Copyright

This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2007 by

Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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Translation copyright © 1962 by St Martin’s Press, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 2007 Judith Thurman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-778-8

TO SANDI

INTRODUCTION

Many, perhaps most, fans of Luis Buñuel have no idea that his consummately stylish and enigmatic Belle de Jour (1967)—the portrait of a society woman slumming in a brothel—was adapted from a controversial novel by Joseph Kessel, a Russian Jew born in Argentina who wrote in French, that was first published in 1928. Kessel has himself suffered the fate (near-oblivion outside France) of the book that he called the “dearest” of his creations, and the one “in which I think I’ve best caught the accent of life.” But he was among the most widely read French authors of his time, a famously prolific and charismatic storyteller, biographer, travel-writer, reporter, editor, aviator, Resistance fighter, member of the Academie Francaise, and—more to the point, perhaps—a reckless and virile hedonist. “I knew the risk I ran,” Kessel writes in his preface to Belle de Jour—the risk of outrage at the novel’s blasphemous (and, if one is honest, enduringly titillating) premise: that Séverine, a frigid beauty otherwise blissfully married to a handsome surgeon would court debasement in search of ecstasy by freelancing as a whore.

There is not an obscene word or a graphic sex scene in Kessel’s novel, but its subject almost guaranteed that there would be no American edition for decades, and the first English translation of Belle de Jour wasn’t published until 1962. If it scandalized Jazz Age Parisians, what hope did it have of seeing the light in a country that would not only close its borders to Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but that would—in 1930—stop Voltaire’s Candide at customs, en route to the Harvard library? Buñuel and his screenwriter, Jean Claude Carriere, had the advantage of a liberal, even revolutionary, climate and they attribute fantasies to Séverine that Kessel (who treats her with a gallantry that Bunuel found sentimental) leaves to the imagination. “Séverine’s daydreams are Buñuel’s contribution to the plot-line,” Michael Wood writes in his monograph on Belle de Jour. “Indeed, Bunuel said that the idea of the two levels of reality, where in Kessel there was only one, was what provoked him to film the story in the first place … This was a way of distancing himself from his real debt, perhaps, since the novel already contains a good deal of what he turned out to need. It is shrewd and intelligent throughout, warmly sympathetic to its troubled heroine, only a touch too dedicated, in the end, to the idea of sexuality as a horrible fate.”

If the sadomasochism of Buñuel’s faintly parodic dream sequences is explicit, their meaning isn’t. (And what the devil does Séverine’s brutish Chinese client have in that ominously humming box? According to Wood, the question drove Bunuel crazy—it was all people asked him, he said—and his standard answer was: “How should I know?”) Fifty years earlier, however, Kessel felt obliged both to explain himself and to defend Séverine’s “sick heart.” He did so to counter the charges of “pointless licentiousness, even of pornography” that greeted Belle de Jour when it was serialized in Gringoire.¹ Unlike the old Buñuel, who revels with a certain cool, ironic glee in the perversity of bourgeois society, not to say of human nature, the young Kessel (they were born two years apart, the former in 1900, the latter in 1898) was a romantic. His goal, he writes, was to dramatize a common, if tragic, marital predicament: the divorce between “a body and soul,” and between “a true, tender, and immense love, and the implacable demands of the senses.” In that respect, his friend Colette took a page, and perhaps more than one, from Belle de Jour when she wrote The Pure and The Impure (first published as Ces Plaisirs … in 1931).² “But what is the heart, madame,” asks Charlotte, an orgiast with ladylike manners, when Colette meets her in an opium den. “It’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it’s not very particular. But the body … Ha! That’s something else again.”

In reframing the novel as a high-minded case study, Kessel underplays Séverine’s courage—and perhaps his own. Colette, I suspect, read Belle de Jour more perspicaciously than Kessel read himself, because his real originality (and the novel’s enduring interest) is not vested in Séverine’s noble love for her perfect husband; not in the “aberrant” nature (Kessel’s adjective) of the sex that she volunteers for with the brothel’s roughest trade; not in her infatuation with the seductively thuggish and volatile Marcel; nor the inevitable collision of her double lives. It’s a function of Kessel’s willingness to challenge certain fundamental pieties, taboos, and hypocrisies about erotic life—and in particular, the erotic life of women.

Though Kessel was a rebel and bohemian, he was, like many heretics, a product of the religion he was trying to overthrow, and what he calls a divorce between “body and soul” is, in fact, a split that exists in most civilized people—between a social and a sexual self. Literature, to a large degree, is a chronicle of the lengths that tormented men and women go to in their effort to escape, punish, rationalize, or resolve that conflict. (And it’s worth noting that in his private life, Kessel was more successful than most. He managed to content a harem of mistresses who all, apparently, coexisted in relative peace and adored him.)

Séverine and Pierre may have an idyllic marriage—a union, in other words, with a high index of compatibility—but sex thrives on the thrill of otherness. The social self seeks a consort, the sexual self an accomplice—and how often do they coincide in the same partner? French fiction has always been obsessed with that conundrum, and readers of the late 1920s were fairly blasé about dangerous liaisons and dramas of adultery, even when the heroine’s other “man” was a woman. So what nerve did Kessel shock, and Buñuel after him, in Belle de Jour, and why is it still raw?

To discover the answer, read the book, though before you do, a word of caution. Art and pornography may both draw the curtains on a stirring, troubling, and forbidden scene, but in a work of art, there’s no voyeurism with impunity.

—JUDITH THURMAN

¹ Gringoire, which published the Belle de Jour serial in 1927, was a journal of culture and politics with a mass circulation, some six hundred and fifty-thousand readers. It was funded by a rich Corsican, Horace de Carbuccia, and Kessel, one of its co-founders and the literary editor, recruited a distinguished roster of contributors. By the mid-thirties, however, Carbuccia had become an apologist for Hitler, and Kessel departed. (He later fled France to serve as de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp in London). Gringoire’s readers apparently made no objection to the obscenity of rabidly antisemitic caricatures and pro-Nazi propaganda, but obscenity, of course, is subject to “community standards.” Nouvelle Revue Francais, an irreproachable French company, publlished Belle de Jour in book form a year later.

² Kessel bought it for serialization in Gringoire, though after three installments, Carbuccia abruptly suspended publication, without notifying Colette. He simply cut off the text in mid-sentence with the word “Fin.”

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I don’t much like prefaces that explain books and I’d especially dislike seeming to use one to make excuses for myself. None of my books is dearer to me than this one, in which I think I’ve best caught the accent of life. Yet it seems such language may be wasted, for I’m well aware that there is a misunderstanding about the book, which I’d very much like to clear up.

When Belle de Jour was first serialized in Gringoire the readers of that journal reacted with a certain liveliness. Some accused me of pointless licentiousness, even of pornography. To them there is no reply possible. If my book failed to convince, then so much the worse for them or me, I don’t know which; in any case there’s nothing I can do about it. To me, it seems impossible to lay bare the drama of spirit and flesh without speaking frankly of both. I don’t believe I’ve gone beyond the limits permitted a writer who has never used lust as bait for his readers.

From the moment I chose to write on this subject I knew the risks I ran. But when the novel was finished, I couldn’t believe anyone might mistake my intentions; otherwise, Belle de Jour would never have appeared.

One must despise false modesty as one scorns poor taste: prudish complaints don’t bother me, intellectual attacks do. It was to disarm them that I decided to do something I hadn’t thought of before, namely, write a preface.

“What an exceptional case!” people commented, and several doctors wrote me that they’d run across Séverines in their practice. It became clear that according to such people Belle de Jour was a successful piece of pathological observation. Now that is precisely what I didn’t mean to convey. Painting the portrait of an ogress wouldn’t interest me, even if I could do it perfectly. What I tried to do in Belle de Jour was show the desperate divorce that can exist between body and soul; between a true, tender, immense love and the implacable demands of the senses. With a few rare exceptions, every man and woman who has loved over a period of time has been burdened by his conflict. It is recognized or not, it tears one apart or it sleeps; but it’s there. A banal conflict described how often! I think, though, that the existence of an extraordinary situation can force this conflict to such a degree of intensity as to allow the instincts to be shown in the fullness of their eternal greatness. Thus, I constructed my story deliberately, not for any meretricious appeal, but as the sole means of touching surely and sharply the depths of every human soul hiding this latent tragedy. I chose my subject as one examines a sick heart: in order better to know how a healthy one functions; or as one studies mental illness, in order to understand how the mind operates.

The subject of Belle de Jour is not Séverine’s sensual aberration; it is her love for Pierre independent of that aberration, and it is the tragedy of that love.

Shall I be the only one to pity Séverine, and to love her?

PROLOGUE

To reach her mother’s room from her own, Séverine who was eight had to go down a long hallway. She disliked the trip, and invariably ran all the way. But one morning Séverine was brought up short halfway down the corridor. A door leading to the bathroom had just opened. A plumber appeared: short, squat. From under sparse reddish lashes his eyes contemplated the girl. Bold as she was, Séverine was scared, took a step back.

Her movement decided him. He glanced around sharply and grabbed Séverine with both hands. An odor of gas, of animal strength closed against her. Two ill-shaven lips burned her neck. She fought back.

The workman laughed silently, sensually. Under her frock his hands slipped over the soft flesh. Suddenly Séverine stopped struggling. She was stiff, white. The man put her on the floor and left noiselessly.

Séverine’s governess found her lying in the hallway. She thought the girl had slipped. So did Séverine.

I

Pierre Sérizy was checking the harness. Séverine had just put on her skis.

“Ready?”

She had on a man’s thick blue sweater but her body was so firm, so slim, that her impatient figure seemed not at all burdened.

“Can’t be too careful with you in tow,” Pierre called back.

“Darling, there’s absolutely no risk. The snow’s so clean it’ll be a pleasure to fall. Come on, let’s go.”

Pierre straightened and swung lightly into the saddle. The horse didn’t move, didn’t so much as quiver. A powerful, placid animal with heavy flanks, it was used to pulling rather than being ridden. Séverine held tight to the grips on the long leashes attached to the harness, spread her feet a little. She was trying the sport for the first time, and concentration contracted her features a little.

Because of this, her facial defects, which one usually didn’t notice, stood out: chin rather too square, cheekbones jutting. But Pierre loved absolute determination in Séverine’s face; to be able to watch it a moment longer, he pretended to be adjusting his stirrups.

“Okay,” he called out, finally.

The guide-reins Séverine was holding drew tight. She felt herself slowly sliding forward.

At first she could think only of keeping her balance and not making a fool of herself. To reach open ground they had to go all the way along the one street of the little Swiss village. At this time of day everyone was out. Smiling, Pierre greeted sporting friends, bar acquaintances, some girls in ski-pants, others stretched out on brilliantly painted sleds. Séverine saw no one, aware only of indications that they were getting into the country: now passing the church, with its little square and without any mystery … the skating rink … the stream, dark against white banks … the last hotel, facing the fields.

Once beyond the hotel, Séverine breathed easier. No one would see her fall if she stumbled now. No one but Pierre … for a moment, the young woman felt her love for him like a soft, living creature in her breast. She smiled at her husband’s broad shoulders, his tanned neck. Pierre had been born under the sign of harmony and strength; everything he did was natural, right, assured.

“Pierre!” she called.

He turned. The sun swept across his face, making his gray eyes squint.

“It’s marvelous,” she said.

The snow-covered valley stretched ahead in curves so gentle they seemed artificial. High up, a scattering of clouds drifted on the summits, soft and milky fleece. On the slopes, skiers moved with the winged, unconscious grace of birds.

“It’s marvelous.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Pierre answered. He urged the horse on, and it broke into a trot.

“Here we go,” she thought.

The delicious anxiety she’d felt so far gradually became confidence. She was doing pretty well. These elongated skis carried her by themselves. All she had to do was yield to their movements. Her muscles began to relax. She started to gain control. They met heavy sleds piled with logs; on them, their legs dangling, sat square-set men with sunburnt faces. Séverine smiled at them.

“Fine, fine,” Pierre called out to her from time to time.

Then it seemed to Séverine that this happy loving voice came from inside herself. And when he called “Watch it!” hadn’t some reflex already informed her that the pleasure was about to mount? The noble cadence of the horse’s gallop hammered at the roadway; the rhythm took possession of her. The speed helped her balance, she stopped thinking about it and surrendered herself to a rising primitive joy. Nothing in the world existed but the pulsations of her body, ruled by the rhythm of their speed. She was no longer being drawn along, she herself controlled this impetuous race; she ruled, and was ruled by it.

And this whiteness shining all around … the iced wind, pure and fluid as spring water, as youth itself.…

“Faster!” she cried. “Faster!”

But there was no need to urge Pierre on; nor did the horse need any prompting. The three of them made one happy animal group.

Leaving the road, they made a sudden swing. Séverine couldn’t make it—dropping the guide-reins, she ended up half-buried in a snow-drift, so soft and fresh that, ignoring an icy trickle down her back, she felt a new joy. Before Pierre could come to help she was standing up, sparkling. They set off again. When they’d reached a little inn, Pierre pulled up.

“We can’t go any further,” he said. “Let’s take a break.”

They were early; the main room was empty. Pierre looked around the room.

“How about sitting outside?” he suggested. “The sun’s warm enough.”

When their table had been set in front, Séverine said, “I knew right away you didn’t like this place. Why don’t you? It’s so clean.”

“Too clean. It’s been scrubbed and scrubbed till nothing is left. In France even the lowest dive has its own character: you can breathe in a whole district. Don’t you see how open everything is here? The houses, the people: nothing mysterious, no life.”

Séverine laughed. “How nice you are to me—every day you tell me you love me for my clarity.”

“Right, but you’re my vice,” Pierre replied; and brushed her hair with his lips.

The waitress gave them country bread, wrinkled cheese, and beer. It disappeared as Pierre and Séverine ate hungrily. Every now and then they glanced down at the narrow gorge winding below. The firs bore flimsy spindles of snow on each branch, which sun and sky turned into ash-blue haloes.

A bird perched nearby. It had a startlingly yellow stomach and gray wings streaked with black.

“What a splended vest,” Séverine cried.

“It’s a tit mouse, a male. The females are duller-looking.”

“Like us, I guess.”

“I don’t see.…”

“Oh, darling, you know perfectly well you’re the handsome one. I love you so much when you scowl like that!”

Pierre had turned his head and Séverine could see only his profile, made childish by irritation. Of all the moods of his bold face, this was the one that most touched her.

“I want to kiss you,” she said.

But Pierre had scrunched up a snowball.

“I’ve a good mind to chuck this at you.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a handful of powdery snow hit him in the face. He replied in kind and for a few moments they were embroiled in a fierce battle. The old lady who kept the inn appeared in the doorway at the sound of their overturned chairs; the snow-fight came to a somewhat embarrassed halt. But the old woman gave them a motherly smile; and it was with a similar smile that Séverine brushed the snow off Pierre’s hair as he remounted.

This time they galloped all the way, even through the village, shouting warnings at the top of their lungs from sheer happiness.

Séverine and Pierre occupied adjoining rooms in their hotel. As soon as they got back, Séverine said, “Go and change, Pierre. And rub down well. It’s chilly out.”

Since she was shivering a little, Pierre offered to help her undress.

“No, no,” she cried. “Go and do as I say.”

Pierre’s hurt look told her she’d put something too lively into her refusal, something beyond mere solicitude.

“After two years of marriage!” His eyes said. Séverine felt her cheeks burning.

“Hurry,” she said nervously. “Or we’ll both catch cold.”

As he opened the door she went and pressed against him for a moment. “That was a beautiful drive, darling. You make life so full.”

When Pierre came back he found his wife wearing a black dress which revealed her fine firm body. For several seconds neither of them moved. They stood still, enjoying the sight of each other. Then he went and kissed her neck where it softly joined her shoulder. Séverine stroked his forehead. There was something about this sisterly gesture that always intimidated Pierre. He quickly raised his head to break away and said, “Come on, let’s go down. We’re late already.”

Renée Févret was waiting for them in the Viennese pastry shop. This woman, elegant, vivacious, always on the go and bursting with talk, had married a friend of Pierre’s, like him, a surgeon. She’d developed a deep, even extravagant affection for Séverine, which had eventually broken through that young woman’s reserve and forced her into intimacy.

When she spotted the Sérizys coming in Renée waved at them and cried across the room, “Here, I’m over here. It’s no fun being stuck here with all these English men and Germans and Yugoslavs. They make me feel like a foreigner!”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Pierre said. “Our horse took us rather too far.”

“I saw you coming back. You two really make a lovely couple. And Séverine looked so charming in blue.… What do you want to drink? Martini? Champagne cocktail? Oh, here comes Husson. He’ll make up our minds.”

Séverine frowned slightly.

“Don’t ask him over here,” she murmured.

Renée answered—too quickly (at least in Séverine’s estimation): “No good, darling. I’ve already caught his eye.”

Henri Husson slid between the tables with nonchalant agility. He kissed Renée’s hand and then Séverine’s—at length. Séverine found the touch of his lips deeply disagreeable. As Husson straightened she stared him full in his emaciated face; he met the attack without a change of expression.

“I’ve been skating,” he informed them.

“Did you let everyone admire you?” asked Renée.

“No. I could only manage to do a few figures, there was such a mob. I preferred to watch the others. Pleasant enough when they’re good skaters. Makes me think of an angelic algebra.”

His voice contrasted sharply with the worn immobility of his features. It was restless, richly inflected and endowed with a captivating musical quality. And he employed it discreetly, as though he weren’t aware of its power. Pierre, who seemed to enjoy listening to him, inquired: “Plenty of pretty girls, I suppose?”

“Possibly half a dozen. Not too bad. But where do they get their clothes? You know,” he said, turning to Séverine, “Take that big Danish girl, the one who’s staying at your hotel … Well, she was wearing a pleated olive jersey with a pink and cream scarf.”

“How awful!” screamed Renée.

His eyes still on Séverine, Husson continued: “Besides, a girl with breasts and hips like that ought to go naked.”

“You’re not asking much,” Pierre laughed. “Look at you.…”

He touched the heavy coat Husson kept on despite the heat, so that only his fine, thin, chilly hands were exposed.

“Clothes lend sensuality to women,” Husson answered. “It seems obscene to me to clothe a chaste woman.”

Séverine had turned her head aside, but she felt his tenacious eyes on her. It wasn’t so much what he said, it was his determination to address his words to her that made Séverine so uncomfortable.

“In other words, the angels of our skating-rink bore you?” Renée remarked.

“I didn’t say that. Bad taste gets on my nerves, and that I always find stimulating.”

“Oh, so to please you we have to dress badly!” Renée spoke gaily and yet, Séverine thought, she was more restrained than usual.

“No, no, no,” interrupted Pierre. “I get the idea. It’s just that some combinations of colors are exciting. They make you think of whores—right Husson?”

“These men are really very complex, aren’t they?” Renée said to Séverine.

“Hear that, Pierre?”

He laughed his virile, tender laugh. “I’m only trying to understand things,” he answered. “With a little alcohol, it’s easy.”

“Do you realize,” Husson broke in suddenly, “that you two are still taken for honeymooners? After a couple of years of married life, that’s not bad.”

“But a little ridiculous, I suppose,” said Séverine; her manner was now strangely aggressive.

“Why? I’ve just said that sights that unnerve me aren’t necessarily unpleasant.”

Pierre was frightened by the violence that contracted his wife’s face.

“Tell me, Husson,” he interrupted, “you in shape for the race tomorrow? We absolutely have to beat this Oxford team.”

They started talking about bobsleighs and rival teams. When the subject was exhausted Husson asked the Sérizys to have dinner with him that evening.

“Sorry,” Séverine replied, “we’ve already got a date.”

In the street, Pierre said: “So you dislike Husson so much you’ll tell a lie to avoid him. Why? He’s a good sport, he’s cultivated, and he isn’t malicious.”

“I don’t now what it is, but I find him just insufferable. That voice of his … it always seems to be looking for something inside you you’d rather not … And then those eyes … have you noticed how they never move? That icy air … in any case, we’ve only really known the man a couple of weeks.” She paused. “Don’t tell me we’ve got to see him back in Paris? You don’t … ah, you’ve already invited him. Oh my poor Pierre, you’re really incorrigible. You’re so trusting, you make friends so easily. You needn’t make excuses; actually, it’s one of your charms. I’m not blaming you, my darling. Besides, Paris isn’t like this place. I’ll be able to avoid him there.”

“Renée will doubtless avoid him less.”

“Do you think …”

“I don’t think anything, but she shuts up when Husson’s there. That’s a sure sign. By the way where are we going to eat tonight? We can’t be caught.”

“At the hotel.”

“Baccarat afterwards?”

“No, darling. You know it’s not that I care about how much money you’d lose; but you say yourself it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. And you have your race tomorrow. I want you to win.”

“All right, sweetheart.”

He added, as if despite himself, “I never thought it would be nice to take orders.”

Because Séverine was watching him with the loving, slightly troubled eyes of a young girl.

That evening they went to the theater. A London company was giving Hamlet. A famous young Jewish actor was playing the Prince of Elsinore.

Though she had been schooled in England, Séverine didn’t care much for Shakespeare. Nevertheless, on the sleigh-ride back, under moon and snow, she respected Pierre’s silence. She sensed that the play had put him in a mood of nobility and sadness; and, though she didn’t share it, she loved the expression it lent to his handsome face.

“Movelski’s a real genius,” he murmured. “It’s almost frightening. He even manages to put sensual desire into madness and death. And there’s no more infectious form of art than that of the flesh, is there?”

She was slow to answer, and he said thoughtfully, “True, you wouldn’t really know.…”

II

During their last days in Switzerland Séverine felt feverish and depressed. They had scarcely reached Paris when she came down with pneumonia.

It was a severe case. For an entire week, at the mercy of surgical cupping-glasses, sucked at by leeches, she was on the verge of death. When she was conscious, she saw her mother’s bony silhouette at her bedside and heard some vaguely reassuring, but unrecognizable, step in her room. Then she would plunge back into the hot deaf stupor of a greenhouse plant.

One morning, as dawn crept up to her bed like a hesitant animal, she awoke from this vegetable condition. Her back hurt frightfully but she could breathe without much difficulty. A shape was sitting at her bedside. It must be Pierre, she thought. The name, which came back to her automatically, recalled only a vague feeling of security. Her husband’s hand touched her forehead, stroking it softly; Séverine turned her head aside. Pierre thought she had moved unconsciously —but Séverine wanted to avoid his touch. She felt so whole, so momentarily self-sufficient, that she wished to forget everything outside herself.

A desire for isolation, an exclusive egoism, left her only gradually. She spent hours watching her wasted wrists with their soft blue veins, looking at her nails, still deathly pale. When Pierre spoke to her she didn’t answer. How small her husband’s love seemed, compared to what she felt for her own body. Her body was so precious to her, so great and abundant! Séverine even imagined she could feel the gentle stream of blood nourishing it. Daily, with a profound sensuality, she measured the revival of her strength.

At times her face closed as if over some secret; she seemed to follow odd images. And when Pierre talked to her then she looked at him with a mixture of impatience, weakness and confusion.

But when she thought she discovered in her husband’s expression a wave of desire, she felt a wave of revulsion and weariness pass through her.

Pierre loved the look that appeared on Séverine’s face at those moments. The sickness seemed to have stripped her face, reducing it to a state of tender adolescence. It seemed to express nothing but youth and chastity.

Séverine’s strength returned quickly, but without giving her much joy. As the fever left her, so did her indefinable voluptuousness. She recovered dispossessed. She walked from room to room, as if to learn how to live again.

Séverine was resonsible for everything in the apartment except Pierre’s desk. Until her illness she had enjoyed establishing order, because by doing so she created comfort and space and left her own stamp on things. Now, though she still felt a certain pride in this, it was abstract and colorless. Her whole life appeared before her in the same monotone—well-to-do, measured, assured. Parents seen always through a shield of governesses, years at that English school where she’d been taught fair-play and discipline … Oh well, now she had Pierre; he was, in fact, all she had in the world … Thinking of his beloved face, Séverine smiled softly and pushed her reveries no further. But something within her, something dim, tenacious and demanding, was silently waiting to evade Pierre’s image and to reach beyond its intangible shape to an unknown horizon. That something troubled her, though she refused to acknowledge its existence.

“I’ll feel better once I’ve played a few sets of tennis,” she told herself, as if answering some vague reproach. Pierre thought the same, when he caught sight of her, pensive, or asleep.

One day in this queer convalescence was vivid for Séverine—the day when she received flowers from Husson for the first time. She was startled when she read the card. She’d forgotten the man’s existence, and now here she was with this feeling of having been expecting him to come into her life again. She thought of him all day long with a discomfort that amounted to hostility. But such irritable tension suited her state of mind so well that it positively pleased her.

More gifts came.

“He knows perfectly well I can’t bear him,” she thought. “I’m not thanking him, I’ve forbidden Pierre to thank him. And he still goes on.…”

She pictured Husson’s motionless eyes, his cold lips; and she shuddered with a dull repulsion.

Renée Févret, meanwhile, visited daily. She would arrive in a rush, refuse to take off her hat, announce she could only stay a second, and remain for hours. Her chatter chained her there. Her frivolity dizzied Séverine but it did her good. It put her back in that easy world where all that mattered was make-up, clothes, love-affairs and divorces.… Still, it seemed to Séverine that there were moments when a bitter weariness ravaged her friend’s face, when her vivacity was merely mechanical.

One afternoon while they were together a card was brought in for Séverine. She twisted it in her fingers for a moment, then told Renée, “Henri Husson.”

There was a pause.

“You’re not going to receive him, are you?” Renée cried out suddenly.

Her tense sharpness contrasted so strongly with her ordinary tone that Séverine almost acquiesced automatically. Once over her surprise, however, she asked, “Why not”?

“I don’t know … I remember you didn’t like him … and then there’s still so much I have to tell you.”

If it hadn’t been for her friend’s peculiar attitude Séverine would probably have avoided seeing Husson; but Renée’s desire to prevent the meeting piqued Séverine’s curiosity, and her pride.

“Maybe I’ve changed my opinion of him,” she said. “And also … look at all these flowers he’s been sending me.”

“Ah … he sent you them, did he?”

Renée had risen to take flight but had barely put on her gloves when Séverine, moved by Renée’s agitation, said, “Darling, what’s wrong? You can speak freely to me. Surely you’re not jealous?”

“It’s not that. I should have explained right away, you’re so uncomplicated you’d have understood. No, I’m scared. He plays with me. I know this man well by now; he’s utterly perverse. He gets his fun out of weird psychological manipulations. He’s nicely managed to make me despise myself … only too easily. With you it’s the opposite: he wants to cultivate the loathing you feel for him. For him that would be just wonderful. Watch out, Séverine, this one’s dangerous.”

