Ça Ira
I had alighted at Barvilles only because I had read in a guide (I don’t know which): “Fine gallery, two Rubenses, one Teniers, one Ribera.”
So I thought: Let’s go and see it. I will dine at the Hôtel de l’Europe, which the guide declares to be admirable, and set out again tomorrow.
The gallery was closed: it was opened only when travellers asked to see it; it was opened now at my request, and I could contemplate some obscure daubs attributed by a highly imaginative caretaker to the finest masters of painting.
Then I found myself all alone, in the long street of a small town quite strange to me, built in the very middle of illimitable plains; and, having absolutely nothing to do, I walked the whole length of this artery, I investigated several uninteresting shops; then, as it was only four o’clock, I was seized by one of those despondent moods which overwhelm the most spirited of us.
What could I do? Heaven help me, what could I do? I would have given twenty pounds for the suggestion of any conceivable amusment. Finding my mind barren of ideas, I decided merely to smoke a good cigar, and I went in search of the tobacco shop. I recognised it very shortly by its red lantern, and I went in. The saleswoman proffered me several boxes to choose from; having glanced at the cigars, which I perceived to be as bad as possible, I directed my attention, quite by chance, to the woman in charge.
She was a woman of about forty-five years of age, stout and turning grey. She had a plump, decent-looking face, which seemed to me somehow familiar. However, I did not know this lady. No, most assuredly I did not know her. But could it be that I had met her? Yes, that was possible. The face in front of me must be an acquaintance known only to me by sight, an old acquaintance since lost to view, changed now, and certainly grown much stouter.
I murmured:
“Forgive me, Madame, for staring at you like this, but I seem to have known you for a long time.”
She answered, blushing:
“It’s funny. I feel the same.”
I gave a cry:
“Oh! Ça ira!”
She flung up both hands in exaggerated despair, absolutely overwhelmed by my words, and stammered:
“Oh, suppose someone hears you.”
Then she herself cried suddenly:
“Well, I never! It’s you, George!”
Then she looked round in terror lest anyone were listening. But we were alone, quite alone.
“Ça ira.” How ever had I succeeded in recognising Ça ira, the skinny Ça ira, the forlorn Ça ira in this placid and stout official of the Government?
Ça ira. What memories woke to sudden life in my heart: Bougival, La Grenouillère, Chatou, the Restaurant Fournaise, long days spent in skiffs along the riverside, ten years of my life spent in this corner of the country, on this delightful stretch of river.
At that time we were a company of twelve, living in Galopois’ place, at Chatou, and leading there a queer enough life, always half naked and half drunk. The habits of the present-day boating man are considerably changed. Nowadays these gentlemen wear monocles.
In our set we had a score of river girls, regulars and casuals. Some Sundays we had four; on other Sundays they were all there. Some of them were, so to speak, members of the family; the others came when they had nothing better to do. Five or six lived in communal fashion on the men who had no women, and among these was Ça ira.
She was a thin and wretched girl, and walked with a limp. This lent her the charms of a grasshopper. She was nervous, awkward, graceless in everything she did. She attached herself fearfully to the meanest, the most insignificant, the most poverty-stricken of us, who would keep her for a day or a month, according to his means. How she came to be one of us no one knew. Had we met her one Sunday evening, at the Rowing-Club ball, and rounded her up in one of those drives of women that we often made? Had we asked her to a meal, seeing her sit lonely at a little table in a corner? None of us could have said; but she was one of the gang.
We had christened her Ça ira, because she was always bewailing her fate, her misfortune, and her mortifications. Every Sunday we said to her:
“Well, Ça ira, is life treating you better?”
And she made an unvarying reply:
“No, not much, but we’ll hope things will get better one of these days.”
How came this wretched, unattractive, and graceless creature to be following a profession that demands infinite attractions, confidence, skill, and beauty? A mystery. Paris, moreover, is full of harlots ugly enough to disgust a policeman.
What did she do during the remaining six days of the week? She had told us on several occasions that she went to work. At what? We did not care to know; we were quite indifferent to the way in which she managed to exist.
Later, I had almost lost sight of her. Our little company gradually dispersed, leaving the way open for another generation, to whom we also left Ça ira. I heard about it on the odd occasions when I went to lunch at the Fournaise.
Our successors, unaware of our reason for bestowing that name upon her, had supposed it to be an Oriental name and they named her Zaira: then in their turn they bequeathed their canoes and some of their river girls to the next generation.
