Sometimes Betka would feel violent hatreds for her mother, and this curiously made her weep and feel infinite tenderness toward her; for nothing plunged her into a more inconsolable state than to imagine her mother as a victim of her chimerical vengeance. In spite of the fact that her mother made her suffer so greatly she admired her as a being endowed with an all-powerful sovereignty. Yes, her mother was superior to all other mothers, and in the depth of her unhappiness she venerated her like a divinity. She saw the other children around her, wasteful, gluttonous and heedless, lost in the sweet and peaceful unconsciousness of their lives; yet she did not envy them, she would not have changed places with them! Her youth did not allow her to understand her mother’s injustice. The latter was always right, and they were monsters. She recognized this of her own accord, for no injunction could prevent her from sinning. Thistles by the roadside, evening star! And each of her tiniest impulses of pleasure was born already shrunk, sickly and bent by the stronger impulse of begging forgiveness. If her mother chastised her, it was of course to curb her evil instincts, her innate perversion; she was still sure of this today! And was she not even now, in the depth of her anguish, fondling herself, taking advantage of the agony of her emotions to clutch once more at pleasure?

  Betka closed her gown again and held herself rigid. She belonged to the race of animals. She would have liked to die. Veronica! Angel! Never despise me!

  At ten o’clock Betka received a telegram from Poland, signed by her mother, which contained one single word in Russian, ‘Suka!’ (bitch).

  The following morning at a quarter-past ten Betka telephoned to Veronica who was sitting naked before the desk in the living-room, trying to rub out the remorse of not yet having telephoned to her friend, and at the same time trying to think of the most tactful way of being of service to her. Four times she had carefully folded and unfolded a five-hundred franc bill which she had slipped into a little envelope and immediately pulled out again. She also had the receipt of Betka’s telegram which had gone to Poland the day before yesterday. Should she put it into the same envelope, or simply keep it? For that matter, she would have to give her this envelope in person. Otherwise she might be offended. ‘I must telephone her immediately!’ And at the very moment when she was reaching for the receiver, the telephone rang.

  Veronica got up and unhooked the receiver. She leaned her icy knee against the warm satin of the chair where she had just been sitting; but realizing suddenly that she was cold, she sat down again. Gathering her feet under her thighs she curled up, transforming her slim tall figure of a moment ago, as if by a miracle of the elasticity of her body, into a regular ball composed of all the intermingled confusion of her knees, her shoulders, her golden hair, her silver medals and her pearls. From this ball emerged a free arm, with which Veronica definitely put away the telegram receipt in a box of envelopes, keeping the five hundred francs in the hollow of her hand.

  ‘Hello! My angel, it’s you?’

  ‘… Why yes. I’m fine. When can I see you?’

  ‘… No, I can’t today, shall we make it tomorrow?’

  Barbara, who had just finished her own telephoning in her room, came in to the living-room at this moment and began from a distance to grimace incomprehensible words at Veronica, who looked at her without seeing, not trying to understand what she was saying. Then Barbara cried to her. ‘Tell Solange we’ll be at her cocktail party tomorrow!’ Veronica merely responded with a furiously impatient shake of her head, but suddenly decided to make use of the information.

  ‘Hello, chérie, hello! Is tomorrow all right? At Solange de Cléda’s?… No, no, that doesn’t matter, mon chou, I’ve already told her about you, she wants to meet you. You’ll adore her…. Why of course it’s true! Yes, wait, I’ll give it to you… listen to me! Rue de Babylone, number….’

  ‘Number 107,’ said Barbara grumpily, tossing her daughter’s dressing-gown at the feet of her chair.

  ‘107,’ Veronical repeated. ‘Will you remember?… 107… Madame Solange de Cléda… Rue de Babylone… 107… Yes, chérie… as you wish… seven or half-past six… and afterwards I’ll take you to dinner. Did you get a telegram in answer to yours?… Not yet…. Listen, my angel, you’ll need some cash!… Don’t be an idiot, will you?… Don’t bring that up…. Of course, chérie, I’m listening to you, go ahead…. Yes, chérie…. Yes, chérie….’