These words, more than any others, decided Séverine.

“You must stay and see him,” she said.

“No, really. I can’t.”

Left alone, Séverine got out of bed and had Husson shown in. He found her seated behind a table, and defended by a vase of irises that made it difficult to see her. He smiled. This steady smile, accentuated by a determined silence, broke Séverine’s poise. And she was even less at ease after Husson, sitting opposite her, shifted the flowers to one side.

“Sérizy’s not in?” he asked.

“Obviously not, or you’d have seen him.”

“Yes, I imagine he seldom leaves you alone when he’s at home. And—you miss him?”

“Very much.”

“I can understand that. As a matter of fact I myself enjoy seeing him very much. He’s handsome, happy, considerate, loyal: an invaluable companion, I’m sure.”

Séverine abruptly changed the subject. Each word of praise uttered by this man diminished and cloyed Pierre’s image.

“Thanks to a friend who comes to see me every day,” Séverine said, “I don’t get too bored.”

“Mme. Févret?”

“You saw her go out?”

“No. I can smell her perfume. It’s rather like her, a little whining.”

He gave a laugh which Séverine found odious.

“For a second there,” he said, “you were exactly as you used to be.”

“Have I changed so much?” she asked with a start. Instantly she regretted the irrational anxiety which, she felt sure, had shown through her question.

Husson said: “It seems to me you’ve lost something of your girlishness.”

“Thank you.”

“Usually you’re more honest with yourself.…”

Séverine waited for an explanation. It didn’t come. To show her irritation she rose and pretended to arrange the flowers beside her.

“Sitting up tires you,” Husson said. “You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me. Go lie down.”

“I assure you, I’m quite used.…”

“No, no, Sérizy would be angry with me. Lie down.”

He rose and pushed his chair aside so she could get by. Séverine sought for some neat, tart retort, the kind she could so easily have found before her illness; but nothing came. In order to keep the battle between them from becoming ridiculous, she went and lay down, highly annoyed and embarrassed.

“If you only knew how much better you look like that,” Husson remarked softly. “I’m sure you’ve often been told you were made for movement. Well, let me tell you that’s a superficial judgment. From the moment I first set eyes on you I’ve always thought of you lying down. And how right I was! Look how you’ve softened … what relaxed grace …”

While speaking, he moved his chair back a bit so that Séverine could no longer see him. Only his voice now acted on her, that voice of whose power he usually seemed unaware, but which he now handled like a lethal instrument. And this voice was directed not only at her hearing, but, in a secret and destructive way, at every cell in her body. Tensed to the breaking point, Séverine had no strength to stop him. Sapped by her illness, prisoner of those insinuating waves of language, she seemed to be plunged back into the limbo of her convalescence, into the strange voluptuousness that had bathed her then.

Suddenly two hands were on her shoulders, a hungry breath burnt her lips. For a brief fraction of a second she was amazed by the sharp pleasure that seized her; in a moment, this changed into absolute disgust. Without quite knowing how, she stood up. In a driven sensual whisper she heard herself saying, “No, you weren’t cut out for rape.”

They stared at each other for a long time. In those seconds there were no barriers between them. They discovered in each other’s eyes feelings, instincts, of which each had probably been unaware. In Husson’s eyes, Séverine saw an admiration that frightened her.

“You’re right,” he said finally. “You deserve much better than me.”

Such soft respect, reserved for those the gods have chosen as their victims!

When Husson had gone, Séverine felt neutral and colorless. She no longer felt any resentment or even repugnance toward him; and this didn’t surprise her. She knew that she would never yield to him, and that he’d never try anything with her again. Nevertheless, she thought of him as an accomplice.

Suddenly it occurred to her that she ought to tell Pierre. She was so used to telling him everything, and she had no desire to hide anything. Still, the idea of telling him filled her with a sort of anticipatory boredom. Pierre seemed such a stranger to the world she’d just been part of.

“Pierre … Pierre.…”

Séverine caught herself repeating his name, as if to charge it with reality. But it didn’t relieve her odd anesthesia. But as soon as she heard her husband’s step, she stopped worrying about how she was going to tell him. He’d notice after one look at her face that something unusual had happened, he’d ask her, she’d tell him … it was that unimportant.

But Pierre didn’t give her his usual look of searching adoration. He kissed her briefly, which, actually, brought Séverine to her senses more quickly than any number of urgent questions. She felt that a support she’d taken for granted had given way—and she stumbled. Then she caught sight of his face. Lifeless and drawn, it seemed no longer his at all. Though he was obviously trying to keep it from her, a haggard anguish appeared in his eyes.

“Darling, what’s wrong?”

He started, and took his chin in his hand as though to keep his jaw from quivering.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Something at work …”

He tried to smile but knew the attempt pitiful and gave up. Pierre never spoke to her about his work, desiring to spare her details of its pain. So Séverine thought it would be difficult to get him to unburden himself now. But his load was apparently too heavy to bear, for he continued.

“It was horrible. I never thought … there was no way of knowing … a happy little Italian.…”

When he didn’t go on Séverine asked in a low tone, “You mean, he died … during the operation?”

Pierre tried to answer, but his lips trembled too much. Every idea of estrangement or anger was suddenly swept out of Séverine’s soul. She could feel only an infinite tenderness toward her husband, a great maternal force that seemed to melt her heart. She took his head in her arms, murmuring softly her immediate response:

“Poor sweet, it wasn’t your fault. You mustn’t be sad about it. Oh, when you’re unhappy like this, then I realize that you’re my whole life.”

III

Séverine woke early. In spite of her short sleep, she felt fresh and lively, and her first thought was to get up. But she was stopped by a body which lay beside her, blocking her way. Pierre. For the first time since her illness they’d spent the night together. And how well she’d slept—no dreams, not a single confused night-mare.

Was it he who’d protected her? Had she freed herself by giving herself to him?

Still, she had been urged toward Pierre only by a desire to make him forget his unhappiness. Her own enjoyment, as usual, had been simply the pleasure of making him happy. When he’d taken her in his arms, she had wondered if those dark and delicious workings of convalescence would be resolved in some rapture she’d never known. But when his arms released her, Pierre saw his wife’s still virgin eyes. And if Séverine felt a faint brush of disappointment, she forgot it immediately when she saw his haggard features recovering their vigor and tenderness.

Now, in the early light, she was unable to distinguish his face clearly; but to reconstruct its noble lines all she needed was the mass of the head. Pierre was sleeping confidently, like a boy. Séverine was deeply moved. The two years they’d lived together passed through her mind like a rich and cherished flame. How easy Pierre had made them! Always considerate. And how humbly, too, this man, whose pride she knew, had worked to make her happy.

The silence pervaded everything, leaving room only for gratitude and concern.

Have I really been able to repay so much love? she asked herself. Have I tended his happiness well enough? He’s done so much for me and I’ve taken it all for granted, as my due.

Remorse felt sweet. For someone to be so sensitive, there was a kind of virtuous exaltation in recognizing faults she desired to put right. For Séverine knew perfectly well both what she owed Pierre and how much power she had over him. A day ago she’d never have believed that her voice, her arms, could have brought peace so quickly to such a despairing heart.

Now I know, thought Séverine. He depends on me like a child.

She remembered that Pierre sometimes called her as his drug. She didn’t understand the dark shadows connoted by this word, and she didn’t like it, as she was repelled by anything that worked against the norm, against good health. She’d never been curious about her husband’s possible experiences before they’d met. What need had they of anything outside themselves? They had their love, their simplicity.

Séverine thought of Pierre’s shining smile, she remembered his strong, frank hands. She had a moment of fear at the idea that this smile, this strength, were at her mercy.

I could hurt him so much, she thought.

No pride corrupted that anxiety. It was mixed only with the profound integrity of her love. Pierre was all she had in the world, she loved no one else.

This assurance struck her so strongly, it rose from so deep within her, that she smiled at her fleeting fears. Whatever happened, Pierre would never suffer because of her. What a wonderful warmth she felt for that man, breathing beside her like a boy. Since all his joy and sorrow lay in her hands, she would see to it that his days were happy. Till the end of their twin existence. They’d never know a single doubt. Séverine realized she was the guardian of a proud flame but she felt so strong, so pure with love, that the high task seemed simple to her.

Another woman might, at that moment, have been concerned about the dreams which followed her sickness, about the queer relationship that had been established, the night before, with Husson. But Séverine’s principally physical education, her usual good health and happy balance, her natural propensity for untroubled happiness, all discouraged her from introspection. She was concerned only with surface emotions, controlled only the most obvious aspects of herself. Since she imagined she was in full possession of her being, Séverine had no idea of the powers that lay dormant in her, and, as a result, no hold over them at all. Since these secret layers of her personality had so far supported wishes sanctioned by reason, her desires had invariably possessed a strength to which she acceded with a feeling of impatient inevitability.

She could wait no longer to show Pierre the new depths of tenderness in which she moved. She kissed his forehead, a long kiss. Still trapped in that uncertain state between sleep and full consciousness in which the drifting body obeys its instincts, Pierre pressed against Séverine. For several seconds he lay on the warm shores of love, before becoming aware of the woman beside him. Then in a voice redolent of dreams he murmured, “Darling. My beloved love.”

Séverine switched on the low bedside light. She needed to see that total felicity, void of thought, implicit in her husband’s words. Veiled by thick silk the light spread softly through the room. It barely touched Pierre, who didn’t stir; but the elemental mystery of a face belonging to the shadows and bearing only the semblance of life, which Séverine had attempted to surprise, had now fled from his features. Pierre came to.

“How wonderful to find you here again,” he said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

His eyes opened suddenly.

“Of course,” he continued slowly. “Poor little Marco. He was Italian, you know. He used to horse around with me.”

This time Séverine had only to stroke Pierre’s hair to calm him down. Softly he added, “Already I’ve stopped grieving for him. I’m too full of you. There’s not much left over for anyone else.”

“Hush. If everyone were like you, Pierre, life would be a whole lot better. Do you know,” Séverine went on lovingly, “I’ve been thinking about you so much this morning.”

“Have you been awake long? But it’s barely light. Weren’t you feeling well? And there I was sleeping like a log.”

Séverine laughed tenderly.

“Don’t go and reverse our roles now,” she said. “I was just going to tell you how much you mean to me, and ask you how I can make you happier …”

She stopped short, as if she’d struck a false note. There was surprise and a good deal of embarrassment in her husband’s face.

“Please,” he muttered. “Don’t be too kind to me. It’s you who are my child.”

“In any case,” Séverine continued, “I want to take more of an interest in your life. I want to know everything you do, all about your patients, your operations. I don’t help you in a single thing.”

All this roused in Pierre feelings of guilt rather than gratitude. Like all sensitive strong men in love, he imagined that the slightest trouble Séverine took on his behalf was a sort of crime he had committed against her.

“I lost hold of myself last night,” he said, “and now I’ve gone and made you anxious over me. I’m really ashamed. But don’t worry, darling, that’s the last you’ll see of that.”

Séverine felt faintly impatient. Her desire to love was so difficult to put into practice. Every attempt she made seemed to turn back on itself. She wanted to serve Pierre, and instead he constantly put himself at her service.

She wanted to share in his work, his concerns, his reading, his thoughts. But despite her desires, Séverine felt powerless to enter his world: her own upbringing, her own abilities, her very desire, caused her to fail in this activity, never very congenial to her.

With growing confusion and an immense desire to give she murmured, “Then what can I do for you, my darling?”

The tone of her voice made Pierre lean toward her. They looked at each other as if suddenly discovering themselves. And the prayer the young woman read flickering deep in those gray eyes was this:

Ah, Séverine, if only you could stop giving me your body just for my own enjoyment, and enjoy it yourself, lose yourself in such happiness.

His look was so powerful, so heavy with appeal, that Séverine actually felt aroused as never before. What Husson had made her feel the previous day she felt again, but accompanied now with all the joy of love. If Pierre had taken her then, with those hands of his whose strength she knew so well, with those limbs whose muscles had so often played so proudly before her eyes, surely she would have arched beneath the ecstasy he asked of her. But at the very moment he reached for her she saw a gleam of gratitude in his eyes. Once more she let herself be taken, feeling maternal.

Later they lay without moving.

What was Pierre thinking? Was he remembering his mistresses, women he hadn’t loved but in whom he had aroused the almost mortal pleasure of sensuality? Or was he thinking of the injustice that made of this woman who loved him, and for whom he’d have given his life, a body incapable of the passion he desired so savagely, so religiously.

Séverine herself felt only a dull misery. Despite her awareness of total power over Pierre, she had failed to pry open any further a soul that belonged to her. Without wanting to, that soul had refused itself to her, as her own body had refused itself to him. The silence between them was thick with their defeat.

Fortunately, they had a passionate affection for each other that soothed everything. Their essential love was in no way hurt. On the contrary, they felt all the more a need to draw close to each other, to affirm what they knew to be indestructible. Unconsciously, Séverine slipped her hand into her husband’s. He gave it a firm squeeze, innocent of any sensuality, the grasp of some traveling companion, of some life companion. She replied in kind. They felt that their love was above meaningless disharmony.

Sensuality, they seemed to agree, is a passing flame. We share a rarer, surer wealth.

Daylight had now come to dispel the subtle and mysterious struggles of the instincts, those creatures of the dark. Pierre and Séverine looked at each other and smiled. This first light, implacable to all things forced to fade, was kind to their young faces. They emerged from the night, filled with freshness.

“It’s still early,” Séverine said. “You’ve got time before you have to go to the hospital. Come to the Bois with me.”

“It won’t tire you?”

“No, that’s all over now. I’m not sick any more. Hurry up and dress.”

When Pierre had left the room she suddenly realized she’d never told him about Husson.

Well, I won’t, she decided. Why should I give him any unnecessary anxiety?

For the first time in her life she thought it best to conceal something from Pierre; and somehow, she loved him all the more for it.

IV

Séverine felt as though she’d been exorcised. She was finally free of that unknown woman who had seemed part of her on the brink of death, and who had been slowly destroying, by a succession of strange, corrupt fantasies, her pure self—the only self she accepted. She was quit of that woman for ever, she felt sure. Born of sickness, this creature of the shades had collapsed now that Séverine was strong again, now that her mind once more grasped the normal relationships of the rational world.

She resumed her former place in this world with assurance. Food, sleep, affection and straightforward pleasures put themselves at her disposal as before, and in a way that restored her equilibrium. A refreshed interest in the details of everyday life stimulated her vitality. She went from one room to another as if on a voyage of discovery. Furniture, objects, seemed to demonstrate their deep functional cohesion. Once again she was in charge of them, as she was of her maids, her own feelings, her life.

These inner feelings, this more intense vigor, showed on her face only as the most subtle glow. Never had Pierre found his wife more seductive. And never had Séverine evinced such effective tenderness towards him; for all that remained in her consciousness of the imperfect crisis following her sickness was a resolve to work harder for her husband’s happiness. Her too-direct approach had failed, but this frustration by no means weakened her desire. Her wish to please him could be heard in the inflections of her voice, could be felt in a constant gentleness which both moved and disturbed Pierre. Such solicitude unbalanced the axis on which his life had till then swung.

Two aspects of his wife’s behavior, however, remained the same as before, and so lessened his apprehension over her new attitude: Séverine still showed the same almost savage modesty, and she kept to the same style of dress.

In fact, she showed the same happy hunger in choice of clothes that she did in everything; but, as before, she chose girlish materials and designs. Sometimes Pierre went to the couturiers and hat-shops with her, so as to share her pleasure and also so that she wouldn’t hesitate over prices. But mostly it was Renée Févret who was Séverine’s companion in shopping sessions. Renée had a great flair for the world of cutters, fitters, mannequins and saleswomen. She showed a truly lyrical talent and faultless taste. Séverine, less interested in all the paraphernalia, and always tempted to cut the business short too quickly, was very grateful for Renée’s devoted help.

One evening when she was due for an important fitting she waited for Renée in vain. Eventually her friend joined her, but only after her dress had already been fitted.

“Do forgive me, darling,” Renée cried, “but if you knew.…”

She barely glanced at Séverine’s dress, made no comment on it whatsoever, and when the saleslady had gone out for a second whispered hurriedly: “I just heard something absolutely fantastic at that Jumiège tea-party. Henriette—our good friend Henriette—goes regularly to a brothel!”

Séverine made no reply, and Renée went on: “You don’t believe me? Well, I couldn’t credit it at first either; it was listening to all the details that made me so late. But there’s no doubt about it. Jumiège shares a party line with Henriette and he overheard her conversation with the madame of the place on the phone. And you know Jumiège—he talks a lot but he doesn’t lie. And he certainly wouldn’t risk slander … you realize, of course, the whole thing’s dead secret. Jumiège begged me not to tell a soul.”

“And now everyone will know all about it,” Séverine retorted amicably. “But what do you think of my new dress? I have to wear it tomorrow night.”

“Darling, do forgive me. I’m afraid I’m not quite so hard-headed as you. Just a minute. Mademoiselle, would you.…”

She gave meticulous instructions, but Séverine realized what will-power her friend needed, today, for the task, one that as a rule absorbed her utterly.

As soon as the fitting was over Renée asked, “Where are you going now?”

“Home. Pierre will be back soon.”

“Then I’ll come with you. I absolutely must tell you about Henriette. I simply don’t understand how you.…”

Once in a cab Renée went on: “No, really I don’t understand you. I tell you something like that and you don’t seem to give it another thought.”

“But you know quite well I’ve only seen Henriette a couple of times at most.”

“That’s not the point, darling. It’s the whole idea of someone, even if she were a total stranger … a woman who … who … well, words fail me. Look, you don’t realize what it means, you’re still thinking about your dress. A woman from our level of society, not as rich as we are, of course, but still a woman like you and me—goes into a whore-house.”

“A whore-house,” Séverine repeated mechanically.

Struck by her friend’s voice Renée said nothing for a second, then added in a lower tone: “I really should have guessed it. You’re beyond anything like that. You’re so pure you couldn’t possibly understand the situation. Well, I’d better be.…”

But Renée’s need to communicate her excitement pressed too strongly.

“No, you absolutely have to know,” she exclaimed. “It can’t do you any harm, one simply doesn’t live in this world with one’s eyes tight shut. Look, even when it’s with a man for whom one only feels a sort of tenderness” (she means her husband, thought Séverine, annoyed at herself for thinking of Pierre) “even then certain things can be sort of unpleasant. Well, darling, imagine what it’s like in a house. At the mercy of the first man to come in, ugly, dirty. Doing what he wants you to do, everything he wants in fact … total strangers, changing every day. And in the midst of furniture belonging to anyone. Imagine those beds … just for a second, just one second, darling, imagine yourself a prostitute and you’ll see what I mean.…”

She expatiated on this theme for some time, since Séverine did not reply; her silence drove Renée to paint the most turbid, hideous picture she could in order to draw some reaction from such an obstinate creature.

She failed to do so; but if she had seen Séverine’s expression in the half-light, she would have been terrified. Her face was frozen, caught in some invisible mold, unbreathing. Séverine felt that she was dying; her limbs were so heavy it seemed impossible that she could ever move them again. She didn’t know what was happening to her, but she was never to forget that cadaverous moment nor the unspeakable anguish which stopped her heart. There passed before her eyes waves of cloudy flames through which appeared nude, contorted bodies. She wanted to shut her eyes with her fingers, for her lids were as rigid as the rest of her body, but her hands remained helpless beside her.

Enough, enough, she would have screamed at Renée if she’d been able.

Each of her friend’s phrases, each loathsome image conjured up, sank into Séverine, seemed to take advantage of her lethargy and to lodge, charged with vitality, in the depths of her being.

Séverine, never knew how she got out of the taxi, nor how she reached home. True consciousness only returned in her own room, and there only because of a sudden shock.

Since her recovery, Séverine had been in the habit of entering her room and going straight to the big mirror which she used while dressing. Now she went and stood motionless in front of her reflection, so close she seemed to want to melt into her image. In the icy mystery of the mirror she became aware of herself. At first her stupor was such, her defense-mechanism so strong, that she thought she was staring at a stranger. Then she realized that this woman drawing nearer was her double, part of herself, and she wanted to detach herself from that reflection, to escape an act of possession she didn’t desire. But a fierce fascination held her there. She had to know who was leaning toward her. She could not have explained it, but it seemed imperative that she examine this person who faced her.

She inspected her image with excruciating clarity. Chalky cheeks, nude forehead bulging above hollow eyes, abnormally developed, red, yet lifeless lips: all produced such an impression of panic and bestiality that Séverine couldn’t bear to see herself a second longer. She ran to the door to escape, to put as much ground as possible between herself and that curdled, thin and frightful figure in her mirror. But when she twisted the door handle, it wouldn’t open. She realized she had locked herself in, and a quick heat flooded her face.

“I wanted to hide,” she said aloud.

Then, with a revival of her pride and honesty, she violently flung the door wide and muttered, “Hide from whom?”

But she didn’t go beyond the doorway. She felt sure that the reflection in the mirror was still alive, quite close to her. Would it re-appear outside the room where she’d first surprised it?

Séverine shut the door behind her, steered her eyes clear of anything that might reflect an image of herself, and collapsed into a chair. She pressed her roaring, burning temples between her icy fists. Gradually her cold hands calmed her queer fever, and at last she found herself able to think; all that she had so far felt were instinctive sensations, chaotic impulses which she was already forgetting. Even the memory of her desperate animal-mask in the mirror was blurred.

Séverine emerged from this disordered state feeling an intolerable sense of shame. She felt eternally soiled and it seemed to her that not only was she unable to wash herself clean, but that she didn’t even want to.

“What’s wrong with me?” she groaned, over and over. Her head rocked back and forth.

She tried to rally the dim scattered remnants of the moments she had just lived through but couldn’t. Some veto from the depths of her soul, to which her will-power had no access, opposed all her efforts and stopped her from reconstructing Renée’s chatter. Séverine walked quickly into Pierre’s den and dialled Renée’s number on the telephone.

“Listen, darling,” she said to Renée in a voice that strove to conceal her play-acting, “I must have had some sort of blackout in that cab. Do you know I barely remember how we parted.”

“But you seemed perfectly all right. I didn’t notice anything odd.”

Séverine breathed again. She hadn’t given herself away. And she didn’t bother to ask herself in what way she might have done so. She just didn’t know.

“Feeling better now?” Renée inquired.

“Absolutely,” Séverine replied cheerfully. “I’m not even going to mention it to Pierre.”

“Still, take care of yourself, darling. These spring evenings can be tricky. You really don’t wear enough, you know.…”

Séverine listened impatiently, but she made no effort to cut short the conversation. She expected, she feared, she actually hoped that Renée might go on and perhaps return to that bit of scandal … If she does, Séverine told herself, then I’m positive the whole thing will become clear to me. And in all sincerity she believed that to be her sole motive in staying on the phone.

But Renée hadn’t finished with her good advice when Séverine heard Pierre come in. All at once the inexplicable fear which had closed on her in her room gripped her again. Should Renée talk of Henriette, Pierre would guess something. Once again, Séverine didn’t ask herself what he might guess, for in fact she had no idea; she simply hung up in a panic.

“You’ve just come in, sweetheart?” Pierre asked her.

“Oh no, it must have been at least ten minutes ago I.…”

Séverine stopped in bewilderment. Why, she still had her coat on, and her hat. She rushed on: “You know what I mean … ten minutes … I can’t say exactly … probably less. I suddenly remembered I had something to ask Renée. And what with phoning her, I didn’t have time … but please don’t think.…”

She felt that every word she uttered more and more exposed the guilt she felt, a feeling which for the life of her she couldn’t define. She stumbled out, “Just a moment. I’ll get my things off.”

By the time she’d come back her clear, almost powerful reason had triumphed over the still unknown enemy crouching in the secret recesses of her being. But she had become fully aware of the bizarre nature of her behavior, almost delusional. She knew she wasn’t guilty of anything. Then why did she feel such a need to make excuses for herself? Why that suspicious disorder lurking in her soul?

She kissed her husband. More than had any of her efforts of will, the feeling of security at Pierre’s touch relaxed her. For the first time in an evening whose despotic, abandoned pace belonged to some power alien to her, Séverine felt free. She gave such a sigh of healthy well-being that Pierre came out with—“Not feeling well? Had a quarrel with Renée?”

“Darling, what an idea. On the contrary, I’m absolutely delighted. My dress is perfect and I feel like enjoying myself. Let’s go out somewhere.”

Séverine saw that Pierre was disappointed by the idea. Only then did she remember that this was the only evening in the week they’d be alone, and that they’d decided to spend it at home together. She recalled her resolution, faithfully maintained till then, of doing everything she could to make her husband happy; but she felt it absolutely imperative to have a violent change of scene to throw back into the past those terrifying moments she’d just lived through.

At first her plan seemed to succeed. The blazing lights and noises of the vaudeville and dance-hall to which she had Pierre take her did give her the suspension of feeling she was seeking. But as soon as they came out onto the street the now familiar agony filled her body. The noise of the engine, the splashes of light and shadow inside the taxi, the driver’s back seen dimly through the glass, all made Séverine think of riding with Renée and hearing about … In the elevator up Pierre noticed his wife’s dead white face.

“I told you,” he said gently, “going out would tire you.”

“No, it’s not that. Please. I’d let you know if …”

For a second Séverine was liberated. She’d tell Pierre and everything would be made clear. He’d led a full life before meeting her. And he’d be able to explain, he’d be able to calm this satanic agitation of hers by comparing it with similar examples drawn from his experience.

Was the flush at Séverine’s temples due solely to her hope for release? Or was this hope mingled with another, less distinct but far more disturbed and powerful desire? To evade the problem Séverine started speaking as soon as the apartment door shut behind them.

“I was rather upset by some gossip Renée told me about. One of her friends, Henriette, you don’t know her, well, it seems she often works in a … a whore-house.”

These last words came out on such a note of shock Pierre was surprised.

“And?” he asked.

“But … well, that’s all.”

“So you upset yourself over a thing like that. Come and sit down, darling.”

They’d been talking in the hall. Pierre led his wife through to his study. She sank onto a sofa. A fit of trembling had taken hold of her, light enough but so rapid and recurrent that she felt faint.

She was avidly, desperately, waiting for what Pierre would say. And now it was not simply tranquillity she wanted: she felt incurably curious. A necessity as organic as hunger possessed her to hear discussed aloud those things she herself had refused to imagine.

“So? What do you think?” There was a prayer in her question, a prayer in which fear and violence played equal parts.

“But my poor sweet, this is a perfectly simple little story. A matter of wanting a little luxury, that’s all. I mean, this Henriette, her husband doesn’t make much, I imagine? So there you have it, she wants to be dressed like you and Renée. You know, like everyone else, I’ve met creatures of that kind in the sort of place you mentioned.”

