The Party
WHEN Marie-Claude received Emilienne’s invitation she gave a little exclamation of pleasure and ran to the telephone to say that she would be delighted to come.
This was not the correct procedure on her part. The glossy, pre-war texture of the card, its embossed gilt crest and elaborate pharseology, — it was all in the third person, — required an answer involving paper, ink, and the postal services. But although Marie-Claude was thirty-five, her sense of the fitness of things often deserted her in moments of emotion.
There had been a time when the prospect of a party at Emilienne’s would have occasioned Marie-Claude no emotion. But that time was five years ago. And Marie-Claude had spent the intervening period in a small village in southern France where, although she had been — and knew herself to have been, and frequently reminded herself she had been — among the more fortunate war victims, she was not among those whose sense of national humiliation was unexacerbated by personal grief. In addition to hiding Jewish and Communist friends, and struggling to feed the floating population with which this activity kept her house filled, she had had to support the knowledge that her beloved husband was first supposed dead, and then a prisoner.
Precisely what had happened to him she did not learn until he returned to France as a member of the liberating army, and the resultant strain had developed in her a febrility that manifested itself in attacks of immoderate longing for pleasures similar to those that had gratified her when she was an earnestly frivolous nineteen-year-old.
These longings were encouraged by her husband, a tender-hearted man who had found it hard to live away from her and now seized every opportunity to pet her as one pets a loved child one has not been able to preserve from injustice. They were also encouraged by her appearance. For the war had not impaired her looks. Her slender figure, her dark curls, her pale and beautiful forehead, still composed the da Vinci charm that had caused portraits of her to enlighten several municipal art galleries; and now that her husband had made extravagant purchases at the dress shows that coincided with her arrival in Paris, she looked fashionable as well as pretty.
Puerile satisfaction with her new clothes accentuated the eagerness with which Marie-Claude spoke to Emilienne and listened to her friend’s cordial replies; and this despite the fact that she knew Emilienne’s cordiality to be directed less at her than at her name, which was one often found in a prominent position in French history, and prefixed by a “de.”For Emilienne was profoundly, sincerely snobbish, although she was forty. Ever since her twenty-first birthday, when she gained control of the fortune her industrious mother had made by designing corsets, she had courted the nobility with assiduity, and she still believed a duchess to be inevitably superior to a commoner, and a surname prefixed by “de” better than one without that particle.
And because she was unable to hide this point of view, all Emilienne’s friends went through periods when they found it necessary, but not easy, to remind themselves that she had a heart of gold. But Emilienne’s ridiculous snobbery had not prevented her behaving in a manner far from ridiculous during the occupation; and her courageous and idiosyncratic exploits in the Maquis having been crowned by the Legion of Honor, invitations to her house were now sought after by persons of the kind she had once vainly besought.
None of this, however, was present in MarieClaude’s thoughts as she babbled cheerfully into the telephone. She had forgotten the anachronistic, white-gloved footmen dispensing cocktails in a manner that would have done credit to a papal nuncio; she had forgotten the need for not catching the irreverent eye of her friend Jacqueline when with an accentuated lisp, with the English accent reserved for state occasions, Emilienne introduced them to a princess; she remembered only that the Germans had been driven from Paris and that in consequence friends could meet.
2
ON THE day of the party, Marie-Claude and her husband lunched together adequately and expensively in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Separation not having diminished the extreme love they felt for each other, every meal they shared gave them a pleasure rendered emotional in Marie-Claude by her thoughts of the watery soup on which her husband had subsisted before his escape from Germany, and in Gérard by the thought of the dangers his wife had undergone in order to feed her refugees. Neither referred to these thoughts, and each looked quickly away on detecting the other gazing with unduly bright eyes at the spectacle — still rare in 1945 Europe— of a beloved fellow creature enjoying food. After lunch they went into the rococo drawing room to drink coffee. The coffee Gérard had brought from England had long ago been shared with friends, and only in restaurants run by or for Allied troops could good coffee be found.
As they drank their coffee, very slowly, Gérard thought how enchanting Marie-Claude looked in her hat of pale straw encrusted with blue roses, and Marie-Claude reflected that at last she understood why military uniforms are vulgarly supposed to possess aphrodisiac properties. Then, each being sufficiently pleased with the other for both to feel free to direct their attention elsewhere, they sighed with enjoyment at the spectacle of the garden visible through the line of tall French windows opposite; its exquisite green lawn, its varied, budding trees, would have made it an appropriate setting for ballerinas clad in white tarlatan, all swaying to the tender music of Chopin, and about to die of consumption as the consequence of unhappy love.
