The Fires of Autumn by Irène Némirovsky Read Free Book Online Page A

furniture. Nearly three o’clock … At three o’clock he would leave the Bruns; he would walk down the staircase, Thérèse on his arm; they would head for a little hotel he knew in Versailles where they would spend their wedding night. And the next day, while she was still asleep (his wife … her hair falling over her neck, her shoulders, just as it did when she was a child, her fine, sweet-smelling hair … that cloud of spun gold …) while she was still asleep, he would very quietly leave, without saying goodbye, without even kissing her, because his heart wouldbreak if he had to give her one last kiss and see her eyes fill with tears.
    Finally the meal was over. Madame Brun carried the empty cake dish into the kitchen, the one that had held her masterpiece, her triumph, a specialty of Savoie filled with cherry cream. Not a crumb was left. She had been so overcome with emotion by making this dessert that she had hardly noticed anything else, the wedding, or that Thérèse had left … But nothing would change, because tomorrow, with Martial back at the front, Thérèse would return to the room she had before she was married and her life would carry on as if nothing had happened. The elderly Madame Brun was delighted at this thought with the sweet childlike cynicism of the elderly.
    In the dining room, the men had fallen silent, one after the other. Even Adolphe Brun had not been able to take part in the women’s chatter for long; Madame Humbert’s loud, strident voice could be heard above everyone else’s, like the big drum in an orchestra, and during certain patriotic tirades, she sounded like a shrill, heartbreaking fife, while Renée’s voice was a flute alongside hers and Madame Jacquelain sighed like a mandolin. Thérèse was visibly trying to be cheerful, talking and laughing; it was the moment when she began to learn how to behave like a soldier’s wife, no crying, no lamenting in public, rarely talking about herself and never about the one who was ‘over there’, the woman who continues waiting for him when everyone else has stopped waiting, the one who remembers when everyone else has forgotten, the one who hopes against all hope.
    The women were talking about the war.
    They descended from such lofty conversation to discuss the theatre; the Parisian theatres had reopened in December. Madame Jacquelain exclaimed that it was sacrilege: ‘How can people go out in the evening when our dear little soldiers are so miserable? I wouldn’t dare do that, not me …’
    Madame Humbert did not agree:
    ‘But come now, my dear, it all depends on the performance. At the Comédie Française they’ve been showing
Horace
. Marthe Chenal sang the
Marseillaise
at the Opera House. Well, what do you want? We need things like that to keep our spirits up. Civilians need that.’
    ‘We’re young,’ said Renée, ‘we need to take our minds off things.’
    She looked at Détang and smiled brightly, provocatively. She and her mother had always dreamed of finding her a rich husband. But the war was wreaking terrible havoc with the men. ‘Soon, it won’t be a question of choice. It will be like it is at the butcher’s: since August, you had to take whatever you could get,’ Madame Humbert had said with a disillusioned sigh, as she sewed her hats beneath the lamplight every evening. ‘Soon a lad like Détang, with no fortune and no prospects, a nobody, will seem like a good bargain, just as long as the war agrees to send him home with at least one arm or leg.’
    ‘He’s not stupid,’ Renée would say to her mother, ‘he’s only as enthusiastic as necessary. It’s very odd: he never gets carried away. He gets everyone else to speak. He does talk a lot but he never actually says anything. He’s got a true Southern personality. He told me that if he makes it through this war he wants to go into politics, and it’s not a bad idea for him. He could be successful.’
    ‘Yes,’ her mother replied, ‘but