“Did you visit them often, Pierre?”

This time her voice scared him. He took her hand and said, “Now calm down, of course I didn’t. In any case I’d no idea you’d be so jealous of my past, which after all is an ordinary one.”

Séverine summoned up the strength to smile. Yet what she would have given to have been able to slake the thirst that consumed her.

“No, no, it’s not that I’m jealous,” she answered. “I just like to hear anything new about you, that’s all. Go on, go on.”

“But what do you want me to say? That kind of woman—I mean someone like Henriette—is generally very quiet, submissive and frightened in such establishments. That’s all, darling, and now let’s talk about something else because really that sort of enjoyment is just about the saddest in the world.”

If Séverine had been an addict she would have recognized the intolerable sensation she now felt. She was on the verge of the sort of madness that seizes a junkie whose shot is snatched away just as he feels the needle’s prick. None of Pierre’s explanations corresponded to what she’d been expecting. They lacked savor, they lacked resonance. An exasperation she would never have thought possible grew against her husband; it was born in her fingers, spread through her body without sparing a single nerve, a single cell; it reached her breasts, her throat, her brain. She whispered distractedly, “Say something, say something, can’t you.”

And as Pierre began to stare at her too closely she cried out, “No, that’s enough. Be quiet. I can’t … they ought to forbid … Pierre, Pierre, you’ve no idea.…” Her words ended in convulsive sobs.

“Séverine darling, my poor sweet Séverine.”

Pierre stroked his wife’s face, her hair and shoulders with a pity that transcended his anxiety, since Séverine clung to him as if he were saving her from some frightful hunt. And when her distracted movements revealed her face, he saw in it a heart-rending expression—that of a hunted, innocent child. Finally he was able to make out these words from her groans: “Don’t despise me, please don’t despise me.”

He thought that Séverine was ashamed of crying, since she never cried; so his voice was tender as he said, “But, darling, this only makes me love you more. How incredibly pure you must be to have been hurt so badly by that story.”

Abruptly she shook herself free from him, stared him in the face, and raised her head in a drugged way.

“You’re right. I ought to go to bed.”

Laboriously she stood up. Pierre’s movement to help her was never completed. He suddenly felt himself a stranger to Séverine; but when he saw her standing there, so exhausted, he hesitantly suggested, “Would you like me to spend the night with you?”

“Certainly not.” A moment later, when she saw how pale he’d gone, she added, “But I’d love it if you’d stay by my bed till I go to sleep.”

This was not the first vigil Pierre had held over Séverine, but it was by far the most heavy-hearted. In the half-light he sensed that his wife’s eyes were constantly turning towards him. Finally he could bear it no longer and leaned over her. There was a deathly rigidity in her face.

“Darling, what’s wrong?”

“I’m so scared.” She was shivering.

“But I’m here. Who are you frightened of? What is it?”

“If only I knew.”

“You trust me, don’t you?”

“Oh Pierre, yes.”

“All right, say to yourself that it’s going to be a fine day tomorrow. See how clear the stars are outside. Tell yourself you’ll play tennis, that you’ll be wearing white and win in three straight sets. Close your eyes, darling, and summon up all your strength to imagine that. Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?”

“It does,” Séverine replied, while within her the enemy installed itself again. But was it really an enemy? Each of Séverine’s thoughts, now, was shadowed by a secret image; Husson’s icy smile haunted the tennis-balls curving through the sunshine.

Since Husson’s attempt to seduce her, Séverine had seen him in public several times and had pretended not to recognize him; and he had quietly accepted this. But he showed no surprise when he saw her coming across the court the next morning.

“You haven’t started yet?” Séverine asked him.

“No, not yet,” he answered, “and I’ll only play when you’re fed up with my conversation.”

As Séverine had somehow anticipated, they both felt entirely at ease. Only Husson’s strange deference, the same as that he’d shown after she had rebuffed him, chilled Séverine a little. Still, she said: “You know, Renée and I were talking about you only last night.” (He knows I’m lying, Séverine thought quite clearly and indifferently.) “Yes, she gave me a piece of gossip I’m sure would amuse you. It concerns a friend of hers who goes into one of those houses, you know.…”

“You mean Henriette? Oh yes, I know, I know.”

Without looking at Séverine he seemed to study her breathing before going on: “Not really a very interesting case. Matter of cash. Not interesting in itself, I should say,” he corrected himself in a toneless voice, as if to put Séverine at ease. “But spicy enough for those who want to make use of it. After all, here’s a woman who in the ordinary run of events receives nothing but compliments, or at least courtesy, and on whom, in a whore-house, a man can inflict any desire he has. The most exacting desires and, if you wish, the most degrading. Oh, by and large, men’s fantasies are pretty limited; but it’s worse—or rather better—than rape to treat a society woman like that.”

Her head inclined, body upright, Séverine listened as Husson’s impersonal voice continued: “I hardly ever go into those places any more. I’ve seen too many of them by now. But there was a time … that savor of impoverished corruption. You get an idea of what the human body was really made for. In lust like that there’s a sort of humility on both sides: after all, a butcher can expect the same service there as me. Mind you, I’m speaking of the more modest kind of house, and even there high prices are beginning to ruin everything. I mean houses like 42 rue Ruispar or 9b rue Virène or again … but I could give you a whole list. As I say, I never go there any more but I like walking in front of them. A nice middle-class facade near the Hôtel des Ventes or the Louvre, and behind it faceless men stripping and taking their slaves, just as they like, without any control. That sort of thing feeds the imagination, you know.”

Séverine left Husson without a word. She didn’t even give him her hand. Their eyes didn’t meet.

From that day on the innumerable shapeless desires that had tortured Séverine crystallized into one abiding obsession. She herself was not immediately conscious of this; but she knew that the wall behind which she had isolated that denizen of the subsoil of her soul, in which blind all-powerful motives moved, had collapsed. Already the ordered world in which she’d always lived was linked to the universe that opened to her by instincts whose power she was still afraid to measure. Already her ordinary self was united, bound together, with the other self that had wakened with all the vigor that follows a deep sleep.

It took Séverine two days to understand what this side of herself required of her, two days in which she went through the motions and pronounced the words of her usual existence. No one, not even Pierre, noticed the state of shuddering expectation in which she lived. But she was aware of the burning, pitiless, poisonous thorn that transfixed her.

For two days one single fantasy pulsed in her sacked mind. It was the same day-dream which had possessed her during the ambivalent happiness of her initial convalescence: a man with a face sodden with desire was following her through some slummy district. She ran to get away from him, but couldn’t lose him. Then she was in a blind alley. The man was on her, she could hear his creaking shoes, she breathed his panting breath. She was in agony, in expectation of some nameless sensual bliss. But he couldn’t find her in the little angle of the wall behind which she’d hidden. He went away. And with dreadful despair Séverine sought in vain for the brute who was carrying off her supremely important secret.

Other darker, more muddled imaginings that she’d known after her illness now came back also, but that one was the deep theme in her soul round which the others grouped themselves. For two days and two nights Séverine begged for the man of the blind alley; then one morning when Pierre had gone off to the hospital as usual, she dressed herself as soberly as possible and went down and called a cab.

“Take me to the rue Virène,” she told the driver, “and go up the street slowly. I’ve forgotten the number but I’ll remember the house when I see it.”

The taxi drove along the quays. Séverine saw the great mass of the Louvre. Her throat felt caught in a knot so tight she once actually put up her hands as if to undo it. They were getting closer.

“Rue Virène, lady.” The driver slowed.

Séverine began scanning the odd-numbered side of the street. A brownstone … another … and suddenly before they’d reached it she saw what she was looking for. It was a house just like the others, but a man had just gone in; and though she’d seen only his back, Séverine knew him. Thick-set, a tired-looking suit, and those shoulders, that vulgar nape of the neck … he was going to a house of acquiescent women; a man like that couldn’t be going anywhere else. Séverine would have sworn to that on her life. Some murky intuition helped her understand the haste with which the man went in, the involuntary embarrassment about his arms, and still, the hard lust that drove him on.

The taxi had reached the end of the short street. The driver told Séverine. She had him take her home.

Now she had food for her obsession. The furtive character of the rue Virène and the man who’d lost her in the blind alley became one. A painful sense of weakness made her heart thud each time she thought of the silhouette sliding into that shameful entrance. She imagined his low forehead, his fat, hairy hands, his coarse clothing. He would walk up the stairs, ring the bell. Women would come. At this point Séverine’s fantasy stopped, for what took place in her mind then was a delirium of shadows, flesh, and gasping breath.

Sometimes these images satisfied her, sometimes they exhausted themselves in their urgent intensity. She had to see that house again. The first time she had herself driven there; the next time she went on foot. She was so frightened she didn’t dare stop for a second, even to read the little sign stuck up by the door. Deeply disturbed, she brushed against the old walls as if they were impregnated with the sad brutal lust they concealed.

The third time Séverine rapidly made out the discreet lettering on the sign:

Madame Anaïs—first-floor left

And the fourth time she went in.

She never knew how she got up that staircase, nor exactly how she found herself in an open doorway confronting a big, pleasant-looking blonde, still young. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run away, but didn’t dare. She heard—“Can I help you, mademoiselle?”

And she muttered: “You are … that is to say, you live here.”

“I am Madame Anaïs.”

“You see, I’d like.…”

Séverine flung the look of a stricken beast at the salon into which she was ushered.

“Relax,” said Madame Anaïs. “Come in and let’s talk.”

She took Séverine through to a room with dark wallpaper and a huge bed covered with a red quilt.

“Now then, honey,” Madame Anaïs began good-humoredly, “you want to put a little butter on your bread, right? Well, I’m willing to help. You’re very sweet and nice. That kind goes down well here, believe me. I take half. There’s the upkeep, you know.”

Without finding the strength to reply Séverine nodded her head. Madame Anaïs kissed her.

“I know, you’re a little nervous,” she said. “It’s the first time, isn’t it? Now you can see it’s not that awful. It’s still early, the other girls aren’t here yet, they’d tell you the same themselves. When can you start?”

“I’m not sure … I’d like to see if.…”

Suddenly Séverine cried out loudly, as if afraid that she would never be able to escape, “In any case I absolutely have to leave at five. Positively.”

“As you like, dearie. Two to five, those are nice hours. You’ll be our Belle de Jour, hmm? Only, you’ll be on time, won’t you? Otherwise I’ll get angry. At five you’re free. You’ve got a boy friend waiting for you then, have you? Or a little husband some place.…”

V

A little husband … a little husband … a little husband.…

Séverine stubbornly muttered the words with which she’d left Mme Anaïs. She could not understand them, but they utterly overwhelmed her. When she reached the Louvre she stared at the noble facade; its simplicity seemed to do her good for a second, but then she turned her head away. She had no right to such a sight.

A traffic jam barred her way. One bus was going to Saint-Cloud and Versailles. Séverine remembered coming out of the Louvre once with Pierre, and his remarking with pleasure that there was a bus route connecting with the old dwellings of kings. Pierre … Pierre Les-cot’s Louvre … her little husband Pierre … The man who delighted in the gardens of palaces and faultless parks had a wife who.…

Séverine’s head whirled in a confusion of bus-horns, noble perspectives, Mme Anaïs, herself. Blindly she crossed the road and leaned on the parapet over the Seine. Here she could breathe more easily. The river rolled along in its spring yellow. Séverine was fascinated by the dubious color and went down the incline to the lower level of the quay.

The people and the scene she found there were so different from anything she had ever known that she had a feeling of having been forever cut off from her usual existence. Heaps of sand, mounds of coal, scrapiron, low sooty barges with silent men walking sluggishly about them, the walls far, far higher, far thicker than she’d ever realized; and most of all the muddy, rich, impenetrable water … Séverine went towards the water, knelt, and plunged her hands into it.

She took them out instantly, repressing a cry. That fascinating flood was deadly cold. Séverine was appalled as she suddenly realized that she had desired to give herself to the river’s filth. After all, she’d done nothing yet to make her want to perish in that muddy ooze. Mme Anaïs … it was true she’d gone to see her, she’d listened to her. But Pierre himself, if she were to tell him of her frightful pain and the implacable, joyless obsession that had dragged her into the rue Virène, would pity her. She knew him, she loved him for that. He wouldn’t be angry, or contemptuous, he would simply pity her. How just! Séverine felt torn with compassion for herself.

Did one punish an act of insanity? Was what she’d done anything else? She only had to cure the sickness that had suddenly taken hold of her, and then the whole horrible week would be forgotten. And moreover, she told herself, the cure was at hand, since she was just about fed up with her insane behavior, and the idea of ever going back to Mme Anaïs filled her with terror, and.…

These thoughts, coursing with desperate urgency through Séverine’s mind, were abruptly replaced by a complete inability to think at all, a total void. It was as if every atom of energy had left her, sucked away by some insatiable mouth. She looked up.… A man was standing quite close—close enough to touch her. In her feverish state she hadn’t heard him come up. He had a powerful bare neck, broad quiet shoulders: probably a boatman from one of the barges moored near the Pont-Neuf, since his blue smock—and even his face—were stained with soot and oil. He stank of coarse tobacco, grease, and strength.

He stared thickly at Séverine, perhaps not fully conscious of his own desire for her. He was on his way towards Rouen, Le Havre, and here he suddenly runs across a beautiful woman. Too well dressed for him, of course; but she attracted him and he watched her.

Séverine had frequently felt the eyes of strangers covet her, and had merely been bored and uncomfortable. But this was a solid, cynical, pure desire she’d never before encountered, except in the man who had hunted her down her dreams and the other she’d watched going in to see Mme Anaïs. Now the same man—it was the same—stood beside her. He had only to reach out his hand and she’d know that contact she had so despairingly yearned for. But he wouldn’t dare to, he couldn’t.…

And in the rue Virène, thought Séverine with a sudden dreadful clarity, for thirty francs.…

Her eye registered the faces, the bodies, of this primitive universe enclosed between a rigid wall and the heavy river. The carter, gripping his shaft-horse by the nostrils in order to hobble his descent, who seemed to control with his huge fist both the horse and the rubble the animal dragged down with it; the man unloading that boat, with his low forehead and motionless loins; the laborers heavy with strong food and drink. These men, of whose very existence Séverine had been ignorant till then, were of another flesh than she; but for thirty francs, at Mme Anaïs, any one of them could have her.

Séverine had no time to analyze the nature of the spasm that seized her at that moment. The boatman had taken a step back. Her fear, since it was not bound up with any real impression, became insufferable: it belonged to the world of dreams. This man was going to vanish like the other, like the man in the blind alley. And Séverine felt it beyond her power to face the agony of his disappearance a second time. She couldn’t do it.

“Just a minute, wait,” she moaned.

Then, her feverish eyes clinging to the boatman’s expressionless gaze, she said, “Three o’clock, rue Virène, 9b, Mme Arias.”

Stupidly he shook his head, which was covered with coal-dust.

Either he doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t want to, thought Séverine with the inhuman fright only nightmares can give. Or perhaps he hasn’t any money.

Still staring at him, she dug into her bag and held out a hundred-franc note. In a besotted way the man took it, examined it closely. By the time he’d looked up Séverine was hurriedly climbing the ramp from the jetty to street level. The man shrugged, folded the note in his palm and walked toward a barge. He’d wasted too much time as it was. They were leaving sharp at noon.

That same noon hour, when the old bells of ancient Paris had begun their carillons, decided the direction of Séverine’s steps. Pierre would be finishing up at the hospital. She had to meet him there before he left. Like all Séverine’s decisions in the past few days, this idea occurred to her quite casually, but immediately became an absolutely imperative notion.

A pendulum given a sudden shove in one direction compensates at once by a swing to the other. It was the same with Séverine’s heart: it swung toward Pierre now with an ardor all the stronger for her having so completely and grossly forgotten him.

No longer, however, did Séverine expect Pierre to protect her against her own actions. By now she was horrifiedly certain that nothing and nobody could stop her from being at the rue Virène at the appointed hour. She sought no excuse in the accident that had set the boatman beside her. Now that she had made up her mind she felt that everything had happened could be only a pretext for her decision: she’d have found the boatman at any street-corner of this city she once thought she knew but which now seemed to her peopled with gnarled, demanding animals to whom she was condemned to belong. She didn’t know whether the sacrifice she was making would bring her horror or happiness; but before it was accomplished she had to find Pierre and let him see her as the woman he loved for the last time. For the moment was upon her when this woman would be consumed.

“Is Dr Sérizy still here?” Séverine asked the hospital receptionist with dread.

“Just leaving. Look, there he is, going across to put on his things.”

Pierre was crossing the courtyard surrounded by a knot of students. They were all wearing white coats. Séverine looked at her husband’s youthful face, toward which others still younger were turned. She knew little enough of the delights of the mind; but there was such a strong desire for knowledge, such intellectual vigor in this group—all of which converged visibly on Pierre —that she didn’t dare call out to him.

“I’ll wait here,” she said softly.

But warned, doubtless, by the instinct of his love Pierre turned his head toward his wife, and, though she was shaded by the porch, recognized her. She saw him say a few words to the young men around him and then walk toward her. As he drew near, Séverine hungrily examined those precious features, as if she were never to see them again. But this face of Pierre’s was one unknown to her, still marked by hours spent in a world of his own, a world of teachers and students. Séverine saw in his face the lines left by beloved work, the signs of patient good nature, the look of a leader and good workman together, the expression of a man surprised among his fellows and in his element; all this together with his white coat, so white she couldn’t help thinking of the sacred red of blood.

“Please don’t be angry with me for disturbing you here,” Séverine said, giving him an affectionate and guilty smile, “but since we never lunch together, and as I happened to be in the neighborhood.…”

“Be angry with you,” Pierre exclaimed. He felt both impatient and shy in a way quite unusual with him. “Be angry with you, darling, when you make me happy like this. Why, I’m so proud to be able to show you off to everyone here. Didn’t you see them all staring at you?”

Séverine bent her head slightly to hide the pallor that had crept into her cheeks.

Pierre went on: “Just wait for me a second. We have half an hour before lunch. If only the Director hadn’t invited me for lunch, how happy I’d have been to eat with you, darling.”

The weather was good. Séverine felt drawn towards the most innocent spot she could find and took Pierre off into the garden next to Notre-Dame. Spring was always somehow more humble, there, than anywhere else in Paris. The unhealthy tenements near the Hotel de Ville produced the pallid children who were playing in the park. From time to time a ray of sunlight pierced the April clouds, struck against a gargoyle or lost itself in the mystery of some stained glass window. Old workmen chatted on benches. The Ile Saint-Louis was visible, a peaceful quay on the left bank.

Their arms around each other, Séverine and Pierre strolled through the gardens. Pierre spoke of the humble lives sheltered under the cathedral, but Séverine heard only the timbre of his voice, which he had lowered without noticing. Something within her was slowly, fatally breaking. When it was time for Pierre to go she went with him only as far as the gate.

“I want to stay here a while. You go on, darling.”

She kissed him vehemently, convulsively, and repeated dully, “Go, darling, go.”

Then she managed to get to a bench where she burst into soundless tears between two women who were knitting.

She didn’t think about eating lunch, or leaving the bench. She tried to collect herself; she listened to the secret voice within her. In this way she spent two hours. Without so much as a look at her watch she left the little Notre-Dame garden for the rue Virène.

Mme Anaïs seemed glad to see her.

“I was beginning to give you up, dearie,” she said. “You left so fast this morning I thought you’d gotten scared. There’s really nothing to worry about, you’ll see.”

She gave a healthy affectionate laugh and took Séverine into a small room that overlooked a dark yard.

“Put your things in here,” she ordered cheerfully, opening a cupboard in which Séverine could see two coats and hats.

She obeyed without a word, since her jaws seemed soldered tight. But she was feverishly thinking, I have to tell her … the man who’s coming here for me … just him, no one else. But she found it impossible to utter a sound and went on listening to Mme Anaïs whose sincere kindnesses both comforted and terrified her.

“You see, dearie, I’m generally in here unless someone wants me. There’s not much light but over by the window there’s enough for my work-table. The girls give me a hand when they have nothing else to do. Mathilde and Charlotte are both very nice. To start off with, I can’t stand anyone here who’s not decent and easy-going. We have to get our work done and no nonsense. That’s why I fired Huguette, she was my third, five days ago. She was a pretty girl all right, but her language was something. Now you, dearie, you look real elegant. What’s your name?”

“I … I’d prefer not to give it.”

“Don’t be a fool—nobody’s asking for your birth certificate here. Pick what you want, only it has to be a nice cute name. Pleasing, you know what I mean. Well, we’ll find one. The girls and I’ll find one that fits you like a glove, you’ll see.”

Mme Anaïs stopped and listened. Laughter filtered from the far end of the corridor.

“Mathilde and Charlotte must have finished with M Adolphe,” she said, “one of our very best clients. A salesman. He’s really loaded, and what a character. Pretty much everyone who comes here is O.K. You’ll get along fine, I’m sure. Meanwhile what about a little something to celebrate your start, what’d you like? I’ve got anything you want. Look.”

From a closet opposite the one in which Séverine had put her hat, Mme Anaïs pulled out several bottles. Séverine picked one at random, and drank without tasting anything while Mme Anaïs lengthily inhaled her anisette. When she had drunk it she went on:

“For the time being we’ll call you Belle de Jour. How’s that for size? O.K., dearie? You satisfy pretty easy, don’t you. Still a little shy, but that’s natural. As long as you can get away by five, that’s the idea, isn’t it, then everything’s O.K. You in love with him?” Séverine recoiled. “Oh don’t worry, I’m not going to make you tell me your secrets. You’ll tell me plenty on your own soon enough. I’m not your boss, you know, more like your friend. Hell, I guess I ought to know something about life by now … And, sure, I like my job better than yours, but it wasn’t you or me who made the rules, honey. Now come and kiss me, my little Belle de Jour.”

There was true generosity in Mme Anaïs’ tone; all the same, Séverine disengaged herself quickly from that embrace. With a frown, her whole face drawn and pale, she stared toward the room from which laughter had come a few seconds before. Silence reigned there now, punctuated by muffled noises. And it seemed to Séverine that those noises regulated the beating of her heart. Her eyes were so fixed, so full of animal distress as she looked toward Mme Anaïs, that for a second perhaps the madame felt something of the carnal drama over which she daily presided. An uneasy half-smile appeared on her benevolent lips. Her eyes, too, turned to the room which she rented in all good faith, then looked back at Séverine. They exchanged one of those intimate glances which are always regretted later on because they reveal too deep a truth. It was a look of terrible sexual fear.

“Come on, come on,” and Mme Anaïs shook her blonde permanent, “you’ll put me in a bad mood. Like I said just now, dearie, we didn’t make the world, you and I.”

A rather hoarse but definitely gay cry came down the corridor.

“Mme Anaïs, we need you.”

“Must be Charlotte developing a thirst.”

Mme Anaïs went out smiling comfortably. As soon as she’d gone Séverine rose in a single motion. Escape … she had to escape, she couldn’t stay here another moment. She couldn’t connect her presence in this place with anything real, or possible. She’d forgotten the boatman, she’d forgotten Pierre, she’d forgotten even Mme Anaïs herself. She had no idea what had brought her here and this very fact filled her with a wild desire for liberty. But she didn’t move.

A man’s voice could be heard crying reproachfully, “There’s a new girl here and you haven’t brought her in. That’s not nice.”

Mme Anaïs appeared, took Séverine by the arm, and led her off.

“Here’s Belle de Jour,” exclaimed a very dark girl.

The room Séverine found herself in was the one Mme Anaïs had shown her that morning. Though she no longer recognized it, still it was a far cry from the carnivorous sexual cavern which she had just been imagining. The bed was a little rumpled, a vest hung over a chair, two shoes were set side by side on the floor: all attested to a kind of middle-class licentiousness. And the sanctimoniously smiling man who sat in the armchair and dutifully caressed the breasts of a big brunette didn’t seem to Séverine to belong in this room, which, till that moment, she had seen as pervaded by an atmosphere of quasi-mystical perversion. He sat in his shirt-sleeves. Strong suspenders followed the line of his jovial belly. His fat, soft neck supported a balding head, and good nature and smugness shone from his face.

“Hi, doll!” he called out, moving too-small feet which wore a pair of flashy socks, “what about a glass of champagne with us—and my old friend Mme Anaïs too. ’Course, after the appetizer I just knocked off a good brandy would probably be better, only Mathilde here,” and he indicated a thin girl on the bed getting back into her dress, “she wants champagne. She worked hard and me, I’m not stingy.”

M Adolphe’s eyes followed Mme Anaïs as she went to get the wine. Her powerful, well-built figure made him sigh.

“You still not satisfied?” asked Charlotte, caressing the salesman.

“No matter how you wear me out, when I look at her I feel just like new.”

“Forget it,” put in Mathilde quietly. “It’s no use. Mme Anaïs is too respectable. Take a look at this new kid instead. Look, she’s afraid to sit down.”

“Belle de Jour, dear,” Mme Anaïs came in with a bottle and glasses, “help me with the wine.”

“She sure looks like a kid,” remarked Charlotte, “but sort of English in that two-piece, don’t you think?”

Going up to Séverine she whispered in a kindly tone “you really ought to wear something that takes off easy. You know, like a slip, say. You’ll waste a hell of a lot of time otherwise.”

The salesman caught the last words.

“No, no,” he cried, “the kid’s right. That outfit suits her fine. Let’s see how you look a bit closer to.” He drew Séverine to him and muttered in her neck, “It’ll be fun undressing you.”

Mme Anaïs, disconcerted by Séverine’s expression, intervened: “Girls, the champagne’s cold. Here’s to M Adolphe.”

“Delighted to drink to that,” he answered.

As the warmish over-sweet liquid touched her lips Séverine hesitated. As if she were being acted by someone else, she saw herself, bare-shouldered, seated beside a handsome, loving man named Pierre and ordering only the driest, coldest champagne. But the Séverine in this room felt herself damned to do what was expected of her, and she finished her glass. The first bottle was emptied, then a second. Charlotte gave Mathilde a clinging kiss. Mme Anaïs’ honest laugh rang out rather too often. M Adolphe’s jokes verged on the obscene. Séverine alone kept stoically silent. Suddenly a strong hand gripped her by the hip and saddled her across a pair of fat thighs. Close against hers she saw wet eyes, heard the softened voice of M Adolphe whispering, “Belle de Jour, it’s your turn now. We’re gonna have a good time together, huh?”