It was Marie-Claude’s habit, after they had lunched together, to accompany her husband as far as the Rue Saint-Dominique. But on this occasion Gérard insisted she should leave herself time to rest before the party and, after giving her a kiss made hasty by his sense of their being in public, he murmured, “Amuse-toi bien,” and set off with the long hasty strides that made his friends accuse him of being perpetually about to miss a train.
With the slow dancer’s walk that gave her an air of knowing that all trains waited for her, Marie-Claude took the opposite direction. Now and again she paused. The bookshop on her right contained a rare edition of Balzac that she wanted for Gérard; Lanvin’s contained big black globular bottles of the perfume Gérard wanted for her; Hermé’s windows had lately been re-dressed: bright, soft scarves were flung across the bars of a somber-colored sedan chair, and a coffee-colored saddle was flanked by two glass horses of a deep inky red that made them look as if their airy curvets had been cut from giant rubies. There were English as well as French newspapers for sale on the kiosk at the corner; and beside the Madeleine, up and down whose sunlit steps were going American soldiers and nurses, were stalls bright with plumes of lilac.
As she looked about her, Marie-Claude forced herself to remember June, 1945, as a child forces itself to remember a nightmare for the pleasure of savoring the fact that it is past. Then she gave herself a little shake and turned down the Boulevard des Capucines, smiling, as she went, at American soldiers climbing into horse-cabs or velo-taxis outside Rainbow Corner. She entered the Hotel Scribe, now occupied by war correspondents, among them a woman who had invited her to have a bath.
After she had enjoyed the spectacle and uses of running hot water—nonexistent in the homes of most Paris civilians — she went into the bedroom and looked at herself in the long mirror. She had often been told that her figure was beautiful, and the pleasure with which she now observed this compliment to be based upon fact was unmixed with vanity: she liked Gerard to have the best of everything. Then she dressed, made up carefully, — she applied her lipstick three times before she was satisfied with the result, — and, having eyed the cut of her new navy blue suit with delight, secured a horse-cab and set out for Emilienne’s party.
The driver, an aged and toothless man who worked for pleasure as well as for profit, chose to follow the tourists’ route from the Madeleine across the Place de la Concorde, whose silvery stone was gold in the sunlight and whose spaciousness was emphasized by the brilliant flags on tall white poles left from the Easter Parade, and between the chestnuts of the ChampsElysées to the glittering Arc de Triomphc. And at every step taken by the tranquil piebald horse MarieClaude was ravished by a joy that she mistook for anticipation of until recently forbidden gayety. At the top of the Avenue du Bois she asked the driver to stop in order that she might walk the rest of the way.
Among the trees beside which she walked, with a sense that to dance would have been more appropriate, was one whose fragile candles were not creamy but pink, the rich pink of Mediterranean soil at its palest; the pastel-colored walls were half veiled by begonias and wisteria, and the wrought-iron gates bright with laburnum and acacia; scattered in the thick grass were wild violets and civilized children.
One of the children was playing not far from Emilienne’s gate: a little girl in buttoned boots of white kid, with her black hair dressed in two plaits each looped up and tied above the ear with a tartan bow. Half hidden in the grass beside her were a red, white, and blue tin bucket and scoop, and mounting guard over them, with clearly histrionic ferocity, a small brandy-colored dog who resembled a shaggy door-mat on paws. As Marie-Claude watched them the child took something from her pocket and held it on her outstretched palm for the dog to smell. Craning forward, Marie-Claude saw it to be a large pre-war marble, its interior glittering with opalescent flowers of colors as deep and as brilliant as those of medieval cathedral windows.
3
MARIE-CLAUDE looked at her watch. There was still half an hour to pass before the time announced in Gothic lettering on the card in her handbag, and as she had not lost her sense of what was expected of her so completely as to wish to arrive early at Emilienne’s formality-ridden establishment, she selected one of the biscuit-colored metal chairs scattered about the gravel paths, pulled it into a niche between two bushes, from which she could see Emilienne’s lilachung gate without being seen, and settled down to wait.
