Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. She came to England when she was sixteen, where she trained as an actress and worked on chorus lines. In 1919 she married Jean Lenglet (‘Edward de Nève’), with whom she lived on the Continent until their divorce in 1923. One child from the marriage survived. It was in Paris that she came under the influence of the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged her to write. Rhys’s first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In 1932, she married Leslie Tilden-Smith, who was a reader with the publisher Hamish Hamilton and acted as her literary agent; he died in 1945. In 1947, she married Max Hamer, Leslie’s cousin. Max was convicted of fraud and as he was moved from prison to prison, Rhys followed him and disappeared from the literary scene. On his release, they moved to a cottage in Devon, where Rhys was re-discovered in 1958. She had begun work on a Dominica-based novel on her return from a visit there in 1936; despite poverty and ill-health, but with the support of her editor, Diana Athill, this would be published as Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. The novel was Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre and was a sensational comeback. It won literary prizes on publication and is today recognized as her masterpiece. Rhys wrote two further story collections, Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976). She died in 1979, and her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published posthumously the same year.
Miss Bruce was quite an old inhabitant of the Quarter. For seven years she had lived there, in a little studio up five flights of stairs. She had painted portraits, exhibited occasionally at the Salon. She had even sold a picture sometimes – a remarkable achievement for Montparnasse, but possible, for I believe she was just clever enough and not too clever, though I am no judge of these matters.
She was a tall, thin woman, with large bones and hands and feet. One thought of her as a shining example of what character and training – British character and training – can do. After seven years in Paris she appeared utterly untouched, utterly unaffected, by anything hectic, slightly exotic or unwholesome. Going on all the time all round her were the cult of beauty and the worship of physical love: she just looked at her surroundings in her healthy, sensible way, and then dismissed them from her thoughts . . . rather like some sturdy rock with impotent blue waves washing round it.
When pretty women passed her in the streets or sat near her in restaurants she would look appraisingly with the artist’s eye, and make a suitably critical remark. She exhibited no tinge of curiosity or envy. As for the others, the petites femmes, anxiously consulting the mirrors of their bags, anxiously and searchingly looking round with darkened eyelids: ‘Those unfortunate people!’ would say Miss Bruce. Not in a hard way, but broadmindedly, breezily: indeed with a thoroughly gentlemanly intonation . . . Those unfortunate little people!
She always wore a neat serge dress in the summer and a neat tweed costume in the winter, brown shoes with low heels and cotton stockings. When she was going to parties she put on a black gown of crêpe de chine, just well enough cut, not extravagantly pretty.
In fact Miss Bruce was an exceedingly nice woman.
She powdered her nose as a concession to Paris; the rest of her face shone, beautifully washed, in the sunlight or the electric light as the case might be, with here and there a few rather lovable freckles.
She had, of course, like most of the English and American artists in Paris, a private income – a respectably large one, I believe. She knew most people and was intimate with nobody. We had been dining and lunching together, now and then, for two years, yet I only knew the outside of Miss Bruce – the cool sensible, tidy English outside.
Well, we had an appointment on a hot, sunny afternoon, and I arrived to see her about three o’clock. I was met by a very perturbed concierge.
Mademoiselle had been in bed just one day, and, suddenly, last night about eight o’clock the pain had become terrible. The femme de ménage, ‘Mame’ Pichon who had stayed all day and she, the concierge, had consulted anxiously, had fetched a doctor and, at his recommendation, had had her conveyed to the English Hospital in an ambulance.
‘She took nothing with her,’ said the femme de ménage, a thin and voluble woman. ‘Nothing at all, pauvre Mademoiselle.’ If Madame – that was me – would give herself the trouble to come up to the studio, here were the keys. I followed Madame Pichon up the stairs. I must go at once to Miss Bruce and take her some things. She must at least have nightgowns and a comb and brush.
‘The keys of the wardrobe of Mademoiselle,’ said Madame Pichon insinuatingly, and with rather a queer sidelong look at me, ‘are in this small drawer. Ah, les voilâ!’
I thanked her with a dismissing manner. Madame Pichon was not a favourite of mine, and with firmness I watched her walk slowly to the door, try to start a conversation, and then, very reluctantly, disappear. Then I turned to the wardrobe – a big, square solid piece of old, dark furniture, suited for the square and solid coats and skirts of Miss Bruce. Indeed, most of her furniture was big and square. Some strain in her made her value solidity and worth more than grace or fantasies. It was difficult to turn the large key, but I managed it at last.
‘Good Lord!’ I remarked out loud. Then, being very much surprised I sat down on a chair and said: ‘Well, what a funny girl!’
For Miss Bruce’s wardrobe when one opened it was a glow of colour, a riot of soft silks . . . everything that one did not expect.
In the middle, hanging in the place of honour, was an evening dress of a very beautiful shade of old gold: near it another of flame colour: of two black dresses the one was touched with silver, the other with a jaunty embroidery of emerald and blue. There were a black and white check with a jaunty belt, a flowered crêpe de chine – positively flowered! – then a carnival costume complete with mask, then a huddle, a positive huddle of all colours, of all stuffs.
