Free The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette Page B

forgotten our last interview, have you? You treated me so poorly! I can still see you at the conclusion of your talk, backstage at the public university. ‘What’s he doing here?’ You muttered between your teeth. Oh, yes, don’t deny it, I understood perfectly! The fact is, my evening clothes were singularly out of place in a working-class milieu . . .”
    “. . .”
    “You’re right, it’s not a working-class milieu, it’s . . . help me out . . . it’s . . . popular! That’s it: a popular milieu! And now, let’s talk seriously. This time I’m taking the chair you’re not offering me, and setting in—oh, excuse me, digging in! Our old camaraderie gives me rights, and no one’s going to have a nice little article about your new book before me. You understand that what I would like is something which would get between her police dog and her Siamese cat . . .’ Just between you and me, people have had enough of your animals! I want to present our us away from the eternal ‘We found this unique artist at her worktable, readers with the real ‘you,’ a more detailed ‘you’, more in depth, more . . . Notice, I have a pencil and a note pad! It amuses me quite a bit to play the reporter who chases down dogs who have been run over and potholes in the street. It’s not like me at all to run around with the paraphernalia of a journaler . . .”
    “. . .”
    “Yes, yes, of a journaler, I like the word, whose discouraged ending bespeaks quite well the sadness, the meanness, the spinelessness of a profession which isn’t a profession. That surprises you, admit it, to hear me melancholize in this way. But I’ve just gone through, I’ve barely managed to pull through a nasty period . . .”
    “. . .”
    “Bah! . . . everything and nothing . . . Neurasthenia. A vague word which contains so many precise miseries. It’s at the point where I’m still asking myself: Let me see now, do I exile myself to the country, with the few sous left me by my father, so I can plant my cabbage, live obscurely and . . . how shall I say? monastically . . . ? There perhaps is where wisdom lies. And too bad for all the blackened pages, for the useless offspring of my thought!”
    “. . . ?”
    “Yes . . . I’ve undertaken a . . . how shall I say? a study, a fantastic ‘study of man’—I rather like the title, which is a counterpart to Balzac’s Studies of Women  . . . I’m going to speak to you like a colleague, with perfect frankness: is my book finished—or isn’t it? At each moment, I lean over my hero as over an abyss, and I cry out, ‘But I didn’t know him!—I only catch glimpses of him!’ It is this exhausting task which has brought me to the point: neurasthenia, loss of sleep, fickle appetite, migraines, etc. And the profession, during this time, the terrible profession which does not wait, which forces itself on you, which pushes you: Go, the Queen of St. Marguerite’s Market is calling you, the dramatist whose play is being performed tomorrow hopes for you! So the exasperated body rebels, your nerves get the better of you, you collapse in midstream! You know all this, you’ve suffered it all, naturally . . .”
    “. . .”
    “Go on, go on, there’s no use denying it, we’re talking heart to heart, to listen to you, it seems to me that your soul reflects mine some what, I am so happy, so honored that our impressions are so similar! What did you do to triumph over the crisis?”
    “ . . . ?”
    “For me, at first, I was taken by a—how shall I say—by a phobia about noise and light, I was at the point of going through the childishness of doubling my shutters, of covering my walls with cork. I’ve been—it’s laughably pitiful—at the point of proposing to my upstairs neighbors that I buy them a carpet . . . I lived a prisoner’s life, illuminated by a single lamp: anemia—I take the word out of your mouth—wasting no time