One day La Cigale came down and knocked at my door. She too had put out blossoms for spring in the form of a new turban, a bright orange one. The color tinged her face. I could see then clearly how once she’d been handsome; a big, square-boned, handsome woman, the kind they liked in those days, as one gathers from old postcards. And out of that square, muscular chest, it seemed, had come a light soprano voice. My mother’s voice on the contrary just suited her looks: dark, pure, liquid, passionate. There was something fierce in it too; an humble sort of fierceness, like a beautiful, favorite slave. But then as you know she wasn’t a favorite in the end. Why did they think she had secrets to tell? Or did they just want to think it?

Have you ever considered with all your mind the cruelty of man? People like Simon and even Pierre are forever talking about this or that injustice and cruelty, but they act as if it were only one side that did it, one political group. Or rather, that when the side they don’t like is the victim it’s good. That makes it the worst of all.

La Cigale had something she wanted to tell or to ask me, but she couldn’t get started. I told her to come in and she wouldn’t do that either. She just stood there at the threshold of the front door and smiled. I told you that the apartment wound around the courtyard so that the front and back door are cheek by jowl. La Cigale had actually rung the back-door bell. I can tell the difference in sound. There was something pathetic about that. She had such a proud, insolent nature. She must have been impertinence personified. So she must have loathed to abase herself thus. For my mother, of course, back and front door would be alike. Her noble and natural humility made them so. And there I am again comparing my darling, my beautiful mother to that old woman. I wonder why?

As I said, La Cigale stood there and smiled. I noticed that she was holding her scrapbook. Her smile was a slit, ingratiating and false, and it did not suit her at all. After a lot of hemming and hawing it finally came out that she had written an article on her life with some of her old photographs as illustrations and that she thought Pierre could get it published in Jouvence. Well, for all I knew so he might and I told her this. Then at last she came in and, sitting on the edge of the sofa very primly, she opened her book and shuffled through the pages. First of course she put on her glasses. It was impossible, it seemed, for her to find what she wanted, which I thought strange, seeing she’d come down on purpose to show it to me. Or perhaps she could not quite decide to let her life into my profane hands. While she was looking, the light from the studio window fell full on her face and I noticed that her glasses didn’t reflect it. There was no glitter. In fact they were only empty rims.

I suppose you think it was cruel of me to laugh. I can’t help it. I had to hold on to my stomach. When I laugh hard like that I have a sort of coarse, harsh, exuberant feeling and yet—and yet—

When I finally stopped and looked at La Cigale I saw she had taken off the spectacles and was holding them with two fingers right through the rims. She was grinning like a clown. “C’la donne toujours un peu de ton,” she said.

After that she had no trouble at all finding the papers she wanted. They were the only loose leaves in her scrapbook and she handed them over to me without a word. When she had gone I saw that a pressed rose had fallen out of the book onto the floor.

ROSE put away her journal with a smile. She really did feel better that day and as Bernice was doing the week’s wash, she decided to go to the market.

It was noon when she got there, the busiest hour. The market occupied two streets and formed a sort of cross. Besides the actual stores, there were outside booths and carts lining the gutters. Rose walked along with her basket thinking of La Cigale, whose actual presence now gave her no surprise.

The old woman was holding a few small, withered apples sold in the humblest of the carts. She put them on the scales herself and then argued ferociously with the vendor over their weight. The vendor, another old woman, finally gave in, and as La Cigale turned away Rose thrilled to the gleam of triumph in her eyes.

“Madame la Cigale,” she cried, “come and have an apéritif with me.”

La Cigale turned and looked Rose up and down. “What are we today?” she asked; “la femme bien, the correct little wife, or—”

“Or what?” demanded Rose, changing color. Her clear, ivory skin had suddenly a greenish tinge as though she were about to be sick.

La Cigale came closer, perhaps to savor Rose’s appearance more fully. “Oh, I think you can supply the missing words,” she said.

They went into a small bar where market people forgathered, and ordered beer. When the two lukewarm draughts were set before them La Cigale raised her glass. “To life,” she said, “to la vie d’ bohème!”

Do you still drink to that now that you are old and poor? wondered Rose to herself. La Cigale as though to answer her unspoken question said, “Oh, I know you think I am a miserable old woman. People despise me for the money I let slip through my hands—if they remember about it, that is—but better let money slip through than life itself. I lived life.”

Why do they all talk about living? thought Rose with irritation; how can one help but live if one’s alive? But aloud she only asked, “And was that worth the years from now until you die?”