And again Séverine’s expression was one that didn’t go down well in the rue Virène establishment; and once more Mme Anaïs managed to forestall an anger that would hardly become a Belle de Jour. She took M Adolphe aside and said, “Look, I’ll send Belle de Jour in to you in a second. Only, don’t treat her rough, see. She’s brand new.”

“In your place, you mean.”

“In my place and anywhere else. She’s never worked in a house.”

“A real Christmas present, huh? Thanks, Anaïs.”

Séverine was back in the room with the cupboards and the work table.

“Well, dear, I hope you’re pleased,” said Mme Anaïs. “Picked out the minute you came in. And by a rich, swell guy like that. Now don’t worry, M Adolphe doesn’t ask much. Just relax, that’s all he wants. The toilet’s to the left, but go back in dressed up like you are. He liked your suit especially. And smile, honey. Always make it look like you want it as much as they do.”

Séverine seemed not to have heard. Her head was lowered, her breath came hard. The sound of her uneven breathing was all that showed she was alive. Gently but firmly Mme Anaïs pushed her toward the door.

“No, no,” she burst out, “it’s no use, I’m not going in there.”

“Listen, where the hell d’you think you are, honey?”

Although Séverine was hardly conscious she shivered through and through. Never would she have thought that Mme Anaïs’ amiable voice could have become so inflexibile, or that her open face could suddenly have turned so tough—to the point of cruelty. But it wasn’t fear or anger that made Séverine tremble; it was a feeling she recognized, one that traveled deliciously, miserably, through her whole body. She’d lived her life in such a secure sense of dignity that no one had ever dared displease her. And here was the madame of a bordello putting her in line like some lazy maid-servant. A disturbed gleam of acknowledgement appeared in Séverine’s haughty eyes; and, so as to drink to the dregs this dose of humiliation, she obeyed.

M Adolphe had not been wasting his time. He had folded his trousers and artistically arranged his suspenders over a table. He was just completing this task when Belle de Jour came back. Catching sight of the salesman in long underwear, she took such a definite step back that M Adolphe got between her and the door.

“You’re really a wild one, aren’t you,” he said in a satisfied voice. “But look here, I’ve sent the others off. Now there’s only the two of us.”

He came close to Séverine, who suddenly realized she was taller than he, and pinched her cheek.

“So it’s true—first time with anyone outside your lover. Need a little dough? No? You’re dressed well enough, but that doesn’t prove anything. What is it then, need a little sex …”

Séverine was so revolted that she had to turn away to keep from slapping that pasty face.

“You’re just shy,” whispered M Adolphe, “you wait, you’re going to like it all right.”

He tried to take off Séverine’s jacket but she twisted away from him.

“I’m not kidding around,” M Adolphe exclaimed, “you excite me, honey.”

He took her full in his arms—and a fist in his chest sent him reeling. He was stunned for a second; then the frustrated passion of a man paying for his pleasure produced, in his insipid eyes and bland features the same transformation which Séverine had seen in Mme Anaïs’ face, and which had made her obey. He gripped the young woman’s wrists, shoved his furious and discolored face into hers and got out: “You’re crazy! Me, I like to play around all right, but not with your kind.”

And the same hideous sensuality she had felt a few minutes before—but still stronger—made Séverine powerless before him.

She eventually left, scarcely bothering to put her clothes on properly, ignoring Mme Anaïs’ recriminations. The pleasure the degradation had given her had vanished almost as soon as the man who caused it touched her. He had taken her dead.

And now she fled the rue Virène, M Adolphe, her own actions, and especially the question of what she was going to do. She fled them down the damp evening quays, down shining streets she didn’t recognize, through squares as huge as her despair, crawling with as many caterpillars as there were twisting through her brain. She couldn’t think of the future. The idea of returning home, finding everything as it was, seemed utterly impossible. She walked more and more quickly, paying no attention to where she was going, as if a mere multiplication of steps would serve to place an increasingly impassable space between her and her apartment. So she walked on, sometimes through dense crowds, sometimes down empty alleys, a hunted animal trying to escape being wounded by its mad career. Exhaustion finally stopped her. Seeking the shadows, she leaned against a wall. At once oppressive images streamed into her mind. To get rid of them she started off again. This time she was soon overcome by fatigue. Finally she surrendered to memories of the day she’d just lived through. Though she was mortally afraid of these memories, she tried to recall the day’s events in detail, since doing so at least shielded her from having to make a decision. But gradually her memories lost the power to fill her mind. Hallucinatory blots appeared in her consciousness—the entrance to her house, the concierge looking up at her, her housemaid’s smile, the mirrors, oh all the mirrors all variously reflecting that face kissed by the swollen lips of M Adolphe. For a moment it seemed better to run back to Mme Anaïs’ and shut herself up there, night and day.

Belle de Jour … Belle de Jour.

Could she go home with that name?

The lights of a car were slowly blinking in front of her. She flung herself towards them, shouted her address at the driver and added:

“Hurry, hurry. It’s an emergency.”

Her real agony was finally rising to the surface. Despite all her efforts to suppress it, the image of Pierre’s face had appeared in her consciousness, and Séverine knew that nothing mattered any more, humiliation or horror, except that she get back before Pierre and see to it that he wasn’t worried.

“It’s after six,” she murmured, trembling, as she went into her room. “I’ve only half an hour.”

Frantically she undressed, washed her body over and over again, scrubbed her face till it hurt. She would have liked to change her skin. It was all she could do not to light a fire and burn her suit and underclothes as if she’d just committed a murder.

She was in a peignoir when Pierre came in. As he kissed her, Séverine froze with terror.

“I forgot. My hair.”

She was sure her hair smelled of bordellos, stank of the rue Virène. She was surprised to hear Pierre say in his usual voice, “Yes, you’re almost ready, darling. I’ll have to hurry.”

Only then did she remember that some friends were stopping by to pick them up for dinner and the theater. For a moment she was relieved; but the thought of coming back with Pierre to the sweet midnight tenderness that bound them so closely was utterly intolerable.

“Darling, I’m not feeling very well,” she said hesitantly. “I think I caught a chill in the park this morning. I’d really rather not go out tonight, but you must … no, I insist, darling. The Vernois are such nice people. And I know you want to see the play, you told me so, I’d really be unhappy if you missed it.”

It was a long and cruel night for Séverine. Despite her infinite physical and spiritual weariness she couldn’t sleep. She was terrified of Pierre’s return. So far he hadn’t noticed anything, but it was impossible for this miracle to continue when he came into her room, as he inevitably would. It was impossible that that monstrous day had left no trace on her, in her, about her. More than once Séverine jumped out of bed to see in her mirror whether some special line, some stigmata, hadn’t appeared on her face. The hours went by in this state of demented persecution.

Finally she heard the door open. She pretended to be asleep, but her features were so tense that if Pierre had approached her bed he would have seen through the sham. But he was afraid of waking her up, and slipped out noiselessly. Séverine’s first feeling was one of gloomy surprise. Was it so easy, then, to hide such chaos from the person who knew her best? Though there was reassurance in the idea, it hurt her, and she refused to believe it. Surely this was simply a respite granted by darkness. She would be punished when daylight came. When he saw her then, Pierre would know.

“And my God, my God …” she groaned, propped against her pillows like some suffocating invalid.

Incapable of imagining the result of his discovery, incapable of divining whether the pain she would feel would be worse than the pain she would cause, she shut her eyes, as though the darkness of the room were not intense enough for her despair.

Alternating between terror and abandon she ended by feeling neither shame nor regret. She simply waited for morning and its justice. But the morning brought nothing. Certain as she felt that such a clumsy trick could never save her twice, Séverine again faked sleep and Pierre was again deceived.

As the minutes passed and day-light grew, a dim hope rose within her. It still seemed impossible to escape, but at least she desired to do so. All morning she ceaselessly telephoned, inviting friends to lunch or dinner, getting herself asked out, making dates for every minute of the day—even filling many of her evenings. When she looked at her engagement book after these efforts she breathed again. She wouldn’t be able to spend a moment alone with Pierre for more than a week.

He was surprised by Séverine’s sudden frenzy of gaiety, but as explanation she gave him such an imploring look that, without understanding, he was overcome and disarmed. That night they didn’t go home till Séverine absolutely tired out, nearly fell asleep in a nightclub. As soon as they got home she fell into a deep sleep which helped her avoid Pierre the following morning. The day was taken up with a dozen duties she’d imposed on herself. That evening was a repetition of the one before, and equally exhausting.

Séverine gradually wore down her fears and even her memories. The hectic rush of her life thrust into the distance, reduced to unreality, that day she’d been to the rue Virène. Soon she wouldn’t need a shield to guard her from Pierre.

There now appeared in Séverine’s soul the phenomenon from which those governed by overly-strong instincts seldom escape. She was like a gambler who has weathered his first loss and who, now that the danger is over, begins to dream of the green tables, the look of the cards, and the ritual of the game; or like an explorer tired of his travels who is suddenly consumed by images of solitude, combat, and space; or like an opium addict who has kicked the habit but who, softly terrified, smells the fumes of the drug. Just so, Séverine was insensibly surrounded by memories of the rue Virène. Like all those ruled by forbidden desire, she was tempted, not by the satisfaction of that desire, but by the first-fruits with which satisfaction was surrounded.

Mme Anaïs’ face, Charlotte’s lovely breasts, the ambivalent humility in that room, the smell she seemed to have carried off with her in her hair: all these images maddened Séverine’s lusting memory. At first they made her quiver with distaste; then she derived delight from them. Pierre and the powerful love she had for him stopped her for a while. But the stamp of her destiny, that fate inscribed within her, had to be fulfilled.

VI

Having just shown out a good client, Mme Anaïs paused to consider the justness of her thinking. She simply had to find a partner for Charlotte and Mathilde. They were both attractive, but the house lacked variety; moreover, an empty room was a complete waste. All the same, Mme Anaïs hesitated to seek a replacement for Belle de Jour. That one would have fitted perfectly—so educated, so lady-like. And perhaps Mme Anaïs found it hard to forget the look that had brought them together for a second.

Charlotte and Mathilde lay naked on the bed. Mathilde’s hair was paler than the shoulder on which it lay, and Charlotte tenderly stroked it.

“Sorry to bother you, girls,” said Mme Anaïs, “but I have to talk to you about business. You still don’t know anyone who wants to come and work here?”

Mathilde answered first, in that timid voice of hers, as if she’d done something wrong without realizing it, but everyone else knew about it:

“It’s no good, I don’t know anyone, Madame. I work here, go home, and that’s it.”

“What about you, Charlotte? One of your old friends?”

“I can’t ask them. When I left the last place I told them I was going to be somebody’s mistress. Even if I should meet any of them again, I can’t let them know I was lying.”

Mme Anaïs sighed as if to show that she was ashamed of her sentimentality and asked, “What about Belle de Jour? Think she’ll come back?”

“Oh hell!” And Charlotte stretched sensually.

Mme Anaïs took a step toward the door, but Mathilde called her back. Mathilde was a passive, vague creature who enjoyed any conversation that might lend itself to speculation.

“I was sure we’d never see her again,” she said. “That girl wasn’t one of us, she had some secret or other.”

“A secret, a secret,” cried Charlotte. “You see a soap-opera everywhere, Mathilde. She had a lover, he left her, now she’s found another; that’s all there is to it.”

“No, it’s not like that at all. She asked to leave at five, so she already had a man, see. That kid had a secret, all right.”

Mme Anaïs listened carefully to this exchange. The subject had been discussed daily, and with the inexhaustible patience of semi-cloistered creatures; but Mme Anaïs hoped some chance phrase might still yield a clue. She said slowly:

“I won’t say I’m certain, girls, but I think you’re both wrong. Why? Because Belle de Jour is coming back, that’s why. All right, you can laugh your head off, Charlotte, but in a thing like this you never know, honey, not till the very last minute.”

She was proved right a few minutes later: the first person at the door was Séverine.

“So it’s you, is it.” Mme Anaïs spoke in the most glacial, flat manner imaginable. “What do you think you want?”

The sweat clinging to Séverine’s temples was witness to the effort it had been for her to satisfy the ghastly rending demands that drove her. It had been such an effort that once she had rung the bell she wanted nothing more. But Mme Anaïs’ manner cured her indifference. Was she to be forbidden entry into that sordid paradise? Where would she be able to feed the hunger she had thought dead but which now—close to the taste of its corrupted source—seemed more insatiable than ever?

“I’d like, I’d like,” Séverine stammered, “to see if I could.…”

“Start work again here? And disappear the minute you feel like it, without a word? Oh no, dearie, I’m not interested in amateurs. There’s the street for that.”

Séverine would have done anything for a glimpse of Mme Anaïs’ usual affable expression then. Her whole body begged, pleaded, not to be sent off to seek out some other scummy sanctuary. This one she knew; her own imprint was on it already, as if she’d stepped in soft mud.

“Please,” she murmured, “please.”

Mme Anaïs pushed her into her private sitting room and said, “Listen, dearie, you’re damn lucky I’ll still talk with you at all. Anyone else and I’d have shut the door in their face, but there’s something about you … well, you make me feel like a sort of godmother and you take advantage of that, don’t you.”

She looked at Séverine with genuine affection.

“Now then, Belle de Jour,” she asked, “what was it? Didn’t we treat you right here? Didn’t you feel at home with us?”

Still unable to answer Séverine nodded her head. She gave a scared smile. It was true, the work-table now looked like a familiar piece of furniture.

“Please may I?” She made a movement to take off her hat. Then without waiting for Mme Anaïs’ permission, she put it in the closet. Only then did any peace return to her features.

“It goes without saying,” Mme Anaïs stated simply, “that if I take you back you’ve got to be serious.”

A violent resistance gripped Séverine.

“Oh yes, yes. But only every other day, please,” she implored humbly. “I promise you, I can’t.…”

“O.K.,” snapped Mme Anaïs after a brief thoughtful silence. “In a little while you’ll be begging me to come every day.”

Then in a voice so happy it made Séverine tremble she called out:

“Charlotte! Mathildel Here’s Belle de Jour.”

Nude and incredulous, the two girls ran in. As they cried out their astonishment Séverine felt her knees quiver. Their bare bodies, so close to each other and so immodestly different in color, caused her an only too pleasant sense of weakness. Softly, half-regretfully, she asked: “Won’t you catch cold?”

“Oh, we’re used to it,” answered Charlotte. “Anyway the apartment’s heated. Mme Anaïs is very good about that.”

Her white teeth flashed in an ambiguous smile as she added, “Come on, try. Feels good, doesn’t it, Mathilde?”

Séverine put up no resistance at all as Charlotte undressed her. But when all her clothes had been removed by those quick hot hands she was filled with a confusion that clouded her vision.

The sudden silence brought her to her senses. Despite the professional indifference of the women around Séverine they were all three strangely moved, almost embarrassed. This firm, healthy body was almost too virginal, too aristocratic.

Mme Anaïs recovered first. Two feelings rose in her, pride in her house and care for her interests.

“You really couldn’t be better built,” she stated with respect.

Charlotte was warmly kissing Séverine’s shoulders when the bell rang. Séverine went pale, but it turned out to be one of Charlotte’s customers.

“If you want to take it easy a while,” said Mme Anaïs, “Mathilde will show you your room. I have some work to do. If there’s a ring at the bell put on your dress. We have to be respectable here.”

Belle de Jour’s room was smaller than the one in which she’d met M Adolphe, but in all other ways just like it: the same dark wallpaper, the same dark-red, almost black pattern in the curtains, on an armchair and on the quilt, and the same toilet articles behind a screen.

“It’s dark already,” she murmured. But without switching on the light she went to the window. The rue Virène was a narrow old street, but the men and women she saw walking along were free. Mathilde, who had followed her, watched the passers-by with her for a while and then asked cautiously: “Unhappy to be here with us, Madame Belle de Jour?”

Astonished, Séverine swung around. She had forgotten Mathilde’s presence and, without quite knowing why, her uncertain voice and her shadow a fraction lighter than the darkness (yet so immobile she no longer seemed naked) made Séverine infinitely sad.

“Mind you, I’m not asking why,” Mathilde added quickly, mistaking Séverine’s movement. “We all have our secrets, don’t we. It doesn’t matter as far as I’m concerned because, you see, Lucien—that’s my husband —he knows anyway. It isn’t my fault nor his neither. He’s sick, he has to be in the country. Right?”

She waited in vain for some reply that would give her a hint to go on, then murmured:

“I’m sorry, I bore you with my stories, don’t I? Mme Anaïs and Charlotte aren’t so far wrong when they say I’m a little crazy. I have to talk about … well, it’s natural enough with you, but when I’m with the clients.…”

She’s looking for someone to explain to her why she belongs to everyone when she herself only loves one person, Séverine thought distractedly. The subject failed to interest her. Too easy to classify this wretched existence under the heading of some maladjustment. But she, who would give her the key to the puzzle of why she was in this place when she was rich and had Pierre?

“What about Charlotte?” Séverine inquired abruptly.

“She’s lucky. She was a model, then found out she could make more here. And besides, she enjoys it with just about anyone—with me too. I don’t go for that sort of thing but I don’t argue about it. Might as well do what she wants.”

For a while she was silent, then added hesitantly: “You know, I feel sorry for you, Madame Belle de Jour. The other time I saw just how.…”

A darkness that was not the lack of daylight reigned in the room then, and the red accents turned into marks of night. Mathilde couldn’t see the savage anger on Séverine’s face but a voice heavy with hatred made her jump.

“Shut up. This minute. You have no right.…”

Séverine had to summon all her will-power to keep from bursting into sobs. Suddenly she pulled Mathilde against her and said imperiously:

“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m a little crazy too. And now that we have time on our hands come and show me how Charlotte does it with you.”

Why? Why? Séverine asked herself between teeth clenched despite the jolts of the taxi taking her home. What was there in such joyless prostitution? With disgust she remembered Mathilde’s passive body, the poor girl’s tears, her respectfulness which Séverine didn’t want and which nearly drove her mad. Then she had been allotted to an old man, and hadn’t even felt the shudder of degradation that had made M Adolphe’s caresses bearable. There had been only one moment when she’d found herself moved by a certain nameless pleasure—when Mme Anaïs had divided with her the derisive wages of her body. But this was little enough with which to face the ordeal ahead: Pierre’s eyes.

This time Séverine made no attempt to escape by senseless flight. Her first trial helped her to control her feelings, but it didn’t lessen her terror. It continued to grow, in fact, as she approached her house. Still, this fear was preferable to plumbing the depths of her absurd, monstrous, inscrutable perversion: thinking about that would drive her insane. At the moment, she was faced with the problem of salvaging the only happiness left to her, and she believed she could do it.

Having completed her external purification, Séverine dressed. She had no gift for dissimulation, she wasn’t made that way, but an instinct of self-preservation warned her to avoid the tactics she’d used last time. So she didn’t ask Pierre to take her out, and managed to act natural till dinner-time. But she couldn’t eat. Pierre questioned her in a loving voice that was altogether too much for Séverine. She answered clumsily. She was still too much of a novice in sin to know how to play a role, and she was too self-conscious to carry off her part, as she’d been able to do two weeks ago, out of sheer animal intuition. There was an awkwardness about her movements, a guilty haste in all her words.

Pierre’s face was shadowed by a nameless anguish. He wasn’t exactly worried, but his senses were on the alert, the first step toward suspicion. Petrified, Séverine recognized this. Fortunately, the meal was ending.

“Going to do some work?” she asked him.

“Yes. Coming?” Pierre spoke nervously.

Séverine had forgotten that when Pierre worked on an article, now, she would go with him and read beside him in his study. She had begun to do this since the morning she’d sworn to pay more attention to her husband’s welfare.

Memories of that dawn of fine sweet promises momentarily crushed Séverine, but she didn’t dare retreat. Once she’d sat down in her usual chair, however, she realized that the clumsiest excuse to be alone would have been better than this false intimacy. The watching room, the quiet, bookish atmosphere, the soft light and Pierre’s unusually solemn features—it was impossible to permit them to enter her mind and mingle with images of the rue Virène. Séverine’s misery was so acute that she failed to notice her husband looking at her peculiarly. Suddenly she heard him stand up. Her eyes fled to the book she was holding, and she went pale. The book was upside down; she had no time to reverse it. Pierre made no comment but he forestalled the explanations Séverine was about to stammer out.

“You want to be alone to think in peace, don’t you,” he said. “I guess you’d better be in bed.”

Séverine had never heard him speak with such authority. She got up obediently and in fear.

Pierre took a few seconds to control his voice, then said:

“I hope it won’t bother you to kiss me goodnight.”

Séverine was overwhelmed by his words. That night she would have welcomed any excuse for preventing Pierre from coming into her room, as he always did, to see if she were asleep; but he himself avoided the visit. Did that mean that he had some presentiment of the truth, that perhaps he knew.…

She threw herself on her bed and bit the pillow to stifle the scream. A fervent prayer, vast as her despair, enveloped her: oh God let me escape this time, just this time, and it’ll be the end to these insane, sordid experiments.

The outburst was so sharp and all-consuming that it quieted her. She began to undress. The more naked she became the more clearly the images of two bodies appeared in her memory. Her pleasure in them was muddied when she recognized the obscene forms of Mathidle and Charlotte. She yielded to the fantasy for only a second; but it was long enough to tell her that the promise she’d made in an attempt to appease fate was made in vain. But she refused to admit it, and, to avoid a struggle that threatened her reason and might drive her to seek help by confessing to Pierre, Séverine took one of the sleeping-pills left over from her illness.

The sleep it accorded was brief and brutal. She woke at dawn. Her head hurt. All her senses were like limp leaves blowing in the wind. As she struggled to escape this heavy listlessness Pierre came into her room. The sight of her husband just as she became fully conscious of what had happened dilated Séverine’s eyes with the horror of the damned. If Pierre had been hesitating about speaking, his wife’s look decided him:

“Séverine, we can’t go on like this. I can’t have you being afraid of me.”

She stared at him, motionless. He continued more hurriedly.

“You’re too sincere to play games with me. What is it, darling? You can tell me. Nothing could hurt me more than the way you’ve been acting. You’d be doing me a favor if you told me … but you won’t confide in me, will you, even if I could help you. Listen … maybe—look, I’m speaking to you as lovingly as ever but believe me I’ve been thinking it out all night—what I mean is, maybe you’re in love with someone. You haven’t been unfaithful, I know that, and besides the word is meaningless as far as we’re concerned; but you’re attracted to someone else, it worries you.…”

A queer strident burst of laughter stopped Pierre. It was followed by desperate protestations.

“Someone else! … And you really thought … but I love you, I couldn’t ever love anyone else … my love, my whole life … I’m completely yours … can’t I be a little upset without … I’d rather die than see you unhappy, my darling …”

Séverine’s face had now lost its look of distraction. Her eyes were clear, and shining with such humble adoration that Pierre couldn’t doubt that he had been wrong. Suddenly everything seemed marvellously clear to him. Séverine was right. No one got as close to death as she’d been without an upheaval of their entire organism. What an idiot he was, how happy he felt!

“I should have remembered the expression on your face when you were waiting for me that time at the hospital,” he said.

Séverine interrupted feverishly, “But I’ll meet you there every day … I’ll even … wait, I’ll get dressed in a second and come with you.”

He couldn’t dissuade her, nor could he alter her decision to meet him when he finished work. She even went with him to the clinic where he operated afternoons; when he’d finished working he found her in the waiting-room.

Séverine would have liked to make herself Pierre’s servant; but she couldn’t get herself to welcome him to her bed when, moved by so much affection, he desired her.

But the physical desire that for a moment had beautifully hardened Pierre’s face, Séverine, sleepless, transferred despite herself to foul faces lurking in dubious surroundings. When daylight came she had no desire for these images, but she knew now that soon enough she’d feel a pressing need for them. If she didn’t go to Mme Anaïs’, the door would be closed to her for good. The fear of being denied food for her sad sensuality sent her running there as soon as she’d left Pierre at the clinic, where even on that day she had accompanied him.

That was the beginning of Séverine’s true addiction. Routine took the place of pleasure. She was no longer uncontrollably hurled toward the rue Virène; she found herself going there in a lethargy which each time made her less and less responsive. During this period, she no longer expected the joy she’d hoped for at first; but she found it pleasant to enter the over-heated apartment and take possession of her questionable room. She now heard Mme Anaïs’ interminable conversations, as well as those of the girls, without displeasure—as if listening to some dim lullaby. She herself talked. In order to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about her she invented a past which conformed to both Mathilde’s and Charlotte’s conjectures: she’d had a lover who had seduced her as a girl. She had adored him and he’d left her. Now she was mistress to another man, not so nice, but she humored him along. That was why she had to be so careful, and why she could give so little time to Mme Anaïs.

From then on Belle de Jour had no need to go unsatisfied. The house lived chiefly off a few regular customers. They jumped at the chance for something new. Séverine submitted to their desires without annoyance and without pleasure. She often yearned for the terrors she’d known at first, as an intractable animal; but even M Adolphe, who came occasionally to possess her, couldn’t revive them. It amazed her that such a ludicrous individual could ever have affected her so much.

However, she was forced to study the tricks of her trade, even the most intimate. And her apprenticeship was revolting enough, made her feel sufficiently like some soiled love-machine, for her once more to shudder with perverse humiliation. But carnal excess has limits quickly reached unless a mutual passion extends them. Séverine realized this and once more became numb. Her sense of shame was worn out, and horror also began to die. She could now be taken by a man while others watched; Charlotte or Mathilde or both together could engage her in bouts that meant nothing to her; in fact, nothing meant anything to Séverine any more. All that remained was a faint shiver when Mme Anaïs called her to be looked over, and she went forward obediently. She could feel a certain relish in submission.

At times now, when Séverine remembered the pride she’d clung to for so long, she felt there was an emptiness within her. It was this emptiness that tormented Pierre. He couldn’t seem to recover the absolute simplicity, the marvellous ease of the life he had once known with Séverine. For a while he was protected against his own perspicacity by his happiness at finding false a fear which had all but exploded his existence. Yet soon he began to wonder about his wife’s persistent, abnormal humility. A nervous breakdown might explain her odd quirks of humor; but that scared, mournful tenderness of hers, that eagerness to be of use to him, her total lack of private life—it was hard not to be alarmed by such symptoms in a woman who, a month ago, had been lovable for her self-will and for a pride so natural it seemed as much a part of her as her heart.

Pierre’s anxiety found no satisfactory answer. He couldn’t doubt Séverine’s love for him; in fact, he’d never been more sure of it. But what redoubled his uneasiness was that this didn’t make him feel any happier. There were moments when he half-consciously remembered the day Séverine had first seemed really disturbed, when she told him about that little business of Henriette … and whore-houses. He immediately abandoned the train of thought. Séverine wasn’t the kind of woman who could be caught up by the idea of sensuality—especially that kind.

