“Is he going to get us the money?”
“I don’t know, but as he was leaving he said: ‘We’ll sort that out.’’’
“He’ll pay for the Mas Vieux twice to please Hedwige,” said Fromentine straight away.
“I hope, my child, that you didn’t give this stranger the impression that we are arguing over your father’s legacy with a servant. We do not come from such a grand background that we can do such things without any shame.”
“But, Mamicha, I had to talk to him about the sale. We’re not interested in it ourselves, but we need money. He certainly understood…”
“What makes you think that he understood? What did he say to you? Tell us everything.”
Hedwige opened her mouth, searched for the words and realized she had nothing to say. Fortunately for her, Fromentine cut in:
“First, tell us what he looks like. Describe him. Is he handsome?”
“He’s ugly,” Hedwige said slowly. “He’s ugly and he makes one feel dizzy.”
“Dizziness, that’s light-headedness. Did you find him attractive, Hedwige?”
“Be quiet, child,” said Bonne, immediately concerned. “Come now, Hedwige, let’s start again. Repeat to me word for word your conversation with this gentleman, Monsieur Niox.”
“He’s not exactly a gentleman,” said Hedwige (she was groping around trying to find the right description). “He’s a young man. He dresses oddly. His windows were wide open and it was very cold.”
“So he offered you a chair and you said…”
“He didn’t offer me anything; there were no chairs in the room.”
“I don’t understand,” said Madame de Boisrosé, genuinely amazed. “How can a room not have any chairs?”
“It was his office. I didn’t like it,” said Hedwige in the same slow, reticent tone of voice. “A totally bare room in which there was nothing to hold on to: neither furniture, nor mouldings, nor cornice, nor door handles. Everything was white, too, as if it was made up of six ceilings.”
“You must have felt like a fly in there,” Fromentine burst out laughing, “and wondered whether you were upside down. I can see why it must have made you feel dizzy!”
Hedwige glared at her in annoyance and turned to her mother, who asked her to begin at the beginning, from the moment he greeted her.
“He didn’t greet me,” said Hedwige, “at least not that I remember. For a long time he didn’t say a word to me, then we spoke about various things… things of no interest…”
“What, you didn’t explain the situation to him?”
“Yes, of course. I told him everything. There’s no point in my repeating this story, which you know by heart,” said Hedwige, who was feeling unusually irritated.
“There is a point in our knowing what he replied to you,” said Angélique ironically.
She fixed her gaze on her sister. It had not escaped her that something was missing here.
“You shall know very shortly, my dear,” said Hedwige, “because he intends to ask us to meet him. For the time being, I’m tired and I don’t feel like talking. I’m going to have a rest.”
And she slipped into the maternal bed, fully dressed, having kicked off her shoes with the heel of her foot and sent them to join her sisters’ shoes in the middle of the room. (The Boisrosés were constantly removing their shoes everywhere, in the car, under the tables, in church and, rather more reasonably, at home; this dissoluteness was part of the Rule. What with these pairs of shoes scattered over the carpet, the place looked more like a Christmas hearth, a flea market or the entrance to a mosque; and there was no more characteristic sound made by this colonial family than the noise of large bodies causing the floorboards to bend beneath their bare heels.)
At about six o’clock in the evening, Fromentine was the first to wake up and she went to light the fire. She threw balls of paper which she moistened and put out to dry in the sun before stuffing them into her oven. The stove was an ugly little barrack-room model in which all the Boisrosé family’s refuse was burnt. For, to the great astonishment of the dustbin collectors and the rag-and-bone men, this family never put their rubbish out on the street, not even the bones of a leg of lamb. In this slow combustion oven they burned the remains of what they consumed, which is to say almost nothing. Coffee was their principal gastronomic treat and even then it was Uncle Rocheflamme who almost always brought it, obtaining it from the Trou Dauphin by way of a former slave of the Boisrosé family who had become First Secretary at a Caribbean legation in Paris. Bills, which were anyway quite rare, made no impression on these single women, and the taxman himself, a person of devilish ingenuity, had a hard time making sense of their cloistered existence, which displayed no outward signs of wealth and was far more deprived than that of the Carmelites from the nearby convent whose chanting they could hear.
“Fromentine, the Figaro,” Bonne commanded.
Fromentine read page two of the Figaro aloud. They loved the lists of wedding presents. Her sisters listened, seated on the floor, polishing their nails; this ceremony, which began at the four corners of the room, ended with a gathering of the Boisrosé girls on the maternal throne, and towards evening, since they were cold, with them all lying in a row beneath the old, moth-eaten squirrel-skin blanket that served as a bedcover. For, incapable of standing up to their mother’s “What, you’re going to leave me here!”, they had one by one given up whatever they were doing. One hour later, there could still be heard:
“Marquis and Marquise de Z… a fan, Baronne W… a gilt dressing case, Vicomte B… a hunting print.”
Since this breed of tendrils cling to one another, and these magnets magnetize themselves and magnetize each other, they had reverted to their blissful easygoing Creole life, which they had scarcely abandoned for a moment on their arrival in Paris. Four heads on the pillow: one grey, one brown, one blonde, one red, lying beneath a box-wood Christ, who looked astonished at the sight of these human beings who had reverted to nature. Next to the crucifix was an almanac from which not a single page had been torn out for eight months, which indicated the total contempt of the Boisrosés for the divisions of the calendar. Reconstituted as it was in this way, the mother cell borne on this motionless palanquin was now shut off from the world; it was a return to the embryo, to silence and the solitude of foetal life, to love in its most elementary form.
Shortly before dinner, Uncle Rocheflamme came in dragging his feet, like someone whose life was at an end, but no one paid much attention. With his pumice-stone complexion, his Gallic moustache, his blue Viking eyes and his inside-out clothes, Monsieur de Rocheflamme had only had to cross the road to be with his family: he lived opposite in a flat from which he carried on, without a licence, the occupation of man of the world, earning outrageous commissions for small pieces of marquetry furniture which colleagues left with him “as a minder”, to use the jargon of the Salle Drouot.4 His name, which brought to mind the Palaeozoic age and fermenting flint stones, scarcely accorded with his chilly, Swiss Guard-without-the-feathers personality. Nothing else was colourful about him apart from his knowledge of eighteenth-century furniture. Having no one with whom to converse about the engraving of Gouthière’s bronzes, Monsieur de Rocheflamme allowed his sister to make decisions on every subject except on the roasting of coffee beans, about which he had ideas that, for once, were not fully formed. Apart from this, he was one of that vast herd of idiots who, in a coagulated voice, hand back their newspaper once they have read it. Nobody asked him anything. His presence was an absence. He spent hours standing behind his sister’s back watching her play patience, reprimanding himself whenever he gave bad advice and groaning when it was good. He entered quite naturally into this Boisrosé nirvana, a sort of suspension of any future, of permanent peace and quiet in which Time resembled a reel of film that has come to a sudden stop due to a power cut.