“It’s the breeze caused by your speed,” Vincent interrupted mockingly.
“…the mere presence of Hedwige gives me a warm rush. Her skin is smooth and fiery, she emits a sleek radiance like the glaze of a fine stove. Without being bubbly, she enlivens everything; she hasn’t the vulgar incandescence of effusive women, she doesn’t parch you; she radiates the true warmth of life, that of the woman, that of the breast, that of the heart. In her presence, it’s always summer.”
“You’re grateful to her for giving you a child,” said Amyot enviously.
“No, that’s not why I find her so good and so beautiful. For she’s still just as beautiful at the end of her third month; Plato says that beauty is a short-lived tyranny; with Hedwige it’s a long-lasting empire; yes, Hedwige is enduring and perfect like my most treasured belongings. She is a living High Renaissance piece, a constantly rekindled, always satisfying requirement for my eyes. Oh no! Mother Boisrosé didn’t cheat on quality!”
“Do you get on well with the mother-in-law?” asked Amyot.
“Oh yes,” said Pierre hastily, “she’s a decent woman.”
“Ah, do you think so!” said Amyot, starting to laugh. “Forgive me, but the epithet is funny.”
“Wasn’t she kind to you?”
“My dear Pierre… she has been perfectly kind, naturally; it’s just that with perfect kindness she took away my wife!”
He sighed and nodded, the still fine features of his appearance creasing into the folds of his double chin and, confronted with Pierre’s questioning gaze, he continued:
“In the beginning, I tried to keep Angélique for myself — not for me alone, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do that — but at least share her fifty-fifty. For a year and a half I acted methodically, as befits a meticulous Polytechnique graduate. And then, I grew weary. Angélique leaves at nine o’clock in the morning and comes back at eight in the evening (on the evening she doesn’t have dinner at Saint-Germain, that is). And she sleeps there at least twice a week.”
“Hedwige very seldom goes there,” said Pierre, “I forbid her to drive in her condition.”
“I should be extremely surprised,” said Vincent, “if Madame de Boisrosé could survive a single day without seeing one of her daughters. First of all, the Rule decrees it so. You think that you have contracted a marriage; you have contracted a disease, the Boisrosé disease: for your wife this means communal life, a siesta until six in the evening, the dormitory; for you, being led by the nose and presented submissively to Bonne, while waiting for her to grab you by your protruding snout.”
Pierre, who was accustomed to being direct, suddenly turned towards Vincent:
“Is she hot-blooded, your wife?”
“She is. Only it’s not focused on men. She only opens her arms to Mamicha, she only embraces her sisters, she has Saint-Germain in her blood, she stops being unfeeling there even with Uncle Rocheflamme, and I really do think that she won’t ever know any real pleasure until she’s in the Boisrosé family grave, because, in her will, she has refused to be buried with me. When it’s a matter of climbing into the maternal bed, there’s no problem! I wish you could see her hurling off her clothes. And her impassioned messages about putting an end to her solitude, the way she glances at the door of my house, at that lovely door that will allow her to rush off ‘home’ at last! And her weariness as soon as she returns! And her eagerness as soon as she sets off there again! Not to mention the hours that she evades me. Everything she loses in insomnia and weight when she is with me, she puts on again with siestas and kilos the moment she’s gone back to her family…”
He sighed once more.
“Angélique is an accomplished lover, I’m sure of that,” he continued. “She has extravagant desires that are like rages, and a prodigious lust; she can love until she draws blood, but the blood is that which she has in her veins.”
Pierre stood up suddenly, knotted the cord of his swimming trunks and paced up and down.
“I suggest we found a club,” he said, “an association comprising all present and future men married to Boisrosé girls. We have to stand together, for heaven’s sake! We have to pit a rule against the Rule. Each of these girls is incomparable individually; they are also very beautiful all together, but I loathe having to think of them collectively. When I think of Hedwige, it makes me attribute a series of attractive qualities to the others that I had thought were particular to my wife and which, I am bound to acknowledge, don’t really belong to her. It’s very unpleasant! It’s already bad enough marrying someone who looks like her mother; it’s like living with a memento mori, with the ivory death’s head on the table, among the festive roses.”
“The Boisrosés don’t look like their mother fortunately,” said Amyot, “but I know what you mean. When you possess a beautiful piece of original cire perdue, you wouldn’t want the sculptor selling his reproduction rights to a maker of chimney stacks. Nevertheless, you have to resign yourself; Boisrosé habits are stronger and the Boisrosé girls less pliable than the hardest of metals. This family is a voodoo sect in which the sons-in-law are sympathizers, not founder members. There’s nothing to be done, we might as well give up.”
“I won’t give up anything,” exclaimed Pierre, his brush in one hand, his comb in the other. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m absolutely determined to have Hedwige to myself alone. And what’s more, it’s already happening: she dresses in her own clothes and none of her sisters wear her shoes any longer.”
“One question,” asked Amyot. “Has Hedwige kept her bed at Saint-Germain?”
“Er… I think she did, just in case of a breakdown… or fog… it would be better than sleeping in a hotel.”
“My poor fellow!” said Amyot, squeezing his brother-in-law’s hand affectionately.
“I’m not disturbing you?” said Hedwige as she opened the door.
“You’re only disturbing yourself, my beloved darling, for I was with you.”
“With me?”
“Yes, I was thinking of you. I was thinking that you are relaxation.”
“That’s not very flattering.”
“Yes, when I say it, it’s high praise.”
In fact Pierre, whose long strides make the house tremble during his soliloquies, is standing still, relaxing and pressing his lips to his wife’s wrist in the way one drinks spa water from the place where the water is warmest.
“You’re here,” he said, filled with joy, “it’s good.”
He takes her in his arms.
“When I come close to you, not only do I feel your body, but I am in touch with all bodies. Before knowing you, I lived in isolation as though on a glass shelf in an electric machine. But now the current passes through me.”
Hedwige snuggled up to him for fear of being looked at from a distance and so that he wouldn’t notice her disappearing waist when standing in front of her, or her convex belly from the side. But by clasping her to him, he can imagine what his gaze might not have noticed, closes his eyes and says:
“It’s beginning to show, and seriously so.”
“Too bad,” Hedwige replies, torn between the pleasure of appearing beautiful and pride at being a mother.
“So much the better.”
Hedwige closes her eyes, happy to feel her two children pressed one against the other, because Pierre, who used to seem so strong, so Zeus-like, so striking in the early days, has, through their living together, become her child. “He’s a funny boy,” she says tenderly, almost with compassion, feeling indulgent and full of pity, like most women, for the incomprehensible side of their male partner, for their mysterious obsessions — for they all have one — be it gardening, civic duty, curing illnesses, war or any other mission they believe they have been given; just like those elderly retired colonels who, in order to give themselves the illusion of being busy, indulge in having imaginary mobilization orders sent to themselves. Every male thus creates a curious structure for himself in which he pays homage to a god, a demi-god, a folly. Any altar, however peculiar it may be, can be used to inspire a new zest in someone and give them a reason for living. Hedwige was not trying to delve into Pierre’s motives; he was a man: that was explanation enough. Her husband’s frantic pace, this invariable way he had of changing his mind, this need to take not just an overall view of things, but to see the same thing from every angle by skipping from one point of the compass to another, like our present-day landscape artists who follow the sun with their canvases in their motor cars, with that enthusiasm for seeing everything and considering nothing, for doing everything and not completing anything, for running from an occasion to an event and from a situation to an occurrence — all this was tiring, certainly, and pointless, but it was the other side of the coin to a husband who was kind on the whole, gentle, delightful at times, but devoid of any self-control.