Belle De Jour by Joseph Kessel

Author:Joseph Kessel [Kessel, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC005000
ISBN: 9781468307788
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2007-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Séverine was brought in to him one evening when, dirtied and again disappointed, she was about to leave Mme Anaïs’. The bell stopped her just as she was reaching for her hat. The girls could tell that something unpleasant was in store by the way the madame called them. And they were right.

The man waiting to look them over was drunk. Wearing the short canvas coat of a market laborer, he alternately stared at his muddy shoes and around the room—which obviously pleased him. Two strong hands rested on his knees.

“That one,” he nodded at Belle de Jour, “and a shot of rum.”

She undressed while he drank. He watched her without a word. Then he took her without a word. His body was heavy. Everything about him, even the rheum in his eyes, seemed thicker than in an ordinary man. And Séverine, suddenly recognizing coarse fury and bestial sensuality, groaned from the depths of her being. The desire slaking itself on her body was no careful, refined thing: it was an aspect of that trinity which had led her to this bed. The man in the blind-alley, the man with the obscene neck, the bargeman: they were all three satisfying themselves on her body in the person of this man whose weight crushed her, whose knotty limbs quartered her. An undefinable flood of feeling coursed through her. Both surprise and fear appeared on her face. She ground her teeth; then, suddenly, her expression become so relaxed, so happy and young, that anyone but the man whose prey she was would have been amazed. He put a folded bill on the bedside table and left.

Séverine lay sprawled there for a long time. An urgent duty called her, but she ignored it. She felt that from now on she had nothing to fear. She had just received a gift upon which no one else had the right to look. She had reached the end of her dreadful race and her finish-line had turned into a new beginning. The sense of joy she felt now was even greater than the physical joy which had shuddered through her with such unspeakable ecstasy. All the drives that had ruled her since her convalescence were justified for Séverine now, whereas before they had seemed a disgusting, impossible madness. She’d conquered what she had sought so blindly; and this conquest, won through hell, filled her with an enormous, strange, stunning pride.

Charlotte asked her sympathetically, “That animal give you a hard time?”

Séverine didn’t answer; she only chuckled richly. Charlotte and Mathilde looked at each other in surprise. They realized that till that minute they’d never heard Belle de Jour laugh.

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