Belle De Jour by Joseph Kessel Read Free Book Online Page B

and, if you wish, the most degrading. Oh, by and large, men’s fantasies are pretty limited; but it’s worse—or rather better—than rape to treat a society woman like that.”
    Her head inclined, body upright, Séverine listened as Husson’s impersonal voice continued: “I hardly ever go into those places any more. I’ve seen too many of them by now. But there was a time … that savor of impoverished corruption. You get an idea of what the human body was really made for. In lust like that there’s a sort of humility on both sides: after all, a butcher can expect the same service there as me. Mind you, I’m speaking of the more modest kind of house, and even there high prices are beginning to ruin everything. I mean houses like 42 rue Ruispar or 9b rue Virène or again … but I could give you a whole list. As I say, I never go there any more but I like walking in front of them. A nice middle-class facade near the Hôtel des Ventes or the Louvre, and behind it faceless men stripping and taking their slaves, just as they like, without any control. That sort of thing feeds the imagination, you know.”
    Séverine left Husson without a word. She didn’t even give him her hand. Their eyes didn’t meet.
    From that day on the innumerable shapeless desires that had tortured Séverine crystallized into one abiding obsession. She herself was not immediately conscious of this; but she knew that the wall behind which she had isolated that denizen of the subsoil of her soul, in which blind all-powerful motives moved, had collapsed. Already the ordered world in which she’d always lived was linked to the universe that opened to her by instincts whose power she was still afraid to measure. Alreadyher ordinary self was united, bound together, with the other self that had wakened with all the vigor that follows a deep sleep.
    It took Séverine two days to understand what this side of herself required of her, two days in which she went through the motions and pronounced the words of her usual existence. No one, not even Pierre, noticed the state of shuddering expectation in which she lived. But she was aware of the burning, pitiless, poisonous thorn that transfixed her.
    For two days one single fantasy pulsed in her sacked mind. It was the same day-dream which had possessed her during the ambivalent happiness of her initial convalescence: a man with a face sodden with desire was following her through some slummy district. She ran to get away from him, but couldn’t lose him. Then she was in a blind alley. The man was on her, she could hear his creaking shoes, she breathed his panting breath. She was in agony, in expectation of some nameless sensual bliss. But he couldn’t find her in the little angle of the wall behind which she’d hidden. He went away. And with dreadful despair Séverine sought in vain for the brute who was carrying off her supremely important secret.
    Other darker, more muddled imaginings that she’d known after her illness now came back also, but that one was the deep theme in her soul round which the others grouped themselves. For two days and two nights Séverine begged for the man of the blind alley; then one morning when Pierre had gone off to the hospitalas usual, she dressed herself as soberly as possible and went down and called a cab.
    “Take me to the rue Virène,” she told the driver, “and go up the street slowly. I’ve forgotten the number but I’ll remember the house when I see it.”
    The taxi drove along the quays. Séverine saw the great mass of the Louvre. Her throat felt caught in a knot so tight she once actually put up her hands as if to undo it. They were getting closer.
    “Rue Virène, lady.” The driver slowed.
    Séverine began scanning the odd-numbered side of the street. A brownstone … another … and suddenly before they’d reached it she saw what she was looking for. It was a house just like the others, but a man had just gone in; and though she’d seen only his back,