Montjoye takes Aurora by the arm, laughs at her embarrassment, pours her a drink and seats her next to the duchess. I loathe Montjoye. He is the person who comes to mind when I try to recall how long I have had a horror of people of taste. I cannot describe the irritating minutiae of his home. From the tongs to the doorknobs, from the candelabras with their green candles to the engraved glasses, everything is perfect. On the work table, which has been pushed into a corner of the room so that people can dance, there are a pile of documents: Credits to the Allies, Loans to the Banque de France, Special Expenses. All of the minister’s work is there, in a jumble, amid tuberoses and photographs. But with his genius for figures, his work that can be done in an instant, Montjoye will be able to make sense of it all overnight, on his boss’s behalf, the day before questions in the House or a conference.
“We can’t manage to get you drunk, Aurora. However, promise me you will drink this, which I have prepared specially with you in mind.”
Feverishly, he shakes a bottle that contains four compartments for liqueurs and walks over to the fireplace where his strange face, his large head, his grey hair, are lit up.
Fred sits down at the piano. Grünfeld, having discovered some Pushkin in the library, recites—
“Don’t believe a word of it,” says Montjoye. “He doesn’t know Russian.”
From behind her lorgnette, the duchess, sitting motionless, appraises each of us with her cold eyes. She has that sterile youthfulness of fifty-year-old American women, exquisite feet, grey hair, teeth of white jade. She is dressed in nurse’s uniform with a large ruby cross over her forehead.
Aurora is enjoying herself in a gloomy sort of way. She is accompanying Fred at the piano. I try to get closer to her and to join in myself singing All Dressed up and Nowhere to Go, which Hitchcock, who created it and who is dozing in an armchair, professes not to know. Aurora turns away from me moodily. On a corner couch, Montjoye is talking in a low voice with muffled laughter to the duchess.
“Aurora’s going to dance,” he cries, suddenly jumping to his feet.
And he leads her to the middle of the room.
“Wait, Aurora, I’m going to make a carpet for you, a carpet of flowers, a carpet of pearls, a carpet for your beauty, for your grace …”
He hesitates, no longer knowing what he is saying, demolishes the vases and scatters the flowers on the ground.
Everything spins round. Everything still spins round in my memory, and Grünfeld’s red beard and Montjoye’s pale features, and Aurora, especially Aurora, scantily clad, between four lotus-shaped lanterns, her arms outstretched, streaming with sweat, as if possessed, making mad leaps from one end of the room to the other, twirling round with machine-like speed, impressing on our retinas something resembling a Hindu image, with multiple legs and arms. She falls to the ground. Montjoye kneels down beside her, wipes her brow with his handkerchief. He bends over her to inhale her, his eyes closed. I can see the vein in the middle of his forehead bulging, his neck bursting out from under his collar. His head moves closer and closer, then draws back; then, unable to control himself any longer, Montjoye places his lips on Aurora. Aurora shudders, opens her eyes, gets to her feet and, with the speed of a pugilist, sends Montjoye sprawling across to the firedog with a punch to the jaw. Montjoye screams in agony. A bottle of crème de menthe spills its emerald contents over the floor.
“Aurora has created a pogrom,” says Fred very calmly from the piano.
I try to intervene.
“Leave me alone, you,” says Aurora. “I hate you.”
And before any of us could have lifted a finger, she jumps through the window into the little ground-floor garden and disappears.
When I enter her studio, Aurora is sitting on her bed, her chin in her hands, her elbows on her clenched knees. She does not turn her head towards me, I walk straight over to her, in the direction of her eyes, but her gaze goes through me and remains fixed to the wall.
I place my hands on her shoulders: she flinches.
“Leave me. Leave me. I don’t want to see you anymore. Go away.”
I sit down.
“Go away.”
I stand up.
She softens and reaches out her hand to me.
“Sit down. I only wanted to tell you that it would be best to leave me alone from now on. You are of no use to me. I don’t want to say more.”
She pokes the tip of her umbrella through the straps of her sandals.
“I was beginning to reap the fruits of all my voluntary labour. I am not a nun. I have to both invent the rule and observe it at the same time. And abnegation is not easy for the wild creature I am. You who have not been aware of this long struggle wouldn’t be able to understand … Parties like the one last night don’t help matters …”
Tears flow down her cheeks. I want to say … But she interrupts me as she gets to her feet and covers herself with a violet veil.
Large zinc clouds jut through the rays of the setting sun. It thunders. Taxis rush madly by.
As soon as we are out of her neighbourhood, people start to look round. Aurora stops, places her hand on mine. Between us this layer of very skimpy veil.
Aurora trembles.
“Will you forgive me, Aurora?”
A vague gesture from Aurora which I interpret:
“It’s not your fault.”
She waves her hand. The number 19 bus draws up obediently at her feet, by the edge of the pavement. She climbs up to the top deck as if she were walking on a length of unrolled frieze.
The panel states that she can go as far as Islington.
I am very sad. I feel that I shall not really be upset until after dinner.
1916
AFTERWORD BY MICHEL DÉON
PAUL MORAND was thirty-three when Gallimard published Tendres stocks (Tender Shoots) in 1921, a debut that may seem tardy in these days of untold geniuses of eighteen, and younger. The three novellas that make up this slim book date, in fact, from a few years earlier and we may not be incorrect in thinking that Morand kept them on his back burner, polishing and improving them, precisely in order that they should appear effortless.
Are they, in any case, novellas? No, not really, not in the true sense of the word, and I would feel more inclined to place these first three trial attempts, by a writer who had not yet found his path, among the ‘portraits’ that he may have considered as an exercise in style, a sort of trial gallop before the future work of his full maturity. Proust was dazzled, as was the high-priest of Surrealism, André Breton, who would later feel disillusioned when his followers supported Moscow.
The astonishment aroused by Tendres stocks was huge. Europe was emerging from an appalling war, gathering its breath to overturn the idols of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Morand burst forth without warning, accurate, fluent, clever, poetic, cruel. The early years of his life as a diplomat had shunted him between Rome, Madrid and London until he had acquired sufficient know-how to have himself recalled to Paris and to spend the last year of the world war under the command of the most brilliant operator in French politics — Phillipe Berthelot. The names of his friends were Giraudoux, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and, even more so, le tout-Paris, including a few ladies of already mature age who held open table at the Ritz, at Meurice’s, chez Larue or Maxim’s. Here they talked of politics, here they swapped the latest gossip and even the substance of the top-secret government meeting held that very morning. At those luncheons Morand would meet the woman who was to become his wife, Hélène, Princesse Soutzo, half-Greek, half-Romanian, to whom he was deeply unfaithful but whom he would also deeply mourn when she died.