(Generally speaking, one generation of boating men lives on the water for three years, and then leaves the Seine to take up law, medicine, or politics.)
Zaira then became Zara, and, later still, Zara was modified into Sarah. By this time, she was supposed to be a Hebrew.
The latest of all, the gentlemen with the monocles, now called her simply, “The Jewess.”
Then she disappeared.
And here I had found her again, selling tobacco at Barvilles.
I said to her:
“Well, things are better now, eh?”
She answered:
“A little better.”
I was seized with curiosity about this woman’s life.
In those earlier days, I had cared nothing at all about it; today I felt intimately concerned, held, vividly interested. I asked her:
“How did you manage to find an opportunity?”
“I don’t know. It happened just when I was least expecting it.”
“Was it at Chatou that you came upon it?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then where was it?”
“At Paris, in the boardinghouse where I lived.”
“Ah, so you did have a place in Paris?”
“Yes, I was with Madame Ravelet.”
“And who is Madame Ravelet?”
“You don’t know Madame Ravelet? Oh!”
“Indeed I don’t.”
“The dressmaker, the fashionable dressmaker in the Rue de Rivoli.”
Whereupon she began to tell me about a thousand little phases of her old life, a thousand hidden phases of Parisian life, the inside working of a fashionable dressmaker’s, the life led by these wenches, their adventures, their notions, the intimate psychology of a workgirl, that street hawk flitting along the sidewalks in the morning on her way to the shop, strolling bareheaded after the midday meal, and on her way home in the evening.
Delighted to talk of old times, she said:
“If you knew how terrible we were … and what awful things we did! We used to tell each other our adventures every day. We don’t think anything of men, I can tell you.
“As for me, the first trick I pulled off was over an umbrella. I had an old alpaca one, a disgraceful object. As I came in one rainy day, shutting it up, tall Louise says to me:
“ ‘I don’t know how you dare go out with that thing.’
“ ‘But I haven’t another, and at the moment funds are low.’
“The funds were always low!
“ ‘Go and pick one up at the Madeleine,’ she answers.
“That surprises me.
“She goes on:
“ ‘That’s where we all get them: there are as many as you want.’
“She explains the method to me. It is simple enough.
“So I go off with Irma to the Madeleine. We find the verger and explain to him that the week before we forgot an umbrella. Then he asks us if we remember what the handle was like, and I describe to him a handle with an agate knob. He takes us into a room where there were more than fifty lost umbrellas; we look through them all and we don’t find mine, but I choose a fine one, a very fine one with a handle of carved ivory. Louise went and claimed it some days later. She described it before she saw it, and they gave it to her without the least suspicion.
“For this sort of work, we dressed ourselves very smartly.”
And she laughed, opening and dropping the hinged lid of the big tobacco box.
She went on:
“Oh, we played our little games, and very queer some of them were too. You see, there were five of us in the workroom, four ordinary girls and one quite different, Irma, the lovely Irma. She looked like a gentlewoman, and she had a lover in the State Council. That did not prevent her from being very friendly with the rest of us. There was one winter when she said to us:
“ ‘You don’t know what a jolly good thing we’re going to pull off.’
“And she unfolded her idea to us.
“Irma, you know, was so shapely that she simply went to men’s heads, and she had such a figure too, and hips that made your mouth water. And now she had thought of a way for each of us to wangle a hundred francs to buy ourselves rings, and she planned it out like this:
“You know I wasn’t well off just then, and the others were no better; we hardly made a hundred francs a month in the workshop, no more. We had to make the rest on the side.
“Of course each of us had two or three regular lovers who gave us a little money, but only a little. Sometimes during our noonday stroll we managed to catch the eye of a gentleman who came back again next day; we’d play him up for a fortnight and then give in. But these fellows didn’t bring in much. And the fellows at Chatou were merely recreation. Oh, if you knew the tricks we were up to! They’d make you die of laughing. So when Irma said she’d thought of a way for us to make a hundred francs, we were wild with joy. It’s a disgraceful tale I’m going to tell you, but I don’t care; you know a thing or two, since you’ve lived at Chatou for four years. …
“Well, she said to us:
“ ‘We are going to pick up at the Opera ball the very best, most distinguished, and richest specimen of manhood in Paris. I know them all.’
