Othello as a tragic jealous figure, and Molière’s George Dandin as a comic one. Imagining that I might someday play one of these characters, or perhaps both at once, would have seemed quite ridiculous. I had always been the one to abandon my mistresses when I tired of them. If they were unfaithful to me, I never knew it. I remember when a friend told me he was suffering from jealousy, I replied, “I can’t understand you … I simply wouldn’t be able to carry on loving a woman who didn’t love me …”
Why did Odile make me anxious the moment I saw her surrounded by male friends? She was so gentle and even tempered but, I could not say how, she created an aura of mystery around her. I had not noticed it during our engagement or our honeymoon because our solitude and the total intermixing of our two lives at the time left no room for any mystery, but in Paris I immediately perceived a distant, as yet undefined danger. We were very close, very tender, but—as I want to be honest with you here—I have to confess that as early as the second month of our married life I knew that the real Odile was not the one I had loved. I did not love the one I was discovering any the less, but it was with a quite different sort of love. In Florence I believed I had met the Amazon; I myself had created a perfect mythical Odile. I was wrong. Odile was no goddess made of ivory and moonlight; she was a woman. Like me, like you, like the entire unhappy human race, she was divided and multiple. And she too doubtless now realized I was very different from the besotted man who had walked beside her in Florence.
As soon as I was back in France, I had to take a serious part in running the factory in Gandumas and the office in Paris. My father, who had considerableparliamentary commitments, had been overrun with work in my absence. When I met with them, our best clients were quick to complain of being neglected. The business quarter was a long way from the home we had rented on the rue de la Faisanderie. I soon realized it would be impossible for me to return home for lunch. If you add to this the fact that I had to spend one day a week at Gandumas and that this hasty journey was too tiring to allow me to take Odile with me, you will understand how our lives were immediately separated against our will.
On my way home in the evenings, I felt happy knowing I would soon see my wife’s beautiful face. I liked the furnishings with which she had surrounded herself. I was not accustomed to living among lovely things, but it seemed I had an innate need for them, and Odile’s taste delighted me. In my parents’ house in Gandumas, too many pieces of furniture accumulated over three or four generations cluttered salons whose walls were hung with fabrics in blue-green tones, featuring crudely drawn peacocks wandering between stylized trees. Odile had had our walls painted in soft single colors; she liked bedrooms to be almost bare, with great deserted plains of pale carpeting. When I went intoher boudoir, I felt such an acute sense of beauty that I found it obscurely disturbing. My wife would be lying on a chaise longue, almost always in a white dress, and beside her (on the low table of our first supper) stood a narrow-necked Venetian vase bearing a single flower and sometimes some scant foliage. Odile loved flowers more than anything, and I in turn was learning to love choosing flowers for her. I learned to follow the changing seasons in florists’ windows; I was happy to see chrysanthemums or tulips appear once more, because their strident or delicate colors gave me an opportunity to solicit from my wife’s lips the happy Odile smile. When she saw me come home from work with a crisp-edged white paper package in my hands, she would jump up happily: “Oh! Thank you, Dickie …” She admired them, enchanted, before becoming serious and saying, “I’m going to arrange my flowers.” She would then spend an hour finding the correct vase, stem
Why did Odile make me anxious the moment I saw her surrounded by male friends? She was so gentle and even tempered but, I could not say how, she created an aura of mystery around her. I had not noticed it during our engagement or our honeymoon because our solitude and the total intermixing of our two lives at the time left no room for any mystery, but in Paris I immediately perceived a distant, as yet undefined danger. We were very close, very tender, but—as I want to be honest with you here—I have to confess that as early as the second month of our married life I knew that the real Odile was not the one I had loved. I did not love the one I was discovering any the less, but it was with a quite different sort of love. In Florence I believed I had met the Amazon; I myself had created a perfect mythical Odile. I was wrong. Odile was no goddess made of ivory and moonlight; she was a woman. Like me, like you, like the entire unhappy human race, she was divided and multiple. And she too doubtless now realized I was very different from the besotted man who had walked beside her in Florence.
As soon as I was back in France, I had to take a serious part in running the factory in Gandumas and the office in Paris. My father, who had considerableparliamentary commitments, had been overrun with work in my absence. When I met with them, our best clients were quick to complain of being neglected. The business quarter was a long way from the home we had rented on the rue de la Faisanderie. I soon realized it would be impossible for me to return home for lunch. If you add to this the fact that I had to spend one day a week at Gandumas and that this hasty journey was too tiring to allow me to take Odile with me, you will understand how our lives were immediately separated against our will.
On my way home in the evenings, I felt happy knowing I would soon see my wife’s beautiful face. I liked the furnishings with which she had surrounded herself. I was not accustomed to living among lovely things, but it seemed I had an innate need for them, and Odile’s taste delighted me. In my parents’ house in Gandumas, too many pieces of furniture accumulated over three or four generations cluttered salons whose walls were hung with fabrics in blue-green tones, featuring crudely drawn peacocks wandering between stylized trees. Odile had had our walls painted in soft single colors; she liked bedrooms to be almost bare, with great deserted plains of pale carpeting. When I went intoher boudoir, I felt such an acute sense of beauty that I found it obscurely disturbing. My wife would be lying on a chaise longue, almost always in a white dress, and beside her (on the low table of our first supper) stood a narrow-necked Venetian vase bearing a single flower and sometimes some scant foliage. Odile loved flowers more than anything, and I in turn was learning to love choosing flowers for her. I learned to follow the changing seasons in florists’ windows; I was happy to see chrysanthemums or tulips appear once more, because their strident or delicate colors gave me an opportunity to solicit from my wife’s lips the happy Odile smile. When she saw me come home from work with a crisp-edged white paper package in my hands, she would jump up happily: “Oh! Thank you, Dickie …” She admired them, enchanted, before becoming serious and saying, “I’m going to arrange my flowers.” She would then spend an hour finding the correct vase, stem
Similar Books
