in her words that seemed suspicious to me. Affecting complete indifference, I pretended that I thought she was joking and moved away from this burning subject without daring to name a day.
Once I had hung up I thought about my idiotic refusal. I desired Anne very much, that was evident. But I had been afraid to find myself alone with the strange, cold girl of the bookstore who left so few openings I hardly thought I could even carry the thing off. One might as well try and have a go at Claire!
Or was the solution I had adopted, getting out of it entirely, perhaps going to lead to some far more unusual form of pleasure? And was this very hope, without my being aware of it, my real motive?
At any rate it was with Claire that I finally had made a date, at her place on the rue Jacob, on the pretext of wanting to see the photographs she had promised to show me that first day.
I thought again about the girl in the white dress kneeling under the beech tree, about the noise her stream of water made hitting the dead leaves under her dress, and about the rose, its petals all bruised, still dripping with bright beads of liquid.
V : THE PHOTOGRAPHS
I recognized the photographs at first glance: the very ones that were proffered to susceptible souls in the bookstore where I had run into Anne.
It hadnât seemed to me, however, that she was known to the house: or at least not to the salesman who waited on her.
The prints that Claire showed me that after noon were much larger and far superior in quality to those I had absent-mindedly leafed through one day in Montmartre. At the time, the pictures had struck me as being quite uninteresting, and the pictures very ordinary.
This time, on the contrary, I saw them in an entirely new light. It wasnât only because I recognized Anne as the pretty model who had posed for them, either. But I was particularly aware of their extraordinary clarity, while the other prints I had seen hadnât conveyed at all this sense of flagrant reality, more real, more palpable almost, than nature itself. Perhaps this impression was due to the lighting, or to the dramatic contrast between the blacks and whites which gave added precision to the lines of composition.
In spite of these differences, however, I was sure they were the same pictures. Claire must savour the pleasure of a slave trader in allowing the humiliated image of her friend to be sold to the first customer. And this was, as far as I could tell, the sort of gratification sheâd been looking for in from the beginning.
Used in this fashion, the photographs had a heightened value for me, as well as for her. On top of this, from a technical point of view, I could be quite sincere in offering her my congratulations.
We were sitting at armâs length in two little upholstered chairs before a low table. Above us was an adjustable lamp that must have been used as a spotlight during the posing sessions.
It was the first time that Iâd been to her apartment on the rue Jacob. I was agreeably surprised by the ease and cheerfulness of this room and its very modern furnishings (as well as by the rest of the apartment, from what I could tell), especially in contrast to the dark, narrow stairway and the great age of the building.
To achieve this isolation from the world outside, so different in feeling, the heavy curtains at the windows were closed even though it was broad daylight. Even if they didnât open onto a narrow courtyard, as often happens in old buildings, the windows could have only let in a dreary light, less bright yet less intimate than the clever artificial lighting in the room.
Claire handed me the photographs one after the other, first carefully examining each one herself while I was occupied with the preceding one. They were mounted on cardboard the size of regular business stationery. The glossy surface of each was protected by a transparent overlay which one turned back to look at the picture.
In the first