So Pierre suffered also. Each morning he hoped to see in Séverine’s face what he needed for his own happiness; and each morning he met a submissive being who constantly tried to anticipate his wishes. Séverine herself realized that the servile character her love was assuming was the opposite of what he sought; but she couldn’t help herself. She looked at Pierre, and from the depths to which she’d fallen he seemed to be living on an overwhelmingly high plane. At the same time he became even dearer to her. She developed a respectful adoration for his cleanliness and youth, qualities that had once been hers also (she now felt terribly old). And the more she loved him the more she hated seeing him racked by pain which she inflicted.

The only place she could forget the vicious situation was in the rue Virène. As soon as she’d stepped over Mme Anaïs’ threshold she forgot Pierre; that she did was, in fact, a sign of her love for him. And this very love now inflicted such intolerable suffering on Séverine that it drove her to Mme Anaïs not three times a week, but daily.

Daily prostitution only increased her lassitude and misery, from which she escaped only in returning home to face her husband’s mental anguish. Continually flung from one agony to another, Séverine wondered more than once, as she walked the now familiar quays, whether the Seine’s cold grip would finally hold her long enough for her to give herself to its depths. Perhaps the boatmen would someday find her drowned body: unless she were granted some other martyrdom.

Séverine was brought in to him one evening when, dirtied and again disappointed, she was about to leave Mme Anaïs’. The bell stopped her just as she was reaching for her hat. The girls could tell that something unpleasant was in store by the way the madame called them. And they were right.

The man waiting to look them over was drunk. Wearing the short canvas coat of a market laborer, he alternately stared at his muddy shoes and around the room—which obviously pleased him. Two strong hands rested on his knees.

“That one,” he nodded at Belle de Jour, “and a shot of rum.”

She undressed while he drank. He watched her without a word. Then he took her without a word. His body was heavy. Everything about him, even the rheum in his eyes, seemed thicker than in an ordinary man. And Séverine, suddenly recognizing coarse fury and bestial sensuality, groaned from the depths of her being. The desire slaking itself on her body was no careful, refined thing: it was an aspect of that trinity which had led her to this bed. The man in the blind-alley, the man with the obscene neck, the bargeman: they were all three satisfying themselves on her body in the person of this man whose weight crushed her, whose knotty limbs quartered her. An undefinable flood of feeling coursed through her. Both surprise and fear appeared on her face. She ground her teeth; then, suddenly, her expression become so relaxed, so happy and young, that anyone but the man whose prey she was would have been amazed. He put a folded bill on the bedside table and left.

Séverine lay sprawled there for a long time. An urgent duty called her, but she ignored it. She felt that from now on she had nothing to fear. She had just received a gift upon which no one else had the right to look. She had reached the end of her dreadful race and her finish-line had turned into a new beginning. The sense of joy she felt now was even greater than the physical joy which had shuddered through her with such unspeakable ecstasy. All the drives that had ruled her since her convalescence were justified for Séverine now, whereas before they had seemed a disgusting, impossible madness. She’d conquered what she had sought so blindly; and this conquest, won through hell, filled her with an enormous, strange, stunning pride.

Charlotte asked her sympathetically, “That animal give you a hard time?”

Séverine didn’t answer; she only chuckled richly. Charlotte and Mathilde looked at each other in surprise. They realized that till that minute they’d never heard Belle de Jour laugh.

That evening Pierre, too, was astonished by Séverine’s behavior.

“Let’s go and eat out in the country. Quick, go and get the car.” She spoke in a radiant voice that brooked no contradiction.

Séverine made no attempt to analyze the elements of her sudden sensual revelation. She was afraid that introspection might sully the integrity of her discovery. She didn’t even wonder how to reactivate the wonderful lightning that had struck her. Now that she knew her body could accept it, she was sure she couldn’t prevent it from striking again. But none of the men who picked Belle de Jour in the next few days managed to reawaken the flame, and a feverish, impatient Séverine vainly sought the bliss she had captured once and which now escaped her again. She sensed that she could only recapture it under special circumstances, but what those circumstances were she didn’t know. Soon an incident occurred that gave the answer to her question.

Early one afternoon a tall young man with a package under his arm appeared on Mme Anaïs’ doorstep.

“I’ll keep it with me,” he announced at once. “Much too fond of it to let it get away.”

He had a charming voice, and he pronounced all his syllables as if he were amusing himself by joining them together in words for the first time, and was surprised that they had only one meaning instead of dozens.

Like most women, Mme Anaïs disliked irony; but this young man’s brand seemed much nicer, since it was spoken with enormous courtesy. What’s more, he was slim, broad-shouldered, well-dressed and had a pleasant face that was at once clever, gentle and childish.

“I’ll get the girls for you, O.K.?” she asked.

“An eminently logical suggestion. Tell them my name is André, and I insist they call me that. I suspect they’ll address me familiarly, and familiarity turns into intimacy unless it’s kept anonymous. Please add that they have no right to be ugly, not even plain, since I didn’t choose your house, Madame: I’m here because I shut my eyes and put my finger on a list of ads. So it was fate sent me here, you see. It never fails and if.…”

Mme Anaïs interrupted with a laugh.

“If you weren’t so nice I think I’d be a little scared of you,” she said.

Both Mathilde and Charlotte kept wonderful memories of the hour that followed. An exquisite madness ruled all of Andre’s actions; the girls didn’t know quite what was going on, but they had the feeling that such exploits belonged to a superior world. And they were confused and touched by the fact that this man refrained from using them as pleasure-machines, but instead gave them, so they guessed, the very best of himself.

Only Séverine remained unmoved by these games, whose ins and outs she alone really understood. Mathilde was shocked by her disinterest and whispered to her, “Hey, be good to this kid. You don’t get many like him in here.”

André thought there was something Mathilde was afraid to ask for.

“My friends,” he exclaimed, “you’re not making any demands on me. I must say I’m glad you aren’t, not because I’m avaricious but because it flatters my vanity. Even if I was rich, you know, I wouldn’t make a business of it, but today it happens I’ve a little cash on me and I insist on drinking it up with you in the form of the most expensive wine in the house.”

Mme Anaïs glanced at her girls. They all wore the same look of affectionate hesitation.

“Thank you, ladies,” said André with more gratitude than he meant to show. “But do you really mean me to take my money elsewhere? Do you refuse to drink to my first book?”

“You’re a writer?” cried Charlotte incredulously. She’d often wondered what kind of men could be behind the names one saw in bookshop windows.

André unwrapped his package, which he had put on the mantelpiece, and revealed five books all bearing the same title.

“It’s true,” said Charlotte. “You’re really André Millot?”

The pride in Andre’s smile was so naïve it could almost have been put-on.

“I’d never’ve believed it,” Charlotte continued innocently. “You’ve got to give me a copy.”

“Well, the fact is … they’re first edition.”

“Yeah, honey, so …?

The young man didn’t have the courage to say that he was hoping to sell them. He was moved by the deep sincerity on those price-tagged lips, of words that were usually so false. He gave Charlotte a copy. Having done so he met Mathilde’s timid eyes. He couldn’t resist those, either. After which his honor wouldn’t permit him to ignore Mme Anaïs or Séverine. With a jerk of the head he looked at the last copy he had and slipped it in his pocket; then he inscribed loving dedications for all four women.

The champagne was brought in. Never had it been drunk with such happy innocence in Mme Anaïs’ house.

But the bell rang. A strange annoyance, a sadness, made both Charlotte and Mathilde lower their heads.

“I must go,” said Mme Anaïs, excusing herself.

André could know nothing of the cruel happiness he’d brought into the lives of these cloistered women, and he was surprised at the sudden silence. He looked from Mathilde to Charlotte to Séverine. And Séverine’s eyes, shining most brightly, glowed with the joy of a deliverance.

“Anyway you stay here with me,” André told her.

But Belle de Jour knew that for nothing in the world would she allow pleasant, charming youth to take her in his arms.

So softly that only he could hear she said, “Please excuse me.”

Something passed over Andre’s mobile features. Later, he was often to recall that request filled with a delicacy foreign to a woman of her world; but now he merely gave an imperceptible bow and turned to Charlotte. She kissed him passionately.

“Too bad, honey,” Mme Anaïs said to Séverine. “I would have bet my bottom dollar he’d pick you. Oh well, you’ll have to hurry, M Leon’s waiting and he’s only got a quarter of an hour.”

Belle de Jour knew M Léon, the hurried businessman who had a tannery near the rue Virène. She’d already received his favors, of which she retained a dismal memory. But this time the little man—so impregnated with raw leather you could smell it on his breath —made Séverine shudder with the agony and heat of lust she’d begun to despair of ever finding again. He was so avid to take her quickly.

After lying quietly for a few minutes she went into Mme Anaïs’ room. The madame wasn’t there; Séverine heard her laughing in the room from which came Andre’s refined accents. Séverine sat down by the work-table. Resting her chin on hands still damp with pleasure, she began to consider the secrets of her body.

When she once more became aware of her surroundings, her face was calm and serious. She knew now.

She knew that she’d refused André because he belonged to the same physical and spiritual world as the men she knew in her normal existence. He was of the same class as Pierre. With André she would have deceived the husband she loved so completely. It was not for tenderness, for trust, for charm, that she had sought out the rue Virène. Pierre flooded her with all of those. What she’d sought was what he couldn’t give her: this supreme bestial ecstasy.

Pierre’s manner, his taste, his desire to please, all were poles apart from something in her that had to be beaten and subdued, mercilessly defeated, before her flesh could flame out. Séverine was not disturbed by the recognition of this fatal divorce between herself and he who was her whole life. On the contrary, she felt a comforting sense of relief. After weeks of mental torture that was close to insanity, she had come to know herself; the dreadful twin who had ruled her in darkness and dismay melted away. Strong and serene, she found her soul united again. Since destiny refused to permit Pierre to give her the joy that gross strangers gave, what could she do about it? Did she have to surrender a pleasure which with other women was a part of love? If she’d had their luck would she ever have taken this frightful path in the first place? Who then could reproach her for actions that the very cells of her body, over which she had no control, demanded? It was the right of every animal to know the sacred spasm which each spring makes the earth tremble.

This revelation transformed Séverine. The suffering of her wretched struggle was annulled, so that she was once more her former self. She recovered her self-assurance, together with the serene zest for life she’d previously known. In fact, she felt stronger than ever; for now she had discovered and destroyed the quicksand, teeming with monsters, on which she had so long and so precariously struggled to maintain her life.

Had Séverine been at all disturbed about the path she had deliberately chosen, Pierre’s once-feared eyes would have been the first to confirm her doubts. But as it was, they watched Séverine’s resurrection with touching joy. And they had plenty of time to feast themselves on the spectacle, since she was clever enough to draw out her recovery. Only by degrees did she give up her humility, her timid servitude. She took a daily step in this direction, but only one. Daily she made some new demand on her husband, but one only. She could see how happy he was to obey her, but she knew that if her personality altered too quickly she ran the risk of alarming him and making him suspicious. She didn’t want to do that, nor did she want to give up her visits to Mme Anaïs. She sought for a balance between these two necessities: the balance of her fulfillment.

Very patiently and calmly she reached her goal. Or was even this an act? Séverine could pretend so easily now, she was no longer able to recognize pretense. But she’d never felt so completely and purely Pierre’s as when she now returned from the rue Virène, exorcized. The two hours she spent there every day were a separate, isolated life, hermetically sealed and feeding on itself. And during those hours Séverine truly forgot who she was. Only her body’s secret existed, like one of those strange flowers which open for a moment only to return at once to their virginal repose.

Soon Séverine hardly realized she was leading a double life. Her existence seemed to have been planned like this long before she was born.

She placed the seal on her new life by once more becoming physically Pierre’s wife. She no longer had any qualms about bringing him a soiled body, because she felt that on the way back from the rue Virène she was completely renewed, even to the substance of her flesh. And in her love-making with Pierre she was now more maternal than ever, for without realizing it, she was afraid that some too passionate or skillful movement might reveal the illicit knowledge of Belle de Jour.

VII

The first time she saw Marcel Séverine hardly noticed him. He came in with Hippolyte, who attracted her attention immediately: even before she met him Séverine had been intrigued by the sense of evil which surrounded him.

“Now be nice to Hippolyte,” Mme Anaïs instructed, without looking them in the face.

“Don’t worry, we will,” Charlotte answered uneasily, “but I thought we’d got rid of him for good.”

With a sigh Mme Anaïs shrugged her shoulders.

“You never know with him. Maybe we’ll never see him again. Or maybe he’ll be here for a week on end. Anyhow, be nice to him, you won’t be sorry.”

In the hall Séverine asked, “Who is he?”

“She won’t tell us,” Mathilde murmured.

“Rich?”

“You kidding!” cried Charlotte. “He never pays a red cent.”

“Why not?”

“Mme Anaïs says so. At first we thought he was her lover, but he isn’t. My guess is he used to be and he still has a hold over her. Thank God he doesn’t come in much. Twice in eighteen months is plenty for me. Otherwise I’d get out of here.”

“Me too,” put in Mathilde.

They hesitated a moment when they reached the door to the big room. Séverine pressed them:

“Is he very passionate then? Brutal?”

“Not really—is he, Mathilde? He’s pretty quiet, not even dirty. But he scares the shit out of you, I can’t explain it.”

A few seconds later and Séverine understood. Hippolyte was a barbaric hulk of a man, bigger and taller than anyone she’d ever seen. True, there was nothing particularly cruel about his face, which was fat and very large. But there was something else, perhaps the contrast between his majestic, almost deadly immobility and the savage animal life that darkened his lips, closed his jaws like a trap, and turned his fists into hammers of flesh and bone. Perhaps it was the way he rolled his cigarettes and licked them together. Or perhaps it was the tiny gold ring he wore in his right ear. Like Charlotte, Séverine couldn’t say what it was; but fear slid slowly up her veins. Fascinated, she couldn’t take her eyes off this man with the color and size of some bronze idol.

Though Hippolyte continued to stare at some secret spot beyond the room, he noticed the three girls’ uneasy fear. He didn’t bother to comment on it, but said in a lazy voice loaded with scorn:

“Everything O.K., kids?”

Then he was silent. It was clear he didn’t like talking; silence—that dead water intolerable to most—didn’t worry him in the least. But Charlotte had to break it.

“And how are you, Monsieur Hippolyte?” she asked with false gaiety. “It’s been months since we’ve seen you.”

He didn’t answer, but took a drag at his cigarette.

“Why don’t you take off your clothes, it’s hot in here,” suggested Mathilde, who was also bothered by his silence.

Hippolyte made a short sign and she went and helped him off with his jacket. His shirt was of heavy silk; the muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest showed under it. They might have been of cast iron, designed for some immense labor.

“I brought someone with me,” said Hippolyte. “My friend.”

The tone in which he spoke the last word was noticeably at variance with the man’s superb nonchalance. Solemn and sonorous, that word seemed to be the only one that mattered, for Hippolyte, in the whole human vocabulary.

Séverine turned to look at the young man, who stood a little behind Hippolyte, as if shrunk into his shadow. She saw a pair of deep-set, glowing eyes fixed on her; but her attention was once more magnetized by the colossus, who was saying:

“We don’t have much time. I’ll pay for drinks some other day. Come here, you—the new one.”

Séverine started toward him but was stopped short by a hot drawl. “Let me have her,” said the younger man.

Charlotte and Mathilde stirred uneasily—it seemed to them so completely forbidden to try to oppose Hippolyte’s desires. But Hippolyte gave a massive, gentle smile, put his enormous hand on his companion’s shoulder—which, for all its seeming fragility, bore the burden lightly—and said:

“O.K., kid—have a ball. She’s your age.”

Séverine was attracted to Hippolyte; so she was surprised to realize that this cynical exchange didn’t relieve her excitement. For, in fact, the thin young man attracted her even more.

“I must like you pretty well to take you off my friend,” he said when she’d taken him to her room.

Ordinarily, a remark like that would have been enough to deaden Séverine’s senses: what they required was silence, haste, and rage. But she was amazed to find that this man’s patient desire disturbed her. She took a second look at the person to whom the immovable Hippolyte had surrendered her. His hair shone with thick pomade. His tie was expensive but very loud, his clothes were much too tightly cut, and a large diamond sparkled on his ring finger. There was something suspect about the whole ensemble, just as there was in the tough, tight skin of the man’s face, and in the eyes, at once anxious and inflexible. Séverine remembered how those narrow shoulders had remained unflinching under Hippolyte’s hand. A keen emotion took her in its grip.

“I’m telling you I like you,” the youth repeated without opening his mouth.

Séverine realized that what he said wasn’t simply a compliment; it was a kind of gift, and he was annoyed that she was not more grateful for it. She moved toward him, her lips half-parted. He pressed his mouth against hers with calculated intensity. Then he carried Séverine to the bed. She felt herself so light in those undeveloped arms! Hippolyte’s friend had only the appearance of weakness. She moaned with pain when he gripped her between his thin legs, and already an ecstasy more violent than she had ever known was invading her.

The young man took out an expensive cigarette-case, lit a cigarette, and inquired:

“What’s your name?”

“Belle de Jour.”

“What’s the rest?”

“That’s all.”

His lips creased with ironic indifference.

“Think I’m a cop or something?”

“And what’s your name, honey?” Séverine asked him, feeling a sensual pleasure at using the intimacy for the first time.

“I don’t have any secrets. They call me Marcel. Also the Angel.”

Séverine felt a slight thrill; the dubious nickname was just right for the cynical face sunk in the pillow beside her.

“And sometimes,” Marcel continued hesitantly, “well, they call me … let’s not be formal … they call me Gold Mouth.”

“Why?”

“Look.”

Only then did Séverine realize that he’d managed to keep his lower lip held close to the gum. He pulled it forward now, and she saw that all his front teeth were made of gold.

“All at one blow,” snickered Marcel, “and then, too.…”

He didn’t finish, for which Séverine was grateful. The sudden glimpse of that mouth had frightened her. Marcel dressed hastily.

“You’re going already?” she asked despite herself.

“Sure, I have to. I’ve got a friend.…”

He cut himself short with a sudden surprised irritation, and added, “Get that! I was going to make excuses to you.”

He left without bothering to look at her, but he returned alone the following day. Séverine was busy. Charlotte and Mathilde offered themselves.

“Get lost,” Marcel said. “I want Belle de Jour.”

He waited patiently. Time wasn’t measured in the ordinary way for him, or for Hippolyte. Marcel had an animal’s ability to relax and think with his body. What went on inside his head couldn’t be dignified by the name of thought.

Séverine’s footsteps banished this watchful torpor in an instant. She went to him radiantly, but he stopped her with a harsh gesture.

“Well, finally.”

“It was hardly my fault if you had to wait.”

He just managed not to shrug his shoulders. Had to wait! But how could he explain to this woman the cause of an anger he refused to admit to himself in the first place.

“O.K.,” he said roughly. “I’m not asking any questions.”

He kissed her lips. Since he didn’t bother to cover his gold jaw, Séverine felt both the heat of his mouth and the cold of the metal. She was never to forget the taste of that contrast.

Marcel stayed with Belle de Jour quite a while. He seemed to want to slake at a draught a disturbing thirst. And Séverine felt a sickening fear at the center of her soul: she enjoyed his embraces altogether too much, she felt much too contented beside him. More than once she had to resist the desire to stroke Marcel’s body, invisible in the twilight. Finally she could repress herself no longer, and brushed his shoulder. She withdrew her hand at once: she’d touched what seemed to be a sort of gap in his skin. Marcel gave a hiss of scorn.

“Not used to buttonholes? You’ll have to be soon.”

Taking Séverine’s wrist he led her fingers along his body. He was covered with scars: on the arms, thighs, back, belly.

Séverine exclaimed, “But how …?”

“You want to see my police record? Don’t ask questions.”

The sententious severity of his own voice acted on him like a signal.

“With which, good-night,” he said.

She didn’t watch him dress. She didn’t want to reckon up his scars in a look; it was as if she were afraid that the sight of all those virile and mysterious wounds might further tighten a knot she felt was already only too well tied.

She learned just how strong the bond was in the next few days; Marcel didn’t appear. She could measure how much she missed him by her constant anxiety and the strange, starved languor that spread through her. She was terrified of his not wanting her any more, and she worried that he hadn’t enough to pay Mme Anaïs and was staying away for that reason.

So when after a week she finally saw his welcome face, tautened in an evil grimace, she suggested, “Look, if you don’t have enough money, I could.…”

“Shut up,” he told her.

His breath came quicker, then with insulting conceit he said, “I know if I wanted to … any time … I’ve already got three of them supporting me, see … but you, that’s different. And that’s how it is … money, money, money here!”

He tossed a rumpled packet on the table. Hundred franc notes were mixed with smaller bills.

“I don’t even know how much there is,” he muttered scornfully. “And when that lot’s gone there’ll always be more somewhere.”

“So?” Séverine whispered.

“So what?”

“What’s kept you away?”

Once again, he had the sharp reaction which any question from Séverine seemed to cause him; he retorted, “That’s enough. I didn’t come here to talk.”

But there was a faint tremor in his voice.

From then on Marcel never missed a day. Fidgety at first, and taciturn, he gradually relaxed, as if no longer trying to fight a seduction stronger than himself. Each day he sank deeper into Séverine’s senses, each day she found it harder to shake off his image. So much so that the rampart which had till then so rigorously separated her two lives crumbled bit by bit. No doubt this breach had begun some time before she noticed it, but the following circumstances made Séverine realize what had happened to her:

Marcel had just left, and in her infatuation for him, she had lost all sense of time. Suddenly she remembered that she had to dine out with Pierre and friends, and realized that Pierre had undoubtedly got home by now and was probably worrying about her. But still broken and burning from Marcel’s kisses, she felt too indolent to accept the idea of going home. She dressed very slowly in order to turn her lateness into a definite obstacle, then telephoned Pierre to say she’d been kept longer than expected by a fitting and that she’d meet him at the restaurant. It would tire her less than rushing home, and in any case it was to be an informal evening and an afternoon dress would do.

So for the first time Séverine went without transition from the world of Mme Anaïs, of her girls and their customers, into her own respectable society. She felt a little inner shock when the waiting men rose as they saw her; in her mind’s eye she had a fleeting but intense vision of Mathilde taking off Hippolyte’s jacket.

The Sérizys had been asked out by two young surgeons. The darker of the two had the reputation of being quite a Don Juan. He moved with controlled sensuality, and the expression on his face was alternately tender and tough, which women found extremely attractive. Séverine was aware of this; the thought only made her feel ironically safe when he asked her for a tango. This friend of Pierre’s had always treated her respectfully, but this evening he must have sensed some strange aura about her, for throughout the dance he held her boldly close. Far from disturbing her, this audacity produced only an involuntary disdain on Séverine’s features. How polite seemed the desire of this individual celebrated for his bluntness! How pathetically bloodless he appeared beside the man to whom Belle de Jour now submitted daily! There was more despotic suggestiveness in a single one of Marcel’s spontaneous gestures, in one squeeze of those steel-hard hands, then in all the efforts of this rich-woman’s Casanova put together. No matter how he tried, he’d never attain the ingenuous savagery of a Marcel, laced with scars and with the price of love haughtily folded in his pocket.

At that moment Séverine was closer to the impure angel with the golden mouth than to the people around her. On her lips, intended for her dance-partner, lay the words she had one evening of obscure prescience hurled at Husson—“I’m afraid you weren’t cut out for rape.”

All that evening Marcel’s image refused to leave her. She was still bound to him by the dress she was wearing, and which he’d taken off; by the skin he’d caressed and which she’d had no time to purify. Séverine felt very beautiful that night, and she experienced a perverse intoxication at mixing the two women she now was. As they left the restaurant she kissed Pierre with a warmth not wholly meant for him.

But when she saw him start, and noticed during the drive back that something heavy and unexpressed separated them, Séverine was horrified. A second of thoughtlessness had compromised all her careful work. Once again she had hurt Pierre.

Séverine only fully realized the strength of her love for him at such moments of emotion or peril; but in those moments she felt it to the point of pain. She now recognized suddenly that she was no longer going to Mme Anaïs’ in search of an anonymous lust, but for Marcel. She knew then that her secret life, which had been so well contained within the walls of the rue Viréne, was overflowing into her other world which was dedicated to Pierre; and she knew too that she risked losing everything in that corrupt flood. She had to dam up the dike at all costs. The routine she’d gotten into with Marcel was what had caused this dangerous situation. She’d have to forget him. It would mean a sacrifice, but one she looked forward to as she contemplated Pierre’s solemn face in the darkness. She decided to set straight the course of destiny.

Mme Anaïs greeted Séverine’s resolution with a satisfaction in which there was an admixture of anxiety.

“Sure, I know how you feel, honey, you don’t want to see any more of him,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that guy, but frankly he’s someone I’d rather not see in my place. The only thing is, how’s he going to take it? One of Hippolyte’s friends, you know … well, I’ll tell him you’re sick. He’ll get tired of waiting.”

Four days later when Séverine left the house a figure barred her path. She knew who it was before she made out his features: that body was so massive it seemed to shut out the evening light.

“I’ll walk you to the end of the road,” Hippolyte said quietly.

Séverine was paralyzed with terror, at first. But once past the rue Virène—Mme Anaïs’ antichamber—and onto the square of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, a cry rose within her. What was she doing! Here she was out in that world where she represented only virtue, health —where she was Pierre’s wife—with a man from Anaïs’ house. And what a specimen! She’d given up the most vivid passion of her secret, cloistered life in order to keep her two worlds separate; and here was that life stretching its tentacles toward her quite literally, with none other than Hippolyte for its agent.

Her trembling terror arose not so much from her present situation as from a realization that fate, which she had thought she could bend to desires, was utterly out of her control. Then her fright gave way to an instinct of self-perservation. Rigid, ready to shriek for help, Séverine ran toward a passing cab. She made no more than a sort of stumble: Hippolyte’s hand fell on her and Séverine knew the dull shock of a convict taking his first step at the end of a chain. The weight of that hand drained all her strength.

“No hurry,” said Hippolyte without raising his voice. “I want to talk with you. Somewhere quiet O.K.? Come on.”

He walked toward a small wine-store on the square. Although he’d let go of her, in fact wasn’t even looking at her, Séverine followed him.

The tiny room was empty. There was just one workman downing a glass of wine at the stained counter. He did so with such relish, however, that he gave Hippolyte the idea. He waited till his drink had been brought before turning toward Séverine.

“Listen to me,” he said, “because I don’t want to say this again. And if you want to know how I keep my word, ask around in Montmartre or Les Halles about Hippolyte the Syrian. What I’m saying is, if you don’t want any trouble”—the mildness of his expression sent a shiver through Séverine—“then don’t play around with Marcel.”

