Le Divorce Read Online Free PDF Page B

his late sixties, maybe seventy, tall and white-haired, with deep-set eyes and the nose of a Vichy general, very handsome in a way. When we went in to lunch, he limpedslowly toward the house. Then I could see he had an ankle in a cast, but what had happened to him was not explained.
    By now I was embarrassed that they were all making this polite effort to speak English, all of them compelled to use a language not their own because of one person’s inability to speak theirs. “Oui” and “non” I tried to say through my nose when l’oncle Edgar, beside whom I was sitting, would ask me if I wanted more cheese or meat. I was imitating French in hopes they would think I understood it and they could lapse back into speaking it.
    “Eet ees very amusing about your senator,” said Oncle Edgar. I did not at first know what he meant.
    “The chap who kept the diaries,” said Antoine.
    “Detailing how he patted the knees of young women, detailing his erotic hopes, perhaps, and now he has to turn these private musings over to the public court,” said l’oncle Edgar.
    They all laughed. “No, no,” said Charlotte, “he turns them over to the other senators, I believe.” It was not clear whether comment was expected from Roxy or me.
    “Yes, extraordinary,” agreed Suzanne, “and it is supposed he’ll have something to say about his friends.” They all laughed, a merriment somewhat mysterious to me at that time. I would learn it had to do with our reputation for native prudishness and their native toleration of certain things of this world, like old senators with young women.
    “ Zut , I would hate for my colleagues to read what I thought of them,” added Oncle Edgar.
    The Persands were so pleasant, laughed so charmingly, they were so uniformly good-looking in their fancy wood-paneled room—yet I did not feel entirely welcomed. I felt young. I felt that a nurse would be sent in to take me out of the room when my sayings had ceased to amuse them. It was with relief that I saw their resolution about speaking English drain away with the second bottle of red wine. “Eleanor of Angoulême was not, as is often thought, the niece of . . .” said l’oncle Edgar, and that was the last thing I understood, as they all began to discuss some episode of French history, with violent gesticulations, in French.
    After lunch, we had coffee on the terrace. Charlotte smokedincessantly. That seemed strange, as keen as she was on tennis. She was telling me about her sojourn in England, when she was fourteen, and how the English cheated at tennis. I did not believe that. “Their line calls were very dubious,” she was saying severely. By now I know that the things that French people say about the English are probably like what they say about Americans when we aren’t around. What we call “French leave” they call filer à l’anglaise . And a kitchen in the living room is called cuisine américaine —why I don’t know. And of course the vice anglais .
    Antoine smoked in the garden while tossing a ball to his little boy. Roxeanne was evidently planning to stay at the end of the afternoon, in order to have a private word with Suzanne. When someone proposed a walk to the antiques fair going on in the town, I took Geneviève and went off with the others, Roxy insisting she preferred to stay behind to help with cleaning up. In the Persand family, such offers are accepted. The day had assumed a cast of normality, no sense of a looming catastrophe, and it even took on, at the antiques fair, an air of propitiousness, because Antoine found a sort of cabinet he had been hoping to find.
    But when we got back and were walking into the courtyard, we were met by none other than Charles-Henri himself, looking pale and thunderous, not like the blithe and slightly distracted man I had met. He seemed astonished to see us. Perhaps he had hoped to see his mother alone, but he might have expected we would all be there. I thought at first maybe he