sure instinct for these shipwrecks of life, these forfeited items.

Clarissa does not acquire without qualms. And for each purchase she must have a reason:

“It will make a lovely wedding present; instead of giving something horrible …”

“The children need one …”

“It’s not for me, I’ve been asked to buy it …”

“I let the same thing go last year, today you can’t get hold of it anywhere …”

For every happy occasion, Clarissa buys herself a little something, as a memento; for every sad one, she buys herself a little something, so as to forget.

Once I have described Clarissa’s love for yesterday’s cast-offs, half-opened her cupboards full of collections of old shoes, dolls, marionettes, braided waistcoats rescued from oblivion, formal dress-wear, military uniforms, tawdry stage costumes, glittering old rags, tatters, a whole array of trash that not even a taste for antiques can excuse, I shall still not have clarified fully all that I want to explain.

She laughs as she shows them to me:

“Little objects that are of no possible use!”

Still better. Unimaginable little objects, of no antiquity, never sought after, a primitive child’s museum, oddities from lunatic asylums, the collection of a consul rendered anaemic by the tropics. She confesses:

“You know my tastes: broken mechanical toys, burnt milk, steam organs, the smell of priests, black silk corsets with floral patterns and those bouquets of coloured beads made from all the flowers quoted in Shakespeare …”

And I suddenly think of the delirious ravings in Une saison en enfer: “I loved the silly pictures, overdoors, decorations, canvases by mountebanks, signboards …”

Stranger still is her liking for sham.

She prefers the imitation to the thing itself. She enjoys the disappointment she experiences and that of others. When she sees the way other women look at her pearls, she is amused at being able to arouse so much bad feeling at so little cost. She loves this paraphrase of the truth, the modern religion of window dressing, and this latent mockery of the fake, nature made ridiculous, shown to be useless or imperfect. Wearing fancy dress is one of her delights. She disguises her clothes, dyes her carpets, bleaches her hair, paints pictures of her cats. She has thousands of objects around her that are used for other purposes than one might imagine, books that open into boxes, pen-holders that are telescopes, chairs that become tables, tables that turn into screens, and also those countless bits of surprise jewellery that we owe to the bad taste of the Italians or the Japanese.

The shabby suburban shops displaying their filigree and costume jewellery fascinate her. She has not the slightest longing for panther skins, but she cannot tear her gaze from this crude imitation, with its black patches painted on red rabbit fur.

She has put some glass fruit, some crystal balls, in large bowls; but she reserves her affection for those fruits that are here — the oranges gleam with a viscous varnish, alongside celluloid berries, in glassy, over-swollen clusters, with small, sickly leaves. She only likes dwarf cedars when they are dead and she can smear their branches with red lacquer and make feather pistils and tinfoil petals grow there.

“I’m contemplating an artificial garden,” she says. “It would be in the middle of the park. You would arrive there naturally, as though it were the coolest, shadiest spot, and discover sterilised vegetation. You would lie down on moss of that beautiful green that you only find in dyed moss, warm and dusty to the touch. All around there would be beds of coloured beads, tissue paper flowers, and beneath bushes made from glued bits of material, in a smooth glass pool, the motionless frolicking of gutta-percha carp.

Clarissa has a house in town and a house in the country. Our life is spent dashing from one to the other, like a pendulum; they are shared out unequally during the year; one for the dense, brisk winter months, the other for the limpid months of summer. They are not far apart — in the city, by climbing up to the roof terrace, you can make out the country house, perched on the horizon, at the top of the blue hill that, like the well-defined brim of a bowl, marks the outer limits of London.

The first has a noble, self-satisfied atmosphere. Byron lived there. It maintains its standing and, from the pavement and from above, does its best to keep its alignment. The frontage has a severity of line that, were it not for the thought of the myriad eccentricities it conceals, would be boring.

The second, on the other hand, is small and precious, like a neglected piece of Empire furniture left out in a garden. Sunk into its middle is a circular anteroom crowned by a gallery onto which all the bedroom doors open; so that in the morning, from their beds, guests can hurl apples into the bedroom opposite theirs …

Apart from her two Persian cats that sleep by the fireside where they look like cinders, Clarissa has few close friends.

“Clarissa, let’s talk about your friends, if you wish, my companions.”

You are the centre of a whole little world that appears to have its raison d’être solely in you. No more than your trinkets, can we conceive of any other life than the one you impose on us. (For you impose things, Clarissa. You are a tall woman, with decisive actions, a definite face, powerful lungs and an air of authority.)