For one instant I thought of kleptomania, and dismissed the idea. Dresses for models, then? Absurd! Who would spend thousands of francs on dresses for models . . . No nightgowns here, in any case.
As I looked, hesitating, I saw in the corner a box without a lid. It contained a neat little range of smaller boxes: Rouge Fascination; Rouge Manadarine; Rouge Andalouse; several powders; kohl for the eyelids and paint for the eyelashes – an outfit for a budding Manon Lescaut. Nothing was missing: there were scents too.
I shut the door hastily. I had no business to look or to guess. But I guessed. I knew. Whilst I opened the other half of the wardrobe and searched the shelves for nightgowns I knew it all: Miss Bruce, passing by a shop, with the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve, well hidden under her neat dress, more or less stifled, more or less unrecognized.
Miss Bruce had seen a dress and had suddenly thought: in that dress perhaps . . . And, immediately afterwards: why not? And had entered the shop, and, blushing slightly, had asked the price. That had been the first time: an accident, an impulse.
The dress must have been disappointing, yet beautiful enough, becoming enough to lure her on. Then must have begun the search for the dress, the perfect Dress, beautiful, beautifying, possible to be worn. And lastly, the search for illusion – a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of Miss Bruce’s life.
Wonderful moment! When the new dress would arrive and would emerge smiling and graceful from its tissue paper.
‘Wear me, give me life,’ it would seem to say to her, ‘and I will do my damnedest for you!’ And first, not unskilfully, for was she not a portrait painter? Miss Bruce would put on the powder, the Rouge Fascination, the rouge for her lips, lastly the dress – and she would gaze into the glass at a transformed self. She would sleep that night with a warm glow at her heart. No impossible thing, beauty and all that beauty brings. There close at hand, to be clutched if one dared. Somehow she never dared, next morning.
I thankfully seized a pile of nightgowns and sat down, rather miserably undecided. I knew she would hate me to have seen those dresses: ‘Mame’ Pichon would tell her that I had been to the armoire. But she must have her nightgowns. I went to lock the wardrobe doors and felt a sudden, irrational pity for the beautiful things inside. I imagined them, shrugging their silken shoulders, rustling, whispering about the anglaise who had dared to buy them in order to condemn them to life in the dark . . . And I opened the door again.
The yellow dress appeared malevolent, slouching on its hanger; the black ones were mournful, only the little chintz frock smiled gaily, waiting for the supple body and limbs that should breathe life into it.
When I was allowed to see Miss Bruce a week afterwards I found her lying, clean, calm and sensible in the big ward – an appendicitis patient. They patched her up and two or three weeks later we dined together at our restaurant. At the coffee stage she said suddenly: ‘I suppose you noticed my collection of frocks. Why should I not collect frocks? They fascinate me. The colour and all that. Exquisite sometimes!’
Of course, she added, carefully staring over my head at what appeared to me to be a very bad picture, ‘I should never make such a fool of myself as to wear them . . . They ought to be worn, I suppose.’
A plump, dark girl, near us, gazed into the eyes of her dark, plump escort, and lit a cigarette with the slightly affected movements of a non-smoker.
‘Not bad hands and arms, that girl,’ said Miss Bruce in her gentlemanly manner.
‘I assure you,’ said the Commandant, ‘that I adore women – that without a woman in my life I cannot exist.
‘But one must admit that one has deceptions. They are frankly disappointing, or else they exact so much that the day comes when, inevitably, one asks oneself: Is it worth while?
‘In any case it cracks. It always cracks.’
He fixed his monocle more firmly into his eye to look at a passing lady, with an expression like that of an amiable and cynical old fox.
‘And it is my opinion, Madame, that that is the fault of the woman. All the misunderstandings, all the quarrels! It is astonishing how gentle, how easily fooled most men are. Even an old Parisian like myself, Madame . . . I assure you that of all men the Parisians are the most sentimental. And it is astonishing how lacking in calm and balance is the most clever woman, how prone to weep at a wrong moment – in a word, how exhausting!
‘For instance: A few months ago I was obliged to break with a most charming little friend whom I passionately adored. Because she exaggerated her eccentricity. One must be in the movement, even though one may regret in one’s heart the more agreeable epoch that has vanished. A little eccentricity is permissible. It is indeed chic. Yes, it is now chic to be eccentric. But when it came to taking me to a chemist and forcing me to buy her ether, which she took at once in the restaurant where we dined: and then hanging her legs out of the taxi window in the middle of the Boulevard: you will understand that I was gêné: that I found that she exaggerated. In the middle of the Boulevard!
‘Most unfortunately one can count no longer on women, even Frenchwomen, to be dignified, to have a certain tenue. I remember the time when things were different. And more agreeable, I think.’
The Commandant gazed into the distance, and his expression became sentimental. His eyes were light blue. He even blushed.
‘Once I was happy with a woman. Only once. I will tell you about it. Her name was Madeleine, and she was a little dancer whom some sale individu had deserted when she was without money and ill. She was the most sweet and gentle woman I have ever met. I knew her for two years, and we never quarrelled once or even argued. Never. For Madeleine gave way in everything . . . And to think that my wife so often accused me of having a sale caractère . . .’
He mused for a while.
