Checkmate

I was going to Turin by way of Corsica. At Nice I took ship for Bastia, and as soon as we were out at sea I saw a charming, quietly dressed young woman sitting on the bridge: she was looking out to sea. “Ah,” I said to myself, “there’s my friend for the voyage.”

I took a seat opposite her and looked at her, my mind filled with the questions that leap into any man’s mind when he sees an unknown and interesting woman: what was her class, her age, what sort of a woman was she? Then, from what he can see, he speculates on what he can’t see. Eye and mind peer through the bodice and under the gown. He observes the line of the bust when she is seated: he tries to catch a glimpse of her ankle: he notes the texture of her hand, which reveals the fineness of the rest of her limbs, and the shape and size of her ear, which is a truer indication of birth than a birth certificate, that must always be open to dispute. He tries to hear her speak, to get at the character of her mind and the tenderness of her heart through the tones of her voice. For, to the experience observer, the pitch and all the subtle gradations of the spoken word reveal the mysterious structure of the soul: difficult though it may be to grasp it, there is always perfect accord between thought itself and the organ of its expression.

So I observed my neighbour with grave attention, watching the signs, analysing her movements, keeping my eyes open for the revelations her every attitude would make.

She opened a small bag and took out a newspaper. I rubbed my hands: “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.”

She began at the leading article with the air of a person savouring a delicate pleasure. The name of her paper leaped to my eyes: Echo de Paris. I was puzzled. She was reading one of Scholl’s scandalous commentaries. Devil take her, she read Scholl.⁠ ⁠… Scholl. She began to smile: a pointed jest. So she was not a prude, or an innocent. So much the better. A reader of Scholl⁠—yes, a lover of our native wit, its fine shades, and its salt, even its pepper. A good sign. I thought: let us try her on another tack.

I went and sat near her, and began to read, no less attentively, a volume of poetry that I had bought for the journey: the Chanson d’amour by Félix Frank.

I observed that she had snatched up the name on the binding with one rapid glance, like a bird on the wing snatching up a fly. Several passengers, men, walked past us to look at her. But she seemed to think of nothing but her column of town scandal. When she had finished it, she laid her paper down between us.

I bowed and said:

“May I glance through your paper?”

“Certainly.”

“Do you care to look at this volume of verse in the meantime?”

“Yes, certainly. Is it amusing?”

The question puzzled me slightly. It is not usual to ask if a collection of verse is amusing. I answered:

“It’s better than that; it’s charming, delicate, and the work of an artist.”

“Give it to me, then.”

She took the book, opened it, and began to glance through it with a vaguely surprised air that made it clear she rarely read verse.

Some of it seemed to move her, some made her smile, but a different smile from the one she had worn when reading her paper.

I asked her suddenly:

“Do you like it?”

“Yes, but I like amusing things myself, very amusing things: I’m not sentimental.”

We began to talk. I learned that she was the wife of a captain of dragoons, stationed at Ajaccio, and that she was going to join her husband.

I very soon guessed that she had little love for this husband of hers. She did love him, but with the mild affection a woman retains for a husband who has not fulfilled the hopes roused in courting days. He had drifted from garrison to garrison, through a number of small, dull towns, such very dull towns. Now he was stationed in this island, which must be very gloomy indeed. No, everyone’s life was not amusing. She would rather have gone on living at Lyons with her parents, for she knew everyone in Lyons. But now she had to go to Corsica. The minister was not inclined to favour her husband, who had, nevertheless, an excellent service record.

And we discussed the places where she would have liked to live.

“Do you like Paris?” I asked.

“Oh,” she cried, “do I like Paris? How can you ask such a question?”

And she began talking about Paris with such ardent enthusiasm, such wild envy, that I thought: “This is the right string to touch.”

She adored Paris from afar, with a passion of repressed gluttony, with the exaggerated longing of a provincial and the maddened impatience of a caged bird who all day looks at a wood from the window where he hangs.

She began to question me, stammering in an agony of impatience: she wanted to be told everything, everything, in five minutes. She knew the names of all the famous people, and of many others whom I had never heard mentioned.