  During this time Veronica with her free hand folded the banknote three times, slipped it inside a small envelope, folded the latter in turn twice, and by pressing it with her wrist and holding it thus, managed to pass a brand new celery-coloured rubber band around it. Veronica’s fingers, long, pale and blue-tinged at the joints, had executed all these complex operations with the inexorable, somewhat frightening and almost inhuman calm precision of those metallic phalanges that catch, turn over and mechanically change the records in automatic phonographs.

  ‘Listen to me, don’t worry about that. I’ve just put it into a visiting card envelope; I’ll give it to you tomorrow. Don’t lose it-it’s so tiny!… Don’t say that… don’t be an idiot, now… I’ve already explained to you…. Why yes, chérie…. Just what you had on the other evening, but wear black shoes – and no raincoat, even if it rains! No, chérie, no hat…. Yes, at half-past seven, chérie, and we’ll go out. I kiss you, chérie!’

  ‘My angel, mon chou! Yes, chérie! No, chérie! The tiny, tiny ones, in the tiny little envelope. I can just see it!’ exclaimed Barbara, imitating her daughter’s tone of voice, both tender and vivacious. ‘A windfall for another poor, pretty, idle girl!’ Then she asked more energetically, ‘Who is she?’

  ‘It’s your new secretary whom I’ve just invented, but whom I’ll never let you see. It’s none of your business,’ answered Veronica, curtly. Then she went on in a honeyed voice, as if seeking forgiveness from her mother’s disapproving glance, which was riveted on her nakedness: ‘Thank you, Mama, for having rescued me with the dressing-gown; but you know perfectly well I only like to put on the other one which we sent out to be starched; this one is too thin, it’s like a silk handkerchief,’ and as she spoke she caught it between her toes that were almost as agile as her fingers. Then she began to swing the dressing-gown capriciously from the end of her extended leg, and suddenly – whish! – she tossed it with an impulsive kick up to the ceiling, catching it with her two uplifted arms. Then she began coquettishly to roll it like a turban around her head, while at the same time she purposely and negligently spread her legs open with an air of candour and as if forgetting herself.

  ‘Tell me, Mama, did you go and look at the streamlined car you promised me?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t like it at all,’ answered Barbara in an uncompromising tone.

  ‘Why not, Mama?’

  ‘Because it’s like you – it’s too naked, it’s really embarrassing to look at it – too many curves, too many roundnesses, too many lights, too many buttocks, too much of everything! I said without batting an eyelash to the salesman who showed it to me, “I’ll only take it if you dress it for me!” As he seemed overcome with surprise I explained to him, “What I mean is this, my dear man: it’s too naked. You’d have to dress it up in a cover cut in the shape of a scotch tailored suit!”’

  Barbara had drawn close to her daughter, seeming unaware of her nakedness at the moment, and continued with exaltation. ‘Don’t you think that’s amusing? A dressmaking establishment for automobiles! Very formal evening dresses, with low necks, the radiator of their bosoms emerging from the organdie, and long, dragging satin trains, to go to opening nights! This would automatically double our fashion collections – spring, summer, fall and winter collections. Convertible tops lined with ermine, door handles lined with seal-fur, and bison muffs to wrap on the radiators. Can’t you just see the effect of our Cadillac travelling through an icy landscape in the vicinity of Leningrad?’

  Veronica sneezed, and with the jolt her turban became undone, and fell in a mass over her, concealing her head and her shoulders. Veronica remained thus without moving, as if comically expecting to be rescued.

  ‘It serves you right!’ cried Barbara, and she added with a false note of concern, ‘Don’t move, I’ll go and get you some nose-drops.’

  In her private mansion on Rue de Babylone, Solange de Cléda was preparing to receive her guests for cocktails. Since the incident in the Count of Grandsailles’ room some five weeks before she had not seen him again. The latter, still obstinately keeping to his solitary retreat in the Château de Lamotte, had given her no other sign of life than to send her flowers. Those flowers of his were something to die and to laugh over! One Thursday morning her chambermaid, Eugénie, had opened before her wonderstruck eyes a large square lustre-lilac box from one of the best Parisian florists. Inside an immaculate starched nun’s head-dress serving as a vase was a homogeneous mass of tightly packed jasmines filling it to the brim, and in the centre of this fragrant blinding whiteness, the Count of Grandsailles’ card, with nothing on it but his own engraved name.

