He goes home. He has a nice house, three children, an attractive young wife whose picture he keeps in the drawer of the table in the glass pavilion next to the put-away diary. He let me see her once. I’m sure he doesn’t show the picture to anyone else, and only sees it each time he opens or closes the drawer and he gives her a quick caress. He has never loved another woman and he isn’t the man to succumb to a sudden infatuation. (His salary is higher than the hotel manager’s.) Before the war he worked in many of the world’s great cities. Always in an atmosphere of tiles, glass, water and silvery metal. He went to war in 1914, calmly, without zeal and without fear, because he knew his uncommon gift would not fail to make an impression on the general staff officers. For four years he sat a dozen miles behind the front, in idyllic villages, with hot saucepans and abundant supplies. Sometimes he talks about that time. He never forgets to add: “The gentlemen on my staff dined better than they fought.” It’s the only aphorism that’s ever occurred to him. It will last him to the end of his days, and it’s meant as praise not blame. Once I asked him if he had been back to visit his newly independent homeland. “No,” he said, “there’s no need. This is where I pay my taxes.” I asked him whether he wanted his son to follow him into the profession. “Maybe!” replied the cook. “If he has the talent.” But there was doubt in his gentle voice. Perhaps, like many, he thinks the sons of geniuses turn out badly.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 February 1929
43. “Madame Annette”
When Annette turned twenty-eight and still hadn’t found a husband, she went to one of the jewellers in the Rue de la Providence in whose windows wedding bands of gold and silver and doublé by the dozen are looped over little velvet turrets, suggestive of tiny shimmering monuments to monogamy. She bought herself a silver wedding ring and put it on her left ring finger, in accordance with the practices of her country. She may have thought in the privacy of her own soul that one day a husband would present himself, and she would be able to exchange the silver ring for a golden one. For the time being, though, the silver one was sufficient, so to speak, as a way of putting God on notice, as moral compulsion exerted on Fate, so that it might at long last see fit to give her a spouse. Beyond that, the ring had one other, immediate function: it was able to keep the girl from the attentions of undesirable men, who are usually cowards en plus, by implying the presence of a jealous and strongly built husband lurking somewhere. It also won her a measure of respect with her female colleagues. Indeed, shortly after Annette had purchased the ring, the staff, which previously had called her “Mademoiselle Annette”, took to calling her “Madame Annette”. This might be the place to observe that the title of dame still impresses the odd spinster from a good family nowadays, who doesn’t have the sorry prospect of serving strangers for a living; how much more, then, a girl who is supposed to remain so all her life, even if she should have become a grandmother! — To Annette’s colleagues, who had so little occasion to call each other “Madame”, that title conferred a social distinction. They bestowed it on Annette, even though they half-guessed that the silver ring was merely for appearances. They felt themselves ennobled when they were able to say “Madame Annette”.
She had been in service since her fifteenth birthday. Her father, a Normandy fisherman, sent her to a small hotel in Le Havre, to whose landlady he had had old ties from when he had been a sailor. It would appear that girls are not readily countenanced in Le Havre. Less than a month after her arrival, Annette succumbed to the belated love-lowings of a fifty-year-old shipper, who promised to marry her, and was only kept from doing so by a marriage of twenty years. Annette got a baby, and shortly afterwards a good job with some blue-blooded people outside Paris, who were originally from Normandy themselves, and who liked to recruit their staff from there. The baby was left with the landlady in Le Havre, as a paying guest, and therefore died some six months later. Annette sent money for the funeral, and, not having a picture of her child, but wanting to remember him in some way, bought a postcard of a bonny infant in a papeterie, put it in a black frame, and kept it hidden away in her trunk.
Taught a lesson by her experience in Le Havre, and persuaded in her Norman-rustic way that any affair was bound to result in pregnancy, Annette fought off the wooings of M. de L., her new master — even though she did so with some reluctance. To save herself once and for all from temptation, she proceeded to tell Mme de L. of the attempts of her husband. As a result, how could it be otherwise, Annette was terminated straightaway, and, lest she create further confusion in another noble house, she was recommended to a large hotel in Paris, where a certain M. de L. sat on the board.
Here began her modest career.
She (not altogether mistakenly) thought it pleasanter in the course of a morning to clean twenty rooms of unknown and constantly changing persons, than eight or ten thoroughly established for all eternity, on whom she depended for bread and keep. She preferred tips, left behind like a form of tax by those departing, to a Christmas gift handed over with all ceremony by the lady of the house in December, and still made much of in April, at Easter. She became used to her job, because it lacked the monotony of a servant’s; had none of the shabby lustre of a patriarchal disposition, but something of the cold, clear objectivity of a trade, almost of an office; and because in addition it gave her a sense of the diversity and colour of the world, its riches and its inhabitants. Because she was observant and quick on the uptake, she attained over time an understanding of the various habits of various circles, various degrees of intimacy with luxury, with life in a culture and a nobility that has its economic foundation. These experiences raised her expectations of those men she happened to meet. And even though she liked one or other of them, she could not decide to marry any of them. The only man she met at a dance who seemed to master the arts of a gentleman, which in the opinion of the chambermaids are the preserve of the upper classes, was a zouave, a corporal from the French colonies. She was frankly a little afraid of coloured gentlemen. If a man was yellow or black, surely it was bound to show one day, be it in the form of an outbreak of madness, a sudden act of violence or just an exotic malady. Still, she was all set to take the plunge. Then war broke out, and her zouave gave his life, as was proper, for Alsace-Lorraine.
Her grief was greater than her love had ever been, because she endowed the dead man with greater gifts than the living one had had. She remained convinced that she had lost the embodiment of manliness. Compared to her image of the dead man, the hotel guests were so many botched jobs. Even boxers and aviators were left trailing by her zouave. Not having his photograph, and as idealized pictures of zouaves were not offered on sale, she endowed him with all the traits of all the heroes whose pictures she saw in illustrated newspapers. In her pious brain that over the course of a few years did all the work that normally was performed by generations in the making of a legend, the departed became a coloured demi-god. Her memory of him kept her safe, it should be noted, from the seduction attempts of white, half-drunk and irresponsible hotel-guests.