Belle De Jour by Joseph Kessel Page A

connectingwith the old dwellings of kings. Pierre … Pierre Les-cot’s Louvre … her little husband Pierre … The man who delighted in the gardens of palaces and faultless parks had a wife who.…
    Séverine’s head whirled in a confusion of bus-horns, noble perspectives, Mme Anaïs, herself. Blindly she crossed the road and leaned on the parapet over the Seine. Here she could breathe more easily. The river rolled along in its spring yellow. Séverine was fascinated by the dubious color and went down the incline to the lower level of the quay.
    The people and the scene she found there were so different from anything she had ever known that she had a feeling of having been forever cut off from her usual existence. Heaps of sand, mounds of coal, scrapiron, low sooty barges with silent men walking sluggishly about them, the walls far, far higher, far thicker than she’d ever realized; and most of all the muddy, rich, impenetrable water … Séverine went towards the water, knelt, and plunged her hands into it.
    She took them out instantly, repressing a cry. That fascinating flood was deadly cold. Séverine was appalled as she suddenly realized that she had desired to give herself to the river’s filth. After all, she’d done nothing yet to make her want to perish in that muddy ooze. Mme Anaïs … it was true she’d gone to see her, she’d listened to her. But Pierre himself, if she were to tell him of her frightful pain and the implacable, joyless obsession that had dragged her into the rue Virène, would pity her. She knew him, she loved him for that. He wouldn’t be angry, or contemptuous, he wouldsimply pity her. How just! Séverine felt torn with compassion for herself.
    Did one punish an act of insanity? Was what she’d done anything else? She only had to cure the sickness that had suddenly taken hold of her, and then the whole horrible week would be forgotten. And moreover, she told herself, the cure was at hand, since she was just about fed up with her insane behavior, and the idea of ever going back to Mme Anaïs filled her with terror, and.…
    These thoughts, coursing with desperate urgency through Séverine’s mind, were abruptly replaced by a complete inability to think at all, a total void. It was as if every atom of energy had left her, sucked away by some insatiable mouth. She looked up.… A man was standing quite close—close enough to touch her. In her feverish state she hadn’t heard him come up. He had a powerful bare neck, broad quiet shoulders: probably a boatman from one of the barges moored near the Pont-Neuf, since his blue smock—and even his face—were stained with soot and oil. He stank of coarse tobacco, grease, and strength.
    He stared thickly at Séverine, perhaps not fully conscious of his own desire for her. He was on his way towards Rouen, Le Havre, and here he suddenly runs across a beautiful woman. Too well dressed for him, of course; but she attracted him and he watched her.
    Séverine had frequently felt the eyes of strangers covet her, and had merely been bored and uncomfortable. But this was a solid, cynical, pure desire she’dnever before encountered, except in the man who had hunted her down her dreams and the other she’d watched going in to see Mme Anaïs. Now the same man—it was the same—stood beside her. He had only to reach out his hand and she’d know that contact she had so despairingly yearned for. But he wouldn’t dare to, he couldn’t.…
    And in the rue Virène, thought Séverine with a sudden dreadful clarity, for thirty francs.…
    Her eye registered the faces, the bodies, of this primitive universe enclosed between a rigid wall and the heavy river. The carter, gripping his shaft-horse by the nostrils in order to hobble his descent, who seemed to control with his huge fist both the horse and the rubble the animal dragged down with it; the man unloading that boat, with his low forehead and motionless loins; the laborers heavy with strong food and