“At first we couldn’t believe it would come off, because that sort of man isn’t really open to dress makers; to Irma, yes, but not to us. Oh, she had style, had Irma. You know, we always said in the workroom that if the Emperor had known her, he would certainly have married her.
“For this business, she made us put on our smartest clothes, and she said:
“ ‘Now you won’t come to the ball, you are each of you going to wait in a cab in one of the streets near by. A gentleman will come and get into your carriage. As soon as he gets in, you will embrace him as enticingly as you know how, and then you will scream to make him understand you’ve made a mistake and are expecting someone else. The pigeon will be thoroughly excited to think he’s taking another man’s place and he’ll want to insist on staying; you’ll resist him, you’ll struggle like the devil to get out … and then … you will go and have supper with him. … Then of course he’ll have to give you something for your trouble.’
“You still don’t understand? Well, this is what she did, the sly little devil.
“She made all four of us get into four carriages, real private carriages, very swagger carriages, and then she sent us into the streets near the Opera. Then she went to the ball by herself. As she knew all the most famous men in Paris by name, because Madame dressed their wives, she picked one of them out and played him. She said all kinds of things to him; my word, she was witty too. When she saw that he was well worked up, she dropped her mask and there he was caught in a noose. Then he wanted to take her off with him at once, and she gave him an appointment in half an hour’s time in a carriage standing opposite Number 20 in the Rue Taitbout. In the carriage was me! I was all wrapped up and my face veiled. Suddenly a gentleman put his head in at the window and said:
“ ‘Is it you?’
“I answered softly:
“ ‘Yes, it’s me, come in quickly.’
“He comes in, and I take him in my arms and hug him, hug him until he couldn’t breathe; then I go on:
“ ‘Oh, how happy I am, how happy I am!’
“And then all at once I cry:
“ ‘But it’s not you! Oh, heavens! Heavens!’
“And I begin to weep.
“Imagine how embarrassed the man is! At first he tries to console me; he apologises, and protests that he has made a mistake himself.
“I went on weeping, but less bitterly, and then sighed deeply. Then he talked tenderly to me. He was everything a gentleman should be, and now he was delighted to see my tears gradually stopping.
“In short, one thing led to another, and he suggested my going to supper with him. I refused; I tried to jump out of the carriage; he caught me round the waist, and then held me, as I had held him when he came in.
“And then … and then … we had … we had supper … you understand … and he gave me … guess, just guess … he gave me five hundred francs. … Believe me, some men are free with their money!
“Well, it came off all right with every one of us. Louise did least well with two hundred francs. But, you know, Louise really was too thin.”
The tobacco-shop woman chattered on, pouring out in one wild rush all the memories stored so long in her heart, the cautiously closed heart of a Government licensee. All the days of poverty and adventure stirred in her memory. She thought with regret of the gay bohemian life of the Paris streets, a life of privation and sold kisses, of laughter and misery, of trickery and love that was not always feigned.
I said to her:
“But how did you get your licence to sell tobacco?”
She smiled:
“Oh, that’s quite a story. I must tell you that in my boardinghouse I had right next door to me a law student; but, don’t you know, one of those students who never study. This one lived in cafés from morning to night, and he adored billiards, as I have never known anyone adore it.
“When I was alone we sometimes spent the evening together. It was by him that I had Roger.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“My son.”
“Oh.”
“He allowed me a little money to bring up the brat, but I knew very well that the fellow wouldn’t be any real good to me; I was the surer of it because I’d never seen a man so slack, except him, never. At the end of ten years he hadn’t got through his first exam. When his people saw that he would never come to anything, they sent for him to come back home somewhere in the provinces; but we kept up a correspondence about the child. And then would you believe it? at the last election, two years ago, I heard that he had been made a deputy for his district. And then he spoke in the Chamber. It’s quite true what they say, that in the kingdom of the blind … Well, to cut the story short, I sought him out and made him get a tobacco shop for me at once, on the strength of my being the daughter of a deported man. It’s quite true that my father was deported, but I never thought that would be any use to me.
“In short … but here’s Roger.”
There came in a tall young man, a correct, serious, self-conscious young man.
He dropped a kiss on his mother’s forehead, and she said to me:
“Now, Monsieur, this is my son, head clerk at the town hall. You know what that means … future assistant prefect.”
I greeted this functionary with all proper respect, and departed to go to my hotel after gravely pressing the hand held out to me by Ça ira.