favorite game: the game of If I Had. I already know how this peremptory young woman would behave if she had an automobile, if she had a yacht, if her husband were Minister of War, if she inherited ten million francs, if she were a great actress . . .
When she enters my home, it’s as though the wind were rising, and I squint as I do at the seashore. She arrives, out of breath, and looks around her, sighing each time, “You can say what you like, my dear, but Passy is the middle of nowhere!”
Even if she asks me to, I won’t say anything about what I want . . . but I let her spout off anything that comes into her head.
Since the Ballets Russes, my friend Valentine has been stiffly wearing fashions that the softest Oriental grace would barely excuse. She perfumes herself with jasmine and rose, swears by Teheran and Isfahan, and—wrapped in a Byzantine dress set off with a Marie Antoinette fichu, with a Cossack bonnet on her head and American shoes sharpened into sabots on her feet—is quick to exclaim: “How can anyone not be Persian!”
She is earnest, fickle, and spirited. Once in the door, she showers me with streams of words, endless strings of contradictory axioms. I am dear to her because I don’t put up a struggle, and it pleases her to think I’m timid when I’m only flabbergasted. She talks while I read or write . . . Today, the warm and rainy autumn afternoon brings her to me very well behaved and stiff—she is playing the part of the bourgeoise and is despotically raising the children she doesn’t have.
“If I had a daughter . . . Oh, my dear, I’d show people what I think of modern education and this mania for sports, and these Americanized young girls! It all makes for some very sorry wives, I can tell you, and absolutely pitiful mothers! What are you looking at in the garden?”
“Nothing . . .”
Nothing . . . I am silently asking the russet trees and the softened earth where my friend Valentine could have gotten her facts about modern education. I am not looking at anything, except my neighbors’ narrow garden and their house, a brick and wooden chalet forgotten among the last gardens left in Passy.
“A return to family life, my dear, it’s the only way! And family life like our grandmothers understood it! They didn’t worry about baccalaureates for girls back then, and nobody was any the worse for it; on the contrary!”
I look up for a moment at my houri in the green caftan, searching in vain for the morbid trace of a poorly healed baccalaureate.
“Yes, you can be sure if I had a daughter, I’d make her a little provincial girl, healthy and quiet, the old-fashioned way. A little piano, not too much reading, but lots of sewing! She would know how to mend, embroider, and take care of the linen. My dear, I can see her as if she were right here—my daughter! Her smooth hair, with a flat collar . . . I swear to you, I can see her!”
I can see her, too. She has just sat down, as she does every afternoon, in the house next door, near the window: she is little more than a child, with sleek hair and a pale complexion, who lowers her eyes over some embroidery . . .
“I would dress her in those nice little fabrics, you know, with a somewhat subdued background and silly little patterns. Not to mention what a great hit she would be in them! And every day, every day, instead of classes at the Sorbonne or fashionable lectures, she would sit down by a window, or near a lamp—I have a little oil lamp, it’s just the thing, made of tinted porcelain, it’s gorgeous!—she would sit down with her embroidery or her crocheting. A young lady who plies her needle isn’t looking for trouble, believe me!”
What is she thinking of, this diligent child, of whom, at this moment, all I can see is her smooth dark hair, tied at the back with a black ribbon? Her hand rises and falls, pulling on a long silk thread, and flutters like a bird on the end of a string . . .
In the
When she enters my home, it’s as though the wind were rising, and I squint as I do at the seashore. She arrives, out of breath, and looks around her, sighing each time, “You can say what you like, my dear, but Passy is the middle of nowhere!”
Even if she asks me to, I won’t say anything about what I want . . . but I let her spout off anything that comes into her head.
Since the Ballets Russes, my friend Valentine has been stiffly wearing fashions that the softest Oriental grace would barely excuse. She perfumes herself with jasmine and rose, swears by Teheran and Isfahan, and—wrapped in a Byzantine dress set off with a Marie Antoinette fichu, with a Cossack bonnet on her head and American shoes sharpened into sabots on her feet—is quick to exclaim: “How can anyone not be Persian!”
She is earnest, fickle, and spirited. Once in the door, she showers me with streams of words, endless strings of contradictory axioms. I am dear to her because I don’t put up a struggle, and it pleases her to think I’m timid when I’m only flabbergasted. She talks while I read or write . . . Today, the warm and rainy autumn afternoon brings her to me very well behaved and stiff—she is playing the part of the bourgeoise and is despotically raising the children she doesn’t have.
“If I had a daughter . . . Oh, my dear, I’d show people what I think of modern education and this mania for sports, and these Americanized young girls! It all makes for some very sorry wives, I can tell you, and absolutely pitiful mothers! What are you looking at in the garden?”
“Nothing . . .”
Nothing . . . I am silently asking the russet trees and the softened earth where my friend Valentine could have gotten her facts about modern education. I am not looking at anything, except my neighbors’ narrow garden and their house, a brick and wooden chalet forgotten among the last gardens left in Passy.
“A return to family life, my dear, it’s the only way! And family life like our grandmothers understood it! They didn’t worry about baccalaureates for girls back then, and nobody was any the worse for it; on the contrary!”
I look up for a moment at my houri in the green caftan, searching in vain for the morbid trace of a poorly healed baccalaureate.
“Yes, you can be sure if I had a daughter, I’d make her a little provincial girl, healthy and quiet, the old-fashioned way. A little piano, not too much reading, but lots of sewing! She would know how to mend, embroider, and take care of the linen. My dear, I can see her as if she were right here—my daughter! Her smooth hair, with a flat collar . . . I swear to you, I can see her!”
I can see her, too. She has just sat down, as she does every afternoon, in the house next door, near the window: she is little more than a child, with sleek hair and a pale complexion, who lowers her eyes over some embroidery . . .
“I would dress her in those nice little fabrics, you know, with a somewhat subdued background and silly little patterns. Not to mention what a great hit she would be in them! And every day, every day, instead of classes at the Sorbonne or fashionable lectures, she would sit down by a window, or near a lamp—I have a little oil lamp, it’s just the thing, made of tinted porcelain, it’s gorgeous!—she would sit down with her embroidery or her crocheting. A young lady who plies her needle isn’t looking for trouble, believe me!”
What is she thinking of, this diligent child, of whom, at this moment, all I can see is her smooth dark hair, tied at the back with a black ribbon? Her hand rises and falls, pulling on a long silk thread, and flutters like a bird on the end of a string . . .
In the
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