For a moment she tried to think of the war that was at last beginning to take the shape of an Allied victory; but her mind blinked and averted its head — her husband was home, the air warm, the place beautiful, and she so tired that when she tried to think of the war she felt as might a very old woman who had been twenty in the Brussels of 1815 and was being asked by overzealous grandchildren for details of the battle of Waterloo. “Well, my dears — I remember that people everywhere were very excited. (But were they? Of course. They must have been.) And there was a lot of tramping to and fro — but —”
Because she was spying on them from between her bushes, the pedestrians on the silver-gray sidewalk in front of gardens surrounding the tall houses seemed to Marie-Claude to resemble the characters of an outmoded film, their movements quicker and more jerky than those in current usage. First came a pair of American soldiers carrying kodaks very carefully; then a liberated prisoner wearing a 1914 uniform with puttees and talking to a small elderly woman whose fingertips moved against his sleeve as if to make sure that he really existed in space; then a young girl wearing riding breeches and eating a roll — she must have come from the stables down the nearest side street, whose faintly discernible fragrance increased the rural atmosphere of this fashionable avenue; then two short-sleeved boys carrying brief cases, and a nun carrying a breviary; then a woman whose fair hair was so abnormally bright that where it lay across her shoulders it seemed to reflect the color of her purple hat, and a schoolgirl swinging a black beret in one hand and a copy of Le Canard Enchainé in the other; and then two very young Wacs looking about them with dazzled expressions explained by the one who said with a pronounced Southern accent, “Gee, I know now what that guy was getting at — that guy who said you only had to add three letters to Paris to make Paradise.”
After they had passed, the sidewalk remained empty for a few minutes. The child with the dog had gone and in her place half a dozen exceptionally vulgar sparrows were disputing the ownership of the little heap of sand fallen from her bucket. From the way they held their heads, first on one side and then on the other, their eyes brilliant, their feathers poised for ruffling, it was apparent that they were arguing for pleasure rather than gain.
From down the street in which the horses lived came the sound of someone playing “Le Petit Vin Blanc” on an accordion. Because the accordion, more than any other instrument, evokes the aspect of Paris that is in essence provincial, tears came into Marie-Claude’s large blue eyes; and at the same time she giggled at the thought of Emilienne’s expression, should the latter hear music so vulgar near the — in her view — sacrosanct Avenue du Bois.
By now it was only five minutes before the appointed time. But as none of the other guests had arrived — Emilienne had said it was to be just an intimate little gathering, so there probably would not be more than a hundred — she decided to wait a short while longer.
At that moment there drove up to Emilienne’s door a black horse-cab with bright-yellow wheels, and from it stepped an American officer and a young girl whom Marie-Claude recognized as one of her friend’s tame princesses. Their delight with each other was so obvious that for a moment Marie-Claude wondered whether, after all, Emilienne was not absent and the house empty. A few minutes later they were followed by two elderly women who came in a brougham, both with white hair glittering as a result of mauve rinses, and with diamonds at their withered throats, and plumes in their elegantly unfashionable hats. Next came a young woman in Red Cross uniform, escorted by a young man whose impeccable civilian clothes and air of maintaining calm despite extensive knowledge of matters conducive to frenzy proclaimed him a young diplomat who had very recently secured professional advancement.
Having looked at her watch again, Marie-Claude put on her gloves and slid the strap of her handbag over her shoulder. As she did so, Emilienne’s gate was hidden by a low and shining Embassy car, from which there stepped two women and two men.
The first woman was young, red-haired, and well dressed in violent colors that almost clashed with her hair and with each other, but just did not. Her companion was an American whom Marie-Claude recognized as one of the ten parachuted to Emiliennes section of the Maquis. He was plain but appealing, and the fact that he had both a glowing boyish complexion and his left arm in a model sling gave him the unreal air of a figure in a poster designed to recruit nurses.
The second woman was a few years older than Marie-Claude, delicately featured and of a fairness that made her elaborate widow’s weeds extremely becoming to her. Despite her clothes she did not appear devoid of gayety. As her companion held the gate open he bent his head and made a remark at which she lowered her eyelids and smiled the smile of someone who is genuinely confused but finds the sensation both novel and exciting. Her companion, a middleaged man in French Army uniform, had regular features and brown eyes, and the fine curves of his eyebrows and the modeling of his mouth composed an expression whose calm benevolence was unmarred by complacency. But it was his gesture, rather than his face, that made Marie-Claude suddenly and disagreeably aware of the quickened beat of her heart.
Agitation compelling her to move, she stood up, and in so doing dropped her handbag, scattering its contents in the long grass. By the time she had picked them up and muttered some childish imprecations, the officer had shepherded the widow inside and the brilliant sun, the brilliant scene, put MarieClaude in mind not of 1940 but of 1930, the year in which she had been a young girl experiencing first love for the officer who had just entered Emilienne’s house.
4
IN THOSE days he had been a promising young diplomat lacking the fortune advisable for the successful pursuit of his profession. This lack had not been without its advantageous aspect. When he tired of Marie-Claude, whom the course of true love had transformed from a gayly docile child to a passionately exacting woman, he was able to offer her pride the excuse that he must marry a rich woman. Soon after his dismissing her, Marie-Claude tried to kill herself. Being afraid of heights and incompetent with revolvers, she took an overdose of morphia. Its only effect was to make her exceedingly sick. She did not tell her lover of this attempt, since she had wellfounded fears that it would arouse his irony rather than his pity, and he was in any case greatly occupied by his marriage to an English girl with more money than breeding.
