But if what that woman said were true, Robert had remained celibate for more than two years, an unimaginable situation knowing, as I did, the blazing urgency of his desire. Who, then, had been his lover, if not his very own sister?
Corinne’s voice broke: “My God, madame, you don’t think that Yossi and I—!”
“What is the purpose of your visit?” I asked, incensed, wiping my eyes with the hem of my dress. “Tell me what you want. I have things to do.”
“The purpose of my visit? I need money, something that you and Yossi have plenty of. You see, my father, as I’ve said, has suffered an attack of paralysis and mama has nothing. I wrote to Yossi at the barracks, as I always do. I had already written to him at the Passau hospital to tell him that I had returned home to Haguenau, but he’s stopped responding to my letters and we have run out of time. We are penniless, madame. Plain and simple. I had to sell our grandfather’s watch, the only thing of his we had left, to pay for this visit. If only Yossi had been at the barracks. . . . ”
“How am I to know that you aren’t lying?” I interrupted her, defiant.
“Look at my face, madame. Look at it carefully and tell me that you don’t see him. Don’t you recognize your Robert’s eyes, his lips? They are our mother’s.”
“Enough! You shall have your money!” I said, standing up suddenly. I had recently received the rent from my tenant at Foix through my lawyer, Monsieur Lebrun. I ran to the bedroom and emptied the desk drawer of money into a pillowcase.
“Here. This is all I can give you,” I said, holding out the bundle. She grabbed it from my hands and looked inside.
“It’s a lot,” she said with an ironic smile. “Enough to buy Yossi’s entire past—no? But what am I saying? I meant the honorable Hussar Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste-Robert Renaud. Neither you nor your husband will ever see my face again. Take care, madame,” she added sarcastically, and abruptly turned her back to me.
How I missed Maryse in the days that followed! But Maryse was traveling through the Grand Armée encampments in Germany with a wagon and three carriages—one of them mine—putting on shows with the help of Pierre and Françoise, who, as I learned from her letters, had become actors. Though, in truth, the fact that I weathered that spiritual storm alone had its benefits; it allowed me to discover a part of myself I’d never known existed, a shameful part, I must admit. Because not only did I reproach Robert for his inexcusable deception; I also reproached him for being a Jew.
During those days I barely ate, and drank nothing but water. I locked myself in the bedroom, a prisoner to my own mind. Standing in front of the mirror in my nightshirt, my hair uncombed, I confronted a hypothetical Robert, practicing my harangue, throwing his betrayal in his face, demanding that he go back to the barracks and leave me alone until Maryse came back with my servants and my carriages. But in the end, I threw myself on the bed with choking sobs, knowing that I wasn’t going to break with him, that I didn’t have the strength to leave him. And it was my love for him that hurt the most, my unjustifiable love for that traitorous and opportunistic Hussar who only wanted me for my money, my love that, come what may, he would never deserve. But in a small corner of my pain I soon found a handhold, something to grab onto, an excuse that I held up in front of my own eyes that would allow me to stay with him: the war with Prussia was imminent. Robert would die and the least I could do was to bury him with his cross. It was the certainty that he was going to die that, for an instant, dissuaded me from leaving him, that made me swing, like a pendulum, from one conviction to another, trapped between rupture and reconciliation. If only he weren’t a Jew. Did Maryse and Uncle Charles know? And if someone were to find out? And if Corinne continued to blackmail me and the day came when I could no longer pay her? And even if that didn’t happen, why assume that she and Robert hadn’t been lovers, hadn’t rolled about like pigs in the muddy filth of incest? How was it possible that I had fallen in love with an incestuous Jew? How would I feel entering a dancehall on his arm, people whispering behind our backs? And once again, the pendulum would swing back the other way. What did it really mean that he was Jewish? What was written on his face or in his character that would damn him? Because eyes like his were common among the Marseillaise, the Spanish and the Italians, not to mention the Corsicans and the Creoles from the islands, and even Josephine and Napoleon himself. And really, what proof did I have that he and Corinne had been lovers, why not believe that he’d had a secret lover in Boulogne, some married woman with whom he couldn’t be seen in public? And in any case, aside from their reputation as leeches, I had to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about those men in black overcoats who had followed us from the Rhine all the way to the Danube, buying silver, clothing, shoes, and stolen objects at one tenth of their value, then turning around and selling them at a profit. But silly me—I remembered with relief—what of the clockmaker in Strasbourg? He could not possibly have been kinder to me. Maryse and I had slept in his bedroom, his distant songs sweetening our dreams. And wasn’t I in favor of equality for all in the eyes of the law, had I not always defended this principle against Aunt Margot’s contrary opinion? In short, what harm had the Jews ever done to me? There didn’t seem to be any in Foix, or if there had been, I’d never noticed. I had to admit that, for me, they were little more than a vague entity that came into being who knew when: a scattered biblical tribe that didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God; a passionate and miserly people who attended temples called synagogues in which rabbis officiated and who circumcised their male babies. (“Circumcision,” a word I’d discovered in Aunt Margot’s dictionary—my secret source of knowledge—along with “penis,” “foreskin,” “testicles,” and “semen,” words that aroused me just to read them, and made me want to masturbate. How was I to know that Robert was one of them, I, who’d only ever seen the gardener urinating from a distance?) Ultimately, I had no reason to reproach Robert for having been born Jewish—he wasn’t stingy, wasn’t a money-lender, and didn’t practice Judaism—but even so, he was circumcised, and that thought alone was enough to torment me.
Joyful shouts from the other side of the door shook me from the exhausting seesawing of my emotions: Robert had returned. That night we made love, as was to be expected after an absence, my gaze seeking out his penis, trying to guess what it had originally looked like, wondering what other men’s penises, untouched by the rabbi’s knife, might be like. But, as the days passed that pernicious curiosity waned. Almost without realizing it, the moment arrived when the only thing I faulted him for was his deception, his lack of honesty. And for that, I had not forgiven him.
I chose to remain silent. What would I have accomplished had I thrown his lies in his face? But even if it’s true that I never told him about Corinne’s visit, it’s equally true that my reserve, joined now with his, drew new parameters around my love, a less luminous configuration, still beautiful, but mediated by the compromises of guilt and blame. Soon my relationship with Robert ceased to be the absolute surrender that it had been in the days before Corinne. My orgasms, which before had always opened the doors to heaven, were now limited, even mediocre. Yes, my love had lost not only passion but also innocence, freshness, and the game of playing God now seemed stupid to me; I preferred to match him, hand to hand, on the green cloth of the game table. The get-togethers with the other Hussars began to bore me with their predictability, and instead of going down to meet him in the café I would wait for him at home, playing the piano or lying on the sofa reading what Madame de Staël had to say about literature, or an enormous tome of Shakespeare in translation.
Robert, for his part, threw himself into winning me back, without knowing that nothing could ever restore things to the place where they had shined the brightest, to that place of illusion. He did everything within his power: gifts, kind gestures, professions of love. Like a child who needs to be the center of attention, he did extravagant things like shaving his head and trying to make me jealous by flirting with the magistrate’s daughter. When he’d tried everything, he got drunk and told me the truth, told me he was Jewish and that his last name was Dorfman and that he’d been born to a shoemaker in Haguenau.
“I already knew that you were a Jew,” I said, hoping to wound him, to make him pay for the suffering he’d caused me. “I’ve known since