‘A sale caractère . . . Perhaps I have. But Madeleine was of a sweetness . . . ah, well, she died suddenly after two years. She was only twenty-eight.
‘When she died I was sad as never in my life before. The poor little one . . . Only twenty-eight!’
‘Three days after the funeral her mother, who was a very good woman, wrote to me saying that she wished to have the clothes and the effects, you understand, of her daughter. So in the afternoon I went to her little flat, Place de L’Odéon, fourth floor. I took my housekeeper with me, for a woman can be useful with her advice on these occasions.
‘I went straight into the bedroom and I began to open the cupboards and arrange her dresses. I wished to do that myself. I had the tears in my eyes, I assure you, for it is sad to see and to touch the dresses of a dead woman that one has loved. My housekeeper, Gertrude, she went into the kitchen to arrange the household utensils.
‘Well, suddenly, there came from the closed sitting-room a very loud, a terrible crash. The floor shook.
‘Gertrude and I both called out at the same time: What is that? And she ran to me from the kitchen saying that the noise had come from the salon. I said: Something has fallen down, and I opened quickly the sitting-room door.
‘You must understand that it was a flat on the fourth floor; all the windows of the sitting-room were tightly shut, naturally, and the blinds were drawn as I had left them on the day of the funeral. The door into the hall was locked, the other led into the bedroom where I was.
‘And, there, lying right in the middle of the floor was a block of white marble, perhaps fifty centimeters square.
‘Gertrude said: Mon Dieu, Monsieur, look at that. How did that get here? – Her face was pale as death. – It was not there, she said, when we came.
‘As for me, I just looked at the thing, stupefied.
‘Gertrude crossed herself and said: I am going. Not for anything: for nothing in the world would I stay here longer. There is something strange about this flat.
‘She ran. I – well, I did not run. I walked out, but very quickly. You understand, I have been a soldier for twenty-five years, and, God knows, I had nothing to reproach myself with with regard to the poor little one. But it shakes the nerves – something like that.’
The Commandant lowered his voice.
‘The fact was, I understood. I knew what she meant.
‘I had promised her a beautiful, white marble tombstone, and I had not yet ordered it. Not because I had not thought of it. Oh, no – but because I was too sad, too tired. But the little one doubtless thought that I had forgotten. It was her way of reminding me.’
I looked hard at the Commandant. His eyes were clear and as naïve as a child’s: a little dim with emotion . . . Silence . . . He lit a cigarette.
‘Well, to show how strange women are: I recounted this to a lady I knew, not long ago. And she laughed. Laughed! You understand . . . Un fou rire . . . And do you know what she said:
‘She said: How furious that poor Madeleine must have been that she missed you!
‘Now can you imagine the droll ideas that women can have!’
The old man and the little boy were the last of the queue of people waiting to show their permits and to be admitted to the parloir – a row of little boxes where on certain days prisoners may speak to their friends through a grating for a quarter of an hour.
The old man elbowed his way weakly, but with persistence, to the front, and when the warder shouted at him brutally to go back to his place he still advanced.
The warder yelled: ‘Go back, I tell you. Don’t you understand me? You are not French?’ The old man shook his head. ‘One sees that,’ the warder said sarcastically. He gave him a push and the old man, puzzled, backed a few steps and leaned against the wall, waiting.
He had gentle, regular features, and a grey cropped moustache. He was miserably clothed, hatless, with a red scarf knotted round his neck. His eyes were clouded with a white film, the film one sees over the eyes of those threatened with blindness.
The little boy was very little; his arms and legs matchlike. He held tightly on to the old man’s hand and looked up at the warder with enormous brown eyes. There were several children in the queue.
One woman had brought two – a baby in her arms and another hanging on to her skirt. All the crowd was silent and overawed. The women stood with bent heads, glancing furtively at each other, not with the antagonism usual in women, but as if at companions.
From the foot of the staircase leading down from the room in which they waited ran a very long whitewashed corridor, incredibly grim, and dark in spite of the whitewash. Here and there a warder sat close against the wall looking in its shadow like a huge spider – a bloated, hairy insect born of the darkness and of the dank smell.
There were very few men waiting, and nearly all the women were of the sort that trouble has whipped into a becoming meekness, but two girls near the staircase were painted and dressed smartly in bright colours. They laughed and talked, their eyes dark and defiant. One of them muttered: ‘Sale flic, va’ – as who should say: ‘Let him be, you dirty cop!’ when the warder had pushed the old man.
The queue looked frightened but pleased: an old woman like a rat huddled against the wall and chuckled. The warder balanced himself backwards and forwards from heel to toe, important and full of authority, like some petty god. There he was, the representative of honesty, of the law, of the stern forces of Good that punishes Evil. His forehead was low and barred by a perpetual frown, his jaw was heavy and protruding. A tall man, well set up. He looked with interest at the girl who had spoken, twirled his moustache and stuck his chest out. The queue waited patiently.
The parloir was like a row of telephone boxes without tops.
Along the platform overhead one saw the legs of yet another warder, marching backwards and forwards, listening to the conversations beneath him. The voices all sounded on one note – a monotonous and never-ending buzz.
