“You admire her so much?”
“I do.”
“But she’s grotesque. She goes in for politicians and for journalists.”
“I adore her.”
“She’s shameless—her affairs—”
I cut her short. “I know nothing about her affairs. What I know is that she has a generous soul, a warm heart and the most brilliant mind in Paris. No other woman in Paris can touch her for brains.”
Claire lifted her eyebrows. I saw that she washed her hands of me. At the moment I was glad of it. As for Clémentine, she cared nothing for what Claire or any one else thought of her. She was a law unto herself. Her love affairs, of which I knew more than I admitted, were as necessary to her as her meals. She must have food, and she attached no great importance to it. An artistic find, an amusing trip or an exciting debate in the Chamber of Deputies, would make her forget with equal ease her lunch or a sentimental rendezvous. Her relations with men didn’t seem to me to be any of my business. There was a certain recklessness there that I didn’t understand. I left it at that. It was Fan who told me about Clémentine’s marriage.
“My dear, her husband had unnatural tastes. He kicked her downstairs a month after the wedding. She can never have any children, and she hasn’t spoken to him since. Also, she is said to have said that she would never again have anything to do with a man of her own world. If she did, well, she has kept her word. Her mother stopped her getting her marriage annulled. Clémentine never got over that. She’s at war with the whole tribe of her relations, but of course she can’t cut loose from them for she hasn’t a son, and anyhow one doesn’t in France. So her revenge is to do just those things that most irritate them. They wouldn’t mind a bit how many lovers she had if she would choose them from her own class, and preserve the usual appearances. What they can’t bear is her going about with men whose fathers made boots or sold pigs. And in justice to them you should remember that these men’s grandfathers cut off their own grandfather’s heads.”
“They prefer, I suppose, a person like Bianca.”
“Of course, a million times.”