“You’re right,” she said, “we don’t see Fromentine any more. As soon as she comes home, she locks herself away in her bedroom. She is, of course, sorting out her clothes and basing everything around this one central purpose: ‘a man to take her out’. Wouldn’t she be better off reading my Figaro to me? And the airs she puts on! She continually annoys her sisters. Hedwige sulks. It’s understandable, the younger one is trespassing on her preserve… she’ll return empty-handed; I’ve seen only too clearly that if he is chatting to Fromentine, he’s only really looking at Hedwige; but Angélique, I do rather wonder what’s biting her? She’s bored; did she get bored before? To think that I was counting on this man to restore some order to my affairs and all he has done is to sew disorder in my household! He’s indecisive, a dawdler,” she concluded in a caustic tone that pierced Madame de La Chaufournerie’s sluggish eardrum. “Yes, a dawdler!”
“But of whom are you talking, my dear?” the latter replied. And since Bonne looked vague and did not answer: “Would it be about a good catch for your girls?” (Herminie was prone to the sort of insights which, along with her exceptional inquisitorial ability, would have taken her far as an examining magistrate…) “And of course, all three are in love with him?”
Bonne gave a start.
“In love! My girls in love! Well, that would be the last straw!”
She drew her heavy jade-green Ottoman morning coat over her bosom (any allusions to love aroused these reflexes of threatened modesty in her) and cast a resentful glance at her friend.
“Love, love, that’s all you ever think about!” she said severely. “Should a woman of your age be meddling in such filth! Men ought to disgust you, just as they do me! You do make me laugh.”
But she wasn’t laughing; it was Madame de La Chaufournerie, her face like that of a scrawny overworked nag, who broke into an extremely rare fit of laughter.
“It’s you with your horror of men who’s the comical one! So have you decided never to marry your daughters?” she said.
“Yes, men are repugnant, but my daughters ought to get married,” said Bonne peremptorily.
The new secretary was extremely usefuclass="underline" since she knew neither shorthand nor typing, Pierre was obliged to learn them himself; since she did not know Paris very well, he did his own shopping and because she organized her own time badly, he also did Fromentine’s. She was aware of this and she laughed.
“I’ve never been so well waited upon,” she would say, “as I have since I’ve been employed.”
The girl answered the telephone and kept an eye on the house. Reclining on the sofa in the empty office, she leafed through illustrated magazines. To begin with, this office had disappointed her.
“But where’s your antique shop then?” she asked Pierre.
To her astonishment, he showed her his safe.
“There,” he said.
“And here was I thinking you had a very dark shop piled with collections of crocodiles up to the ceiling, with ticketed prices hanging on the end of their tails, and pretty little tea sets, and dalmatic vestments embroidered in gold, all lit by lantern fish! What a disappointment! Are you going out? Be kind, Pierre, bring me back some American cigarettes.”
He came back loaded with supplies.
“How quick you’ve been! I’m flabbergasted. You really are an electric man. It’s wonderful. Where do find the time?”
“Did anyone phone?”
“Yes. A foreign gentleman. I couldn’t catch his name.”
“Try to remember…”
“It was something like Stravinsky… Striesky… something with ‘ski’ in it.”
“It wasn’t Erckmann by any chance?”
“Yes, Erckmann, exactly.”
“He’s the keeper of the Ethnology Museum in Stockholm. I was waiting for him to call.”
“Oh? I rang off. I always ring off, for that matter, when I don’t understand.”
“And what have you done in my absence, Fromentine?”
“I’ve made a mess.”
And she laughed as she pointed to the magazines on the floor and the papers that were scattered around.
“You would make a very poor cleaning lady; a jumble shop cleaner, at best.”
After a week, Pierre re-engaged his former secretary and kept Fromentine for trips to rue Masseran to play tennis on a covered court.
He no longer talked about Hedwige. He was indifferent to Angélique. He never mentioned the Boisrosés. To think that he had almost thrown in the towel. “And now I’m turning over a new leaf,” he often said. Had he done so this time, turned a page without leaving a bookmark, without leaving a dried flower as a memory?
“I loathe things that have been papered over,” he sometimes exclaimed. Regencrantz, who had watched him rushing eagerly for a drink when he wasn’t thirsty, would have said that he had also thrown himself into this business without having the least desire to do so. He had vanished from the Boisrosés’ home just as he always did everywhere, as if through a trapdoor. In the blink of an eyelid he was no longer there; he melted into the crowd like sugar in water; walls absorbed him; he slipped away as people do in dreams; dreams are apartments without doors that one enters through walls.
Pierre had passed through many a milieu in this way without pausing there, doing whatever business he had to do quickly and never coming back. At the casino, he walked into the gaming room and shouted “banco!” over everyone’s heads; before they had had time to look round, he had grabbed his winnings and disappeared. Disappeared for the season too, for he detested the game and only played it in order to test his luck.
“What a card you are, Quick Silver!” Fromentine said as she passed him the two racquets, which he tucked under his arm. “The things you teach me!” she added with apparent ecstasy.
Pierre was in the habit of leaving Fromentine in the street or in his car, waiting for him like a small dog. She was furthermore wonderfully passive and easily distracted, with, at the same time, a great facility for not doing or thinking of anything for hours on end, like a becalmed sailing ship. When, a moment later, Pierre returned, ready to set off at full tilt, she would follow him with the same easy manner, keeping up the same absolutely neutral appearance, never complaining, and with that marvellous temperament that frivolous, selfish people have.
Coming back from rue Masseran, Pierre stopped in boulevard de Grenelle in front of a shop which, even as a child, used to fascinate him. They had made clocks there since the eighteenth century and the wrought-iron sign hanging outside represented a belfry. Dials in the shop window informed passing travellers from the métro what the time was in every language. The time in Stamboul was in Turkish letters, the time in Calcutta in Bengali, the time in Suez in Arabic, the time in Peking in Chinese characters.
“How many minutes these dials must have ticked off over one hundred and fifty years!” Pierre exclaimed. “Think of it… what human impetus could compete against them? What diastoles and systoles will ever match their range and their mechanism?”
“You’re a philosopher in your own way,” replied Fromentine with shrewd simplicity, “the philosopher of the quarter-second.”
“I’m not a philosophic person,” replied Pierre drily. “I’m a tragic person. You don’t understand a thing.”
“Talk to me more about yourself,” sighed Fromentine as she reapplied some rouge, “it’s fascinating.”