The first warder looked at his watch and began to fling all the doors open with ferocious bangs. A stream of rather startled-looking people poured out, their visits over. He beckoned to the queue for others to come forward and take their places. He called the dark-eyed girl who had spoken, staring hard at her as she passed, but she was busy, looking into her mirror, powdering her face, preparing for her interview.
To the opposite door of each box came a prisoner, gripping on to the bars, straining forward to see his visitor and starting at every sound. For the quarter of an hour would seem terribly short to him and always he listened for the shout of the warder to summon him away and always he feared not being on the alert to answer it.
The monotonous buzz of conversation began again. The warder on the roof sighed and then yawned; the warder outside twirled his moustache and stared at the wall. Then a fresh stream with permits came up the stairs and he tramped forward weightily to marshal them into line.
When the quarter of an hour was over the doors were flung open again.
As the dark-eyed girl passed out the warder stared hard at her and she stared back, not giving an inch, defiant and provocative. He half smiled and actually drew back to let her pass.
The old man came last, shuffling along, more bewildered than ever. At the gate of the prison all the permits must be given up, but he trailed out unheeding. The important person who was taking those documents shouted: ‘Hé! your permit!’ and added: ‘Monsieur’, with cynicism. The old man looked frightened, his eyes filled with tears, and when his permit was snatched from him he burst into a flood of words, waving his arms.
A woman stopped to explain to him that if he asked for it next visiting day it would be given back to him, but he did not understand.
‘Allons, Allons,’ said the warder at the gate authoritatively. ‘Get along. Get along.’
Outside the people hurried to catch the tram back to Paris.
The two girls stepped out jauntily, with animated gestures and voices, but the old man walked sadly, his head bent, muttering to himself. By his side the little boy took tiny little trotting steps – three to the old man’s one. His mouth drooped, his huge brown eyes stared solemnly at an incomprehensible world.
The five musicians played every evening in the café from nine to twelve. ‘Concert! The best music in the Quarter,’ the placard outside announced. They sat near the door, and at every woman who came in the violinist, who was small and sentimental, would glance quickly and as it were hopefully. A comprehensive glance, running from the ankles upwards. But the pianist usually spent the intervals turning over his music morosely or sounding melancholy chords. When he played all the life seemed to leave his white indifferent face and find its home in his flying hands. The cellist was a fat, jolly, fair person who took life as it came; the remaining two were nondescripts, or perhaps merely seemed so, because they sat in the background. The five played everything from ‘La Belotte’ upwards and onwards into the serene classic heights of Beethoven and Massenet! Competent musicians; middle-aged, staid; they went wonderfully well with the café.
It was respectably full that evening. Stout business men drank beer and were accompanied by neat women in neat hats; temperamental gentlemen in shabby hats drank fines à l’eau beside temperamental ladies who wore turbans and drank menthes of striking emerald. There were as many foreigners as is usual. The peaceful atmosphere of the room conduced to quiet and philosophic conversations, the atmosphere of a place that always had been and always would be, the dark leather benches symbols of something perpetual and unchanging, the waiters, who were all old, ambling round with drinks or blotters, as if they had done nothing else since the beginnings of time and would be content so to do till the day of Judgment. The only vividnesses in the café, the only spots of unrest, were the pictures exposed for sale, and the rows of liqueur bottles in tiers above the counter of the bar, traditional bottles of bright colours and disturbingly graceful shapes.
Into the midst of this peace stepped suddenly a dark-haired, stoutish gentleman in evening dress. He announced that the Management had engaged him to sing. He stood smiling mechanically, waiting for silence, gracefully poised on one foot like the flying Hermes. His chest well out, his stomach well in, one hand raised with the thumb and middle finger meeting, he looked self-confident, eager and extraordinarily vulgar.
Silence was long in coming; when it did he cleared his throat and announced: ‘Chanson: Les Grues de Paris!’ in a high tenor voice, ‘Les Grues!’ The pianist began the accompaniment with its banal, moving imitation of passion.
The grues are the sellers of illusion of Paris, the frail and sometimes pretty ladies, and Paris is sentimental and indulgent towards them. That, in the mass and theoretically of course, not always practically or to individuals. The song had three verses. The first told the pathetic story of the making of a grue; the second told of her virtues, her charity, her warm-heartedness, her practical sympathy; the third, of the abominable ingratitude that was her requital. The hero of the song, having married and begun to found a family, passes the heroine, reduced to the uttermost misery and, turning his head aside, remarks virtuously to his wife: ‘What matter, it is only a gru . . . u . . . er!’
The canaille, as the third verse points out, to forget the numberless times on which she had ministered to his necessities!
All the women there looked into their mirrors during the progress of the song: most of them rouged their lips. The men stopped reading their newspapers, drank up their beers thirstily and looked sideways. There was a subtle change in the café, and when the song finished the applause was tumultuous.
The singer came forward with his dancing, tiptoe step to sell copies of his song . . . ‘Les Grue . . . Les Grues de Paris! . . . One franc!’
‘Give me two,’ she said with calm self-assurance.
The pianist chalked on a little black-board and hung up for all the world to see the next number of the orchestra.
‘Mommer loves Popper. Popper loves Mommer. Chanson Américaine. Demandé.’
Peace descended again on the café.