Slowly he drank his wine, and reflected, for it was clearly an effort for him to develop an idea.

“Now you, you seem to be a nice kid, a good kid,” he went on, “so maybe I better tell you how it is. See, Marcel’s a guy once saved Hippolyte’s life. Get that straight. That’s more than if he were my son, I mean. Only thing, he has one weakness—women. Last year, for instance, without telling me … well, I don’t have to tell you all that. I never thought he was going to start all over again when he picked you out—but you never know. In the beginning he kept himself going pretty good … he’s a man even when he’s acting like a damn fool. And then … see, he’s so simple, he lets them take him. But, you don’t really think he swallowed that story you were sick, do you? If I didn’t stop him it’d be Marcel you were seeing tonight, kid. But I didn’t want that. No. He gets too excited.”

Hippolyte seemed to lose himself in a heavy reverie. For a second Séverine thought he’d forgotten her.

“What I mean is,” he said eventually, “I think you’ve got the idea.”

He put his hand on her shoulder again, gave her the full stare of his immobile eyes, and said, “Fix it up. Only fast, see. It’s giving me a headache.”

From the other side of the window Séverine saw the huge, blurred shadow slumped in front of an empty glass. And though she was free again she turned her head away sharply. That shadow fascinated her. She had to do something right away, every one of her maddened nerves told her that. One more day and she’d be completely in the power of that pair; she didn’t know which of the two scared her most. And behind them she sensed other dangerous men, ready to obey them. She returned quickly to the rue Virène.

“I’m going away,” she told Mme Anaïs.

“Had a talk with your friend, is that it, dear? He’s taking you off on a vacation?” A total break with the house was incomprehensible to the madame.

“Yes, yes, that’s right,” Séverine said, to avoid having to explain.

If Mme Anaïs’ guess was not what decided Séverine, it certainly relieved her of any further hesitation. She had already, during the interview with Hippolyte, felt a blind desire to escape. But escaping the house on the rue Virène was not enough. Séverine couldn’t—wouldn’t—breathe the same air as her tormentors. She had to put distance between herself and Marcel, between herself and Hippolyte. Summer was starting. As a rule Pierre liked to take his vacation later on. He’d put up objections about the hospital, the clinic, about the doctors’ fixed roster for vacations. But Séverine knew herself sufficiently hardened by suffering now to win him over. Once again her love made her unite her feelings of deepest tenderness with her most wretched writhings.

As she’d suspected, she was easily able to persuade Pierre, arguing her health and her longing to be alone with him. A week after Hippolyte’s warning the Sérizys left Paris by train for a little beach near Saint-Raphaël.

Even on the platform Pierre and Séverine were nervous, each for different reasons. Pierre was worried about the way this sudden departure would interfere with his work; Séverine was in dread of seeing the evil gold thread of Marcel’s smile, or the monstrous shadow of Hippolyte. The first jolts of the train shook up and carried off these worries. The wonderful isolation of private sleeping compartment enveloped Pierre and Séverine. The same pristine pleasure shone in both their eyes. They felt their love as fresh as on their honeymoon, and considerably stronger. Above all, Séverine was moved by the nearness of gentle, quiet days ahead—stretching on, so it seemed to her, into eternity.

They were indeed among the happiest days of her life. The weeks she’d just lived through, together with the threat hanging over her life, increased her capacity for happiness. And that capacity, which had sufficed Séverine so long, was deep and powerful. So she proceeded to extract from all the elements around her—sea, sand, sunlight, hunger and sleep—their most intense essence. The sky was a clear blue. The air overhead was like a delicate, precious balm. It bathed her body—a body which began to forget the touch of many hands, began to belong to her again, as it chastely unfolded.

Pierre too was happy. He loved the relaxation, the beloved countryside, and above all he adored the sight of the young woman who was all his joy in the fullness of her innocence. They swam together. When they hired a boat their oars dipped together easily. They played like two schoolboys on the sand. It was in this sort of life that Séverine felt truly close to Pierre. In Paris, his patients, his books, and his learned articles all came between them; but here every game they played—vigorous, innocent exercise at which she was almost as good as he—served to unite them in common contentment.

How sweet, how beloved Pierre was to her during those matchless days. How she pitied and despised herself for risking the ruin of such total harmony.

After some hurt or moral shock too strong for the system, certain vices so frighten their victims that they become horrified by their addiction, and, as a result, think they’ve freed themselves from it for ever. So it was with Séverine. In the heat of her new-found happiness and resurrected love she would have considered it mad even to think of the house in the rue Virène. Since she no longer felt the sting that drove her to that shadowed house, she was amazed—and disgusted—to remember her enslavement to it. She’d got away in time. There would be no trace left of her visits. Nobody—not even Hippolyte—would know where to find Belle de Jour. She held her safety in her own hands. And what could keep her from feeling invulnerable as she lay under a July sun, at the edge of a gentle sea, protected by Pierre?

But her own weapons turned against her. Her self-assurance had been won too rapidly, too totally. Distance had served to reduce to human proportions what in Paris had haunted her like a nightmare. As soon as Séverine had begun to be realistic, and could see Mme Anaïs’ apartment as an apartment, Mathilde as just a poor kid, Marcel as the pimp he was; and when Hippolyte himself had turned into a sort of inarticulate wrestler: then Séverine thought she was safe. And her best guard—her sense of mystical terror fell. Only reason was left to protect her. Crouching in her carnal depths, the enemy became quick with life.

One morning it rained. Later, Séverine thought that if only the weather had been good that day everything would have been all right; as if the powers that drove her could have remained indefinitely patient, those powers that had waited so many years for their sweet sad prey.

The bad weather kept Pierre and Séverine in. He took advantage of the rain to revise an article on surgery. Mechanically she picked up the illustrated magazines she’d bought on leaving Paris but hadn’t bothered to read during the trip. They’d lain on a table since. She glanced through a couple, opened the third. The stories and the illustrations were equally boring. She turned to the ads. All at once her eyes stumbled on a sequence of lines which at first made no sense to her. Then the letters turned into words she could understand:

9b rue Virène
Mme Anaïs receives daily
in her intimate home
surrounded by her three Graces
Elegance, Charm, Specialties

Séverine read it over and over again. For a moment she imagined she’d given her name away. Then she remembered that all she’d left behind in the rue Virène was a nickname. She gave a frightened glance at Pierre—but he was studiously working away—then she looked out of the window. Sea and sky were growing brighter.

Briskly she said, “Let’s go out. It’s clearing up.”

But neither the bathe nor a run on the beach allowed her to forget that greasy insert. At night she took up the magazine again and, folding it so that Pierre couldn’t see the page, gave the advertisement a dull scrutiny. It was the tally-ho of the whore-house keeper, the rallying cry to Belle de Jour’s bed … and how different the printed name, Mme Anaïs, seemed when it was—spoken. Her house, her girls, eventually Séverine herself, stood transformed and debased by euphemisms dirtier for their insipidity than honest filthy language.

Intimate home … the three Graces … Specialties.

Séverine’s mouth filled with the strange baleful taste of a drug both familar and new. A shameful, bountiful heat spread through her. She calculated, and realized that Pierre’s vacation was almost over. And she felt sorry for him, not for herself.

How did Marcel know immediately that Belle de Jour was back? He never told her; but Séverine hadn’t been in the rue Virène more than an hour when she heard his voice. Her head swam. She’d expected to see Marcel, but that he was there so quickly testified to both his tenacity and his methods of getting information. But she didn’t have long to think about it. The door slammed angrily. In front of it stood Marcel, white in the face, trembling with a fury built up by days of waiting.

“So you’re by yourself,” he said almost inaudibly. “Too bad. I’d have liked to have caught a man here.”

Without realizing it, Séverine had retreated to the wall.

“I had to go away,” she murmured, “I’ll tell you why.”

The gold jawline snickered.

“You’ll tell me why! Just wait, I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

He took off the belt that enclosed his narrow waist. Then he locked the door. Séverine watched him like an idiot, uncomprehending. Swung by that angry hand, the lash whistled through the air.

Séverine never knew where she managed to find the agility, the strength, to dodge the cut and cling to his belt—nor indeed where the savage energy came from that held Marcel back as she said, “Don’t make a move or whatever you do, any of you, you’ll never see me again.”

They stayed like that for some time, separated by the width of the room. Their panting breath filled the silence. Gradually they grew calm and gradually also there vanished for Séverine the ghastly image that had hurled her into action—Pierre staring at a squalid welt across her face. As this picture faded so did her will-power. She needed it no longer. Head low, Marcel was saying:

“You’re different from the others. I don’t care what Hippolyte says.…”

A thud made him look up. Séverine had fallen to the floor. He ran and carried her to the bed. Semi-conscious, she raised her arms to protect herself.

“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared,” he muttered in bewilderment.

He didn’t touch her that day. There was something deeper than desire on the face of that fallen angel.

But by the next day he’d recovered and went in to Séverine with his usual sneer. But when he took her in his arms, an imperceptible watchfulness in his muscles showed that he was afraid of hurting her, and that he wanted to please her. Consequently, she enjoyed their love-making less than usual. And her enjoyment continued to decrease as she became more and more aware that their union was no longer purely sensual.

Before Belle de Jour’s flight Marcel had suggested going out with her one evening. Naturally she had flatly refused. At that time he’d wanted to keep up his reputation as a tough guy, and so had simply shrugged and dropped the subject. Now he persistently returned to it. In a confused way he’d sensed something strange and unknown to him in his new mistress, and he wanted to be linked to her by something more subtle than daily meetings in a public brothel.

On her side Séverine was victim of the fatal laws of that purely physical pleasure which, as it loses its sharpness, pushes its pursuer into seeking it out by ever more factitious means. In order to stimulate her desire for Marcel she had increasingly frequent recourse to imagining the dangerous and mysterious circles in which his young life moved. But her imagination soon wore out this resource. She became more amenable to the idea of going out with him. She hoped to watch him in the underworld and revive in herself, if only for a while, the sense of fear which was at the core of her sensuality. She got all the more pleasure from imagining such an evening because she knew it to be impossible. How could she ever get out late at night without Pierre?

But unconsciously she was watching for just such an opportunity. It came, as it always will for those whose secret self is waiting for it. An operation in the country took Pierre out of town for twenty-four hours.

Marcel and Hippolyte waited for Séverine in the wine-store near Saint-Germain-l’ Auxerrois. As was usual when they were together, they didn’t speak; but tonight the deep security that usually fed their silence was lacking. Hippolyte wasn’t worried by the fact that Marcel wanted to take a woman out. Their customary consorts knew their place, and didn’t interrupt when the men were talking or thinking. But it was wrong for Belle de Jour to be his date. How could Marcel confer on that woman the honor of spending a whole evening with them, after she’d insulted him by going away like that without his permission? And Hippolyte felt sure he hadn’t even punished her properly. It made him unhappy, for Hippolyte recognized a hint of cowardice quite foreign to his friend in this behavior, just the sort of thing he’d watched break up really good guys, loyal and brave as you could ask for.

“Oh hell,” growled Hippolyte, “and to think I was the one to take him to Anaïs to start with.”

Then out of the wisdom of his unfathomable past he rolled a cigarette and thought how good it’d be to eat, since he was hungry.

Séverine arrived ahead of time. A sign of respect that mollified the colossus somewhat. He was equally pleased with the casual way Marcel remarked to Belle de Jour, “You look all right in a hat.”

But in his unbounded joy the youth knew he’d never have achieved that tone without Hippolyte beside him.

The latter now inquired, “Where are we going to eat?”

Marcel suggested some well-known restaurants on the boulevards. Séverine turned them down one after another.

“Shut up,” Hippolyte told her, “Marcel was talking to me.” To his friend he added, “Your big mouth. We’ll do it up good at Marie’s. The guys will be there.”

When Hippolyte made a decision he wasted no time over having it accepted. He paid and went out. The two others followed, but not without Marcel throwing Séverine a look. Hippolyte’s animal awareness intercepted it.

“You go on ahead, Belle de Jour,” he ordered.

Alone with Marcel the menace in his voice combined oddly with a note of request— “If you don’t want me to get rough, act like a man, see … at least while I’m around.”

The restaurant Hippolyte had singled out lay at the start of the rue Montmartre. They walked there. In a bad dream Séverine accompanied the two silent men leading her God knew where. They crossed the empty market of Les Halles. If Marcel had been by himself she would have gone no further; but Hippolyte’s padding footsteps were enough to drive away all her will-power. And in any case the room they finally went into reassured her. Like everyone ignorant of the secret life of Paris, Séverine thought that since her companions led marginal existences they must spend their time in gangster joints. This small restaurant, however, was clean and welcoming. A counter shone brightly by the entrance. A dozen freshly laid tables completed the scene.

“Marie’ll be pleased to see you two,” said the man behind the counter; he wore a wool vest and his eyes were kindly.

While he was hospitably greeting Séverine a ball of a woman in a skirt and blouse shot out of the door that led to the kitchen; a strong smell of garlic and herbs came with her.

“You crooks, you should be ashamed of yourselves,” she exclaimed, planting vigorous kisses on the two men. “Four days without coming to see Marie.”

Her southern accent was quite touchingly warm and youthful and Séverine smiled as the woman looked her over. Her fine black eyes were so filled with goodness, and they were still huge, despite the fat that had made her face prematurely shapeless.

“Hello, sweetheart,” said Marie. “Whose are you?”

“Wait a minute,” declared Hippolyte gravely. “Let me do the honors here. My good friend, M Maurice”—he indicated the man behind the counter—“and Mme Maurice”—this was Marie. Then drawing Séverine forward he pronounced, “Mme Marcel.”

“I thought so,” Marie said maternally. “That Marcel, what a guy.”

Then she became serious and inquired confidentially: “Now what are you going to have? My stuffed cabbage, to start. And afterwards?”

Hippolyte ordered for them. Maurice threw in aperitifs free.

Marcel drew Séverine close. She yielded almost tenderly, since everything in the room had a strong, virile and somehow forbidden quality.

Men came in. They shook hands with Maurice, and Hippolyte, and Marcel. They greeted Séverine. A very few were followed by women, who didn’t stop by the counter but went and sat down discreetly at the table indicated by their escort’s glance or some brief word. These men might differ as to breadth of shoulder, dress, or accent, but they all bore an indefinable sign: that of leisure. Time lay on their gestures, on their words, their manner of holding their heads, on their lively idle eyes. Their conversation revolved about the turf or matters they spoke of by allusion.

The stuffy room grew hotter. The rich heavy dishes, highly spiced by Marie, and the heady wines added lively internal warmth. And though everyone in the place was highly “regular”—as Hippolyte liked to put it—the ponderous manner in which the men ate, the curve of their shoulders, even the bend of their necks gave Séverine the feeling of some dangerous, clandestine repast. She tried not to look around, tried not to hear the drawn-out conversations at nearby tables, nor even the one going on between Hippolyte and Marcel. She was held in a state of suspended, sensual well-being by all the anonymous suspect lives surrounding her—“free” was Marcel’s expression for them. She knew what he meant. It all had the effect of some powerful potion on her.

No one seemed in a hurry to leave, except the women, who drifted off one by one.

To do what? Séverine asked herself with a faint shudder, as a tide of images more luridly sensual than even those of the rue Virène flowed over her.

“Time to go,” announced Hippolyte all of a sudden. “We’ll have a nightcap somewhere else.”

Marcel paused, whispered, “I can’t … Belle de Jour.”

“Say, Maurice,” Hippolyte raised his voice, “if there was the chance of trouble for you in a certain place, would you take your wife there with you?”

“She’d make me take her.”

Hippolyte got up. Then Marcel, and Séverine. Out in the street Hippolyte deigned to give Belle de Jour his arm.

“Looks like you’ve got guts.”

His shoulders slid up and he added to Marcel, “But after all, for all the danger there is …”

Séverine was in an agony of mortal fear, not so much at the idea of some unknown peril as at the crazy promiscuity she was letting herself get into. But there was a strange contagion in Hippolyte’s touch, as there had been about the bistro they’d just left, and her terror lay dormant.

Hippolyte led them to a little all-night bar opposite the vegetable market in Les Halles. This was more like the low life: soiled tables, trash on the floor, a sense of emptiness in the room, and a queer light, dim but tiring. Séverine felt her heart catch. Slow carts passed by outside, piled with obscure plunder and drawn by gleaming horses in charge of sleepy men who wore huge boots and were armed with big whips. There was something barbaric about the place.

Hippolyte and Marcel settled for cheap brandy and gave up any interest in the outside world. But Séverine gripped her lover’s hand when she saw the group come in; for a second he seemed her sole protection against a ghastly threat.

“Take it easy,” he got out between his teeth. “It’s a good thing I came. All three of them.”

The men sat down peacably at Hippolyte’s table. The smallest, a seedy individual with a pocked face, cast a quick look at Séverine.

“Marcel’s wife,” explained Hippolyte. “Don’t worry.”

Séverine’s head was a dull void, but in any case she’d never have understood the talk that took place then, so mysterious and rapid. She was sitting between Hippolyte and the pockmarked man, each of whom was backed up by the silent presence of his own men. Suddenly Séverine heard the little man growl—“Thief.”

Marcel’s hand flew to his coat pocket and his three adversaries followed suit. But Hippolyte’s fist was wrapped around Marcel’s hand.

“We don’t want any trouble here, my friend,” he said softly, “not with these double-crossers.”

Pushing the table aside he gripped the pocked man’s wrist and dragged it from the pocket in which it was buried. The fingers were curled round a revolver. Hippolyte directed the barrel at his own belly and said, “It’s a little better like that, I think.”

For a second it seemed the man might fire, then his eyes faltered under Hippolyte’s gaze.

“All right, let’s have it,” said Hippolyte. “I know you’ve got it on you.”

As if hypnotized the pocked man took a small package from his other pocket and handed it to Hippolyte.

“The weight’s O.K.,” commented the latter. “You can go now.”

The three got to the door. Marcel shouted after them, “For what you called me, don’t worry, I won’t shoot you in the back. We’ll settle that later.”

“Your man’s doing O.K. tonight,” Hippolyte remarked proudly to Belle de Jour.

Séverine’s mind whirled, but no longer with fear. Her widened eyes grew even more beautiful as they fastened on Marcel’s. He saw that she recognized his courage, and the fact that he’d been the first to unleash death.

“I’ll get that guy,” he said, “just like I did the other one, even if I have to follow him to Valparaiso to do it.…”

Hippolyte broke in gruffly, “You don’t have to tell stories to look big. You go to bed, I’ve got work to do.”

He turned to Séverine.

“You were all right. Want any, by the way?”

She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was offering, but she refused.

“Sure,” said Hippolyte, “that’s only for street whores, correct. Have yourselves a ball, kids.”

Alone with Marcel again Séverine asked, “What was it he wanted to give me?”

“Cocaine,” her lover replied with marked distaste. “The little guy just now gave him a few kilos’. You saw it. He’s going off to get rid of it somewhere, and we’re rich for a month.”

Séverine didn’t want to go to Marcel’s place, nor even leave the part of town they were in. She felt that the rue Virène, the wine-store, Marie’s restaurant and the bar they were leaving were the only places suitable for her excesses. But excited by all she’d just seen, she began to feel a burning desire for Marcel. She let him take her to a dirty hotel nearby; in a vile room, she knew unutterable joy.

Dawn had scarcely begun to show when Séverine slipped out of bed.

“I have to go.”

Marcel, reverting to his usual self, said threateningly —“You’re kidding.”

“No, I have to,” said Séverine.

As on the day when she’d grabbed his belt, he felt behind her some nameless invincible power.

“O.K.,” he muttered, “I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

Once more that unbearable stare of someone fighting for life. Marcel gave in. He got Séverine a taxi and let her go. As long as he could see the cab’s rear lights he stayed in the street as if spellbound. Then he cursed horribly and went to consult Hippolyte.

Only when she was safe in bed could Séverine think about what might have happened had Hippolyte’s reflexes been slower, or if the pockmarked man had fired. She began to shiver as if in fever.

Pierre came back a few hours later, his face drawn with fatigue.

“Please don’t leave me alone,” Séverine begged him. “I can’t live without you.”

For several days Marcel didn’t put in an appearance at the rue Virène. It didn’t bother Séverine; she didn’t want any more from him. When he did come he said immediately, “We’re going out tonight.”

She refused quite calmly. She had the feeling that he was now a harmless stranger. And, in fact, Marcel showed no violence. In an almost gentle tone he asked, “Would you kindly tell me why not?”

“Everyone here knows I’m not free to do as I like.”

“Then get free. I swear on my word of honor you’ll have everything you want.”

“No, it’s impossible,” Séverine answered.

“You’re in love with him, then?”

She was silent.

“O.K.,” said Marcel. And he left.

She thought she’d finally subdued him. All the same, on the way out she glanced back several times to see whether Marcel or Hippolyte were following her. Not noticing anything suspicious she continued on home.

That evening Hippolyte and Marcel drank silently in a bar off the Place Blanche. A young man joined them.

“I have the whole story, Monsieur Hippolyte,” he began deferentially. “I got in as an electrician.”

He gave the address, apartment number and real name of Belle de Jour.

Hippolyte released his spy and turned to Marcel.

“There you are, then. Whenever you want it.”

But if he had known the fate he was preparing for the only being in the world dear to him, Hippolyte —though he in fact detested bloodshed—would have murdered his pallid young informer before he had ever opened his mouth.

VIII

Whether out of kindness or some more complex emotion over which he had no control, Marcel at first made no use of the weapon he held over Séverine. While he delayed, a shadow intervened.

One Thursday around four—each detail remained inscribed in Séverine’s memory—Mme Anaïs summoned her girls.

“And look your best,” she instructed them. “It’s a rich gentleman. He wants to see all of you.”

No warning lit in Séverine’s mind as she followed her companions. With her quiet grace, her beautiful shoulders back, she went into the big room. The man was at the window; only his back was visible. But a glimpse of that narrow bony figure made Séverine start away. A second more and she’d have opened the door to run, to bury herself alive somewhere. And Mme Anaïs would never have seen her again. But Séverine never made that movement. The new client of the rue Virène swung around and, suddenly drained of strength, Séverine found herself unable to take a step, nor to release the great groan that went through her.

The small weary eyes of Henri Husson fell on her. It only lasted a moment, but she felt trapped at the end of a thread no human power could ever sever. Hippolyte’s heavy bulk was light beside the fleeting focus of that gaze.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” said Husson. “Do sit down, please.”

“He’s nice, isn’t he, Mathilde?” giggled Charlotte.

The contrast in the two voices, representing the meeting of her two existences, broke Séverine. She slipped onto a chair, hands clenched, as though the deadly grip of her fingers could prevent her remaining reason and life from running out.

“If you’d care for some refreshment, sir,” suggested Mme Anaïs.

“Of course … whatever the ladies want … But what are their names again? Ah yes, Mlle Charlotte, Mlle Mathilde, and—Belle de Jour. Now that’s an unusual name, Belle de Jour, very odd.”

All the musical resources of his voice were put into play, all his wearing charm. Séverine’s hands unclenched, her arms hung loosely against her body as if stuffed with straw.

Drinks were brought. Charlotte tried to sit on Husson’s knees. He courteously declined.

“Later on, Mademoiselle,” he said. “For the moment let me just enjoy your presence, and your conversation.”

He began to discuss various trifles, but with more and more studied care, more and more pointedly, until each of his phrases tore up Séverine’s soul piece by piece. She didn’t feel any shame in particular, nor even fear, rather a horrible undefinable sense of sickness. With the same skill Husson provoked Charlotte into ambiguous retorts and coarse laughs. He prolonged this game of double-entendre for a whole hour, during which he barely glanced at Séverine; but when he did, flickers of light deepened his eyes. Séverine realized with horror that these feeble symptoms denoted lust.

What won’t he do to feed and increase it, she thought. She knew the dark depths the pursuit of that divinity led to.

But Husson paid for the drinks, put a few bills on the mantelpiece and said, “Please share this little souvenir of my visit among you. Farewell, ladies.”

With a sense of prostration, Séverine watched him leave the room; but as soon as he’d gone a desperate impulse hurled her after him. She had to know whether, be certain that … she had to.… Husson was taking leave of Mme Anaïs in the foyer. Had he really meant to go, or was he waiting for Belle de Jour to appear? Probably he wasn’t sure himself, but had let his more morbid instincts guide him toward that difficult pleasure which only certain facial expressions, certain perversities, now gave him.

“Stop,” Séverine stammered out, stretching her arm out to Husson. “I have to.…”

“Now look, Belle de Jour,” protested Mme Anaïs. “You’re usually so polite. What’s Monsieur going to think of you?”

Husson was silent for several seconds in order to lose nothing of the triumph of this call to order. Then he said:

“I’d like to be alone with Madame … completely private, that is.”

“All right, what are you waiting for, Belle de Jour?” Mme Anaïs exclaimed. “Take Monsieur to your room.”

“Not there.”

“But I beg you, please don’t change any of your usual customs for me,” added Husson in a slightly unsteady voice.

When the door was shut behind them a sort of hysteria flamed up in Séverine.

“How could you, how did you dare?” she cried out. “Don’t go and tell me you came by chance. You knew I was here, didn’t you … you gave me the address yourself. Why? Why?”

She allowed him no time to answer. An idea had crossed her mind.

“You don’t think you’ll get me this way, do you,” she continued more rapidly. “I’ll scream, throw myself out the window … Stay where you are. You disgust me more than any human being has ever disgusted me.”

“This your bed?” inquired Husson quietly.

“Ah, that was what you wanted to see, wasn’t it? Yes, this is my room, and that’s my bed. What else do you want to know? My specialty, how I do it? Dirty photographs? You’re worse than anyone I’ve seen here.”

Then she stopped, because the delight with which he was listening to her became too obvious.

Husson waited a while. Then, seeing that Séverine insisted on remaining silent, he took her hand and began stroking it with the tips of his thin cold fingers. An enormous weariness, compounded of gratitude, melancholy and compassion, suffused his face.

“All you say is quite just,” he observed quietly, “but who could forgive me better than you?”

Séverine was stunned by his reply. She fell back on the bed. Her haggard schoolgirl look … the scarlet coverlet … Husson felt the resurgence of a desire he thought he had entirely exhausted. He took his pleasure in silence; afterward, fatigue, sadness and pity kept him hunched forward. For a second Séverine and he stared at each other like pitiable animals under the ban of the same incomprehensible, incurable evil.

Husson rose. He managed not to make the slightest sound, as if frightened of awakening the impure power that had brought them together in that room. Séverine, however, had still not won from him the only promise which could restore her to life.

“One minute, just a minute,” she begged.

