The Gigolo by Françoise Sagan

Author:Françoise Sagan [Sagan, Françoise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241339657
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Lake of Loneliness

Prudence – for such was her name, alas, and an inappropriate one at that – Prudence Delvaux had parked her car in a forest ride, near Trappes, and was strolling aimlessly in the damp, chill November wind. It was five o’clock and growing dark: a melancholy hour, in a melancholy month, in a melancholy landscape, but nonetheless she whistled as she walked, stooping now and then to pick up a chestnut or a russet leaf whose colour appealed to her. She wondered drily what she was doing there – why, on her way home from a charming weekend, with charming friends, with her charming lover, she had felt a sudden and almost irresistible urge to stop her Fiat and set off on foot on this heart-rending autumn evening, why she had suddenly succumbed to the desire to be alone and walk.

She was wearing a silk scarf and an extremely well-cut coat in lodencloth the colour of the leaves, she was thirty years old and her hand-sewn walking shoes made every stride a pleasure. A rook flew cawing overhead and was immediately joined by a bevy of its fellows until they filled the sky to the horizon. And oddly enough, this raucous cry, familiar though it was, made her heart beat faster as though in response to some nameless terror. Not that Prudence was afraid of prowlers, or the cold, or the wind, or even of life itself. On the contrary, her friends would burst out laughing whenever they uttered her name. Considering her attitude to life, they said, it was the purest paradox. However, she hated anything she couldn’t understand, and that was really the only thing she was frightened of: not understanding what was happening to her. And now, suddenly, she had to stop and catch her breath.

The landscape reminded her of a Breughel, and she liked Breughel; she liked the warm car that awaited her and the music she would switch on once she was back inside it; she liked the thought of meeting, around eight o’clock, a man who loved her and whom she loved in return, a man called Jean-François. She also liked the thought of getting up, yawning, after their night of love, and gulping down the cup of coffee which he, or she, would have made for ‘the other’; and also the thought of her office tomorrow morning, of discussing advertising ideas with Marc, the good friend with whom she had worked for the past five years. They would agree, laughing, that in the end the best way of promoting a new washing powder was to show that it washed greyer, and that people needed greyness more than whiteness, dullness more than sparkle, obsolescence more than durability.

She liked all that; in fact, she liked her life: plenty of friends, plenty of lovers, an amusing job, a child even, together with a taste for music, books, flowers and log fires. But now this rook had flown over, chased by that frantic rabble,

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