At ten o’clock of a Saturday evening the ordinary clients of the little Bal Musette in the rue St Jacques – the men in caps and the hatless girls – begin to drift out one by one. Those who are inclined to linger are tactfully pressed to leave by the proprietor, a thin anxious little man with a stout placid wife. The place is now hired and reserved, for every Saturday evening the Anglo-Saxon section of Tout Montparnasse comes to dance here.
In half an hour’s time the fenced-off dancing floor is filled by couples dancing with the slightly strained expressions characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon who, though wishing to enjoy himself, is not yet sufficiently primed to let himself become animated. So even the best dancers look tense and grim though they sway and glide with great skill and have the concentrated air of people engaged in some difficult but extremely important gymnastic exercise.
Most of the men are young, thin, willowy; carefully picturesque and temperamental, they wear jerseys or shirts open at the neck. Most of the women are not so young, with that tendency to be thick about the ankles and incongruous about the shoes, which is nearly always to be found in the really intelligent woman.
For they are very intelligent, all these people. They paint, they write, they express themselves in innumerable ways. It is Chelsea, London, with a large dash of Greenwich Village, New York, to liven it, and a slight sprinkling of Moscow, Christiania and even of Paris to give incongruous local colourings. The musicians are in a tiny gallery, a concertina, a banjo and a violin – the concertina, a gay soul who winks and smiles violently at every woman whose eye he can catch. At the door sit watchfully two little French policemen with enormous moustaches. After each dance tout Montparnasse sits at the little tables in the body of the hall or stands at the pewter covered bar and drinks fine à l’eau – a surprisingly weak fine. Nevertheless, as the evening progresses they grow gayer and gayer . . . And more outspoken . . .
Thus one evening a very romantic lady, an American fashion artist, who was there to be thrilled, after having read the Trilby of du Maurier, and the novels of Francis Carco, which tell of the lives of the apaches of to-day, expressed her candid opinion of a supposed Dope Fiend who sat in a corner, glassy eyed, his head against the wall, his face of an extreme pallor. He was as a matter of fact a very hard-working and on the whole abstemious portrait-painter, who, having been struck with an inspiration for his next picture, was merely gazing into infinity with the happy intenseness of one about to grasp a beautiful vision.
‘Why bring people like that?’ she inquired hotly. ‘Why?’ She went on to explain how easy it is to be broad-minded and perfectly respectable, to combine art, passion, cleanliness, efficiency and an eye to the main chance. ‘But one must know where to draw the line. That is an instance of how not to do it!’
Sipping her third artificial lemonade she gazed with an intense reproof at the pallid gentleman. Suddenly he glared back. He was suspecting her of taking mental notes of him for journalistic purposes or perhaps, oh horror, of having designs upon his peace of mind. He rose, shook himself, and thus disturbed in his musings, lamented:
‘Oh, God! How I hate women who write! How I hate them!’ in an agreeable voice.
Someone now enlightened the romantic lady as to the distinction and sobriety of her late victim, and thus robbed of her thrill, over her fourth lemonade she began to yearn for the free life of the Apache and to wish that some of the original clients of the Bal Musette had stayed . . . There had been a dark man in a red muffler, his cap well down over his eyes . . . Or a girl in a check dress with something about the way her hair grew. And the air with which she wore her shabby frock and walked had been graceful . . . exciting . . . Provocative! . . . The brain groped vaguely for the word. Melancholy descended upon that romantic fashion artist, and discontent with her milieu. In her youth she had considered herself meant for higher things! . . . Artificial lemonade of the sort supplied at the Bal Musette is greatly conducive to melancholy.
‘I don’t get any kick out of Anglo-Saxons,’ she said out loud. ‘They don’t . . . They don’t . . . stimulate my imagination!’
Nobody listened to her and upon her the infinite sadness of the world descended.
At a quarter to one the music stopped and tout Montparnasse by this time very lively indeed ordered its last drink at the bar preparatory to drifting on elsewhere.
The romantic lady finished her sixth lemonade and then perceived her ci-devant Dope Fiend.
Solitary at the end of the room he sat, one long thin arm clasping his pallid head, his body drooping complicatedly over a little table top, his face expressive of the uttermost dejection, the uttermost remorse.
Inspiration came to the romantic lady. She had been told that this was a successful and respectable portrait-painter as she was a successful and respectable fashion artist . . . He like herself must now despise his success and must mourn for the higher ideals of his youth . . . Though he was very young!
Then . . . Here was a kindred spirit. Here was someone else who, at one o’clock in the morning at a Bal Musette in Montparnasse, saw the empty grimness of life. Saw it! Knew he would never express it – and despaired. It is thus that, fortified by artificial lemonade, the romantic mind moves.
She drifted across the room, put a hand on his melancholy shoulder and murmured:
‘You are sad! I am so sorry! I understand!’
The young man lifted a heavy head and blinked several times. Smiling in a vaguely happy way, for although normally abstemious, on a Saturday night he could condescend like others, he looked at the lady. Then, recognizing her, panic came into his eyes and he looked wildly round as if for help.
‘I!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘I’m happy as a sandboy!’
