like mine. That year a dazzling October seemed untiringly to prolong a summer that had been magnificent, and the last tourists were still going around the lake shore in shorts, as if they wanted to absorb the sunshine.
But for heavens sake! After all, that suit had cost me almost all my salary, in spite of the fact that I’d bought it on sale at the end of the previous winter, and then I hadn’t had a chance to wear it yet. It was a Saint Laurent divided skirt, Forties-type squared shoulders with stiff padding, and wide lapels with two buttons like a man’s. A super chic item: in
Vogue
Deborah Kerr wore an identical one, leaning on the veranda of her ranch. But in that stupid school whoever would have appreciated a Saint Laurent like mine? My colleagues arrived in the morning dolled up in an appalling way. Only their aprons and hair curlers were missing. I might as well put on the Saint Laurent for the interview with Madame. At least someone would be able to appreciate it. At least I presumed so, and I thought I knew why. I say, a villa like Madame’s was not in keeping with those stupid creatures, the rich grocers’ wives type who had infested the hills around the lake with villas in taste that could compete with Disneyland and who swooped down on the gallery at the end of the season when the owner organized AN AUCTION WITHOUT PRECEDENT and carried away some daubs of paint that would make a horse faint in order to hang them on the walls of their small-town mansions. Furthermore, it was enough to look at the wrought-iron gate from which led two straight rows of cypresses, the arabesque towers in early twentieth-century style, each with its own lightning rod, the Italian garden, the terrace flooded with bougainvillea. And then I thought that even a simple announcement in the newspaper could be enough for a shrewd person to understand something about the class of a lady. The job offers, which I looked through avidly on Saturday, were full of rude and insinuating, or at best dull and predictable, proposals, where “the possibility ofa brilliant career” masked the squalor of selling encyclopedias for deficient children door to door. An announcement like this one requiring a secretary: “Intelligence, discretion, culture. French indispensable,” didn’t happen very often.
I considered that these were four qualities which I possessed unequivocally. It’s a pity that the principal of the school, terrorized because I talked to the boys about the
Nude Maja
, and the owner of the gallery, who thought only of fleecing the ladies from Varese, didn’t agree. Too bad for them.
To say that Madame was
charmante
may seem trifling, but serves to convey the idea. If she was fifty years old, she carried her age in an excellent manner; if she was forty, she carried it with dignity. But I was inclined toward the first hypothesis. She had hair of a blonde so unnatural that one ended up by accepting it immediately, because blatant deceit is much more acceptable than pretended deceit. (At that time I had a whole theory based on the scale of deceit.) And, thank heaven, she didn’t have a permanent. On principle I had nothing against permanents, for goodness sake, but the fact is that my colleagues came to school with such painful permanents that I’d ended up detesting them.
Madame began a very lengthy conversation in French. Evidently she used French to verify my knowledge of the language, as was requested in the advertisement, but in that regard I felt myself impregnable, thanks to Charleroi, even though I was careful not to say so. However, I did nothing to disguise my strong Belgian accent, even though it wasn’t difficult for me to do so: it was only a question of tonics and gutturals.
We began with literature. Very discreetly Madame informed herself of my tastes, not without letting me know hers, in order to put me at ease, which were Montherlant of
La reine morte
(“so human and all-consuming,” she said) and the
But for heavens sake! After all, that suit had cost me almost all my salary, in spite of the fact that I’d bought it on sale at the end of the previous winter, and then I hadn’t had a chance to wear it yet. It was a Saint Laurent divided skirt, Forties-type squared shoulders with stiff padding, and wide lapels with two buttons like a man’s. A super chic item: in
Vogue
Deborah Kerr wore an identical one, leaning on the veranda of her ranch. But in that stupid school whoever would have appreciated a Saint Laurent like mine? My colleagues arrived in the morning dolled up in an appalling way. Only their aprons and hair curlers were missing. I might as well put on the Saint Laurent for the interview with Madame. At least someone would be able to appreciate it. At least I presumed so, and I thought I knew why. I say, a villa like Madame’s was not in keeping with those stupid creatures, the rich grocers’ wives type who had infested the hills around the lake with villas in taste that could compete with Disneyland and who swooped down on the gallery at the end of the season when the owner organized AN AUCTION WITHOUT PRECEDENT and carried away some daubs of paint that would make a horse faint in order to hang them on the walls of their small-town mansions. Furthermore, it was enough to look at the wrought-iron gate from which led two straight rows of cypresses, the arabesque towers in early twentieth-century style, each with its own lightning rod, the Italian garden, the terrace flooded with bougainvillea. And then I thought that even a simple announcement in the newspaper could be enough for a shrewd person to understand something about the class of a lady. The job offers, which I looked through avidly on Saturday, were full of rude and insinuating, or at best dull and predictable, proposals, where “the possibility ofa brilliant career” masked the squalor of selling encyclopedias for deficient children door to door. An announcement like this one requiring a secretary: “Intelligence, discretion, culture. French indispensable,” didn’t happen very often.
I considered that these were four qualities which I possessed unequivocally. It’s a pity that the principal of the school, terrorized because I talked to the boys about the
Nude Maja
, and the owner of the gallery, who thought only of fleecing the ladies from Varese, didn’t agree. Too bad for them.
To say that Madame was
charmante
may seem trifling, but serves to convey the idea. If she was fifty years old, she carried her age in an excellent manner; if she was forty, she carried it with dignity. But I was inclined toward the first hypothesis. She had hair of a blonde so unnatural that one ended up by accepting it immediately, because blatant deceit is much more acceptable than pretended deceit. (At that time I had a whole theory based on the scale of deceit.) And, thank heaven, she didn’t have a permanent. On principle I had nothing against permanents, for goodness sake, but the fact is that my colleagues came to school with such painful permanents that I’d ended up detesting them.
Madame began a very lengthy conversation in French. Evidently she used French to verify my knowledge of the language, as was requested in the advertisement, but in that regard I felt myself impregnable, thanks to Charleroi, even though I was careful not to say so. However, I did nothing to disguise my strong Belgian accent, even though it wasn’t difficult for me to do so: it was only a question of tonics and gutturals.
We began with literature. Very discreetly Madame informed herself of my tastes, not without letting me know hers, in order to put me at ease, which were Montherlant of
La reine morte
(“so human and all-consuming,” she said) and the
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