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By Root 1656 0

her letters lying about. Even then, veiled as they were, she reproached me for not informing her immediately, after each of them, that I had received it: “You remember how Mme de Sévigné used to say: ‘When one is far away, one no longer laughs at letters which begin: I have received yours.’” Without referring to what distressed her most, she expressed displeasure at my lavish expenditure: “Where on earth does all your money go? It is distressing enough that, like Charles de Sévigné, you do not know what you want and are ‘two or three people at once,’ but do try at least not to be like him in spending money so that I may never have to say of you: ‘He has discovered how to spend and have nothing to show, how to lose without gambling and how to pay without clearing himself of debt.’”

I had just finished Mamma’s letter when Françoise returned to tell me that she had in the house that same rather too forward young dairymaid of whom she had spoken to me. “She can quite well take Monsieur’s letter and do his shopping for him if it’s not too far. You’ll see, she’s just like a Little Red Ridinghood.” Françoise went to fetch the girl, and I could hear her showing the way and saying: “Come along now, frightened because there’s a passage! Stuff and nonsense, I never thought you’d be such a goose. Have I got to lead you by the hand?” And Françoise, like a good and faithful servant who means to see that her master is respected as she respects him herself, had draped herself in the majesty that ennobles the procuress in the paintings of the old masters, wherein the mistress and the lover fade into insignificance by comparison.

Elstir, when he gazed at the violets, had no need to bother about what they were doing. The entry of the young dairymaid at once robbed me of my contemplative calm; I could no longer think of anything except how to give plausibility to the fable of the letter that she was to deliver and I began to write quickly without venturing to cast more than a furtive glance at her, so that I might not seem to have brought her into my room to be scrutinised. She was invested for me with that charm of the unknown which would not have existed for me in a pretty girl whom I had found in one of those houses where they attend on one. She was neither naked nor in disguise, but a genuine dairymaid, one of those whom we picture to ourselves as being so pretty when we do not have the time to approach them; she was a particle of what constitutes the eternal desire, the eternal regret of life, the twofold current of which is at length diverted, directed towards us. Twofold, for if it is a question of the unknown, of a person who, from her stature, her proportions, her indifferent glance, her haughty calm, we suspect must be divine, at the same time we want this woman to be thoroughly specialised in her profession, enabling us to escape from ourselves into that world which a special costume makes us romantically believe to be different. Indeed, if we wanted to embody in a formula the law of our amorous curiosities, we should have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman glimpsed and a woman approached and caressed. If the women of what used at one time to be called the closed houses, if prostitutes themselves (provided that we know them to be prostitutes) attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain; it is because they are not conquests. The divergence, there, is at its minimum. A whore smiles at us in the street as she will smile when she is by our side. We are sculptors. We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she has presented to us. We have seen a girl strolling, indifferent and insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious and active behind her counter, who will answer us curtly if only to avoid being subjected to the jibes of her comrades, or a fruit-vendor who barely answers us at all. Whereupon we will not rest until we can discover