He thought of
giving her the balance, but checked himself. She might leave him…”It won’t be
long now, you’ll soon have enough.” He said.
“Almost three hundred frances”. She was
excited as a child.
“Look!” she cried waving a bank book. “And
the man didn’t ask any questions. Only my name, just like you said.” There it
was neatly written in flowery cursive for Marie Francoise Charlet. And the
amount. The price of her nights, of the dreary hours spent with him…. It was
out of her purse, held it in her hand. She talked about it, thus it does
indirectly came to talk about herself.
“Ever
been to Rue MouffetardM” she asked one day, unexpectedly, “That’s where I was
born…” Her simply words brought to life
the putrescence of the slum, the livid abjection of a swarming, horny-handed
humanity of cooperd, bottlers, warehousemen in grimy leather aprons and
hobnailed shoes. She described the rumblings of Percheron (a breed of large
fast trotting draft horses)-driven wine wagons, the hammering of barrel corks,
the various slime over the cobblestones, the stench กลิ่นเหม็น of fermenting vats หม้อขนาดใหญ่
mingling with that of rotting grape vines. She told her about her games with
other pig-tailed gamines in dank courtyards, the cold hungry Saturday nights
when her parents were too drunk to think about dinners, her mother’s slaps, her
father’s beatings followed by fits of ambiguous tenderness. “First he makes me
take off my culotte – knee length trousers made full in the legs to resembles a
skirt, worn by women and girls, then he trash me. Then when I was crying in bed
he’d come and kiss me, and beg me to forgive him.”
Abruptly she would stop in the
middle of her reminiscences, squint at him with the malevolence of the poor for
the rich,
“I don’t know why I tell you these
things. You’ve never been hungry; you can’t understand…”
He did not press her, and unexpectedly an hour or a week
later she would resume her confidences. “One Saturday night – I was fourteen
then a man took me in the hallway of our house, behing the stairs. He was a
cooper in the same warehouse where my father worked. He was drunk, but just the
same he gave me a franc for finished it with me, with the money I bought a knot
of ribbon for my dress.” After the inevitable brawl, she had fled from home and
joined her sister in the Sebastopol district. There under the tutorial of her
elder sister, she had become a street walker. In naïve, ingenuous words she described
the rapture of her first hat, her first scrap of lace, the wonder of easy money,
the thrill of the evenings in smoke – filled snooker salon, the first waltzes
with pomaded ขี้ผึ้งใส่ผมครีมใส่ผม louts
คนที่โง่งุ่มง่ามและมีมารยาทเลว. “Perhaps you’d like to go to the theatre?
Sarah Bernhardt is playing La Dame aux Come’lias at the Renaisance….Perhaps
you’d like to go to music hall?”
“I don’t want to go to nowhere with you. She replied with
sudden violence.” “Think I want people to see me with a cripple?”
He turned white and limped away.
Boredom sharpened her latent cruelity, She hurt him for
fun, to pass a moment. AQn obscure class-hattered, the immemorial enmity of the
poor toward the rich, goaded her into tormenting him, to see how much the
wealthy cripple, who had never been cold or hungry, would endure from her.
She jeer at his fastidiousness, his habits of meticulous
cleanliness. “Fussy, ain’t you? Fond of yourseld?”
“The
men I know don’t go in for so much brushing and washing. But then they are real
men don’t cripple like you.”
She knew the word cripple made him
wince, and she began to use it constantly, just to see the reflex of pain on
his face.
They were quarreled as he stunned by
the violence she made no argue just shouted, made obscene gestures that
enhances him. When she sensed he reached th e limit of his endurance, Marie
would sidle to him, beg his forgiveness,coax him to the couch. Quickly, in one
of her swift and graceful gestures, she would unfastened her blouse, pull up
her skirt. And once again an old magic would succeed .In the moist fusion of
their breaths.
“Don’t ask me how you can hate a
woman and want her at the same time. I don’t know. But one thing I know:
hatered is probably the most powerful aphrodisiac of all, and love performed in
the heat of anger is perhaps the most thrilling of all.” For an instance he
desire at the ceiling. “The only trouble with that kind of love is that it
doesn’t quench your desire, doesn’t bring you either piece of relief, doesn’t
solve anything and…”
”…and slowly drive you nut.” He
stopped abruptly, “Do I make any sense? Can you understand me at all? Perhaps
it’s her indifference. The maddening way she has of looking at me
as if she didn
T
see me. I don’t expect you to understand, for you are not a cripple, and a girl
never looked at you like that. There is something deeper more complicated than
sex, it is pride, not social pride but the human’s pride”. She looked at me as
if I were a toad masquerading into human, that’s insult can drive you crazy.
That day he had come across the bank book on the bath room shelf and found it’s
empty. An uncontrollable jealousy had swept over him. In a spatter of insult he
had ordered her out, raised his voice first and then his cane at her, and would
have struck her if she hadn’t swiftly stepped aside.
That was two weeks ago. Now his
anger has spent itself when pain hadset in. Every hour has brought its torment
of longing. First her body’s fragrance has haunted him, the memory of her small
breasts, of her yielding thighs had agonized his nights, although, he had tried
to applaud himself for his courage, assure himself he was delighted to be rid
of her. But it was no use. You didn’t placate the hunger of your body with self
awarded tributes. He had spent his evening at home, he had scoured the nights
in search of her, peere3d into obscure bistros. Now he knew she would never
come back.
That morning it was the twenty-
seventh of May, he was sitting on the edge of his couch gazing at the small
carpet of sunshine on the floor, when he heard the sound of footsteps outside.
Once more the senseless hope soared.
It wasn’t Marie. These were a man
footsteps, heavy, thudding and tired. Hurriedly he got up, tottered to his
easel, started loading his palette. There was the knock at the door. “Entrez!”
As the door opened, his voice rose
to an exclamation of joy.
“Vincent!” He dropped the tube of
paint he held in his hand, matched his cane. “When did you arrive? How long are
you going to stay? Come and sit on the couch and let me look at you! How do you
feel?”
“I’m glad you’re back Vincent. I’ve
been thinking about you a lot, Montmartre hasn’t been the same since you left…Remember
Cormon’s?”
“Yes I wish I’d gone to the atelier French
that winter instead of
painting at home or in the streets as I did.”
“I’m now care free for anatomy”
“To hell with anatomy! You
have life. You’re really found yourself at last.”
“yes, I suppose I did, it almost killed me though. But perhaps it
was worth it, even the asylum….”
Marie
was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny,
the daughter of Alexander Victor François, Vicomte de Flavigny (1770–1819),
Not really
On 7 May 1889, Vincent took a room at the Café de la Gare on Place Lamartine at a rate of one franc per night. He had recently begun using the Yellow House as a studio. Though Vincent became friendly with the café’s owners, Joseph and Marie Ginoux, it did not stop him from arguing with them over his belief that he was paying too much:
