The time off that the Bibliothèque Nationale allowed Paul Masson assured me of an almost daily visit from him but the phosphorescent conversation of Marcel Schwob was a rarer treat. Alone with the cat and Masson, I did not have to talk and this prematurely aged man could relax in silence. He frequently made notes—heaven knows what about—on the pages of a notebook bound in black imitation leather. The fumes from the slow-burning stove lulled us into a torpor; we listened drowsily to the reverberating bang of the street door. Then I would rouse myself to eat sweets or salted nuts and I would order my guest, who, though he would not admit it to himself, was probably the most devoted of all my friends, to make me laugh. I was twenty-two, with a face like an anemic cat’s, and more than a yard and a half of hair that, when I was at home, I let down in a wavy mass that reached to my feet.
“Paul, tell me some lies.”
“Which particular ones?”
“Oh, any old lies. How’s your family?”
“Madame, you forget that I’m a bachelor.”
“But you told me . . .”
“Ah yes, I remember. My illegitimate daughter is well. I took her out to lunch on Sunday. In a suburban garden. The rain had plastered big yellow lime leaves on the iron table. She enjoyed herself enormously pulling them off and we ate tepid fried potatoes, with our feet on the soaked gravel . . .”
“No, no, not that, it’s too sad. I like the lady of the library better.”
“What lady? We don’t employ any.”
“The one who’s working on a novel about India, according to you.”
“She’s still laboring over her novelette. Today I’ve been princely and generous. I’ve made her a present of baobabs and latonia palms painted from life and thrown in magical incantations, mahrattas, screaming monkeys, Sikhs, saris, and lakhs of rupees.”
Rubbing his dry hands against each other, he added: “She gets a sou a line.”
“A sou!” I exclaimed. “Why a sou?”
“Because she works for a chap who gets two sous a line who works for a chap who gets four sous a line, who works for a chap who gets ten sous a line.”
“But what you’re telling me isn’t a lie, then?”
“All my stories can’t be lies,” sighed Masson.
“What’s her name?”
“Her Christian name is Marco, as you might have guessed. Women of a certain age, when they belong to the artistic world, have only a few names to choose from, such as Marco, Léo, Ludo, Aldo. It’s a legacy from the excellent Madame Sand.”
“Of a certain age? So she’s old, then?”
Paul Masson glanced at my face with an indefinable expression. Lost in my long hair, that face became childish again.
“Yes,” he said.
Then he ceremoniously corrected himself: “Forgive me, I made a mistake. No was what I meant to say. No, she’s not old.”
I said triumphantly: “There, you see! You see it
is
a lie, because you haven’t even chosen an age for her!”
“If you insist,” said Masson.
“Or else you’re using the name Marco to disguise a lady who’s your mistress.”
“I don’t need Madame Marco. I have a mistress who is also, thank heaven, my housekeeper.”
He consulted his watch and stood up.
“Do make my excuses to your husband. I must get back or I shall miss the last bus. Concerning the extremely real Madame Marco, I’ll introduce you to her whenever you feel inclined.”
He recited, very fast: “She is the wife of V., the painter, a school friend of mine who’s made her abominably unhappy; she has fled from the conjugal establishment where her perfections had rendered her an impossible inmate; she is still beautiful, witty, and penniless; she lives in a boarding house in the rue Demours, where she pays eighty-five francs a month for bed and breakfast; she does writing jobs, anonymous feuilletons, newspaper snippets, addressing envelopes, gives English lessons at three francs an hour, and has never had a lover. You see that this particular lie is as disagreeable as the truth.”
I handed him the little lighted lamp and accompanied him to the top of the stairs. As he walked down them, the tiny flame shone upward on his pointed beard, with its slightly turned-up end, and tinged it red.
When I had had enough of getting him to tell me about Marco, I asked Paul Masson to take me to be introduced to her, instead of bringing her to the rue Jacob. He had told me in confidence that she was about twice my age and I felt it was proper for a young woman to make the journey to meet a lady who was not so young. Naturally, Paul Masson accompanied me to the rue Demours.
The boarding house where Madame Marco V. lived has been pulled down. About 1897, all that this villa retained of its former garden was a euonymus hedge, a gravel path, and a flight of five steps leading up to the door. The moment I entered the hall I felt depressed. Certain smells, not properly speaking cooking smells, but odors escaped from a kitchen, are appalling revelations of poverty. On the first floor, Paul Masson knocked on a door and the voice of Madame Marco invited us to come in. A perfect voice, neither too high nor too low, but gay and well-pitched. What a surprise! Madame Marco looked young, Madame Marco was pretty and wore a silk dress, Madame Marco had pretty eyes, almost black, and wide-open like a deer’s. She had a little cleft at the tip of her nose, hair touched with henna and worn in a tight, sponge-like mass on the forehead like Queen Alexandra’s and curled short on the nape in the so-called eccentric fashion of certain women painters or musicians.
She called me “little Madame,” indicated that Masson had talked so much about me and my long hair, apologized, without overdoing it, for having no port and no sweets to offer me. With an unaffected gesture, she indicated the kind of place she lived in, and following the sweep of her hand, I took in the piece of plush that hid the one-legged table, the shiny upholstery of the only armchair, and the two little threadbare pancake-cushions of Algerian design on the two other chairs. There was also a certain rug on the floor. The mantelpiece served as a bookshelf.
“I’ve imprisoned the clock in the cupboard,” said Marco. “But I swear it deserved it. Luckily, there’s another cupboard I can use for my washing things. Don’t you smoke?”
I shook my head, and Marco stepped into the full light to put a match to her cigarette. Then I saw that the silk dress was splitting at every fold. What little linen showed at the neck was very white. Marco and Masson smoked and chatted together; Madame Marco had grasped at once that I preferred listening to talking. I forced myself not to look at the wallpaper, with its old-gold and garnet stripes, or at the bed and its cotton damask bedspread.
“Do look at the little painting, over there,” Madame Marco said to me. “It was done by my husband. It’s so pretty that I’ve kept it. It’s that little corner of Hyères,
you
remember, Masson.”
And I looked enviously at Marco, Masson, and the little picture, who had all three been in Hyères. Like most young things, I knew how to withdraw into myself, far away from people talking in the same room, then return to them with a sudden mental effort, then leave them again. Throughout my visit to Marco, thanks to her delicate tact which let me off questions and answers, I was able to come and go without stirring from my chair; I could observe or I could shut my eyes at will. I saw her just as she was and what I saw both delighted and distressed me. Though her well-set features were fine, she had what is called a coarse skin, slightly leathery and masculine, with red patches on the neck and below the ears. But, at the same time, I was ravished by the lively intelligence of her smile, by the shape of her doe’s eyes and the unusually proud, yet completely unaffected carriage of her head. She looked less like a pretty woman than like one of those chiseled, clear-cut aristocratic men who adorned the eighteenth century and were not ashamed of being handsome. Masson told me later she was extraordinarily like her grandfather, the Chevalier de St-Georges, a brilliant forebear who has no place in my story.
We became great friends, Marco and I. And after she had finished her Indian novel—it was rather like
La Femme qui tue
, as specified by the man who got paid ten sous a line—Monsieur Willy soothed Marco’s sensitive feelings by asking her to do some research on condition she accepted a small fee. He even consented, when I urgently asked him to, to put in an appearance when she and I had a meal together. I had only to watch her to learn the most impeccable table manners. Monsieur Willy was always professing his love of good breeding; he found something to satisfy it in Marco’s charming manners and in her turn of mind, which was urbane but inflexible and slightly caustic. Had she been born twenty years later she would, I think, have made a good journalist. When the summer came, it was Monsieur Willy who proposed taking this extremely pleasant companion, so dignified in her poverty, along with us to a mountain village in Franche-Comté. The luggage she brought with her was heartrendingly light. But at that time, I myself had very little money at my disposal, and we settled ourselves very happily on the single upper floor of a noisy inn. The wooden balcony and a wicker armchair were all that Marco needed; she never went for walks. She never wearied of the restfulness, of the vivid purple that evening shed on the mountains, of the great bowls of raspberries. She had traveled and she compared the valleys hollowed out by the twilight with other landscapes. Up there I noticed that the only mail Marco received consisted of picture postcards from Masson and “Best wishes for a good holiday,” also on a postcard, from a fellow ghostwriter at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
As we sat under the balcony awning on those hot afternoons, Marco mended her underclothes. She sewed badly, but conscientiously, and I flattered my vanity by giving her pieces of advice, such as: “You’re using too coarse a thread for fine needles . . . You shouldn’t put blue baby ribbon in chemises, pink is much prettier in lingerie and up against the skin.” It was not long before I gave her others, concerning her face powder, the color of her lipstick, a hard line she penciled around the edge of her beautifully shaped eyelids. “D’you think so? D’you think so?” she would say. My youthful authority was adamant. I took the comb, I made a charming little gap in her tight, sponge-like fringe, I proved expert at softly shadowing her eyes and putting a faint pink glow high up on her cheekbones, near her temples. But I did not know what to do with the unattractive skin of her neck or with a long shadow that hollowed her cheek. That flattering glow I put on her face transformed it so much that I promptly wiped it off again. Taking to amber powder and being far better fed than in Paris had quite an animating effect. She told me about one of her former journeys when, like a good painter’s wife, she had followed her husband from Greek village to Moroccan hamlet, washed his brushes, and fried aubergines and pimentos in his oil. She promptly left off sewing to have a cigarette, blowing the smoke out through nostrils as soft as some herbivorous animal’s. But she only told me the names of places, not of friends, and spoke of discomforts, not of griefs, so I dared not ask her to tell more. The mornings she spent in writing the first chapters of a new novel, at one sou a line, which was being seriously held up by lack of documentation about the early Christians.
