“Poor Pierre!” Hedwige would murmur simply whenever her sisters discussed him; Pierre’s name made everyone itch to speak and they even preferred to say good things rather than not talk about him. Mamicha, raising her white fringe and her august chin, added some perfidious proverb from the West Indies, a land scarcely filled with serpents, and called her daughters to come closer.
“You’re too far away, I can’t hear half of what you’re saying.”
“Here we are; we’re climbing onto the bed.”
And gathered together under the eiderdown, resembling on a large scale those families of dogs, cats or mice in cartoon drawings, they embarked delightedly on the agenda for the day: Uncle Rocheflamme’s affair with a second-hand goods dealer of his own age (“For an old lady friend, ring out the bells,” Mamicha said with a smile), the choice of carpet for the drawing room, Fromentine’s new hairstyle… Hedwige was totally happy. Had she been more honest or more experienced in self-analysis, she would have realized that saying “Poor Pierre” expressed her regret at not really being able to love him. For her, amusement and variety were to be found in Neuilly, but happiness had never stopped residing at Saint-Germain.
People’s separations or their lack of feeling for one another are no doubt the work of superior powers who have arbitrarily forced us into avoidable encounters, then snatched us away and cast us aside. The same oppressive and blind force which, in Bonne de Boisrosé’s games of patience, prevented the kings from emerging by covering them with sevens and ruining her future prospects, also intervened to separate Hedwige from Pierre and brought her back irresistibly into her mother’s little game. There are unions that the fairies, either out of laziness or through a subtle form of cruelty, allow to be fruitful yet are not blessed by them.
In any case, the fairies were not the only ones to blame; they had, exceptionally, given Pierre a brief reprieve in the course of his destiny, an hour during which, by initiating Hedwige into the pleasures of the flesh, he might have made himself master; he had allowed this moment to pass. Hedwige, disappointed by Pierre, whose clumsiness in matters of love increased day by day the more he became aware of it, was filled with all the inhibitions that Bonne, through long and patient methods of suggestion, had impressed upon her daughters as a precaution against men: man was a social necessity, a fastidious and repulsive physical burden. The beautiful, adorable Hedwige was ruined for love.
The baby brought her even closer to her mother than to her husband. Secretly, on her child’s behalf, she feared this fiery and untidy father, whereas at Saint-Germain it would be pampered and cosseted: “He’s a Boisrosé, he’s got his grandfather’s eyes.” “No, she’s a Rocheflamme one hundred per cent.” The shoot born of Hedwige would prosper well in the warm and humid Boisrosé climate, shielded from those drying desert winds that Pierre left in his wake. In that sweet atmosphere of animal-like tenderness, in that pastoral home life, in that manger where gods could be raised, Hedwige was already imagining her mother and her sisters passing round a magnificent little baby.
In the large room with its blinds lowered so as to protect the young woman’s weary eyes, a ray of sunshine filters in, caresses Hedwige’s neck, a powerful and flexible column that disappears into the darkness of the feathery black hair with golden tints, and proceeds to split in two the body of Pierre who, with much waving of arms, is trying to explain what his son will be like. On this subject, he is as loquacious as his wife is laconic. The still invisible child is constantly present between them; an expression of that subconscious and frenzied imperialism of the self that constantly drives us to extend our fleshly frontiers, it stimulates Pierre and excites his avid impatience.
“Will he ever be born,” he wonders, “this lazy creature, this troglodyte? For the time being, he is withdrawing like a hermit, ‘feeling his life (and not his death) imminent’, he confines himself to his pool, like a fish, but without the nimble flick of the tail and the rapid fins that fish have. It’s inconceivable that someone born of me should be so slow! What a silly invention pregnancy is! Nature goes on its way like a doddery, elderly childminder and the doctors are unable to invent anything to speed up the event… Five months still!”
“Pierre,” says Hedwige, “come and sit down beside me on the sofa. See how soft this velvet is and I’ll put this batiste cushion behind your head, which will refresh you. You’re flushed and your eyes are all feverish. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m thinking of the little one. I’m happy to know he’s inside you. For him as for me you’re a wonderful mother; he’ll have your beauty, your balanced mind. Later on, when the years have hardened him, he can if he wishes take something from me. Just think, Hedwige, he’s going to be thrown among a million men, all naked, with his horoscope under his arm!”
Pierre is bent over the abyss of coming days and distant years. He sees a large-limbed little boy, moving very nimbly between four escape routes and entering the increasingly narrow corridor of the sequence of time. He sees him as a Peter Pan running beneath the tall trees. He attaches this still corpuscular fate to his own destiny.
Will he or she be dark or fair? Punctual or late? Nestlé’s milk or breast-fed? Boarder or half-day? The lycée or a religious institution? Dim or gifted? Latin or Greek? German studies or English? Sacré-Coeur or Sciences politiques? Infantry or artillery? Will he make women suffer or will they dominate him? When he’s twenty, who will be declaring war on whom? What will the world be like? What shape will hats and ideas have?
If you want to escape from your own self, there is no better means than a child.
“Hedwige, have you thought of ordering the baby clothes? And the nursery furniture that hasn’t yet been chosen! We haven’t planned a thing. I’m going to buy the baby clothes.”
“Five months beforehand!” said Hedwige, who could not help laughing.
“From baby clothes to bare knees and from bare knees to trousers, it’s no time at all…”
He doesn’t want to anticipate the long journey from the first cry to the alphabet, from crawling games to the first tottering steps that look like a drunkard walking, from standing up and holding on to the bedcovers to running. Good heavens, what an eternity exists between the eyes of the mole and the fleeting glance of the lynx!