Not daring to call their mother Mummy, they have given her the nickname of Mamicha. Just as primitive religions avoid giving their god a name out of extreme respect. Bonne de Boisrosé is certainly the object of such basic idolatry. For her daughters she is the water goddess, the cow goddess, the tree goddess. And just as a tree in autumn towers over ground that is strewn with its fruits, Bonne, sitting on a pile of cushions, watches her daughters daily as they sprawl at her feet, on her bed, adoring her; and serving her according to a certain number of rituals applied regularly and at random in life which they sometimes refer to with an anxious smile as the Rule.
The Rule assigns all household duties to Angélique. To her belongs the household washing, the ironing, the sewing machine, the kitchen; no one sautées or braises except under her direction; it is she who deals with the daily woman; from her generous hands flows the bleach; the food and the drink are her responsibility; she alone has the keys of the cupboards, the recipes for gherkins and the authority to decide whether a sauce shall be spicy or vinaigrette. But, like a chatelaine who permits servitude, she relinquishes the desserts to Fromentine. Her authority ceases with rum babas, madeleines, brioches and macaroons. Angélique looks after the tinned food. Angélique sometimes looks after her husband too, but having exhausted her domestic energy at Saint-Germain, she is so indolent and lethargic with him that he knows her only as an odalisque.
Hedwige, for her part, tries her hand at household accounting from the moment she jumps out of bed. She has scissors for the rent coupons and also for cutting out patterns for the family’s dresses. She occasionally settles one out of every ten bills. The gas and electricity meters impart their secret tariffs to her. She sorts out the Boisrosé library, which even contains some books; she changes the needles on the gramophone. She also answers letters because hers is the most legible handwriting. Hedwige buys the lottery tickets. From her height of five foot seven, she discusses tax affairs with the inspector, who is only five foot tall.
The Rule requires that Fromentine, on behalf of the Boisrosés, should maintain contact with nature, sporting activities, flowers, fruits, bouquets and secateurs. No doubt because she is the least natural of all of them. She is the one who puts seeds in the pipit’s cage, the little warbler from the tropics that chirps at the tiniest ray of sunshine. Every Thursday morning, she sets off for Paris and alights at that exotic aviary that is Hédiard’s and, like the conquistadors in Seville, she brings back palm oil, potatoes and groceries. As soon as she is informed about a delivery of mangoes (mangoes from Guinea in summer and mangoes from Venezuela in winter), she buys bags of them. In this way, she serves the community while simultaneously gratifying the never-satisfied family appetite for expenditure (an appetite that is assuaged equally well with centimes as it is with banknotes) for a couple of days.
Young and beautiful, these three girls worked hard and never stopped blessing their mother for having brought them up without cares, without religion and with barely a thought of a dowry. But if one of them had a problem or felt upset, it was enough for her to set foot in Mamicha’s bedroom to find peace and feel well again. Like a miraculous idol, Mamicha accepted everything and gave nothing away, but she was able to cure. She took upon herself the responsibility for anything to do with medicaments; and also with justice; she dismissed all appeals as squabbles, for the sake of general well-being.
Cleopatra dropped a pearl into vinegar, poured the vinegar into a vessel, and drank from it. The Boisrosés fit into this brief legend: Fromentine, the youngest and most beautiful, is Cleopatra; Hedwige, the most brilliant and sensitive, is the pearl; Angélique, the most caustic, the most fermentative, the vinegar. And what part does Bonne de Boisrosé play if not the vessel?
Bonne de Boisrosé was neither good, nor loving, nor intelligent; she was neither kind nor energetic, quite the contrary, and yet her three daughters, so different from one another, would have willingly agreed never to marry, or to die in torment, if it brought their poor mother comfort and happiness. Beneath the convenient label of filial love, she had inculcated in them a whole host of taboos and impulses that were as irresistible as the laws of gravity. No one had ever observed in Bonne that joyful self-effacement that most mothers display as their children grow in strength and beauty. The more her daughters progressed, the more assured the Mamicha-like demands and her domineering, radiant and foolish personality became. For there is a fragile power to old age, a stubbornly brilliant ineffectiveness, a frail domestic blackmail that novelists and historians, those Siamese twins of our age, must take into account.
This plump, bedridden dwarf had given birth to these three girls, the shortest of whom was five foot seven tall. When they were all together, one was reminded of the Sibyls in the Sistine Chapeclass="underline" everything was there, the proportions, the bones, the way they carried their heads. They could not handle a broom or a saucepan without looking as though they were holding cornucopias or sceptres. It wasn’t a hat that they should have worn on their heads, but a circus tent. Fashion did not trouble them for they were in vogue at every level. For such women, no men exist these days, and particularly not in France. The Boisrosé girls had no success because in our country popularity wears size thirty-six clothes and size six gloves, because success, like harnessed lightning, is a very delicate thing. Failure awaited them; they were unfortunate in their size, because what is very large either gets damaged or lost, be it the Nile among the desert sands or Jean Mermoz3 in the ocean. The Boisrosés were like those vast Aubusson tapestries, those gigantic seventeenth-century chests that used to be sold at auction extremely cheaply because no one had a lorry driver to transport them nor an apartment in which to keep them. Comparable to allegories, these human creatures were simple and indecisive, very different from those allegories that possess neither simplicity nor mystery and have their names inscribed at the bottom of their dresses. From the Sibyls, they borrowed a vague and sombre aspect; they were the gaudy ornaments of a temple invisible to the non-initiated, the temple of the Mother. They were female Knights Templar, the Porte-Glaive sisters of the uterine order.
“Hurry up, children,” called Bonne; “Madame de La Chaufournerie is due at two o’clock to pay her respects to me on the death of your father and we still have to have lunch and tidy up. Hedwige, my pink dressing gown.”
“You’re not going to get up, Mamicha?”
“What, with my hacking cough and my wretched mortgage, debilitated and thrown into confusion by this news! It’s catastrophic! It’s crucifying! One of these days, I’m going to pass away!”
“Mamicha,” wept Fromentine, “how can you frighten us like this? You, die! But then we’d all die.”