The Collected Stories of Colette Read Online Free PDF

recognized. The time for the music has come; the bar, now packed, is thick with smoke. Clouk is no longer trembling, no longer waiting for anyone. His night is beginning according to ritual; he is warm, he is thirsty because he has been drinking; he will have all the songs he likes, all the chaste, melancholy songs which comprise the repertoire of disreputable establishments and Clouk’s own poetic anthology: he will hum:
    You swore you loved me only ,
    But you left me sad and lonely  . . .
    He will proclaim at the top of his voice:
    I have a girl as blond as the sun ,
    In this wide world she’s the only one . .  .
    He will be drunk, howling, and happy: nothing, except dawn, will disturb the reassuring and predictable course of his sleepless night. A few more drinks, a few more rhymes, and he will be drunk enough to abandon himself—his feet on the knees of a “friend” he doesn’t know, his head leaning back against the warm shoulder of his sweet, insipid companion—to abandon himself to his most heartrending and purest memory, to his hidden, incurable love, still intact, for Lulu.
    [ Translated by Matthew Ward ]
    Chéri

    CHÉRI
    “Léa! Give it to me, give me your necklace! Do you hear me, Léa? Give me your pearls!”
    He moves, black and thin, back and forth across the sun-filled window. Because of the bright-pink curtains, slightly parted, he looks like a graceful demon dancing in front of a blazing fire. As he moves back into the center of the room, he turns white, dressed in silk pajamas and white babouches.
    “Why won’t you give me your necklace, Léa? It looks as good on me as it does on you . . . at least!”
    He raises his hands, and around his neck he fastens a strand of pearls which iridesce and light up, radiant, next to the white silk . . .
    At the faint snap of the clasp, the lace linens of a big bed ripple and two bare, strong arms, thin-wristed, raise two lovely, lazy hands. “Leave it alone, Chéri, you’ve played enough with that necklace.”
    “Why? It amuses me . . . Are you afraid I’ll steal it from you?”
    He had moved toward the bed, silent as a cat in his white slippers. He is a very handsome and very young man whose smooth black hair is worn like the tight cap of Pierrot. He leans his naughty chin over Léa, and the same pink spark, from the window, dances in his dark eyes, on his teeth, and on the pearls of the necklace . . .
    The nonchalant hands draw a vague response in the air and Chéri insists, “Say it, go on! Are you afraid I’ll take it?”
    “No. But if I were to offer it to you, you’re quite capable of accepting it.”
    He laughs softly, to himself, turns toward the warm light, and rolls the round pearls between his fingers.
    “And why not? It’s fine for a man to receive a set of studs and a tie pin, two or three pearls. But any more than that and the gift becomes a scandal. Really now . . . do I look ugly in a pearl necklace? Tell me.”
    He pirouettes nimbly and admires himself in the mirror, opening his pajama top with both hands and revealing a smooth, muscular neck and a tight, hard chest, curved like a shield.
    “Go on, say it, say I’m ugly!”
    Léa, leaning on her elbow, looks at him. In the merciful half-light, she shows what a pretty fifty-year-old woman, well cared for and in good health, can show: the bright complexion, somewhat ruddy and a bit weathered, of a natural blonde, shapely, solid shoulders, and celebrated blue eyes which have kept their thick chestnut lashes. But she is now a redhead, because of her hair, which is turning gray.
    She loves to chat in bed, almost invisible, while her magnificent arms and expressive hands comment on her wise words. Nearing the end of a successful career as a sedate courtesan, she is neither sad nor spiteful. She keeps the date of her birth a secret, but willingly admits, as she settles her calm gaze on Chéri, that she is approaching the age when one is permitted little