  Since the moment when she had abandoned in an outburst of tenderness all the artifice of pride which had nourished her exasperating flirtation with the Count of Grandsailles for five years, Solange had felt distraught and lost. Yet Hervé’s flowers had a smell that was not the insipidity of pity – they were so fragrant! And the nun’s head-dress – she attached no other symbolic significance to it than that of purity, if indeed there were any other reason than the Count’s original taste. During these last four weeks it was as if in spite of the fact that Solange’s bewilderment had grown, her anxiety on the other hand had relaxed by virtue of the very fact of having given up the struggle, and her anguish thus tended to become stabilized in a vague continual torment, in an uninterrupted suffering of her spirit, which she had decided by all human and superhuman means to prevent from marring the glorious integrity of her beauty, the pole star of her hope. She had often observed, in Grandsailles, the kind of earthy taste that bound him so much to the flesh. That need in him, always a little crude, to tap her to test the solidity of her body before taking her affectionately in his arms. No! No spectre, even the most fascinating, could ever have arrested his attention.

  The afternoon of the very day when Solange had received the jasmines, she could not resist dropping in, as if by chance, at the florist’s from whom the flowers came. While waiting to have a bouquet of lilies of the valley made up she caught sight of a suspicious case, on whose cover the place from which it had been sent could be distinctly read: the station of Libreux. As she was waiting Solange went over to where the box stood, with her gloved hand arranged two lilies that emerged from a large basket beside it, loosened a bouquet of bachelorbuttons, and at last casually lifted the cover of the mysterious object. Her legs nearly gave way: that’s what it was – rows of nuns’ headpieces, carefully folded one on top of the other, at least fifty of them! So Grandsailles had generously supplied his florist with his original wrappings. The sudden idea that this kind of bouquet had been invented and destined for other persons than herself made the marble-dust of her resentment grind between the acerbated teeth of her jealousy. These nuns’ headpieces that had a moment ago been pure and celestial now appeared to her a veritable abomination. Of all that whiteness, the receptacle of an offering, of the most delicate feelings, there remained only the degrading reality of a basely utilitarian fabric, similar to and as vile as that of the clean napkins that the chambermaid hurriedly and noiselessly brings in at the last moment to the bathroom – the vile linen of the unavowable intimacies of her own rivals. Nuns’ headpieces, well folded, arranged in rows, waiting in turn for the consummation of the libidinous ignominies with which, she knew, Grandsailles would finally tear out her heart.

  But the next day Solange received a bouquet just like the first, and the same the following day: soon she had proof of her certainty that at least this kind of bouquet was destined exclusively for her. From this moment the flowers became one of her dearest reasons for hope, but at the same time subjected her to the cruellest of all ordeals. For what would become of this insinuation of a nuptial way if at the end of these assiduous offerings there was to be nothing but the sweetness of the light fragrance of a homage and if the fragility of its cloying aroma was not to be mingled at last with the bitter and permanent odour of love? In any case Solange knew that the way of her passion would be long, and while preparing to become the slave of the torments of her spirit she had decided to care for her body as a thing apart. Convinced of the error it would have been to wish to try the impossible, to daze herself or even distract her moral anxiety by events of a different nature from those of her own feelings, she neither sought nor expected from the physical world any ‘consolation’, for the heart can be healed only by the heart.

  Beginning an imaginative life apart, Solange was preparing to pursue the realization of the unique miracle of caring for the physical person of her anatomy as an independent being. Thus, while she delivered only her spirit to her passion, she provisionally lent the inexhaustible biological resources of her body to the studied mouldings of masseurs, beauticians, surgeons, dressmakers and ballet teachers. But before all and at all costs, one thing was certain: she must be able to sleep, and for this Solange de Cléda had recourse to an astute and unscrupulous woman doctor, Dr Anselme, who gave her regularly every night before she went to bed a rather large injection of luminal – a drug by means of which she obtained a refreshing sleep, and whose effects on her organism might be harmful only a few years later. Solange ordinarily awoke without anguish, but after some ten minutes it began to invade her as in the phenomenon of capillarity which makes coffee rise in a lump of sugar, and it came over her, progressively darkening the whiteness of her waking soul with its sombre ideas through the fine capillarity of her sensibility.

