Joseph
They were both tipsy, quite tipsy, the little Baroness Andrée de Fraisières and the little Comtesse Noëmi de Gardens.
They had dined alone together in the many-windowed morning room looking out over the sea. Through the open windows came the soft breeze of a summer evening, warm and cool at once, a breeze with the tang of the sea in it. The two young women, lying at full length in their long chairs, were now sipping chartreuse and smoking cigarettes, and regaling one another with intimate confidences, confidences that only their charming and amazing intoxication could bring to their lips.
Their husbands had returned to Paris that afternoon, leaving them alone at the deserted little seaside place they had chosen in order to avoid the attentions of the floating crowd of gay young men at the fashionable resorts. Away five days out of seven, the two men feared the country excursions, the picnic lunches, the swimming-lessons, and the rapid acquaintances that spring up in the holiday atmosphere of seaside towns. Dieppe, Étretat and Trouville thus seemed places to be shunned, and they had taken a house, built and abandoned by some eccentric man, in the valley of Roqueville, near Fécamp, and had buried their wives there for the whole summer.
They were tipsy. Unable to think of any amusement, the Baroness had proposed to the Countess that they should have a special dinner, with champagne. To begin with, they had amused themselves vastly by cooking the dinner with their own hands; then they had eaten merrily and drunk hard to appease the thirst induced by the heat of the kitchen range. Now they were engaged in a chorus of frivolous nonsense, smoking cigarettes and using chartreuse as a mouthwash. And they really did not know what they were saying.
The Countess, her legs in the air on the back of a chair, was even further gone than her friend.
“To round off this sort of evening,” she was saying, “we ought to have lovers. If I’d only foreseen it earlier, I’d have sent to Paris for a couple and let you have one of them.”
“Oh, I can always find them,” replied the other; “even this evening, if I wanted one, I should have one.”
“What! At Roqueville, my dear? It must be a peasant, then.”
“No, not exactly.”
“Tell me all about it.”
“What do you want me to tell you about?”
“Your lover.”
“My dear, I couldn’t live without being loved. If no one were in love with me, I should think I was dead.”
“So should I.”
“Yes, it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Men don’t understand that; our husbands least of all!”
“No, they don’t understand in the least. But can you expect anything else? The sort of love we need is an affair of amusing episodes, attentions and gallantries. They are the food of our hearts, indispensable to our lives, quite indispensable.”
“Yes, indispensable.”
“I must feel that someone is thinking of me, always, everywhere. When I am going to sleep, or waking up, I must know that someone somewhere is in love with me, dreaming of me, desiring me. Without it I should be miserable, utterly miserable—so miserable I should be crying all the time.”
“I feel just the same.”
“It could not be otherwise. When a husband has been kind for six months, or a year, or two years, he is bound to become a brute in the end, yes, a real brute. … He gets absolutely shameless and inconsiderate, he shows himself in his true colours, he makes scenes about the bills, about every single one. You can’t love a man you’re living with all the time.”
“That’s very true.”
“Yes, isn’t it? … Now where was I? I can’t remember.”
“You were saying that all husbands are brutes!”
“Yes, so they are … all of them.”
“True.”
“And after that? …”
“What do you mean, ‘after that’?”
“What was I saying after that?”
“How do I know? You never said it.”
“But I
