Tender Shoots by Paul Morand

Author:Paul Morand [Euan Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906548988
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2012-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Delphine entered, dressed in mourning, the oval of her face accentuated by a strip of white crêpe. I had not seen her for five years. We embraced.

“Your cheeks are a little less hard as they used to be,” I said, out of affection.

Her face, as smooth as a porcelain bowl, receded at the sides in an equal curve, drawing up to the surface two dark eyes, liquid and flat, but my memory hesitated at the sight of a softened mouth, tired at the corners and which bore her even teeth without any pleasure. Her nostrils were more flared, and being elongated, no longer formed part of the line of her very delicate nose, hooked and slender as to be almost transparent, the one relief in the mask. Her expression, too, had changed, more taciturn, rarely embellished by her former eloquence or self-assurance. The joy in seeing one another again was non-existent.

“I’m not taking the veil,” she said with a laugh, “but I need rest and this convent had been recommended to me and suits me. God provides us with many a pitfall after misfortune, in order to punish us,” she added.

I saw her bedroom, just as basic as those in the gloomy furnished lodgings in the neighbourhood. The walls were covered in old nursery paper, blue with gold stars. Some lilies were soaking in the cracked washbasin. Delphine was getting dressed to go to vespers; I agreed to accompany her.

The sash window decapitated a segment of the square streaked with telephone wires which propped up the immediate weight of a sightless sky. The oriental domes of the Alhambra, the shabby Restaurant Cavour with its dark Chianti stains on the tablecloths, cheered up the image of Sunday with their southern protestations.

In the street she took my arm and traces soon appeared of our former camaraderie.

“I’m glad to be here,” she said, “the English are strange creatures, with hands pitted in freckles, who cry at the sight of squirrels and sweet peas. They talk in a garrulous way like southerners without lips, are victims of their nerves and have no resistance to emotions when they happen to feel them. They are all like Miss Mabel, my governess in Tours, deferential and distracted at the same time. She had a prestigious pocket watch inside which was an elegant miniature. In the early days she believed her husband was in love with her. You never knew my husband? He looked like Michel Strogoff, in the first act, when he still has his fine uniform and all his eyelashes; like a tenor whom I had seen in Hernani. That’s why when I met him for the first time, I turned round. For two months he followed us. He wrote me letters on a paper alternately red and violet. I was thrilled. He asked to marry me. I made up my own mind to refuse. Once I was in his presence I was overcome with panic and two weeks later we were married. You know how he was killed outside Odessa, shortly afterwards.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.