From a little distance a friend swooped on him, heaved him up, said in a bored and patient voice: ‘Come on, Guy!’ and marched him efficiently away. From the back he looked like a helpless, lovable child being led away by its nurse. The tragic lady sighed and made ready to depart. The proprietor served a last Porto to the remaining few. The Saturday dance of Tout Montparnasse was over.
Twelve o’clock. Déjeuner chez Jeanne Veron, Place Vendôme.
Anna, dressed in the black cotton, chemise-like garment of the mannequin off duty was trying to find her way along dark passages and down complicated flights of stairs to the underground from where lunch was served.
She was shivering, for she had forgotten her coat, and the garment that she wore was very short, sleeveless, displaying her rose-coloured stockings to the knee. Her hair was flamingly and honestly red; her eyes, which were very gentle in expression, brown and heavily shadowed with kohl, her face small and pale under its professional rouge. She was fragile, like a delicate child, her arms pathetically thin. It was to her legs that she owed this dazzling, this incredible opportunity.
Madame Veron, white-haired with black eyes, incredibly distinguished, who had given them one sweeping glance, the glance of the connoisseur, smiled imperiously and engaged her at an exceedingly small salary. As a beginner, Madame explained, Anna could not expect more. She was to wear the jeune fille dresses. Another smile, another sharp glance.
Anna was conducted from the Presence by an underling who helped her to take off the frock she had worn temporarily for the interview. Aspirants for an engagement are always dressed in a model of the house.
She had spent yesterday afternoon in a delirium tempered by a feeling of exaggerated reality, and in buying the necessary make-up. It had been such a forlorn hope, answering the advertisement.
The morning had been dreamlike. At the back of the wonderful decorated salons she had found an unexpected sombreness; the place, empty, would have been dingy and melancholy, countless puzzling corridors and staircases, a rabbit warren and a labyrinth. She despaired of ever finding her way.
In the mannequins’ dressing-room she spent a shy hour making up her face – in an extraordinary and distinctive atmosphere of slimness and beauty; white arms and faces vivid with rouge; raucous voices and the smell of cosmetics; silken lingerie. Coldly critical glances were bestowed upon Anna’s reflection in the glass. None of them looked at her directly . . . A depressing room, taken by itself, bare and cold, a very inadequate conservatory for these human flowers. Saleswomen in black rushed in and out, talking in sharp voices; a very old woman hovered, helpful and shapeless, showing Anna where to hang her clothes, presenting to her the black garment that Anna was wearing, going to lunch. She smiled with professional motherliness, her little, sharp, black eyes travelling rapidly from la nouvelle’s hair to her ankles and back again.
She was Madame Pecard, the dresser.
Before Anna had spoken a word she was called away by a small boy in buttons to her destination in one of the salons: there, under the eye of a vendeuse, she had to learn the way to wear the innocent and springlike air and garb of the jeune fille. Behind a yellow, silken screen she was hustled into a leather coat and paraded under the cold eyes of an American buyer. This was the week when the spring models are shown to important people from big shops all over Europe and America: the most critical week of the season . . . The American buyer said that he would have that, but with an inch on to the collar and larger cuffs. In vain the saleswoman, in her best English with its odd Chicago accent, protested that that would completely ruin the chic of the model. The American buyer knew what he wanted and saw that he got it.
The vendeuse sighed, but there was a note of admiration in her voice. She respected Americans: they were not like the English, who, under a surface of annoying moroseness of manner, were notoriously timid and easy to turn round your finger.
‘Was that all right?’ Behind the screen one of the saleswomen smiled encouragingly and nodded. The other shrugged her shoulders. She had small, close-set eyes, a long thin nose and tight lips of the regulation puce colour. Behind her silken screen Anna sat on a high white stool. She felt that she appeared charming and troubled. The white and gold of the salon suited her red hair.
A short morning. For the mannequin’s day begins at ten and the process of making up lasts an hour. The friendly saleswoman volunteered the information that her name was Jeannine, that she was in the lingerie, that she considered Anna rudement jolie, that noon was Anna’s lunch hour. She must go down the corridor and up those stairs, through the big salon then . . . Anyone would tell her. But Anna, lost in the labyrinth, was too shy to ask her way. Besides, she was not sorry to have time to brace herself for the ordeal. She had reached the regions of utility and oilcloth: the decorative salons were far overhead. Then the smell of food – almost visible, it was so cloud-like and heavy – came to her nostrils, and high-noted, and sibilant, a buzz of conversation made her draw a deep breath. She pushed a door open.
She was in a big, very low-ceilinged room, all the floor space occupied by long wooden tables with no cloths . . . She was sitting at the mannequins’ table, gazing at a thick and hideous white china plate, a twisted tin fork, a wooden-handled stained knife, a tumbler so thick it seemed unbreakable.
There were twelve mannequins at Jeanne Veron’s: six of them were lunching, the others still paraded, goddess-like, till their turn came for rest and refreshment. Each of the twelve was a distinct and separate type: each of the twelve knew her type and kept to it, practising rigidly in clothing, manner, voice and conversation.
Round the austere table were now seated Babette, the gamine, the traditional blonde enfant; Mona, tall and darkly beautiful, the femme fatale, the wearer of sumptuous evening gowns. Georgette was the garçonne; Simone with green eyes Anna knew instantly for a cat whom men would and did adore, a sleek, white, purring, long-lashed creature . . . Eliane was the star of the collection.