  Having given herself over to the cares of specialists – all but her sentiments – Solange knew less and less about herself, and each morning she anxiously questioned Doctor Anselme. ‘Did I sleep well?’ She had dreamed so much about being able to sleep that now when she slept she no longer dreamed.

  That evening, when Solange heard her first guests ring the bell at the door to her garden-court she wondered, ‘Mon Dieu! Why am I seeing all those people?’ Yet she knew quite well why. People came running to her to admire her, to serve her, to help her to climb, she still needed their fawning adulation to progress toward the all-powerful goal of her growing social prestige which would enable her to approach Grandsailles’ level. She had already yielded in her pride by admitting to the Count the nature of her feelings. Now she wanted to maintain her inferiority with nobility: on an equal footing.

  At Solange de Cléda’s there was much talk of the Count of Grandsailles’ forthcoming ball, and already several ‘small souls’, with their sharp and wholly Parisian intuition of social Machiavellianism and believing themselves already predestined to be numbered among those who would not be invited, were beginning to prepare the platform of their social battle. They were trying to impose themselves by the terror of their malicious gossip or by the histrionic platitude of their servility, or else by the two methods combined, all without any of them forgetting at the same time to prepare for themselves a favourable terrain of retreat, so that in case of defeat the latter might be interpreted in all possible ways, human and divine, except the true one, namely the Count of Grandsailles’ intentional, pure and simple omission.

  Madame Claudine Druett, with a cup of tea in one hand, was helping herself to cakes which she chewed languorously one after another with a heartbroken expression. In her pearl-grey tailored suit, with a corsage of lilies of the valley pinned at a melancholy angle, she was preparing to launch upon a polemic.

  ‘A Grandsailles ball is always a success,’ she said, while she lifted her white veil with her little finger, the only one that remained free and dry. ‘It’s as clear as day! The Count succeeds because he never runs the risk of failing. These affairs of his are always masterpieces, but in the long run the lack of spontaneity becomes deadly for those who have lived too long in his drawing-rooms.’ She sighed with the ethereal but four-edged breath of her tiny nacreous nostrils, while resting the tips of her pointed buttocks on the knees of Farges, the plump poet, who obliged her to let herself go in his arms. ‘I like balls that grow in twenty-four hours like mushrooms,’ Claudine continued, in a naive and capricious intonation, ‘balls with new faces, dresses that are hardly sewn, and smacks!’

  ‘Why yes, why yes! my Claudinette, my Claudinette, my beautiful reine-claude,’ Farges buzzed, ‘your old Farges is the only one who understands what is on this child’s mind! You remember Venice,’ he continued, addressing Solange de Cléda who had just stretched out at his feet, looking like an oxidized-silver greyhound in her tight-fitting dress of dull silver that accentuated her ribs as they stirred to her breathing. ‘Well, in Venice,’ Farges continued, ‘every time we decided to go off on an excursion to visit a Paladian villa, it would rain – it never failed. In the evening the sky would clear, and someone would point to a cloud of May-bugs dancing in a Saint Andrew’s cross before a cypress, and on returning to Venice we would learn that a ball had just grown.’

  Farges had the reputation of being very witty because he was fat, because he spoke in a very nasal voice, choked and interrupted by a great variety of respiratory troubles and accidents, and finally because he was really very witty. He now dandled Claudine in his arms, and the black, hairy holes of his nose grazed his protégée’s bouquet of lilies of the valley like two buzzing bumblebees. Each of his syllables, barely distinguishable and murmured into Claudine’s ear through the screen of the diverse pollens of the forests of hair of his nose and his ill-kempt beard reached the other auditors confusedly like the unintelligible hum of poetry.