The taxi had just stopped so smoothly that it was as though in the course of the whole trip the passengers’ prestige had grown and become consolidated.

  Cécile Goudreau’s garçonnière was situated in a recess with damp and moss-green old pumice-stone walls, behind the Palais Galiéra. When they arrived it was not yet quite dark, and the brief immobility of their taxi, though it was exactly like that of any other taxi, became immediately suspect, solely because of the moss that covered the oozing walls. It would have been even more so if it had been observed by an imaginary spectator, preferably placed on the fourth storey of a neighbouring house, if such a person had existed in this rich but sparsely inhabited quarter of Paris. The stairway was so dark that when they entered the house Cécile Goudreau took Betka by the hand to guide her.

  ‘Don’t stumble… there! We’ll thee-and-thou each other, shall we?’

  They were now climbing a long spiral staircase.

  ‘There’s one more floor before we get to my door, wait a moment!’

  Goudreau had just got down on all fours, looking under the carpet for the key to let herself in. ‘There, my lovely redhead. I’ve got it! The worst is over!’ said Goudreau, slipping her key into the lock and opening the door noiselessly. They passed through a large room in the dark, and their heels resounded as in an Ambassador’s antechamber, clicking as on marble. Then they passed between heavy curtains into a second, feebly-lighted room, much smaller but with a very high ceiling, which gave it a character both of intimacy and of solemnity. It was entirely covered with broad bands of daisy yellow and black satin folded vertically all along the walls, carried to the ceiling in the form of a cupola, and joining in the centre in an immense rosace trimmed with silver braid, from which hung a heavy black cord sprinkled with silver grains and at the end of which was attached, rather low and in the exact centre of the room, a very large but fragile Japanese lantern of an indeterminate mite-coloured rose – assuming there were mites of this colour. Along the four walls of the room, facing one another, four wide, very low divans, uniformly covered in chinchilla and strewn with large antique oriental cushions, were separated only by the entrance door and a window in the opposite wall. These two openings were hidden by great curtains of the same material and imitating the same folds as those of the walls, so that when everything was closed one had the impression of being shut in by an absolute uniformity of materials. Beneath the lamp, but a little toward the angle between the door and the window and level with the divans stood a rectangular black lacquer table on which were disposed in perfect symmetry two pipes for smoking opium, the little alcohol lamp, the needles, the metal boxes. Two further details completed the atmosphere of this spot: a little niche situated in the same angle as that in which the table stood, halfway up the wall, set in the satin, containing a Russian icon lighted by an oil night-lamp. On the floor a thick hairy all-over carpet the colour of wine-lees, on which one walked as on flexible needles, was still further softened by four immense polar-bear rugs, their four open jaws, their eight crystal eyes facing one another.

  ‘Peel off your clothes!’ said Cécile Goudreau, tossing to her a shiny tobacco-coloured dressing-gown, while she undressed and slipped on a kind of pale blue quilted robe, brown-stained in spots around the black holes of several burns.

  Betka took everything off in a few seconds, and while she adjusted the sleeves of the dressing-gown she had been offered she observed Cécile Goudreau out of the corner of her eye with an anxious heart. The latter was making herself comfortable, as much at ease as if no one had been in the room. Cécile Goudreau’s nude body showed ravages, and her breasts were shrivelled, but she had divinely beautiful and slender legs. She had the face of a bird that looked like a cat, and the body of a cat that looked like a bird without in the least resembling an owl, as one might first be tempted to think. In fact what was birdlike about Cécile Goudreau was the extreme fragility of the joints of her ankles, of her wrists, of her hollow and greenish neck, the exiguous volume of her tiny skull with its small brainpan, and her hair curling in light separate ringlets, smooth and regular as feathers; what was catlike about her was the fixed green gaze and the masculine cynicism of her pointed teeth. Everything else about her was catlike; her elastic and arching movements, the feline and concentrated languor of her indolence, and even her mews, for it could be said that her famous witticisms, brief and shaded with voluptuous inflections, were mewed rather than spoken.

  ‘Do you like this?’ Cécile Goudreau mewed, making a circular nod, with which she seemed to caress, from a distance, all the satin that hung from the walls. ‘I don’t give a damn about the decoration, it’s much too Paul Poiret, but I like its gaga and anachronistic side. I bought the whole thing at an auction, just as it is, from the Prince of Orminy, who was sick of it, you understand? But you’ll see, my puss, as soon as you get used to the whole business all this excessive luxury will begin in spite of everything to strike you as very appropriate for smoking. For all this isn’t rabbit, you know! Real chinchilla, my lass. And is there a lot of it!’ said Goudreau, crushing the fur with her bare bird-foot. ‘Orminy doesn’t wipe his nose on his sleeve, I can assure you! You see that thing, that kind of soup-bowl for puking into? Well, it’s solid gold!’

  As she spoke, Cécile Goudreau stretched herself out and drew up the lacquered table with the smoking accessories set out on a level with her chest. Betka came and lay down beside her, pressing her own body lightly against hers. Then Cécile, with a quick and casual movement, passed her arm around her neck, thus holding Betka’s face glued to hers. Intently their two pairs of eyes watched the preliminary ritual of Cécile’s two hands busily preparing the first pipe. At the tip of her needle, with the consummate skill of an old mandarin, she rolled a tiny pellet of opium, heated it, brought it close to the flame, till it crackled, but just at the moment when it was about to catch fire she withdrew it in order to mould, press, play with it voluptuously, as though this were a matter as precious to her as that which great narcissists pull out of and put back into their noses and ears with such great delight. Cécile Goudreau must have been thinking the same thing, for she said laughingly to Betka:

  ‘Anyway, it’s less dirty than picking your nose, eh? What an occupation! Take that poor Orminy, who smokes like one of the blessed and who got fed up with his atmosphere! You understand, my child, there are two kinds of smokers, those who smoke to create an atmosphere for themselves and, once they succeed, get fed up with it; and the others who smoke simply because they are fed up with the atmosphere. The first are almost always the aesthetic kind, the slightly imbecilic kind, the Orminys; and the second is me, the real thing – dogmatic, without chichi. But you see how curious it is: in the end we buy their atmosphere readymade, with all their chichi, and their trouble thrown in. Suck my ear, chéri, it pricks me… a little lower – thank you, my girl. Will you press a button-just under the table, to put out the light-simply with your foot. There! That’s better, isn’t it, with just the little flame? It’s really nice-the night – lamp near the icon now. Orminy must have been proud of that effect, the poor bastard! How old are you?’

  ‘How good it is to be here!’ Betka sighed.

  ‘Come, now, are you listening to me? You must be twenty?’

  ‘Worse than that,’ Betka laughed. ‘Eighteen!’

  ‘That’s too bad! Just what I thought-the stupid age! Here, my treasure, inhale this fragrance,’ continued Cécile Goudreau, putting the pipe to her lips: ‘some day you’ll thank your old Goudreau for having taught you to smoke this vile stuff. You’re made for it – one can tell by taking just one look at you! Your anguished face and your big sensual mouth. Don’t you see, they don’t go together! Only a good dose of opium can put them into harmony. I’ve had experience. I can tell a future smoker in a bullfight crowd. Will you remind me to tell you the story of young Ortiz whom I picked up in Madrid? Today I’m not talking, you understand? I just say anything that comes into my head. But now we’re going to have several years ahead of us, you’ll hear some good ones from your Cécile. I can give you any literary flavour you like, Marcel Proust, for instance, the real, living thing, not like his; I can also do you some Lautréamont, but I need a piano for that. This place lacks a piano, don’t you think?’

  Betka had just finished the pipe with the avidity of a nursing babe. She was beginning to derive pleasure from her disappointment over Veronica, and to launch on reveries in which the latter was ‘amazed’ at her new life of debauchery which already appeared to her as endowed with a unique distinction, and beyond the scope of anything she had known. ‘Only among a few vice-addicts is there a certain honesty and frankness,’ she reflected, wholly won over by Cécile Goudreau’s irresistible personality….

  ‘I feel nothing, no effect,’ said Betka, gently benumbed as she took a third pipe that Cécile offered her.

  ‘This one is stronger, it’s a very full-bodied opium, but you won’t feel anything either: opium doesn’t produce any effect, but it does what is more important – it makes the nastiness of this world cease to have any effect on you. At your age people believe either that they can banish unhappiness, or invent an artificial life. There is no artificial Paradise, there is only the way to convert that fine and gelatinous pain which is anguish into something agreeable. Are you all right? I’ll fix one for myself now.’

  ‘How good it is here!’ sighed Betka, picking up her fifth pipe.

  ‘You can live here as much as you like. There is always a little pocket money, you’ll never guess where-well, it’s under the gold soup-bowl, you see.’

  Cécile had just picked up this receptacle which rested on a large box, likewise of gold – a polo trophy of the Prince of Orminy’s – whose lid was scrawled all over with engraved autographs. Goudreau opened it and stirred with her hand several rolls of bank bills, among which there was also an ivory elephant, broken, tied to a very dirty red ribbon. ‘You can take whatever you want from here, without asking, my girl. What’s the matter with you, chérie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suddenly feel a dreadful anguish again,’ said Betka, uttering a deep sigh and pressing her brow with her hand moist with cold sweat. It’s Veronica, she thought to herself: it was too good to last – oh, if only the thought of her doesn’t come and harass me with grief!

  ‘I thought so,’ Cécile Goudreau grumbled, bringing the gold recipient close to her, ‘go to it, my girl! It’s because of all the swill you had at Solange de Cléda’s. Opium purifies.’

  Betka began to vomit.

  ‘Go to it, my girl! I’m holding you, chérie. I’m here, chérie,’ and as she spoke Cécile tenderly pressed her brow with her two little hands which were always slightly contracted like bird-claws. ‘Wait a second, I’ll give you a clean towel sprinkled with ether.’ And Cécile immediately returned, bringing the gold basin….

  At the end of three hours Betka murmured, ‘I think I’ve been sleeping.’

  ‘I’ll say you have! It’s half-past four in the morning: it’s raining outside now. I never sleep! Do you still feel like vomiting?’

  ‘A little,’ said Betka. ‘I’ll go – don’t you bother!’ And she went, all dazed, and shut herself up for some time in the bathroom, which was finished entirely in black marble. ‘What a dog’s life! It’s wonderful!’ thought Betka, making the last contractions to assure a longer period of rest for her stomach.

  Cécile Goudreau, seeing her return, brought a fresh pipe close to her. ‘Here’s another one all ready, that I just fixed for myself; it’s good! I’ll have to teach you to make them; I shan’t always be there…. Did you notice that fine green moss that covers the front of the house? Oh, no, you can’t have observed it – it was almost dark when we came in. I’ll show you, the wall of the façade is almost entirely covered with a very fine moss, of a sinister green,’ said Cécile Goudreau, smiling strangely, and continuing in a disturbing tone of voice. ‘Before I used to like that moss! and on days like today I would imagine it dripping in the rain; then the vision of it appearing between pipes only augmented the obscure pleasure of huddling even more madly in the depth of my cushions. But for the last week that confounded moss has had a very funny effect on me, and it’s idiotic how a stupid thing like that can become so anguishing… yet that horrible moss is so pretty when you look at it close! It’s like very fine hairs with what look like flowerlets at the ends, like little yellowish crosses…!’

  Betka listened to all this with half an ear. Rigid, she felt herself floating above the starless and oily marsh of her first opium night, on whose black horizon Veronica’s cruel gaze, blended into a single flame of regret, remained suspended, oscillating like the half-drowned flicker of the night-lamp of her bad conscience.

  ‘Faithless friend! You’ll see! You’ll see!’ Betka kept reproaching her in a bare whisper, without yet knowing whereof her vague threat consisted. For a long time she had been watching the dying light of the night-lamp and saying to herself, trying to play at frightening herself, ‘That would be frightful – Veronica’s face vacillating in place of the icon’s!’ But fear did not take up its abode in her spirit that evening; on the contrary, instead of the barking pack of the stirred-up hounds of her rancour against Veronica, and instead of the terrors which she would have liked to awaken in her spirit, she felt only a limitless sensation of undefined happiness that she had never experienced before, which made her ready to weep with joy. Cécile Goudreau, with an obsessed air, her hands joined on her burnt-out pipe, murmured in a low voice and as if telling the beads of her anguish:

  ‘That horrible green! That awful moss!… Yet it’s funny…. It was just nothing at all, the way this new phobia started… I was walking, feeling very low, and then, bang, I found myself before the wall of the Montmartre cemetery drenched with a moisture that struck me as abominable and covered by exactly the same moss as my façade… and that’s all there was to it… yes, there was also the dream with the business of the coffin in light walnut and then… and then the cards that don’t work, and everything, and everything. I should have been suspicious of Orminy. I remember now the day when the Prince called my attention to that accursed moss, pointing to it with the tip of his ebony cane, and laughing between his yellow teeth he said, “It’s very damp, there’s no denying it, but it doesn’t penetrate. The interior is dry and in perfect condition to preserve people like us… embalmed creatures!” Lord, what a lugubrious creature that Orminy is! My God! that moss, how sticky it can become, an idea, a fixed colour in the night. Green! how I detest you-green! colour of the demon.’

  Betka, who no longer listened to this interminable wail, rubbed one foot against the other. ‘If only this would never end! Now the night-lamp is going to go out,’ she thought, ‘and I’m not at all sleepy.’

  ‘Stop!’ she said, passing her arm around Cécile’s neck, and shaking her head as if to rid herself of a fixed idea. Cécile readily lent herself to this, and once her little head was warm and snug in the hollow of the nest of Betka’s armpit she said to her with a sadness that seemed to have neither beginning nor end, ‘You’re going to be very disappointed with your Cécile Goudreau? So cynical! And here she is, capable of getting all upset over nothing but a little tuft of fresh moss. Bizarre, eh?’

  Betka, who during all this time heard silent and slow steps coming and going across the hall and now already nearer, in the bathroom, turned her face toward the entrance door. A tall skeleton dressed in black silk pyjamas, with a high, tight Russian-style collar, looked at her from a distance as if not daring to approach. It was Countess Mihakowska who lived with Cécile in a separate sickroom. Betka in her drugged state was in no way astonished at her presence, and with a friendly gesture begged her to come and stretch out beside her on the other side of Cécile. Mihakowska shook her head in a sign of refusal that was infinitely gentle and came up to within a few feet of Betka as if to make an explanation. Then, leaning one knee on the divan and with the aid of her hands that seemed to want to draw attention to her left breast, she said, with an exaggerated grimace at each syllable and in a voice so effaced that it was barely audible. ‘I can’t – operation, o-o-operation.’ Betka tried to catch the words by the movement of the Countess’s lips, but she did not succeed in understanding them.

  ‘She has just had her left breast operated on for cancer.’ Cécile Goudreau explained, ‘they’ve removed everything, and she has tuberculosis of the throat – a real angel!’

  Betka then gave the Countess a long smile, and the latter stood up again, with a kind of childish pride at feeling herself at last understood and admired.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to her,’ said Cécile, ‘she never disturbs anybody; a regular dove – she doesn’t talk, she coos like a dove, and like a dove, too, she has just one breast… a little lopsided, to be sure!’ Cécile Goudreau exclaimed, as if suddenly recovering her desire to chatter. ‘You understand, my child, between myself and the Countess, never been anything,’ and lifting her forefinger and her thumb in the form of a cross to her mouth, she kissed it, swearing, ‘I keep her here solely out of kindness. She’s the Prince of Orminy’s former mistress, he had set up this apartment to be able to come and smoke with her; it was more or less her house, you understand? So when I bought the whole thing from Orminy, I also kept his mistress – thrown into the bargain, you understand; a Countess sort of goes with this kind of a house. I’ve just had her disintoxicated and operated on (with Orminy’s money, of course, that would be the last straw!) She’s perfectly well now; she doesn’t talk much, but she never did say much, poor woman; she’s happy; she busies herself with little nothings – especially her icon. Look! Look!’

  Countess Mihakowska had got up on the divan and was adding oil to the little night-lamp; after which she got down, took the gold basin and disappeared. ‘You know, she’s so clean, she wants everything to shine; have you ever seen anything more aristocratic than that skeleton?’