“Don’t lose heart,” said Christophe. “Everyone has to face the experience of life all over again. If you are brave, it will be all right. Look outside your own circle. There must be a few honest men in France.”
“There are. I know. But they are so tedious! … And then, I tell you, I detest the circle in which I live: but I don’t think I could live outside it, now. It has become a habit. I need a certain degree of comfort, certain refinements of luxury and comfort, which, no doubt, money alone cannot provide, though it is an indispensable factor. That sounds pretty poor, I know. But I know myself: I am weak. … Please, please, don’t draw away from me because I tell you of my cowardice. Be kind and listen to me. It helps me so to talk to you! I feel that you are strong and sound: I have such confidence in you. Will you be my friend?”
“Gladly,” said Christophe. “But what can I do?”
“Listen to me, advise me, give me courage. I am often so depressed! And then I don’t know what to do. I say to myself: ‘What is the good of fighting? What’s the good of tormenting myself? One way or the other, what does it matter? Nothing and nobody matters!’ That is a dreadful condition to be in. I don’t want to get like that. Help me. Help me.”
She looked utterly downcast; she looked older by ten years: she looked at Christophe with abject, imploring eyes. He promised what she asked. Then she revived, smiled, and was gay once more.
And in the evening she was laughing and flirting as usual.
Thereafter they had many intimate conversations. They were alone together: she confided in him: he tried hard to understand and advise her: she listened to his advice, or, if necessary, to his remonstrances, gravely, attentively, like a good little girl: it was a distraction, an interest, even a support for her: she thanked him coquettishly with a depth of feeling in her eyes.—But her life was changed in nothing: it was only a distraction the more.
Her day was passed in a succession of metamorphoses. She got up very late, about midday, after a sleepless night: for she rarely went to sleep before dawn. All day long she did nothing. She would vaguely call to mind a poem, an idea, a scrap of an idea, or a face that had pleased her. She was never quite awake until about four or five in the afternoon. Till then her eyelids were heavy, her face was puffy, and she was sulky and sleepy. She would revive on the arrival of a few girlfriends as talkative as herself, and all sharing the same interest in the gossip of Paris. They chattered endlessly about love. The psychology of love: that was the unfailing topic, mixed up with dress, the indiscretions of others, and scandal. She had also a circle of idle young men to whom it was necessary to spend three hours a day among skirts: they ought to have worn them really, for they had the souls and the conversation of girls. Christophe had his hour as her confessor. At once Colette would become serious and intense. She was like the young Frenchwoman, of whom Bodley speaks, who, at the confessional, “developed a calmly prepared essay, a model of clarity and order, in which everything that was to be said was properly arranged in distinct categories.”—And after that she flung herself once more into the business of amusement. As the day went on she grew younger. In the evening she went to the theater: and there was the eternal pleasure of recognizing the same eternal faces in the audience:—her pleasure lay not in the play that was performed, but in the actors whom she knew, whose familiar mannerisms she remarked once more. And she exchanged spiteful remarks with the people who came to see her in her box about the people in the other boxes and about the actresses. The ingénue was said to have a thin voice “like sour mayonnaise,” or the great comédienne was dressed “like a lampshade.”—Or else she went out to a party: and there the pleasure, for a pretty girl like Colette, lay in being seen:—(but there were bad days: nothing is more capricious than good looks in Paris):—and she renewed her store of criticisms of people, and their dresses, and their physical defects. There was no conversation.—She would go home late, and take her time about going to bed (that was the time when she was most awake). She would dawdle about her dressing-table: skim through a book: laugh to herself at the memory of something said or done. She was bored and very unhappy. She could not go to sleep, and in the night there would come frightful moments of despair.
Christophe, who only saw Colette for a few hours at intervals, and could only be present at a few of these transformations, found it difficult to understand her at all. He wondered when she was sincere—or if she were always sincere—or if she were never sincere. Colette herself could not have told him. Like most girls who are idle and circumscribed in