You do not say:

“What could we do this evening?”

But:

“We’re going to the Alhambra, box six.”

We are your prisoners. Everything draws us back to you. If we are far away, boredom; if we are walking down your street, everything entices us: the large flat button of the door-bell, pleasant to touch, the noise of our footsteps on the marble of the staircase, the parrot’s swear-words, the smell of tracing paper and palette that comes from your boudoir, the cameo on your signet-ring, the mauve veins that encircle your eyes.

None of us has any common bond but you. There is, however, a certain family resemblance between us. We are equally slim and youthful, with bright eyes and red lips. We laugh loudly, knock back our drinks, we never get up before breakfast, we dance farandoles all over the house, but we know how to keep quiet when you play music.

You enjoy bringing us together, paying no heed to staunch friendships, yet you nevertheless detect a different virtue in each one of us and you like him or her because of that — Pamela has mahogany hair, Tom slender wrists, Rafael a pretty face and a talent for playing the banjo; as for me, I go well, you say, with your Chinese drawing room.

Here we are, seated around a table, at Murray’s, for our common pleasure, which is hers. Clarissa dominates us all with her height; she has more sparkle than the women, more self-assurance than the men; the maître d’hôtel naturally goes over to her. We gather around her, happy to be here in this comfortable cellar, in this padded catacomb where pleasure presides. The women in this basement have their nails polished, their faces well painted; you can see their armpits. Couples are dancing, circling around an imaginary axis, wringing out the waltz as if it were a tea towel from which the melody oozes. The men in this basement have their arms in slings, bandaged heads; the Negro music tires them a little, takes them back to the indelible memory of the trench where they fell, of the first glass of water. The waiters, as they serve them, stumble over the crutches that are lying on the floor.

There are others, too, fatter, more florid, drinking Pommery in cider bottles, for it is after ten o’clock — the neutrals. They are Scandinavians, Dutchmen, Americans. They exchange knowing glances and under the tablecloth offer two hundred thousand Mausers which can be delivered straight away by sea off Barcelona, or they take out from their hip pocket samples of all the uniform materials worn by the warring armies. They buy back good-humouredly orders that have been rejected (the Russians will take them for sure), overdue contracts. All the tempests of machine-gun fire that will one day be unleashed on men stem from here. Tom sniggers at this interpretation:

“Very much the latest thing; the very last word,” he says. “The last word of the dying.”

Then, handing one of them a piece of shrapnel recently removed from his head:

“If this may be of use to you again? …” We are five, gathered around a small table on which elbows and plates are touching. Pamela remains wrapped up in her ermine coat, silent, her eyes tired from the beam of the footlights, rouge still on her cheeks, looking wretched. Then she eats her bacon and eggs, lights an amber-tipped cigarette and bursts like a camellia out of her coat, which slips down her arms. Narrow shoulders, what Rafael calls “being built like a soda-water bottle”. She is sad. She says:

“I can’t keep a cook.”

Tom, whose left eardrum was burst at La Bassée, raises his hand to his good ear to hear better and, thinking that she is joking, begins to laugh, which creases his shiny cheeks, chapped by the great Flanders winds.

Rafael orders himself a large supper and eats it phlegmatically. His face, that of an eighteen-year-old (although he was decorated in the Boer War), is perfectly calm; he himself is collected amid all the turmoil as he always has been during his life which was and is the most unstable, the most humdrum imaginable. He is stubbornly extravagant. You feel he has no connection with the rest of the world. Without obligations, without cares, without a home, without a bank account, without anything apart from the jewellery he wears. Nothing about him reveals his past — the nights partying in Montmartre or in Rome, the nights gambling in Deauville, the nights dancing in St Moritz, the nights of love in Poland or in Madeira have skimmed over his well-bred face without leaving a trace.

Neither insolent, nor obsequious, he goes through life, indolent as a pet animal, with, like all old Etonians, those somewhat spineless mannerisms of the dandy who does not enjoy working.

Clarissa keeps him near her like a pretty cat; like a cat he expects and receives much respect for the kindness of which he is the object, mitigating the condition of dependency in which he places himself by a show of affected indifference.

Clarissa watches him eat.

From time to time, in between two dances, Louisa comes to sit down with us. She is really beautiful, but it is a beauty that is indigestible; we derive no pleasure from it. She does not radiate and at close range she fades.