Eliane was frankly ugly and it did not matter: no doubt Lilith, from whom she was obviously descended, had been ugly too. Her hair was henna-tinted, her eyes small and black, her complexion bad under her thick make-up. Her hips were extraordinarily slim, her hands and feet exquisite, every movement she made was as graceful as a flower’s in the wind. Her walk . . . But it was her walk which made her the star there and earned her a salary quite fabulous for Madame Veron’s, where large salaries were not the rule . . . Her walk and her ‘chic of the devil’ which lit an expression of admiration in even the cold eyes of American buyers.
Eliane was a quiet girl, pleasant-mannered. She wore a ring with a beautiful emerald on one long, slim finger, and in her small eyes were both intelligence and mystery.
Madame Pecard, the dresser, was seated at the head of the mannequins’ table, talking loudly, unlistened to, and gazing benevolently at her flock.
At other tables sat the sewing girls, pale-faced, black-frocked – the workers heroically gay, but with the stamp of labour on them: and the saleswomen. The mannequins, with their sensual, blatant charms and their painted faces were watched covertly, envied and apart.
Babette the blond enfant was next to Anna, and having started the conversation with a few good, round oaths at the quality of the sardines, announced proudly that she could speak English and knew London very well. She began to tell Anna the history of her adventures in the city of coldness, dark and fogs . . . She had gone to a job as a mannequin in Bond Street and the villainous proprietor of the shop having tried to make love to her and she being rigidly virtuous, she had left. And another job, Anna must figure to herself, had been impossible to get, for she, Babette, was too small and slim for the Anglo-Saxon idea of a mannequin.
She stopped to shout in a loud voice to the woman who was serving: ‘Hé, my old one, don’t forget your little Babette . . .’
Opposite, Simone the cat and the sportive Georgette were having a low-voiced conversation about the tristeness of a monsieur of their acquaintance. ‘I said to him,’ Georgette finished decisively, ‘Nothing to be done, my rabbit. You have not looked at me well, little one. In my place would you not have done the same?’
She broke off when she realized that the others were listening, and smiled in a friendly way at Anna.
She too, it appeared, had ambitions to go to London because the salaries were so much better there. Was it difficult? Did they really like French girls? Parisiennes?
The conversation became general.
‘The English boys are nice,’ said Babette, winking one divinely candid eye. ‘I had a chic type who used to take me to dinner at the Empire Palace. Oh, a pretty boy . . .’
‘It is the most chic restaurant in London,’ she added importantly.
The meal reached the stage of dessert. The other tables were gradually emptying; the mannequins all ordered very strong coffee, several liqueur. Only Mona and Eliane remained silent; Eliane, because she was thinking of something else; Mona, because it was her type, her genre to be haughty.
Her hair swept away from her white, narrow forehead and her small ears: her long earrings nearly touching her shoulders, she sipped her coffee with a disdainful air. Only once, when the blonde enfant, having engaged in a passage of arms with the waitress and got the worst of it, was momentarily discomfited and silent, Mona narrowed her eyes and smiled an astonishingly cruel smile.
As soon as her coffee was drunk she got up and went out.
Anna produced a cigarette, and Georgette, perceiving instantly that here was the sportive touch, her genre, asked for one and lit it with a devil-may-care air. Anna eagerly passed her cigarettes round, but the Mère Pecard interfered weightily. It was against the rules of the house for the mannequins to smoke, she wheezed. The girls all lit their cigarettes and smoked. The Mère Pecard rumbled on: ‘A caprice, my children. All the world knows that mannequins are capricious. Is it not so?’ She appealed to the rest of the room.
As they went out Babette put her arm round Anna’s waist and whispered: ‘Don’t answer Madame Pecard. We don’t like her. We never talk to her. She spies on us. She is a camel.’
That afternoon Anna stood for an hour to have a dress draped on her. She showed this dress to a stout Dutch lady buying for the Hague, to a beautiful South American with pearls, to a silver-haired American gentleman who wanted an evening cape for his daughter of seventeen, and to a hook-nosed, odd English lady of title who had a loud voice and dressed, under her furs, in a grey jersey and stout boots.
The American gentleman approved of Anna, and said so, and Anna gave him a passionately grateful glance. For, if the vendeuse Jeannine had been uniformly kind and encouraging, the other, Madame Tienne, had been as uniformly disapproving and had once even pinched her arm hard.
About five o’clock Anna became exhausted. The four white and gold walls seemed to close in on her. She sat on her high white stool staring at a marvellous nightgown and fighting an intense desire to rush away. Anywhere! Just to dress and rush away anywhere, from the raking eyes of the customers and the pinching fingers of Irene.
‘I will one day. I can’t stick it,’ she said to herself. ‘I won’t be able to stick it.’ She had an absurd wish to gasp for air.
Jeannine came and found her like that.
‘It is hard at first, hein? . . . One asks oneself: Why? For what good? It is all idiot. We are all so. But we go on. Do not worry about Irene.’ She whispered: ‘Madame Vernon likes you very much. I heard her say so.’
