We’ll take you up on that invitation. Just as soon as the present crisis is over.”
M. Duplessis picked up his hat, bowed and nodded his way to the
door. “When will it ever be over?” Charpentier asked. “One can’t imagine.”
Angélique rustled up. “I saw you,” she said. “You were distinctly grinning, when you asked him about his wife. And you,” she slapped d’Anton lightly on the shoulder, “were turning quite blue trying not to laugh. What am I missing?”
“Only gossip, my dear.”
“Only gossip? What else is there in life?”
“It concerns Georges’s gypsy friend, M. How-to-get-on-in-Society.”
“What? Camille? You’re teasing me. You’re just saying this to test out my gullibility.” She looked around at her smirking customers. “Annette Duplessis?” she said. “Annette Duplessis?”
“Listen carefully then,” her husband said. “It’s complicated, it’s circumstantial, there’s no saying where it’s going to end. Some take season tickets to the Opera; others enjoy the novels of Mr. Fielding. Myself I enjoy a bit of home-grown entertainment, and I tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than life at the rue Condé these days. For the connoisseur of human folly …”
“Jesus-Maria! Get on with it,” Angélique said.
CHAPTER 2
Rue Condé: Thursday Afternoon
A nnette Duplessis was a woman of resource. The problem which now beset her she had handled elegantly for four years. This afternoon she was going to solve it. Since midday a chilly wind had blown up, draughts whistled through the apartment, finding out the keyholes and the cracks under the doors: fanning the nebulous banners of approaching crisis. Annette, thinking of her figure, took glass of cider vinegar.
When she had married Claude Duplessis, a long time ago, he had been several years her senior; by now he was old enough to be her father. Why had she married him anyway? She often asked herself that. She could only conclude that she had been serious-minded as a girl, and had grown steadily more inclined to frivolity as the years passed.
At the time they met, Claude was working and worrying his way to the top of the civil service: through the different degrees and shades and variants of clerkdom, from clerk menial to clerk-of-some-parts, from intermediary clerk to clerk of a higher type, to clerk most senior, clerk confidential, clerk extraordinary, clerk in excelsis , clerk-to-end-all-clerks. His intelligence was the quality she noticed chiefly, and his steady, concerned application to the nation’s business. His father had been a blacksmith, and—although he was prosperous, and since before his son’s birth had not personally been anywhere near a forge—Claude’s professional success was a matter for admiration.
When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection.
The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.
Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.
Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, “Claude, you are dull.” She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it
M. Duplessis picked up his hat, bowed and nodded his way to the
door. “When will it ever be over?” Charpentier asked. “One can’t imagine.”
Angélique rustled up. “I saw you,” she said. “You were distinctly grinning, when you asked him about his wife. And you,” she slapped d’Anton lightly on the shoulder, “were turning quite blue trying not to laugh. What am I missing?”
“Only gossip, my dear.”
“Only gossip? What else is there in life?”
“It concerns Georges’s gypsy friend, M. How-to-get-on-in-Society.”
“What? Camille? You’re teasing me. You’re just saying this to test out my gullibility.” She looked around at her smirking customers. “Annette Duplessis?” she said. “Annette Duplessis?”
“Listen carefully then,” her husband said. “It’s complicated, it’s circumstantial, there’s no saying where it’s going to end. Some take season tickets to the Opera; others enjoy the novels of Mr. Fielding. Myself I enjoy a bit of home-grown entertainment, and I tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than life at the rue Condé these days. For the connoisseur of human folly …”
“Jesus-Maria! Get on with it,” Angélique said.
CHAPTER 2
Rue Condé: Thursday Afternoon
A nnette Duplessis was a woman of resource. The problem which now beset her she had handled elegantly for four years. This afternoon she was going to solve it. Since midday a chilly wind had blown up, draughts whistled through the apartment, finding out the keyholes and the cracks under the doors: fanning the nebulous banners of approaching crisis. Annette, thinking of her figure, took glass of cider vinegar.
When she had married Claude Duplessis, a long time ago, he had been several years her senior; by now he was old enough to be her father. Why had she married him anyway? She often asked herself that. She could only conclude that she had been serious-minded as a girl, and had grown steadily more inclined to frivolity as the years passed.
At the time they met, Claude was working and worrying his way to the top of the civil service: through the different degrees and shades and variants of clerkdom, from clerk menial to clerk-of-some-parts, from intermediary clerk to clerk of a higher type, to clerk most senior, clerk confidential, clerk extraordinary, clerk in excelsis , clerk-to-end-all-clerks. His intelligence was the quality she noticed chiefly, and his steady, concerned application to the nation’s business. His father had been a blacksmith, and—although he was prosperous, and since before his son’s birth had not personally been anywhere near a forge—Claude’s professional success was a matter for admiration.
When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection.
The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.
Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.
Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, “Claude, you are dull.” She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it
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