Louisa is about to speak, her eyes move slowly (she must have been brought up near a line on which only slow trains went by); her mouth opens. She says:

“I …”

But Rafael interrupts her. She closes her mouth again, opens her handbag, peers into it as if into the bottom of a well; then: cigarette-case, cigarette-holder, cigarette, cotton thread, lighter; then: powder-puff, rouge; she readjusts her beauty-spot.

She is about to speak; her mouth opens again in the shape of a lozenge; she declares:

“I …”

She is so surprised that she does not continue. She wipes her mascara. She thinks.

“This war is very boring,” she says. “They must get very bored in the trenches. The dentist, too, is very boring. I spent two hours at my dentist’s this morning — and so this evening I’ve got headaches, and how … To think that I’ve waited twenty years to know what toothache’s like. Look, I wanted to have a filling in this one — no this one; the bottom molar … ’

But she only receives polite interest. She lacks confidence when she is with us. She sees Clarissa whose expression seems to be saying:

“Will you never understand?”

She gets up and goes and shows her bottom tooth to the Duc d’Orléans who places his finger on it.

It is four o’clock. We climb up to ground level, leaving the heavy cigar smoke, the smell of perfume and foie gras beneath us. Outside, it is still night, in the dark street the lampposts wreathed in shadows cast down a circle of furtive light like that of a dim lantern; the policeman checks the locks; some dustmen are reading the French communiqué in the glimmer of a lamplight.

I suggest a taxi, but Clarissa prefers to return home on foot.

“Take my arm,” she says. “I so love the night. Why squander half our precious life in slumber? Why, as children, were we sent to bed so early just because it was nighttime — is it not for children? Used you to get up at night? Tell me!”

“Yes, Clarissa. As soon as my mother had kissed me and tucked me up, I would get out of bed. The open window gave onto the balcony and the street below. This balcony was my delight. I can still feel my bare feet on the lead warmed by the sun that used to linger there till evening; I can still recall the fresh taste of the iron railing which I used to lick; I had planted some nasturtiums in tubs into which some real earth bought in the Cours-la-Reine market had been put for me. From the window next to mine, I could see my father in the shade of the studio. He used to draw standing up, with an easy motion of his fine pale hand, beneath the lamp. A grey and violet July dusk was falling over gentle and languid Paris. The horses were pawing the cobbles in the stables, the concierges were smoking at their doorways, in the soft air, the Eiffel Tower did not yet have its necklace of light waves, but sported an emerald on its forehead, menservants were gulping down their liqueurs in tarts’ apartments, and as for the tarts, I used to see them at the end of the street, in muslin dresses, in carriages drawn by rose-coloured horses, making their way up the Champs-Elysées, towards the Arc de Triomphe. The sun was going home to bed at Neuilly; they were dining at the Chalet du Cycle.”

Clarissa squeezes my arm, takes my hand.

“That’s right,” she says, “I’m like you; I’ve the same blood that, on cold mornings, flows through my veins like warm wine, I’m on edge like you on stormy evenings. We are very like one another.”

“Very alike, Clarissa. It’s a duet; we are in touch. Our thoughts keep pace with one another. In the street, our gazes alight upon a funny feather on a hat at the same moment, our curiosity upon the same blouse …

“I am going to point out this Frenchman to you, with his medals, whose trousers are unbuttoned, and who is washing his hands with imaginary soap, but you have noticed him some time ago.”

You say:

“Frenchmen’s faces are like those drawing rooms in which there are too many objects. You discover moustaches, a beard, spectacles, warts, moles with downy hair on them.”

And I, feeling upset, reply:

“My dear girl, that fellow’s a Belgian.”

“You love me a little bit then, Clarissa?”

“Well … it annoys me when you take the phone off the hook or when you go off to Paris.”

“I ask for no more.”

“And you, do you love me?”

“No, but you are to women what London is to other cities.”

“?”

“A city which does not totally satisfy you, but which spoils all the others for you.”

You are jealous. Anything in my life that is beyond your reach makes you anxious. You do not permit freedom; you find silence difficult to bear. You are eager to know, and knowing does not satisfy you.

You say:

“Describe your girlfriend to me!”

I answer:

“She has a smooth belly, firm flesh that does not show bite marks, wide-apart breasts.”

“Young?”

“Very young — she pulls corks out of bottles with her teeth, sits facing the light, is not necessarily at home, gives of herself freely, does not want to make love every day.”

“None of which, in fact, is very nice.”

“And therefore we come back to girlfriends who say: ‘I like to please’, ‘you’re a child’, ‘my car can take you home’, ‘you’re uncomfortable, take this cushion’, ‘because I know you like that …’”

1914