“When I’ve put in lions in the arena and a golden-haired virgin abandoned to the licentious soldiers and a band of Christians escaping in a storm,” said Marco, “I shall come to the end of my personal erudition. So I shall wait for the rest till I get back to Paris.”
I have said: we became great friends. That is true, if friendship is confined to a rare smoothness of intercourse, preserved by studiously veiled precautions that blunt all sharp points and angles. I could only gain by imitating Marco and her “well-bred” surface manner. Moreover, she aroused not the faintest distrust in me. I felt her to be straight as a die, disgusted by anything that could cause pain, utterly remote from all feminine rivalries. But though love laughs at difference in age, friendship, especially between two women, is more acutely conscious of it. This is particularly true when friendship is just beginning, and wants, like love, to have everything all at once. The country filled me with a terrible longing for running streams, wet fields, active idleness.
“Marco, don’t you think it would be marvelous if we got up early tomorrow and spent the morning under the fir trees where there are wild cyclamens and purple mushrooms?”
Marco shuddered, and clasped her little hands together.
“Oh, no! Oh, no! Go off on your own and leave me out of it, you young mountain goat.”
I have forgotten to mention that, after the first week, Monsieur Willy had returned to Paris “on business.” He wrote me brief notes, spicing his prose, which derived from Mallarmé and Félix Fénéon, with onomatopoeic words in Greek letters, German quotations, and English terms of endearment.
So I climbed up alone to the firs and the cyclamens. There was something intoxicating to me in the contrast between burning sun and the still-nocturnal cold of the plants growing out of a carpet of moss. More than once, I thought I would not go back for the midday meal. But I did go back, on account of Marco, who was savoring the joy of rest as if she had twenty years’ accumulation of weariness to work off. She used to rest with her eyes shut, her face pale beneath her powder, looking utterly exhausted, as if convalescing from an illness. At the end of the afternoon, she would take a little walk along the road that, in passing through the village, hardly left off being a delicious, twisting forest path that rang crisply under one’s feet.
You must not imagine that the other “tourists” were much more active than we were. People of my age will remember that a summer in the country, around 1897, bore no resemblance to the gadabout holidays of today. The most energetic walked as far as a pure, icy, slate-colored stream, taking with them camp stools, needlework, a novel, a picnic lunch, and useless fishing rods. On moonlit nights, girls and young men would go off in groups after dinner, which was served at seven, wander along the road, then return, stopping to wish each other good night. “Are you thinking of bicycling as far as Saut-de-Giers tomorrow?” “Oh, we’re not making any definite plans. It all depends on the weather.” The men wore low-cut waistcoats like cummerbunds, with two rows of buttons and sham buttonholes, under a black or cream alpaca jacket, and check caps or straw hats. The girls and the young women were plump and well nourished, dressed in white linen or ecru tussore. When they turned up their sleeves, they displayed white arms, and under their big hats, their scarlet sunburn did not reach as high as their foreheads. Venturesome families went in for what was called “bathing” and set off in the afternoons to immerse themselves at a spot where the stream broadened out, barely two and a half miles from the village. At night, around the communal dining table, the children’s wet hair smelled of ponds and wild peppermint.