Being young and healthy, Marie-Claude survived. But it was a long time before her days ceased to be punctuated by longing for her lover’s presence, her nights by longing for his embraces, and both days and nights by a tendency to annotate her past conduct with variations on “if only I had — or hadn’t — done that.” And a further abortive attempt at the career for which she was best equipped — of loving and being loved — did nothing to remove the impression made on her by this talented man who was almost as remarkable as her besotted fancy had supposed.
But from the moment, four years later, when she married Gérard, until the outbreak of the war, the contentment enveloping her life had exorcised any feelings for her first lover other than a vague amiability. Now and again she saw photographs of him in an illustrated paper. When they were accompanied by news that he was doing well, she was glad; and over his first divorce she shook her head with an indulgence bred of indifference but unsharpened by malice towards his wife.
Had it been possible for her to feel irritated with Gérard — but of course it was not, he was so good, so kind to her — she might have done so on the morning when he laid an accusing forefinger on an Illustration picture of her first love and said in tones that suddenly seemed to her a trifle overhearty, “A fine man in many respects, but the kind that has no business to marry.”
Gérard had been right. Naturally. And MarieClaude was very glad now that she had not been given the opportunity to marry her first love. Very glad indeed. It would never have done. She had not realized the fact at the time — young people never know what is good for them — but she had been undeservedly fortunate: sitting on a tin chair in the Avenue du Bois, Marie-Claude told herself all this several times. But she was not listening to herself. She was watching a young girl in a low-waisted, shortskirted dress and cloche hat pause beside a lilacfestooned, wrought-iron gate held open by a young man who, after wishing her good day in a mockingly formal voice, bent and whispered a remark about the brightness of her eyes that filled her with delight on her own account and with confusion lest the guests following her should have overheard.
Now, as then, the afternoon sun was warm upon her cheek, the smell of the lilacs in the garden strong; and unaware of anything but her determination to feel other than she did, Marie-Claude began to walk towards the woods at the end of the Avenue. There the leafy, sun-shot trees brought her to a standstill. For the first time since her return to Paris she experienced a faint longing for the embattled hilltop village where she and her husband used to spend their summers. In the middle of the strip of sunlight at her feet was a patch of clover. Moved by superstition she bent down and began to search feverishly for a fourleaved stem. The patch was without abnormality, but during the fruitless search contemporary feelings flowed back to her and she was presently able to straighten herself, repowder her face, and determine to return to Emilienne’s — and enjoy herself even more than she would have done had there not been this opportunity to display her emotional prosperity to the lover who had rejected her.
She was surprised by the length of time it took her to retrace her steps. Before pulling the bell rope, she had to pause to regain her breath. From a room on her left came the sound of Emilienne’s high lisping voice and of answering laughter. Presently the sound grew louder, as if the guests were coming towards the window. As they did so Marie-Claude remembered the anachronistic white-gloved footmen dispensing cocktails in a manner that would have done credit to a papal nuncio; remembered the necessity for not catching the irreverent eye of her friend Jacqueline when with accentuated lisp, with the English accent reserved for state occasions, Emilienne introduced them to a princess. And remembering, Marie-Claude dropped the bell rope as if it had been on fire and ran down the path and through the wrought-iron gate.
The sunshine had gone and she shivered as she walked rapidly towards the Arc de Triomphe; and with a faint wish to punish herself for which she could not account, she took part in the battle of the Métro that is a daily feature of liberated Paris and reaches its climax around six o’clock in the evening.
To her surprise Gérard was already home. When he saw her, he exclaimed at her pallor. Instead of answering his question, Marie-Claude put her arms round him and whispered: “You won’t ever get tired of me?”
Gérard looked at her with genuine astonishment. “Has the war rendered you imbecile, my love? You know I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
Pressing her forehead against him she muttered: “One never knows. One says that, but —”
“One says it indeed.” Gérard shook her gently. “Yes, and this particular one means it.”
Then, as Marie-Claude lifted her head and looked at him with a curious expression, in which he would have seen defiance had he not known she never had occasion to direct this emotion at him, Gérard added less easily: “But what have you been doing, darling? Where have you been?”
Marie-Claude moistened her lips. But before she had time to speak, Gérard realized that his question had been a stupid one. Because of course he knew where she had been — she always told him every detail of her doings. She had been to Emilienne’s party — and Emilienne, though fundamentally a good girl, could be very tiring.