Her impassioned entreaty brought a quizzical expression to Husson’s face, but in her agony she didn’t notice. Still lying back over the bed, her dress pulled up by the movement of her body, hands fisted on the coverlet, she whispered:

“Promise … for God’s sake … Pierre won’t ever know?”

Even in his most depraved moments the idea of such a denunciation would never have entered Husson’s head. And it didn’t then, in those fateful seconds. But he couldn’t resist prolonging the voluptuous thrill the sight of Séverine’s agony afforded him. To make her hold her broken expression, he shrugged evasively.

Then he was outside. He couldn’t maintain the pose a moment longer, and he didn’t want to lose the most unexpected, venomous fruit the day had brought him.

Séverine heard the outside door slam. She got up, ran to Mme Anaïs, gripped her wrists, and whispered like a lunatic—“I’m going away, going away. You’ll forget all about me, won’t you? If anyone comes and asks after me, you don’t know where I am. If anyone forces me to come back, you won’t recognize me, right? Every month you’ll receive a thousand francs. More? No? Thank you, Madame Anaïs … if only you knew.…”

IX

The hours Séverine spent waiting for Pierre that evening can hardly be described. She was both impatient and terrified of seeing him. Did he know already? Perhaps Husson had the address of his clinic and on leaving Mme Anaïs … Séverine suddenly remembered that Husson and Pierre belonged to the same sporting club. Pierre didn’t go there often, but maybe he’d gone tonight.

Extreme terror has in common with jealousy that the sufferer takes the slightest likelihood for certainty. The hypotheses racing through Séverine’s head began to be based on a succession of conflicting facts. She had no doubt that the worst had happened. The pure unreasoning fear of final martyrdom made it somehow absolutely certain that Husson had talked. What moral principle could conceivably have restrained him? In any case, didn’t she herself know how little moral principles stood for? Hadn’t he shown himself free of any respect for her when he’d treated her as his double in the brotherhood of perversity? Oh, he’d talk all right. But when? When was known only to the demon Husson held inside him. As she held hers.…

She alone, pathetic creature with inflamed dry eyes, could have described the bitter impotence with which she thought of her pitiless debauch. Not with remorse, nor even regret. The inhuman grip had sunk too sharply into her skin at each staggering step, dragging ever deeper furrows into her. But if fate had allowed her to pick up even one of the broken fragments of her life, Séverine would have passed again through all the stations of that calvary of burning mud. So she felt, so she knew. In her final agony even the poignant sweetness of repentance was denied her, even the diversion of hating Husson. He, too, only followed the path marked for him by forbidden, deadly deities.

A crushing punishment had been dealt her for a fault she had undoubtedly committed, but committed in a state of semi-madness. Her sense of the injustice of her fate made of Séverine’s hell not only a mere matter of anticipating what would happen to her and Pierre; beyond this now was the realization that a universe of shadows was pitting against her its ghosts and goblins, its giants, its potions. From time to time she moaned feebly, like a child lost in the dark.

Séverine’s instinct of defending her love, even to the point of absurd (which she felt had been reached) was so strong that, sensing Pierre’s coming, she could artificially re-animate her ravaged features. But she couldn’t get herself to go to meet him. Everything she heard him doing reverberated in dull shocks through her system: his assured walk … now he was taking off his hat, pausing in front of the hall mirror … just as he always did. But possibly he was just trying to control the savage, rending emotions he was suffering by now. Séverine held her breath, stared at the door by which he would enter. She’d know in a moment. Every second she became more fatally certain. Why should Husson hesitate to tell him? She knew the strength of such inner compulsions … Fat insects stirred their feelers through her skull. Their rustling stopped. The doorknob turned.

If Séverine hadn’t known that the wonderful deliverance she experienced then was only provisional, she would actually have blessed the tortures leading to it. Life rushed into her veins like a gush of water dammed up and suddenly released. Pierre smiled at her. Pierre kissed her. She had nothing to fear, until tomorrow. Joy flooding into her eyes accorded them the purity and delicacy of tears.

They spent the night together. Once Pierre had fallen asleep she sat up slightly. She didn’t want to sleep. Surely the condemned man tried to fill his last moments with happy memories? Séverine listened to Pierre’s breathing.

“Mine. He’s still mine,” she said to herself. “But he’s going to leave me.…”

That fine body, that handsome face and noble heart filled with love for her, were soon to be destroyed. Bent over Pierre’s head Séverine murmured half-consciously:

“My darling, my beloved love, when you find out don’t be hurt too much. Why not? Oh, because my love for you is so much greater than all that. It’s just that without all that I’d never have known. Don’t be hurt. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear it.…”

She fell back on the pillow. She wept for him, she wept for her, she wept for the human condition which so irreconcilably separates spirit and flesh, the misery each man bears, but which no one forgives another.

Then she reviewed their life together. Small details she’d thought forgotten returned to her. And at each memory she brushed his shoulder, his head, repeating like an incantation the words: “Don’t be hurt … not too much. Do what you like to me, only don’t be hurt too much, my darling.”

Sunk in these reminiscences, these agonies and prayers, she saw the first glimmers of dawn. Once before, after her first visit to Mme Anaïs, Séverine had thought the first light would mark the end of all hope for her. Now she felt only pity for her childlike terror. How innocent she’d been then to imagine she’d be found out without revealing some sign. Then, everything depended on her. Whereas today … someone else had to speak only once to dirty that dearest life. And he would speak. Husson wouldn’t resist a pleasure like that.

She stopped thinking. Pierre was waking up. The night had been so short.

Séverine did all she could to delay her husband’s departure for the hospital. To her, the way there seemed sown with danger. She envisaged Husson, or some messenger from him, lying in wait for Pierre at every intersection. But she had to let her husband go.

“You’ll have lunch at home, won’t you?” she asked as he left. “Nothing’ll come up to stop you, will it? … Do you promise?”

And the morning began to drag by, each second beating drop by drop on Séverine’s heart. In any one of those fractions of time Pierre might be learning the truth. And so many many minutes still separated her from his return. Husson … Pierre … Pierre … Husson. Two faces ceaselessly haunted her mind; the one she loved faded before the other, which grew larger, glazed. Her thoughts carried her to the point at which, drilling into the cerebral matter, they led to insanity. She knew she couldn’t go on this way much longer. Pierre mustn’t leave her. Could she go away with him somewhere? He’d have to refuse. She’d just used up her best weapon. Her best … and in any case she’d have to come back and Husson would still be there.…

At noon an agony even more bitter than she’d known the night before mesmerized Séverine’s thinking. Now the passing time was even more relentlessly eating into the respite granted her. Danger gathered like a storm-cloud, driving up the hours to the one chosen by Husson. Her vision blurred. She felt now that even Pierre’s presence would not suffice to untie the knot tightening at her throat. Still she struggled against the invisible, imminent adversary.

“I’m pretty depressed today,” she told her husband, when—after what frights!—she once more knew he didn’t know. “Do you think you could call the clinic and say you can’t leave me?”

She asked with all the appeal of a sick child. He couldn’t refuse.

Often, that afternoon, he was surprised to notice the burning, eager glances Séverine gave him. They sprang from a knowledge of the hopelessly precarious nature of her present safety. And what safety! Every ring of the telephone stopped her wretched heart. Finally she couldn’t stand it any more and picked up the receiver herself.

“It’s something to do,” she explained fearfully.

Then the mail came. And when Pierre paused to scan the envelopes Séverine felt she was going to faint.

“Anything interesting?” she summoned up the courage to ask after she’d taken several seconds to calm herself.

“Nothing,” he answered evenly, not knowing the unbearable burden he was taking off her shoulders.

They slept together that night also, since even in their apartment Séverine now sensed danger on the watch, and could only relax a little by actually touching the man she would have to give up. She couldn’t sleep; she lay listening to the calm breathing beside her, that she would hear only a little longer now.

When the new day dawned, the day of her discovery as it seemed, she couldn’t hold Pierre at home any longer. Unless she herself … For a second she was nearly decided. Wouldn’t it be better if he found out that way? But instantly she knew she couldn’t do it. So he went into the city, where that other would certainly search him out. They’d meet … She fell back, limp.

Her faint was brief, the same stroke of fear that had stunned her brought her to. Since she still had several hours to get through she ought to use them to think, to struggle. She’d go and see Husson, she’d implore him … No … she wouldn’t … that’d be the worst possible thing to do … he’d play with her terror just as he had when, lying on her whore-house bed she’d begged his silence … No … it was the opposite … he ought to understand she wasn’t scared of anything. Perhaps in that case … And Séverine’s despair became so total, so insupportable, that she hung on this new hope.

That same morning Husson called. He knew Pierre would be at the hospital. Actually, he was only guided by curiosity. Did Séverine really believe him capable of the infamy she’d suggested in her fear?

“If she trusts my discretion,” thought Husson, “I’ll confirm her confidence. And if she doesn’t, I’ll reassure her that everything’s all right.”

But Séverine took neither attitude. It was obvious to her that Husson wanted to talk with Pierre; so, following up the only course of battle she’d conceived she said drily:

“My husband’s not in.”

And hung up.

Husson took this desperate maneuver as an effect of her pride, insufficiently schooled by her one humiliation.

“She’ll come on her knees to me yet,” he thought.

An hour later the maid came in to tell Séverine that a young man was asking to see her.

“He wouldn’t give his name,” she added, “and what a character, with all that gold in his mouth.”

“Send him in.”

Under any other circumstances the sight of Marcel in her own apartment would have staggered Séverine; in her present condition she was barely surprised. Her mind was full of Husson’s call, which made her totally indifferent to anything else. Marcel … Hippolyte.… Their reactions were natural, predictable, preventable. She could satisfy them if need be. But chilly, emaciated Husson, who lusted after dominating souls, rather than bodies.…

“Good morning, Marcel,” said Séverine in a strangely gentle tone.

Her welcome cut short the angry speech he’d prepared. Séverine’s sad unconcern crowned the sense of discomfort the room gave him. He stared at her, torn between fading anger and mounting admiration. He had finally placed this young woman, whose style, accent, and general manner had always given him a bewildering but beloved feeling of inferiority.

“Well, Marcel?” Séverine asked in the same softly absent voice.

“Not surprised to see me here? Don’t you want to know how I found out you lived in this place?”

Her gesture was so broken it made him feel ill. He loved her much more than he realized; she was all he thought of now.

“What’s wrong, Belle de Jour?” He approached her with a silent movement of his dangerously angular body.

Séverine looked fearfully towards the door: “Don’t use that name here. You mustn’t.”

“Whatever you say. I didn’t come to give you any trouble”—he had in all sincerity forgotten the blackmail he had planned. “I just wanted to know why you left, how I could get to see you again.” His voice took on a note of indomitable will as he added, “Because I tell you straight, I’m going to be seeing you again.”

Séverine shook her head with a sort of fond surprise. She found it hard to think of the future.

“It’s all over,” she answered.

“What is?”

“He’s going to tell him.”

Marcel was frightened by the strange, half-crazy way she shrugged her shoulders. He’d had the feeling she was going crazy ever since he’d come in. Harshly he squeezed her hand, trying to shake her out of her daydream.

“Talk straight,” he said.

“A terrible thing has happened, Marcel. My husband’s going to find out all about it.”

“That’s right, you’re married,” he returned slowly. It would have been hard to say whether there was more jealousy or respect in his voice. “That him?”

He pointed to a photograph. Her favorite portrait of Pierre. It caught all the youth and candor of his eyes. It had been some time since Séverine had looked at it with enough attention to overcome the dulling effect of habit. Marcel’s question made the picture suddenly alive and vital. She shivered and groaned, “It’s impossible, isn’t it, that anything could come between us.” Then feverishly she said, “Go on, get out, he’s coming back. He’ll know soon enough.”

“Listen, maybe I can help you.”

“No, nobody can help me now.”

She shoved him towards the door, too frantic for him to try to resist; nevertheless he said:

“I’ll wait to hear from you. Hotel Fromentin, rue Fromentin. Just ask for Marcel. If you don’t get in touch with me, I’ll be back in two days.”

Before leaving he made her repeat the address.

Another day, another night.

Séverine went through the motions of eating, listening, replying, like an automaton that she herself didn’t know how to work. The whirlpool she’d fallen into had first flung her from its narrowest to its widest point. Now she felt herself slipping into the center of the vortex, where the eddies close as they form. And always beside her floated those cardboard masks, the faces of Husson and Pierre.

After three nights of insomnia Séverine had reached such a pitch of nervous exhaustion that intermittently she longed for the whole thing to end. Then one morning Pierre, still in bed, glanced through the morning mail and murmured:

“Why, that’s odd. I haven’t heard a thing from him in six months.”

With every fiber of her being Séverine prayed that the letter wasn’t from Husson.

But it was. Pierre read it half-aloud:

My dear fellow,

I have something I must tell you. I know you’re very busy. So in order not to take you out of your way and since I’m going to be in the neighborhood, I’ll expect you tomorrow at twelve thirty in the little Notre-Dame garden. If I’m not mistaken that’s the time you leave your hospital. Kindest regards to Madame Sérizy.…

“He wrote this yesterday, so presumably,” said Pierre, “he means today.”

“Don’t go, don’t go,” Séverine’s voice rose to a wail. She clung to her husband as if to bind him with her body.

“But, darling, I must. I know you don’t like him, but I’m afraid that’s not a good enough excuse.”

Wearily she recognized the one attitude in Pierre which would not yield to her wishes—his desire to maintain free, loyal friendship with men he respected. And Séverine gave in to a hopeless lethargy.

This resignation lasted until Pierre left the apartment. But once the silence of death surrounded her again, once she saw and heard Husson giving her secret away (for she saw and heard him plainly), then she began to pace her room with the gestures and pleas of madness.

“Please, I don’t want … I’ll go and … on my knees … he’ll tell everything … Pierre … help me … he’s going to tell everything—Anaïs … Charlotte … Marcel.…”

And when reason again softened the glitter in her eyes she repeated over and over, “Marcel … Marcel … rue … rue Fromentin.”

Marcel was still in bed when she entered the small, dubious Montmartre hotel room. His first movement was to draw Séverine onto the bed. She barely noticed. Imperious as destiny, she commanded: “Get dressed.”

He wanted some explanation. She cut him short.

“I’ll tell you everything, but get dressed quickly.”

When he was ready she asked:

“What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“We’ll have time before twelve thirty, won’t we?”

“To do what?”

“Get to the Notre-Dame park.”

Marcel wet a towel, passed it over Séverine’s forehead and temples, filled a glass with water.

“Drink it,” he told her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but you won’t last long if you go on like this. Feeling better now?”

“We do have time, don’t we?” she impatiently repeated. It was becoming hard for her to connect two ideas, so deaf and dumb was she to everything but her single purpose.

Her hypnotic state was contagious. Marcel didn’t even feel the need to discuss the matter. And where wouldn’t he blindly have followed his Séverine now that he had found her in his room, seeking his protection, after he’d despaired of getting her back by any faintly honorable means? His pimp’s instinct told him that she had come for one purpose only: to put herself under his protection. Moreover, everything conspired to make him obey Séverine: his love for her, his natural violence, and the savage laws of the underworld which required that men living off women pay for such assistance bravely and with blood.

“We’ll be there an hour ahead of time,” Marcel remarked. “What’ve I got to do?”

“I’ll show you, when we’re there … we’re going to be late.”

He saw that she would calm down only at the place to which her whole being was directed.

“Go ahead,” he said.

His hand plunged quickly under his pillow, sank into a side pocket. Then he rejoined her in the corridor. She didn’t notice that Marcel by-passed the cabs on the Place Pigalle rank, and made for a tiny garage in a side-street. Only there, as he began a whispered discussion with a man in a stained sweatshirt, did she protest. But Marcel answered sharply:

“Let me run this. Do you think you can teach me anything about this racket?” Then he said to the other, “O.K., I’ll wait, Al. Between friends, right?”

A few minutes later they got into a run-down Ford. Wearing a jacket, now, but no shirt, Al drove. He dropped them off in front of the garden, on the Île Saint-Louis side, as Séverine had instructed him; she knew Pierre would come through the Norte-Dame courtyard.

“Stay here till we’re ready,” Marcel said as he got out.

Al complained. “Only two guys in the world I’d take this chance for—you and Hippolyte.”

Séverine and Marcel went into the garden.

“Now then,” he said, “let’s have it.”

Séverine glanced at her watch. Not even noon yet. There was time.

“A man came to Mme Anaïs’ house the last time I was there. One of my husband’s friends. At twelve-thirty he’s going to tell him everything.”

“Because he couldn’t have you?”

“If only that were it.”

“The sonofabitch,” swore Marcel.

Then in a cold, unnatural tone of voice:

“You don’t want him talking, I get it. If only you’d have told me sooner, it could have been fixed that much easier.”

“I only knew this morning.”

He was touched by the realization that she’d come straight to him, without hesitation.

“Take it easy,” he said. “I’ll fix it.”

He led her to a bench behind a clump of trees, which completely hid them from the square side of Notre-Dame. He lit a cigarette. They sat in silence.

“After it’s over?” he asked her. “Yeah, what about it? If everything works out like you want, you’ll be mine? You won’t be anyone else’s? Of course, I’m not talking about your husband.”

She resolutely nodded her head. Who besides this man had come to her aid?

Marcel smoked on, without another word. From time to time his look measured the distance between their bench and the grilled gate opening on the square; then the distance between themselves and the car whose engine could be heard intermittently. Deprived of strength, of thought itself, Séverine waited. She had never felt less mistress of herself, nor felt so with greater resignation.

“Twelve twenty-five.” Marcel stood up. “Take a good look and point him out to me quickly.”

Séverine turned, started to tremble. Husson was standing about a hundred yards away, in a little alley leading to the gate Pierre would be coming through. Marcel did not mistake this trembling.

“He’s there?” he asked. “Show me.”

Séverine’s courage failed her. On Marcel’s forehead she saw the same sign that had shown there that evening in Les Halles.

“Start talking,” he ordered. “You don’t realize.…”

“No, no, let’s go,” Séverine stammered.

All the same she didn’t move. Striding from under the shadow of the cathedral Pierre entered the garden. Husson started toward him.

“That man, the thin one, going to meet my husband,” she whispered.

Then, savagely, like someone releasing a killer-dog: “Go, Marcel. Go.”

He bent a little. The curve of his neck became so expressive Séverine started running wildly. Instinctively she ran in the opposite direction to that Marcel had taken. Mindlessly, she passed through the gate by which she and Marcel had entered. Al was waiting there with his car.

“Get in,” he said, with contempt.

They listened. They could hear mingled cries. People were all rushing to one spot. Al kept on waiting.

The noise grew. A police sergeant ran by. Al floored the accelerator.

When Husson wrote his letter to Pierre he guessed it would surprise him and that he’d mention it to Séverine. He felt certain she’d call him or even come to see him. He proposed to indulge in a conquest of her stubborn pride, and then give up a game he was already beginning to find tiresome and a trifle shameful. But the morning went by without a word from Séverine. He called her up. She’d gone out. At that point he hesitated. Should he go to the Notre-Dame garden? Of course, he’d prepared a plausible enough story to tell Pierre, but Séverine’s silence filled him with an indefinable sense of danger. And for that very reason he decided to go.

Like many people who are essentially noble enough, but who are eaten within by a secret blight, Husson sought to fight free of his evil genius by deploying as intensely as possible the good qualities he did have. Therefore, since this meeting made him uneasy, it was necessary that he should keep it.

The end result of these conflicts was that he got to the garden a few minutes before the agreed-upon hour. He had hardly entered the little alleyway with its view over the left bank before he caught sight of Pierre. He went straight toward him.

It was at that moment that Marcel sprang forward.

Even if Marcel’s resolution had been insufficiently powerful, Séverine’s murderous, passionate cry would have made him strike by its very vehemence. It was a cry which, with men like Marcel and Hippolyte, stiffened the spirit for battle, heated the still-fearful blood. And since he’d been lucky so far in a number of difficult affairs like this, nothing could hold him back.

He ran with his hand gripping the handle of the switch-blade in his pocket. He was thinking lucidly: I’ll get him, make that plot of grass, and before anyone knows what’s hit him Al’ll be on his way. He trusted his own strength and agility, and his driver’s skill. But he hadn’t calculated on Pierre’s intervention, nor on his intended victim’s uneasiness.

As he went to meet his friend, Pierre saw a man rushing at Husson. He made a violent sign of warning. Husson whirled and drew back in a motion that could never have been so fast if his instinct hadn’t been on the alert: there was a flash in front of his face. Supple as an animal, Marcel recovered his balance and raised his knife again. But Pierre had thrown himself forward: he saw a contracted face, a metal snarl. It was Pierre who received the blow, which caught him in the temple.

Still Marcel might have got away. But he realized he’d stabbed Séverine’s husband. Although the shock caused him to hesitate for only a second, that was enough. As Pierre staggered back Husson grabbed the wrist holding the darkened blade. Marcel squirmed to break free, but that fleshless body had unusual strength. Moreover, passers-by were running up and the first police whistles rang in his ears. Marcel gave himself up. At his feet lay a motionless body.

X

After a series of detours, much retracing of tracks, and innumerable stops Al pulled up at the Place de la Bastille.

“Now get lost,” he told Séverine.

She didn’t understand.

“Get out,” he said threateningly. “And watch you don’t get picked up.”

Séverine obeyed passively. As the car was about to take off she asked, “And Marcel?”

He glared at her, but it was so obvious she spoke in good faith that he merely growled, “Read it in the papers tonight. And tell yourself he did it for you.”

The Ford vanished.

“I have to go home,” Séverine said loudly.

Two passers-by turned to look at the young woman talking to herself. Séverine dragged herself out of her stupor. Her conscious life seemed to have stopped the moment Marcel got ready to strike. The aimless ride in the jolting car seemed to have numbed her. She had imagined she was driving for eternity in that questionable vehicle, beside the silent Al cramped over his wheel. Now she had to continue an advance in an unknown direction. In unleasing Marcel, she pictured herself throwing up a wall, digging a precipice, putting some impassible barrier between herself and her future. She was convinced that no living creature could have broken the fatal chain of events. Groping painfully forward through the murky agony of her chaotic soul, she tried to link what she’d lived through with what lay ahead.

She was sure Marcel had killed; the fact caused her no emotion. Her task was to decipher the meaning of those abstract symbols: the actions of men and of herself. Marcel had killed Husson. Husson had been going to tell Pierre what Pierre must never know: that had been the cause of all her terrors. Now Husson wouldn’t talk. Thus she had no more to fear. She could see Pierre again. She had to, in fact. It was lunch time.

Once back home Séverine hadn’t the energy left to be surprised that Pierre wasn’t in. She stretched out in bed and fell asleep immediately. The doorbell, ringing harshly through the still apartment at about two o’clock, didn’t wake her. She didn’t hear her maid knock and come in.

“Madame, madame,” the maid exclaimed more and more loudly, till Séverine’s eyes opened, “there’s a doctor outside and he’s got very serious news about Monsieur.”

Brief as it had been, Séverine’s sleep had brought back all her anguish; her first thought was that Husson had had time to talk before dying, and that Pierre had no desire to return home.

“I don’t want to see anyone,” she said.

“Please, madame, you must.” The maid’s tone was so insistent Séverine suddenly got up and went into the living-room.

The intern from Pierre’s hospital was very pale.

“Madame,” he began, “there’s been an unfortunate accident.”

He stopped, searching for words, hoping for some interruption. It didn’t come. Séverine’s rigidity frightened him.

“Please don’t be alarmed, it’s nothing critical,” he went on hurriedly. “What happened … well, Sérizy was stabbed in the temple.”

“Who?”

She threw herself at the intern so violently that he barely dared repeat, “Sérizy.”

“My husband? Pierre? You must be mistaken.”

“I’ve been working under him for a year, madame,” the intern said sadly, “and I have the same affection for him we all have there … yes, he was stabbed; the man who did it has already been arrested. They brought your husband straight into emergency. Of course, he still hasn’t recovered consciousness but his heart … there’s a good chance he’ll get through. Professor Henri, our director, has been told about it. He’ll be there now. I’ll go with you, madame.”

Even when they were in front of the hospital Séverine couldn’t concede that here, in the same building in which he’d looked after so many suffering bodies, Pierre himself was now no more than a body in the care of men in white coats. She recognized the porch under which she’d waited for him after her first visit to the rue Virène. The memory merely seemed to confirm her sense of unreality: only bad dreams could close a circle as totally as that.

Then she saw Professor Henri, and her protective confusion vanished. They had dined with him several times, and she recalled the pleasure Pierre had taken in repeating the word “director” to him, in mingled affection and deference. The word returned to her now, Pierre’s intonation intact; it all but made her faint, for if the professor was really there, if he was walking toward her … Séverine’s thoughts were cut short. The surgeon was holding her hands.

He was a small, wiry man who had retained his youthful appearance. Because of this, he had great confidence and a scorn for the amenities.

“My dear lady, please don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll answer for Pierre’s life. As far as anything else goes I’ll know tomorrow.”

“Can I see him?”

“Of course. He’s still in a coma. As I say, I’ll know better tomorrow.”

The intern took Séverine to Pierre’s room. She entered firmly but, despite what her mind had accepted in the past few minutes, she couldn’t get herself past the middle of the room. It wasn’t his bandaged forehead or the waxy appearance of the face. It was his total immobility and motionless features, more than asleep yet less than dead. This flaccid impotence made Séverine shudder, not only with pity and fear, but with a sort of ghastly reluctance—and also (though she didn’t admit it to herself) revulsion. Was this lifeless, flabby, lump, mouth hanging wide and eyelids fallen rather than lowered, the firm alert face of her husband? An uncouth relaxation lay upon his flesh which, only that morning, had glowed with bountiful youth.

Séverine couldn’t tell what threatened Pierre, but his features frightened her own animal instinct for good health; they told her that the punishment against which she’d armed a brutal lover was taking a far crueler form than anything she had ever dreamt of.

“I don’t know anything any more,” she whispered. “I must go.”

At the door a man was waiting for her.

“Very sorry to have to question you at such a painful moment, Madame Sérizy, but I’ve been put in charge of the inquiry, you see. Your husband’s still unable to talk. We wondered if you could help us.”

Séverine leaned against the wall. Something she hadn’t thought of before dizzied her. She was Marcel’s accomplice, they’d come to arrest her.

“Oh look,” said the intern, “what do you want her to say, after all? Monsieur Husson has told you that he was the one attacked, and that Doctor Sérizy was stabbed by accident.”

He took the plain-clothesman to one side and added softly: “I know it’s your duty, but give the poor woman a chance. At least for a little while. They were so very much in love with each other, you can see she can hardly stand up.”