At six o’clock Anna was out in the rue de la Paix; her fatigue forgotten, the feeling that now she really belonged to the great, maddening city possessed her and she was happy in her beautifully cut tailor-made and beret.
Georgette passed her and smiled; Babette was in a fur coat.
All up the street the mannequins were coming out of the shops, pausing on the pavements a moment, making them as gay and as beautiful as beds of flowers before they walked swiftly away and the Paris night swallowed them up.
He sat on a bench, a very depressed young man, meditating on the faithlessness of women, on the difficulty of securing money, on the futility of existence.
A little bonne, resting wearily first on one foot, then on the other, screamed: ‘Raoul, Raoul, veux-tu te dépêcher.’ Raoul, aged two, dressed in a jade green overcoat and clutching a ball, staggered determinedly in the opposite direction. He sat down suddenly, was captured and received a slap with manly indifference.
‘Sacrés gosses!’ said the young man gazing morosely at all the other Raouls and Pierrots and Jacquelines in their brightly coloured overcoats.
He turned his head distastefully away: but instantly interest came into his eyes.
A girl was walking up the steps leading from the fountain, slowly and with a calculated grace. Her hat was as green as Raoul’s overcoat, her costume extremely short, her legs . . . ‘Not bad!’ said the young man to himself. ‘In fact . . . one may say pretty!’
The girl walked past slowly, very slowly. She looked back. The young man fidgeted, hesitated, looked at the legs . . .
He got up and followed. She immediately walked faster and adopted an air of haughty innocence. The young man’s hunting instinct awoke and he followed, twirling his little moustache determinedly. Under the trees he caught her up.
‘Mademoiselle . . .’
‘Monsieu . . .’
Such a waste of time, say the Luxemburg Gardens, to be morose. Are there not always Women and Pretty Legs and Green Hats.
It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us.
I said: ‘Who’s the happy man in the corner? I’ve never seen him before.’
My companion who knew everybody answered: ‘That’s Verhausen. As mad as a hatter.’
‘Madder than most people here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes, really dotty. He has got a studio full of pictures that he will never show to anyone.’
I asked: ‘What pictures? His own pictures?’
‘Yes, his own pictures. They’re damn good, they say.’ . . . Verhausen had started out by being a Prix de Rome and he had had a big reputation in Holland and Germany, once upon a time. He was a Fleming. But the old fellow now refused to exhibit, and went nearly mad with anger if he were pressed to sell anything.
‘A pose?’
My friend said: ‘Well, I dunno. It’s lasted a long time for a pose.’
He started to laugh.
‘You know Van Hoyt. He knew Verhausen intimately in Antwerp, years ago. It seems he already hid his pictures up then . . . He had evolved the idea that it was sacrilege to sell them. Then he married some young and flighty woman from Brussels, and she would not stand it. She nagged and nagged: she wanted lots of money and so on and so on. He did not listen even. So she gave up arguing and made arrangements with a Jew dealer from Amsterdam when he was not there. It is said that she broke into his studio and passed the pictures out of the window. Five of the best. Van Hoyt said that Verhausen cried like a baby when he knew. He simply sat and sobbed. Perhaps he also beat the lady. In any case she left him soon afterwards and eventually Verhausen turned up, here, in Montparnasse. The woman now with him he had picked up in some awful brothel in Antwerp. She must have been good to him, for he says now that the Fallen are the only women with souls. They will walk on the necks of all the others in Heaven . . .’ And my friend concluded: ‘A rum old bird. But a bit of a back number, now, of course.’
I said: ‘It’s a perverted form of miserliness, I suppose. I should like to see his pictures, or is that impossible? I like his face.’
My friend said carelessly: ‘It’s possible, I believe. He sometimes shows them to people. It’s only that he will not exhibit and will not sell. I dare say Van Hoyt could fix it up.’
Verhausen’s studio was in the real Latin Quarter which lies to the north of the Montparnasse district and is shabbier and not cosmopolitan yet. It was an ancient, narrow street of uneven houses, a dirty, beautiful street, full of mauve shadows. A policeman stood limply near the house, his expression that of contemplative stupefaction: a yellow dog lay stretched philosophically on the cobblestones of the roadway. The concierge said without interest that Monsieur Verhausen’s studio was on the quatrième à droite. I toiled upwards.
I knocked three times. There was a subdued rustling within . . . A fourth time: as loudly as I could. The door opened a little and Mr Verhausen’s head appeared in the opening. I read suspicion in his eyes and I smiled as disarmingly as I could. I said something about Mr Van Hoyt – his own kind invitation, my great pleasure.
Verhausen continued to scrutinize me through huge spectacles: then he smiled with a sudden irradiation, stood away from the door and bowing deeply, invited me to enter. The room was big, all its walls encumbered on the floor with unframed canvases, all turned with their backs to the wall. It was very much cleaner than I had expected: quite clean and even dustless. On a table was spread a white cloth and there were blue cups and saucers and a plate of gingerbread cut into slices and thickly buttered. Mr Verhausen rubbed his hands and said with a pleased, childlike expression and in astonishingly good English that he had prepared an English tea that was quite ready because he had expected me sooner.
We sat on straight-backed chairs and sipped solemnly.