“How is M. Gounod? And M. Sardou? Oh, how I love M. Sardou’s plays! How amusing and witty they are! Every time I see one, I dream of it for a week. I’ve read a book of M. Daudet’s, too, which I enjoyed enormously. Sapho⁠—do you know it? Is M. Daudet nice-looking? Have you seen him? And M. Zola, what is he like? If you only knew how Germinal made me cry! Do you remember the little child who dies in the dark? How terrible that is! It nearly made me ill. There’s nothing to laugh at in that, my word. I’ve read a book of M. Bourget’s, too, Cruelle Enigme. I have a cousin who was so excited about this novel that she wrote to M. Bourget. I thought the book too romantic. I like something humorous better. Do you know M. Grévin? And M. Coquelin? And M. Damala? And M. Rochefort? They say he’s a great wit. And M. de Cassagnac? Is it true that he fights a duel every day?⁠ ⁠…”

Somewhere about the end of an hour, her stock of questions began to run low, and having satisfied her curiosity by the wildest flights of imagination, I was able to talk myself.

I told her stories about the doings of society, Parisian society, real society. She listened with all her ears and all her heart. She must indeed have gathered a pretty picture of the fair and famous ladies of Paris. There was nothing but love affairs, assignations, speedy conquests and impassioned defeats. She kept asking me:

“Oh, is real society like that?”

I smiled as one who knows:

“Of course. It’s only the middle-class women who lead a dull, monotonous life for the sake of their virtue, a virtue for which no one thanks them.”

And I set myself to undermine virtue with tremendous strokes of irony, philosophy and nonsense. I made magnificent and graceful fun of the poor wretches who let themselves grow old without ever having known the good things of life, the sweet, tender, gallant things that life offers, without ever having savoured the delicious pleasure of long, burning stolen kisses, and all just because they have married a worthy dolt of a husband, the reserve of whose marital embraces allows them to go to their graves in ignorance of all the refinements of sensual pleasure and all the delicate ecstasies of love.

Then I cited further anecdotes, anecdotes of cabinets particuliers, intrigues which I swore were common knowledge. And the refrain of all my tales was a discreet, veiled eulogy of swift, secret love, of sensations snatched in passing, like fruit, and forgotten as soon as enjoyed.

Night fell, a calm, warm night. The big ship, shaken from stem to stern by its engines, glided over the sea, under the vast roof of the wine-dark sky, starred with fire.

The little provincial was not talking now. She drew slow breaths and sometimes sighed. Suddenly she rose.

“I’m going to bed,” said she. “Good night, monsieur.”

She shook hands with me.

I knew that on the following evening she would have to take the coach that runs from Bastia to Ajaccio across the mountains, making the journey by night.

I answered:

“Good night, madame.”

And I too betook myself to the bunk in my cabin.

First thing next day, I took three places inside the coach, all three places, for myself.

As I was climbing into the old carriage that was going to leave Bastia at nightfall, the conductor asked me if I would not agree to give up one corner to a lady.

I asked brusquely:

“To what lady?”

“To the wife of an officer going to Ajaccio.”

“Tell the lady that I shall be glad if she will occupy one of the seats.”

She arrived, having, she said, been asleep all day. She apologised, thanked me and got in.

The coach was a sort of hermetically sealed box, into which light entered only through the two doors. So there we were shut up together inside. The carriage proceeded at a trot, a quick trot; then began to follow the mountain road. A fresh, powerful scent of aromatic herbs drifted in through the lowered panes, the heady scent that Corsica so pours out into the surrounding air that sailors passing out at sea smell it, a pungent scent like the smell of bodies, like the sweat of the green earth impregnated with perfumes drawn out by the ardent sun and given to the passing wind.

I began to talk of Paris again, and again she listened to me with feverish attention. My stories grew daring, subtly décolleté: I used allusive, two-edged words, words that set the blood on fire.

The night was on us. I could see nothing now, not even the white patch that had been the girl’s face. Only the coachman’s lantern flung a ray of light over the four horses that were climbing the road at a walking pace.