Séverine watched the policeman leave. It was hard for her to realize she was free. She asked shyly:

“You mentioned Husson, you’ve seen him then?”

“But I told you, madame.…”

Dimly she recollected that during the ride to the hospital the intern had given her a recital of facts, which hadn’t penetrated her consciousness. She made him repeat them. Only then, and with terrifying clarity, did she understand the consequences of that leap she’d seen building up in Marcel’s muscles. She bit her lips so as not to cry out—“I made him do it, me, me.”

And as if this understanding of her responsibility had suddenly sharpened Pierre’s danger she murmured:

“He’s going to die.”

“I assure you he isn’t,” returned the intern. “Please calm down. You heard what the director said. Sérizy will recover, he’s going to be all right.”

“Why doesn’t he move then?”

“That’s quite usual after a shock of that nature. But he’ll live, I swear it.”

She felt the assurance couldn’t be false, or Pierre’s friend would have shown more anxiety himself. But she didn’t want to question him any further. What did a long and painful period of looking after Pierre matter, beside the single fact—he wasn’t going to die.

Séverine spent the rest of the day beside her husband. He remained motionless. At times she would bend over him, seized with terror, listening to his heart. It beat softly on. Then, reassured, she tried not to ask herself what such a strange surrender of all his muscles meant.

When evening fell Professor Henri changed the dressing and examined the wound. Despite herself Séverine gazed at that somber gash. From it had flowed the most precious blood in all the world, and what more precious still she didn’t know. She knew the weapon that had made that hole. When he undressed Marcel always put his revolver under the pillow and then his horn-handled knife. Séverine had held it in her hand, had toyed with the switch that released the blade.

Her teeth chattered.

“It’d be much better if you’d try to get some sleep at home,” the professor told her. “Sérizy’ll be well looked after, I’ll answer for that. And you’ll need all your strength tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the important day … I don’t mean as regards his life but … well, we’ll see. Why don’t you go and get some rest.”

She obeyed with a kind of concealed satisfaction. But she didn’t return to the apartment. A secret irresistible desire had formed within her. She only recognized it when she was actually giving the cab-driver Husson’s address. Some law of psychological gravity led her to the source of all, the man with whom she thought the affair would end, and the only being who knew her whole story.

Directly she was in Husson’s presence she saw he’d been expecting her.

“Yes, I knew it,” he said absently.

He took her into a quiet luxurious living-room. Though it was the middle of summer, logs blazed in the hearth. Husson sat in front of the fire, his long hands dangling.

“There’s no news, is there?” he inquired in the same queerly abstracted tone. “I was just calling the hospital. It’s the price of my life lying there, you know.”

Séverine remained silent, but a strange well-being went through her. Husson’s company was the only one she could tolerate at the moment, his words alone she could listen to.

He stared alternately at the fire and then at his hands, which he held in front of the flames. It was as if he’d have liked to melt them there. He went on:

“You know, I was sure he wasn’t going to die, as soon as he fell. No, there was something worse in the air.”

Wearily, he raised his eyes to Séverine’s.

“You really thought I’d tell him?”

A flutter of her eye-lids was his only answer.

“How you loved him,” Husson went on after a pause. “Someone like me can’t really understand that, I suppose … so I made my mistake. I didn’t foresee what an emotion like that might lead to.…”

Séverine sat listening attentively. He couldn’t understand the best side of me, she was thinking. And Pierre couldn’t understand the worst … if only he’d guessed, maybe he’d have held me back or watched me more closely. But if he’d guessed, he wouldn’t have been Pierre.

“And the other man, with that knife of his,” Husson said suddenly, “what passion too.”

He shuddered, hugging the fire more closely. His head shook with a sorrow exceeding the circumstances.

He murmured: “I’m the only one who wasn’t motivated by something noble. Yet you three were wounded to death and I got off free. Why? In the name of what, for God’s sake? So that I could begin my little experiments over again?”

He laughed weakly. Then he continued thoughtfully:

“See how well we get on tonight. In this whole wide world there isn’t anyone this evening—even the most ardent lover—who needs you more than I do. And vice versa.”

“Tell me,” Séverine asked him, “when you first caught sight of Marcel, you knew he was sent by me?”

“By us,” Husson corrected her gently.

Then he gave himself up to vague thoughts. The sound of easy breathing drew his attention. Séverine had fallen asleep on the sofa.

A sleep, Husson reminded himself, wrung from how many torments of insomnia. And tomorrow.…

He thought of Professor Henri’s fears, of the official inquiry that would be held. How could this poor broken child defend what remained of her sanity? He’d help her, of course, but could he save her?

He went to her. She was sleeping so freshly, so innocently. Was this the woman he’d seen stretched out on a red coverlet in the house to which, one sunny morning, he himself had sent her? But could he say that he was now the same man who’d answered Belle de Jour’s wretched pleading with a perversely evasive gesture? It was, in fact, that gesture which had pierced Pierre’s forehead. Séverine’s chaste face was full of its own mystery, that quality he’d observed so often, with such keen hopeless avidity. Tenderly he touched her hair; then he went and got the softest blanket he could find and put it gently over this exhausted younger sister.

Séverine selpt soundly till nine in the morning. She woke feeling a purely physical sense of recuperation. But almost instantly she regretted the sleep she’d had. It set her up for her anguish again, for her only agony now: how Pierre was. Everything that had led her to visit Husson seemed hopelessly miserable today. Coming had been a weakness on her part, she’d been neurotic. She was ashamed, now, of their conversation, which had seemed to make such sense the night before.

Husson came in. He too felt embarrassed. He’d slept well also; his shadows had fled, life had taken another step forward. And his view of things had thereby been changed. His words and gestures of the previous evening, prompted by a vision of the great fatal laws, were now no more than embarrassing symptoms of hypersensitivity.

“I have news,” he said. “His life’s no longer in danger, he’s even come to, but.…”

Séverine didn’t wait to listen to anything else. Pierre had recovered consciousness and she hadn’t been there to welcome his first moments of light. How badly he must be needing her.

Throughout the ride she imagined what Pierre’s smile would be like when he saw her, how he would move towards her, feebly, to be sure, maybe even imperceptibly, but enough for her to be able to amplify, and reconstruct, the impulse. Her tormented journey was nearing its end. He’d get well again, she’d take him away somewhere. Once again they’d know days in the shade of great trees, games on the sand, mountain songs on the smooth snow. He’d smile at her again, hold his hands out toward her.

Pierre’s eyes were indeed open, but he didn’t recognize his wife. At least so she thought. How else could she explain the lack not only of any movement, but also of any expression at all, of that faint flicker which stirs even a dying man approached by his beloved. Pierre didn’t recognize her. It was an unspeakable shock for Séverine.

Less dreadful, perhaps, than the one that made her flinch a moment later. She bent over Pierre, and in the depths of his eyes she detected a quiver, a trembling flame, a cry, an endless lament. It could only be addressed to her; then why, if he did know who she was, such terrifying silence and rigidity? She drew back quickly, stared at the nurse, the intern. They lowered their eyes.

“Pierre, Pierre, my dear darling,” she half-screamed, “give me a word, just a sound, something, anything, I.…”

“I beg you to keep calm for his sake,” the intern got out with difficulty. “We think he can hear all right.”

“But what’s wrong with him?” she moaned. “No, don’t tell me.”

What could even the most learned of all these people know? She alone knew every plane of that face. She alone could penetrate its frightful secret. Controlling her terror Séverine went back to the bed, took hold of her husband’s head and drew it passionately to her. But her numbed hands laid it back on the pillow again. His features hadn’t stirred. They were just as slack as the night before.

Still, Pierre’s stare sustained her. Those clear eyes which she’d known smiling and solemn, thoughtful and loving, were alive. What was she afraid of? He was too weak to move, or make a sound. She’d been absurd to be surprised by that, and cowardly to torture him with her cries and pleas.

“My darling, you’ll get better,” she said. “Your friends have told you so, haven’t they, and your director. You’ll see how quickly it’ll happen.”

She stopped and couldn’t keep from asking in an agonized voice, “Pierre, do you hear me? Just a sign so I’ll know … the smallest sign, darling.…”

A superhuman effort darkened the wounded man’s eyes, but nothing rose to the surface of his face. And Séverine began to suspect what the constraint of the old surgeon and his students meant. Without that change of light in Pierre’s eyes she might have deluded herself. But it was only too plain—Pierre wanted to speak and move, but there were bonds on his flesh.

For a long time Séverine bent over those eyes, the sole remaining voice of a deep and loving intelligence. She talked to them, asked questions and tried to read a reply in their wavering light. Finally, to avoid bursting into tears, she left the room.

The intern followed her. In the corridor he said:

“You mustn’t give up hope, madame. Only time can tell for sure what was affected.

“But don’t tell me he’s going to stay like this for ever. It’s impossible. It’s worse than.…”

Suddenly she remembered Husson’s words—there was something worse in the air—and was silent.

“During the war,” the young intern was saying without much conviction, “there were cases of total recovery from paralysis.”

“Paralysis,” Séverine repeated dully.

As long as she hadn’t known the medical word for Pierre’s immobility, it had seemed somehow less disastrous. The affliction belonged to him, all by himself; it was in his power. Once labeled, however, he entered an anonymous category, subject to the dreary laws of all.

“Now that you know the truth,” went on the intern, “may I offer a word of advice. Don’t talk to him too much. Make him realize as little as possible.…”

“Pierre!”

“I agree. With Sérizy it will be doubly difficult, but all the same we ought to be able to numb his intellect a bit. We’ve done it with others, I assure you. In sickness even the liveliest minds.…”

“No, I don’t want to,” Séverine interrupted nearly savagely. “He isn’t impaired at all. He’s still Pierre. If you don’t think so, give him to me. I’ll be able to do it.”

There was such absolute determination, such overpowering love in Séverine’s face that the intern felt like shaking her hand, as he might that of a gallant fighter.

She never left his room. Day and night she belonged to those eyes that glowed like lost lanterns. Her own life was abolished. For what could equal the drama of the closed, desperate struggle that was going on within the immobile body powerless to transmit its will? And what a matchless victory Séverine felt she had won on the morning she thought she saw Pierre’s lips tremble. A scarcely visible vibration, but she was certain she had seen it. Later in the day the trembling recurred, grew stronger. Professor Henri stroked his patient’s forehead more warmly than he had the night before.

The next morning Pierre could form syllables, his weak fingers were able to make folds in the sheets. A boundless song poured through Séverine’s soul. She was now convinced that a complete cure would come about, and the doctors’ cautious attitude only irritated her. At the end of a week she had wrung from them an authorization to take Pierre home. The wound had closed. She’d answer for the rest. For even if the lower part of his body so far remained paralyzed, he could move his arms and torso—in an uncontrolled way, true, but enough to satisfy Séverine. Moreover, Pierre had begun to be able to speak relatively well, and two experiments had proved that he could read.

Never would Séverine have suspected that the simple act of bringing home a crippled man could have given her so much unadulterated joy. She had hated to see Pierre’s lips making effort after effort to formulate a single word; had hated to see him make a spasmodic gesture whenever he wanted to move his hand. Everything would get better now that he was back in his own room, now that he had smiled at the sight of his books —a smile the more touching for being incomplete. All that was needed now was patience. Séverine felt warmly and infinitely patient, and ready to triumph over everything.

She’d completely forgotten that the woman who planned to nurse Pierre back to health had a double within her, who was a prostitute and murderess. She was abruptly reminded the following day.

The gentle young maid who had worked for the Sérizys since their marriage came to her, obviously embarrassed.

“I didn’t want to disturb you, madame, so long as you were at the hospital, and I didn’t want to the first day Monsieur came back, but—you’ve seen the papers?”

Séverine answered truthfully, “No.”

“I see,” the maid continued with evident relief. “If you’d seen the photos of the murderer.…”

Séverine let her continue, but she heard nothing more. She had no need to. Her maid had recognized Marcel from the photographs in the papers.

The room and its furnishings, and the still-speaking maid (Séverine heard vaguely “gold mouth”), all started to sway heavily and steadily. She felt herself swaying. She had to sit down.

“I see you’re just as much amazed as I was, madame,” concluded the maid. “I didn’t want to say anything to anyone about it before talking to you, but now I must tell the police.”

Séverine was sorry she had come home at all. Cut off from the outside world as well as from her own past, she’d had the right of sanctuary at the hospital. How utterly mad she had been to imagine the invisible ten-tacles around her severed forever. They were entangling her again. Oh, hadn’t she suffered enough? What further ransom did they want of her?

“It’s true, isn’t it,” the maid asked, “I ought to, oughtn’t I?”

“Naturally,” Séverine got out without knowing what she was saying.

At once she realized the results of her reply—she’d be subjected to an interrogation, accused of complicity, imprisoned. And Pierre, barely free of his fleshly coffin, would learn the story—for not knowing which she’d made him pay so dearly. It was too absurd.

“Wait … no, you mustn’t,” Séverine exclaimed.

The maid looked surprised. Her suspicion helped Séverine calm down a little.

“Yes, of course … testimony like that of yours, of ours,” she corrected herself forcibly, “it won’t lose anything by waiting two or three days now. But for the moment I can’t get away, you can see that for yourself.”

“As you say, madame, but I feel badly for having delayed so long already.”

Once more that sensation she’d hoped to feel no more, the despair of a hunted animal, filled Séverine. Once more she felt herself driven, cornered, at bay. And now it was no longer a man after her, but a mob society had trained for hunting her. Who would there be to take care of Pierre, to smile at him, amuse him, feed him, put him to sleep? All she asked was to be allowed this humble duty. And it was going to be refused her.

The idea of death entered her mind; at this point she would have welcomed the icy deliverer with all her exhausted soul. But, thinking she heard a sound in Pierre’s room, her whole being was suddenly prepared to struggle—threatened love, dark anger, a furious defiance.

“I’ll go on to the very end,” she murmured, “but they mustn’t hurt him.”

She called Husson and asked him to come over.

My accomplice, she thought. He knows. He’ll help me out.

Husson became extremely attentive from the moment Séverine began to speak.

“It’s worse than you think,” he said. “I see you haven’t been reading the papers. The police are on the right track.”

“They’re after me?”

“In a sense. That young man has a rather conspicuous lower jaw. The Anaïs household talked. It was easily established that your Marcel went to the rue Virène daily, and for the same person. Likewise Anaïs and the other two recognized me from those photographs I couldn’t avoid. A connection was established between my visit and your disappearance. In short, they deduce that Marcel hurled himself on me because of a girl in the whore-house. Next, several spectators, including a cop, said they saw a woman getting away in a car at the moment of the attempt. Other passers-by say they noticed the car parked at the gate, engine kept running, between twelve and twelve-thirty … The press is full of it. The story was cut out for them—an attack like that in plain daylight … Marcel and his various and sundry pseudonyms … the mysterious car, and above all this woman … There isn’t a tabloid in town that hasn’t used Belle de Jour in its headlines.”

“Faster,” Séverine said, “tell me all of it.”

“So much for what’s against you. There’s one fact in your favor, namely that in spite of all inquiries neither the car nor the driver have been picked up, and—most important—Marcel won’t talk. Which is pretty heroic on his part since if he did he’d be let off lightly. But he’s going to keep quiet, that’s clear enough. In other words, though the material facts they’ve got hold of are correct, their moral theories are hopelessly mistaken. At present the police, the press, the law, all believe Belle de Jour to be … if you’ll forgive my.…”

“Say it. What do you think it matters to me?”

Husson admired the way she’d given up all thought of herself in her love for Pierre (but the other man, the pimp, wasn’t he risking imprisonment for love of her?). He went on:

Everyone thinks Belle de Jour is a whore. And since you left no trace of your real identity in the rue Virène, there’s no foreseeable chance that any connection will be established between Belle de Jour and you. But you understand that if your maid breathes a single word, if the faintest thread leads here, you’re lost.”

“But I’d deny … I’d say she was lying … she was trying to hit back at me … I’d.…”

“Please,” said Husson, taking her hands. “We’ve reached a point at which you simply have to keep hold of all your common sense. Your maid wouldn’t be credited alone, true, but if Anaïs recognized you, and the others.…”

“Charlotte … Mathilde,” Séverine murmured, “and then … all those men.”

She started to list their names as if some dread clamor of wind, of which she was only the echo, were conducting them up to her: Adolphe … Léon … André … Louis … others, so many, many others.

“And it’ll all be in the papers,” she said slowly, “and Pierre will read it, because he can read now, you know, I was so happy he could read.”

She smiled then, a sudden grin that oddly recalled a mouth filled with gold, and whispered:

“She won’t talk.”

Séverine tried to take her hands out of Husson’s hold. He gripped them harder, said in a low tone:

“Look, Marcel’s in prison. By yourself you can’t possibly.…”

She shuddered. It was true. She’d actually wanted.…

“Do you think a fat sum of money might do the trick?” asked Husson.

“No. I’ve had her for ages. I know her through and through. I used to have only absolutely honest people around me.”

“So?”

Husson released Séverine’s hands, since his own had started to tremble. He left without asking to see Pierre.

After Professor Henri’s daily visit, Séverine called in her maid. She told her the doctor had advised her not to go out for some time; she begged the girl not to hand over her evidence or, at least, to postpone doing so indefinitely. All she got out of the maid, who was now thoroughly suspicious, was the promise of a week’s delay.

In the days immediately prior to the crime Séverine had thought nothing could exceed her suffering. She learnt now that pain is boundless. More than once she recalled a foreign proverb which Pierre had translated for her: “Oh God, do not give man all he is capable of suffering.” In truth, Séverine felt her martyrdom extending into infinity. Every hour brought her some unsuspected pang, since every hour showed her more clearly Pierre’s complete need of her.

His wan smile and pathetically happy eyes whenever he saw her had been wonderful discoveries for her at the hospital; now they turned into awful accusations. What would become of her when she was arrested? When Pierre found out. When he learnt that, not content with tarnishing his love, she’d cut down all his strength and youth with the knife of a lover picked up in a whore-house.

At least Pierre had then had a faultless body, a good job, with which to defend himself. Perhaps she’d die; or, if she lacked the courage for that, she might be able to rejoin Marcel, be soon buried in the mud of a classless existence. In the rue Virène she’d heard talk of women entangled in that way, passed memories rising intermittently to the surface of their drugged or alcoholic degradation.

Drugs or alcohol … she might have had recourse to them, too; she felt the need enough during those leaden days. But she couldn’t possibly think of such a thing. She had to appear calm and contented whenever she was with Pierre, and she had to be with him constantly. He didn’t require her to be present, he didn’t even ask her to be. But whenever she left his room, the worried fixity of that lost face was itself sufficient appeal.

She went into the next room to read the papers. They fascinated her now. They were full of information about her, in about equal parts of fantasy and truth. Now that everything else about the crime was known, the enigma of Belle de Jour had become the focus of interest. Reporters had questioned Madame Anaïs and her girls. The clothes Belle de Jour had worn in the rue Virène were minutely described, her hours of attendance discussed. Eventually a reporter rang the Sérizys’ doorbell.

Séverine imagined she’d been found out, but the young man only wanted a report of Pierre’s progress. It was his visit that made Séverine realize her husband wasn’t getting any better. And that same evening Professor Henri said with unusual gentleness:

“I’m afraid Sérizy’s going to stay just about as he is now. Possibly there’ll be an improvement in his speech, in control of the neck and arm muscles; but from the pelvis down the body’s dead.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Séverine said.

She wanted to burst into wild, convulsive laughter. This was the state to which she’d reduced Pierre: he could no longer live like a man, but he could suffer with the best of them.

The next day, having been given Professor Henri’s permission to read, Pierre asked to see the papers.

“He thinks about it too much for us to keep the papers away from him,” the Professor had told Séverine.

And Pierre, seeing his wife’s fearful hesitation, had articulated the words:

“I’m not afraid.…”

He wanted to add “darling” but it was a word he hadn’t yet succeeded in forming.

His hands wandered erratically before he found what he wanted to see; Séverine had to turn the pages for him. Belle de Jour was the center of attention, and Pierre, with a sick man’s curiosity, grew interested in this woman on whose account he’d been so pointlessly stabbed. He couldn’t talk very much, but each time he read that name his expressive eyes turned to Séverine. His look tortured her. Soon those same eyes, more full of her than ever, would see the photograph of his wife under the notorious nickname. Her time was running out. She knew the term of her freedom—Tuesday morning the District Attorney’s office would have her maid’s evidence. And today was already Friday.

On Sunday her maid came to tell her that she was wanted on the telephone.

“It’s a Monsieur Hippolyte,” she pronounced distastefully, “and he sounded like a character too.”

Séverine paused before picking up the receiver. What was he going to tell her? By how much was her wretched respite to be curtailed? Terror at the idea of setting off another disaster possessed her. Without giving any explanation, Hippolyte insisted on seeing Séverine right away, at the lake jetty in the Bois de Boulogne.

She found Hippolyte dully contemplating the ripples on the surface of the water. His shoulders hung a little, something that would have seemed impossible two weeks before. His cheeks were grey. As Séverine greeted him his vast frame quivered slightly, his lips contracted in a destructive crease. But these signs disappeared immediately.

“Get in,” he said in a dead voice, pointing to a boat he’d hired.

Séverine was convinced he was going to kill her. A great peace closed upon her. Hippolyte pulled at the oars. He hardly exerted himself, but his strength sent them out to the center of the lake. He let go the oars, and in the tired voice he maintained throughout their conversation he said:

“We can talk here. In a bar someone would have turned us in. But here.…”

Their boat was lost among a dozen others, amid holiday laughter. It was a summer Sunday.

“Marcel wanted me to see you,” Hippolyte continued, “and to tell you to keep calm. He won’t give you away. That was all his idea, see. If it was me, I’d have squealed right away, I don’t mind telling you. He’s got a good lawyer, I saw to that. With Belle de Jour in court he was O.K. Unpremeditated. Passion of the moment. O.K. And I’d have squealed on you in spite of him, even, only he told me if I did he’d tell about the two guys he killed. And he’d do it, too. He’s that crazy.”

He ground his jaws, which seemed less hard than they had been. He sighed:

“You’re lucky, you know it? Al saved your skin, and me, I keep my mouth shut. Now Marcel wants for me to tell you wait for him. He’ll get out. He’ll come back. You’ll see. We’ll give him a hand. He wants you to stay his woman, know what I mean.”

Hippolyte stared harshly at Séverine. She moaned:

“What’s the use? The day after tomorrow Juliette’s going to the police and I’ll be arrested.”

“Who’s this Juliette?”

“My maid. She saw Marcel in my apartment.”

“Wait a minute,” Hippolyte said.

There followed a profound meditation. Without his having anything to do with it, a surprise witness was going to disclose the identity of Belle de Jour. Marcel’s interests and honor would be safe. But would he accept neutrality from Hippolyte? Might he not take vengeance, in the heat of his anger, as he’d promised? For several long minutes Hippolyte summed up these conflicting possibilities and also his duty as a friend. Séverine didn’t know it, but her fate was being played out.

“So she thinks she’s going to the cops,” Hippolyte said finally. “That wouldn’t change anything if I didn’t want it to. I’ve got Anaïs and her girls right in my hand.

All you’d have to do would be deny it, you’d be believed before your maid. But she won’t go. It’d be better if she didn’t go.”

Séverine said in a whisper, “You mean, you’ll.…”

“Don’t be scared. I don’t hit often, only when I have to. No, I’ll just talk to her. That’ll be enough. Just like I’d have talked with the other one, the guy Marcel missed.”

He was swinging the boat back to the landing-platform. Before coming alongside he asked her: “Any message for Marcel?”

Séverine looked Hippolyte straight in the face.

“Please tell him,” she said, “that after my husband there’s no one in the world I love more.”

Her tone seemed to touch Hippolyte. He shook his head. “Ah, that husband of yours, I read how he’s half done for … and I once said you were lucky! The whole thing’s come out bad. But any way, you don’t have to bother about Juliette any more. Now go and take care of your cripple and don’t worry, poor girl.”

When she got back Séverine found Professor Henri at Pierre’s bedside.

“I took the opportunity of a Sunday free to be with Sérizy a bit,” said the surgeon. “I told him where he stood. In a couple of weeks’ time you must take him south. The sun is kind to the muscles.”

“Darling, aren’t you glad?” she asked when they were alone together again.

She tried to put cheerfulness into her words, but the scene she’d just been through robbed her voice of resonance. Strange—she didn’t feel the slightest sensation of relief. She trusted Hippolyte’s word implicity—in fact, Juliette left the following morning without waiting for her pay—but gaining the security she’d so despaired of achieving filled her with no joy. It only scooped a shapeless, nameless hollow inside her, into which everything sank. The runner who has put out too violent a final effort falls, in the same way, beside the winning-post he’s just passed.

Painfully she repeated, “You are glad, aren’t you?”

Pierre made no reply. It was growing dark, she had difficulty seeing the reactions of his feebly expressive face. She switched on the light, sat down beside those dead legs and, as always, questioned her husband’s eyes.

And then Séverine knew a crueler suffering than any that had ever wrung her heart. Embarrassment … worse, shame was what she saw in those trembling, boyish, faithful eyes. Shame for his ruined body, shame for having always to be looked after by her, the one person he himself had so dearly protected.

“Pierre,” she stammered out, “my darling, I’m absolutely happy with you.”

He tried to shake his head, scarcely succeeded in doing so and mumbled between twisted lips—“Poor … poor … south … the small car … sorry.”

“Please, Pierre, no more, no more.”

It was he who was asking her forgiveness, and all his life long, she knew now, he’d think himself a burden on her and long to die to free her from it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Séverine cried out suddenly. “I can’t bear.…”

She pressed her face against the chest that had once been so warm and strong. Was the whole struggle and its miraculous ending going to turn against Pierre then! She would seem purer and purer to him and he would simply suffer the more at causing her so much trouble, she … she who’d been.…

She knew no more. She wanted only to know where the real good, and true salvation lay. She longed for lightning, a shock, a thunderbolt.

In her feverish despair, pressing closer and closer against Pierre, she felt his clumsy hands trying to stroke her hair. Those invalid fingers were intolerably trusting, they decided the struggle. Séverine had been able to endure it all, but this was beyond her. She told him.

How is it possible to explain her motive? The impossibility of showing a false virtue to the man she loved so infinitely? A less noble need to confess? Or a hidden hope of being pardoned despite it all, and of living out her life without the weight of a horrible secret upon her? Who could assess the powers that moved and melted a human heart after such dreadful disturbances, and forced its secrets onto trembling lips?

Three years have now gone by. Séverine and Pierre live over a quiet little beach. But since the day Séverine spoke, she has not heard her husband’s voice.

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