“Ah, that’s another story,” said La Cigale. “One can work and be serious all one’s youth or one can sing and dance like this poor grasshopper. In the end one will be old. Not all the money in the world could make that up to any woman.” She looked at Rose full-face with her handsome old bones deserted, so to speak, by the frailer flesh above them. Downing her glass she got up and held out her hand.

“Thank you for the drink, my lost and abandoned child,” she said.

Rose stayed on there a few more minutes. The door of the café was open and the gusts of air that blew into the bar were warm and soft. Yet they were tinged prophetically with the breath of snow.

ELEVEN

When, on the first of June, Pierre went to Italy on a business trip, Simon called Rose up. The timbre of his voice made the wires vibrate. He asked her out to dine but she refused.

“My father is in town,” she said, “and he’s coming to supper.” She added in her polite manner, “Please, won’t you come too?”

This particular, grave politeness of Rose infuriated Simon so that he accepted. He was using the telephone in Pierre’s office and on putting down the receiver he turned and looked at Marie’s long bare legs which, as usual, were on the desk. “You need a shave,” he said.

Marie nonchalantly reached out and felt them. She shrugged and continued rolling the gum she had in her mouth. This habit secretly repelled her and the bubbles forced into the gum by constant chewing hurt inside her chest and made her burp, but she sternly repressed her weakness for appearance’s sake.

“Your act just doesn’t go over,” said Simon, rising.

“What’s the matter, isn’t Madame Flamand having any?” asked Marie, who had a reporter’s nose despite her affectations. Simon’s jawbones twitched. He could think of no reply that was vicious enough because what he wanted to do was blow a breath on Marie and have her calcify on the spot. He often wanted to do this to people and as so far he had not found out how to do so, he contented himself with dipping his pen in his own gall.

Mark, the father of Rose Flamand, pleased Simon. His leonine head whose shaggy locks were still thick, his straight, square features and his air (common to so many painters) of the workman, soothed this nervous man Simon. Latham however was only a shell now. He gave his daughter intent, ponderous looks that were dumb as an animal’s and it was hard to tell whether the tearful brightness of his eyes came from sorrow or premature old age. He spoke slowly in his French that had never lost its accent and, although his every word gave the impression of sense, even of nobility, he said nothing.

Nonetheless, in Simon’s eyes, Mark lent a certain stability to Rose. It was as if she had been wandering frameless until then. The presence of her father placed her, and even her clothes which Simon had so detested took on elegance. She was wearing tonight a pleated dress of silk whose boyish collar set off the dark, round, neat head. Other women by comparison now seemed diminished by fussiness, by cheaply won maturity. Yet Simon had suspected this all along about Rose. It was why she had made him angry and, partly, why he said sly things about her to Pierre. Actually Simon looked down on Pierre. He used him and people like him to make money if possible, but he did not respect him and in insulting Rose was only showing his disrespect for a man who was too stupid to know his wife’s quality. As for Pierre’s honest heart, his tenderness that was almost powerful, Simon hated those traits which gave him a sense of his own lack. He himself could not afford them despite all his talent, all his perception and brains.

At supper with Mark Latham and his daughter, Simon rested a little. Mark drew from him his venom, or rather, made its fabrication unnecessary. Mark did not know reflection and conclusion as Simon knew them. He had instinctively felt and had put his feeling on canvas in a harmonious way that was full of strength and meaning. Sarcasm, even satire, that crutch of the weak and the oppressed, was foreign to him. If a thing was brutal, ugly or ridiculous he put it down in that essence and drew no conclusions. The work spoke. He let it and was himself silent.

“Are you staying here with Rose?” asked Simon.

“No,” said Mark with a still youthful smile, “I’m a dated Montparnassian and faithful to my old haunts. I’m staying up on the Boulevard Raspail.”

“Well, why not come out and have a brandy with me? And Rose too of course,” said Simon. “Besides, she must profit by her grass-widowhood, must she not, Maître?”

Mark, still smiling, turned his dumb, bright eyes on his child. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I see she must. Have fun, my dear. Have a little fun. The rest comes soon enough.” He got heavily to his feet; a burly, workmanlike figure and yet a shell for all that. “I’m tired,” he said. “It’s exhausting to arrange an exhibit and that’s what I’m doing in town. I don’t know why, either. Any fool can buy a gallery these days, but I suppose it’s habit.”