Sometimes for a little while, until it died away in the distance behind us, we heard the sound of a torrent dashing over the rocks, and mingling with the sound of little bells.

Gently I stretched out my foot and met hers, which was not withdrawn. Then I sat still, waiting, and suddenly, changing my tune, I talked tenderly, affectionately. I had reached out my hand and touched hers. She did not withdraw that either. I went on talking, nearer her ear, very near her mouth. Already I felt her heart beating against my breast. It was beating quickly and loudly⁠—a good sign⁠—then, slowly, I pressed my lips on her neck, sure that I had her, so sure that I would have wagered any money on it.

But all at once she started as if she had awakened, started so violently that I reeled to the other end of the coach. Then, before I was able to understand, to reflect, to think at all, I first of all received five or six staggering slaps, then a shower of blows rained on me, sharp, savage blows that struck me all over, unable as I was to parry them in the profound darkness that covered the struggle.

I put out my hands, trying vainly to seize her arms. Then, not knowing what else to do, I turned sharply round, and presented my back to her furious attack, hiding my head in the corner of the panels.

She seemed to guess, perhaps from the sound of her blows, this despairing manoeuvre, and abruptly ceased to beat me.

A few seconds later she was back in her corner and had begun to cry and she sobbed wildly for an hour at least.

I had seated myself again, very distressed and very much ashamed. I would have liked to speak to her, but what should I say? I could think of nothing! Apologise? That would be absurd. What would you have said! No more than I did, I’ll take my oath.

She was crying softly now, and sometimes uttering deep sighs that filled me with grief and compassion. I would have liked to comfort her, to caress her as if she had been an unhappy child, to ask her pardon, kneel to her. But I did not dare.

These situations are too stupid.

She grew quiet at last, and we remained each in our own corner, still and silent, while the carriage rolled on, stopping now and then for fresh horses. We both shut our eyes very quickly at these halts, to avoid seeing one another when the bright light of a stable lantern shone into the coach. Then the coach set out again; and all the time the pungent, scented air of the Corsican mountains caressed our cheeks and our lips, and went to my head like wine.

Christ, what a glorious journey it would have been if⁠ ⁠… if my companion had not been such a little fool.

But gradually light filtered into the carriage, the pale light of early dawn. I looked at my neighbour. She was pretending to be asleep. The sun, risen behind the mountains, filled with its radiance a vast blue gulf set around with great granite-crested peaks. On the edge of the bay a white town came into sight, still lying in shadow.

Then my neighbour pretended to wake, she opened her eyes (they were red), she opened her mouth as if she were yawning and had been asleep a long time. She hesitated, blushed and stammered:

“Shall we be there soon?”

“Yes, madame, in an hour or so.”

She added, gazing into space:

“It is very tiring to spend the night in a carriage.”

“Yes, it breaks one’s back.”

“Especially after a crossing.”

“Yes.”

“Is not that Ajaccio in front of us?”

“Yes, madame.”

“I wish we were there.”

“I am sure you do.”

Her voice sounded a little troubled; her manner was rather awkward, her glance did not meet mine very readily. But she seemed to have forgotten the whole episode.

I admired her. What instinctive intriguers these bitches are! What diplomatists!

We did indeed arrive in another hour; and a tall dragoon, with the figure of a Hercules, was standing in front of the office; he waved a handkerchief as the coach came in sight.

My neighbour flung herself wildly into his arms, and kissed him at least twenty times, repeating:

“Are you all right? How I have been aching to see you again!”

My trunk was handed down from the roof and I was discreetly withdrawing when she cried:

“Oh, you are going away without saying goodbye to me.”

I stammered:

“Madame, I did not wish to intrude on your happiness.”

Then she said to her husband:

“Thank this gentleman, darling: he has been most kind to me on the journey. He even offered me a place in the coach which he had reserved for himself. It is nice to meet with such friendly companions.”

The husband shook my hand and thanked me warmly.

The young wife watched us with a smile. I must have looked a rare fool.