in a tone of passionate insistence.
‘Do you feel a need for excitement now?’
‘Of course I need it!’ said Xavière, and a wild untamed look glinted in her eyes. ‘Shut up in that room from morning till night, why, I’ll go mad! I can’t stand it there any more, you can have no idea how happy I’ll be to leave that place.’
‘Who prevents you from going out?’ asked Pierre.
‘You say that there isn’t any fun in going dancing with women, but Begramian or Gerbert would be only too glad to take you, and they dance very well,’ said Françoise.
Xavière shook her head.
‘Once you decide to have a good time to order, it’s always pitiful.’
‘You want everything to fall into your lap like manna from heaven,’ said Françoise, ‘you don’t deign to lift your little finger, and then you proceed to take it out on everyone. Obviously …’
‘There must be some countries in the world,’ said Xavière, as if in a dream, ‘warm countries – Greece or Sicily – where it surely isn’t necessary to lift a finger.’ She scowled. ‘Here you have to grab with both hands – and to get what?’
‘You have to do the same out there,’ said Françoise.
Xavière’s eyes began to sparkle.
‘Where is that red island that’s completely surrounded by boiling water?’ she said hungrily.
‘Santorin, one of the isles of Greece,’ said Françoise. ‘But that isn’t exactly what I told you. Only the cliffs are red, and the sea boils only between two small black islets thrown up by volcanic eruptions. Oh, I remember,’ she said, warming to her subject, ‘a lake of sulphurous water in the midst of the lava. It was all yellow and edged by a peninsula as black as anthracite and on the other side of this black strip the sea was a dazzling blue.’
Xavière looked at her with rapt attention.
‘When I think of all you’ve seen,’ she said in a voice filled with resentment.
‘You consider that it’s quite undeserved,’ said Pierre.
Xavière looked him up and down. She pointed to the dirty leather banquettes, the grubby tables.
‘To think, after seeing all that, that you can come and sit here.’
‘What good would it do to pine away with regrets?’ asked Françoise.
‘Of course, you don’t want to have any regrets,’ said Xavière. ‘You are so anxious to be happy.’ She looked away into space. ‘But I wasn’t born resigned.’
Françoise was cut to the quick. Surely she couldn’t contemptuously push aside the acceptance of this happiness that seemed to her so clearly to be asserting itself. Right or wrong, she no longer regarded Xavière’s words as outbursts: they held a complete set of values that ran counter to hers. However much she refused to acknowledge this fact, its existence was awkward.
‘This life of ours is no resignation,’ she said sharply. ‘We love Paris, and these streets, and these cafés.’
‘How can anyone love sordid places, and hideous things, and all these wretched people?’ Xavière’s voice emphasized her epithets with disgust.
‘The point is that the whole world interests us,’ said Françoise. ‘You happen to be a little aesthete. You want unadulterated beauty; but that’s a very narrow point of view.’
‘Am I supposed to be interested in that saucer because it presumes to exist?’ asked Xavière, and she looked at the saucer with annoyance. ‘It’s quite enough that it’s there.’ With intentional naïveté she added: ‘I should have thought that when one is an artist, it is just because one likes beautiful things.’
‘That depends on what you call beautiful things,’ said Pierre.
Xavière stared at him.
‘Heavens! you’re listening,’ she said, wide-eyed but gently. ‘I thought you were lost in deep thought.’
‘I’m paying close attention.’
‘You’re not in a very good mood,’ said Xavière, still smiling.
‘I’m in an excellent mood,’ said Pierre. ‘I think we’re spending a most delightful afternoon. We’re about to start off for the private view, and when we’re through with that, we’ll have just enough time to eat a sandwich. That works out perfectly.’
‘You think it’s all my fault,’ said Xavière, showing more of her teeth.
‘I certainly don’t think it’s mine,’ said Pierre.
It was simply for the purpose of behaving disagreeably towards Xavière that he had insisted on meeting her again as soon as possible. ‘He might have given me a thought,’ Françoise reflected with bitterness; she was beginning to find the situation intolerable.
‘That’s true. When for once in a while you’ve got some free time,’ said Xavière, whose grin became more perceptible, ‘what a tragedy it is, if a little of it is wasted!’
This reproach surprised Françoise. Had she once more misread Xavière? Only four days had passed since Friday and at the theatre, yesterday evening, Pierre had greeted Xavière most amiably. She would already have to be very fond of him to feel that she had been neglected.
Xavière turned to Françoise.
‘I imagined the life of writers and artists to be something quite different,’ she said in a sophisticated tone. ‘I had no idea it was regulated like that – by the ring of a bell.’
‘You would have preferred them to wander about in the storm with their hair streaming in the wind?’ said Françoise, who felt herself grow utterly fatuous under Pierre’s mocking look.
‘No. Baudelaire didn’t let his hair stream in the wind,’ said Xavière. She continued more naturally: ‘What it amounts to is that, except for him and Rimbaud, artists are just like civil servants.’
‘Because we do a little work regularly every day?’ Françoise asked.
Xavière pouted coyly.
‘And then you count the number of hours you sleep, you eat two meals a day, you pay visits, and you never go for a walk one without the other. It couldn’t possibly be otherwise …’
‘But do you consider that unbearable?’ asked Françoise with a forced smile. This was not a flattering picture of themselves which Xavière was showing them.
‘It seems queer to sit down every day at one’s desk and write line after line of sentences,’ said Xavière. ‘I admit that people should write, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘There’s something voluptuous about words. But only when the spirit moves you.’
‘It’s possible to have a desire for a piece of work as a whole,’ said Françoise. She felt a little inclined