It was significant that neither Rose, Simon nor Mark himself thought of the possibilities of Jouvence. Mark could have had his photograph there or that of one of his works. It would have been publicity, the desire of the age. But they did not think about it. Latham in any case had no desire other than that of returning to his hotel where, once asleep, he could be happy. They walked with him to the crossroads of Saint-Germain des Prés where he took a taxi. The evening was warm and a light still lingered in the sky. They watched the taxi lurching around the corner and disappearing unevenly in the haze of its exhaust. Then, with a look at the crowded café tables, they turned into the nearest bar.

“What would you be doing, Simon, if you weren’t being polite to me?” asked Rose when they were seated. “Would you be ‘living,’ as you put it?”

“I am living now,” said Simon, looking at himself in the mirror doors of the cloakroom. His bitter mouth moved uncertainly in its shadowy place like a hungry animal which fear chains to its lair. But his feverish eyes pleased him. He looked at their points of light as sharp as needles. Then, in the mirror, he caught Rose’s glance violet with unlived dreams. “Let’s have another drink to cheer us up,” he said. He rapped on the table with the back of his hand so as to make his signet ring resound. At this gesture his sharp looks took on an aristocratic severity which put him in another light.

As they drank, the bar began to fill and several people came over to greet him. The men shook hands, but the girls kissed him, their hair falling across his face. Rose was silent and perhaps these wild-haired young girls made her shy. They seemed to live more like boys than like girls, drifting into the bar alone and, if they saw no acquaintance free, drifting out again. Although carelessly, even offensively dressed in greasy pants and shirts they had a certain charm. Some of them were beautiful. The ungrateful age—that is, mid-teens—had skipped them. It was as though debauchery had said, “Pass on. I am here already.” And because they were so young, debauchery had made them beautiful, had rounded and softened their cheeks and their breasts which would have been hard as apples, had made their eyes heavy so that a glance full of premature knowledge was imprisoned in their lids. And in their walk there was the displacement, the loosened muscles of women long accustomed to men.

Simon, examining his companion, wondered what she had been like at that age; a prim child doubtless, who looked at the world without seeing it and whose dolls were still neatly arranged around the bed. A pang went through him, rising from some unused space inside his breast. What was there about Rose, he wondered, that could give him this pang? It made him resent her and he could not quite decide if he had felt it before.

“What do all those girls do?” she asked him.

Simon shrugged. “They come here, as you see. If they are lucky someone buys them a drink. If they are luckier still, someone with a bathtub asks them home to bed.” And he added, looking at Rose, “The sex doesn’t matter.” He was hoping almost fiercely that Rose would show some disgust or astonishment, but the straight, ivory mask of her face did not change nor her jewel eyes. She only blinked her lashes as people do to show polite attention when they have no comment to make. These lashes were so thick and black that in profile they had a life of their own. They were rather like overturned insects with black, shiny, innocent legs.

“Where are their families?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh, in the provinces or in some other country; and by the way, they will all tell you that they are actresses or singers or models. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes one of them blossoms into celebrity and leaves this quarter altogether.” To satisfy her curiosity he called one of them over. “Heidi, come here,” he commanded.

The girl was sitting at the bar, her legs mingled with those of the bar stool. She turned around, glanced at Simon and obeyed. Blond, with raggedly cut bangs over painted eyes and a pale little mouth, her small, exhausted face had barely emerged from childhood. No one had bothered to straighten her teeth. She slumped down beside Simon and held out a grimy hand to Rose.

“Sit up straight my girl and behave,” said Simon. “Madame Flamand is hardly impressed by bohemianism.” She made a face at him but did as he ordered. Her glance at Rose was brief and dispassionate. Such a woman was too respectable to bother about.

At this moment a little boy appeared in the open doorway of the bar. Standing alone with the night black behind him, he had a self-sufficient air. He might have been nine or ten years old and was dressed in shorts and a clean white shirt. His appearance, denoting a good mother at home, was made charming by his own fantasy; he had forked a bunch of cherries over each ear and their scarlet darkness made his eyes shine. He held three wooden bottles in his hand and now, smiling pleasantly, he advanced into the bar and started to juggle. The waiter tried to stop him.

“Hey, young man, you know that sort of thing’s not allowed.”

The child made no reply, but without stopping his act looked up smiling into the waiter’s face. Afterward he passed a plate around. Simon gave him twenty francs. He heard Rose ask in a low, eager voice:

“Will you take me to a bal musette?”

“Whatever for?” he demanded, genuinely surprised.