Read Online One Damn Thing After Another by Nicolas Freeling - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicolas Freeling
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to eat?
Mm, she had herself an errand. Rue Ravel. One of the most elegant of the âMusiciansâ quarterâ, which is considered, broadly, the most desirable place in Strasbourg to live. Much of it is in large ponderous blocks of the late nineteenth century,built during the German occupation and of Kaiser-Wilhelm weight and majesty, and absence of any aesthetic sense whatever. There are also large â and small â villas standing in gardens. Wherever a speculator has got his paws on one of these, he has instantly knocked it down and built an apartment-block designed to milk the space to the last square millimetre.
It wasnât at all far. She could walk, as she often did when feeling ruffled. The weather was afternoon-autumnal, and delicious. What had the silly woman said? âThe Orangerie endâ. Since the Rue Ravel runs parallel to Strasbourgâs prettiest public garden, it wasnât a helpful direction.
One of the new ones: everything bijou. The wretched fellow called in to âlandscape the gardenâ which is the size of a pint pot, employs the little horrors sold by nurserymen to this end; a dwarf cypress, a dwarf weeping ash, and one of those stunted bushes with gold and silver foliage. The entrance is a corkscrew of crazy paving between shelves of artificial stone inadequately clothed with miniature alpines. There is no room for plaster gnomes; they must live in the house, getting their beards caught in all the burglar alarms.
The interior arrangements show the same inadequacy: there seems no provision for anything but drinking, fornicating, and being-in-the-bathroom; activities catered for with a lavishness amounting to frenzy. There are a very few unreadable books, several hideous daubs purporting to be pictures and many of those ugly things florists insist are flowers.
The furniture, generally a mix of oriental, modern and bogus-Louis, is dwarf-size and gossamer-fragile. The slightest rip or chip in the leather or lacquer and you must throw it all away. The owners do not mind. Whatever their pretended profession, they have a great deal of money. One need not feel sorry for them, nor for the cramped and squalid discomfort of their pastures in Passy or Neuilly: they like it this way.
The woman who let Arlette in was called Madame Estelle Laboisserie. There was also a daughter of late teen age, spotty and supercilious, with neither brains, looks, nor character, named Ghislaine. Mama was thin, with a beige face, and a body like the furniture, of kindling wood swathed in beigesuède with gold accessories. On her spindly legs were high boots of glove-leather, coloured violet.
This all sounds, Arlette was later to remark, exceedingly improbable. I swear, she said, itâs all true. I did have such a strong sense of unreality I could hardly concentrate upon what the woman said. And she had one of those voices thought in Passy to be Parisian, that swoops upward upon high at every punctuation mark. Government ministers, those expletive-deleted counter-tenors, adopt this voice in television interviews when taxed therein with peculation.
The one thing real is the story. It comes out very slowly, with a multiplicity of evasions and euphemisms. But this woman is not a plaster dwarf after all. Was once a human being, and produced a baby from between her legs. Has still occasionally remnants of human emotion. Is terribly ashamed of them, but theyâre there. It is a shameful story, and pitiful.
Monsieur Hervé Laboisserie is a consul. The French Foreign Service, still known as the Quai dâOrsay, exactly the way M. de Norpois spoke of Saint-Jamesâs and the Ballplatz, is as snobbish as it is useless, and despises consuls terribly.
âLe service consulaire
Câest une belle carrière,
Je ne dis pas le contraire:
Mais, moi, je suis Ministre.â
Monsieur, and Madame, suffered terribly from this. However, he had grown to become a very grand consul. In one of
Mm, she had herself an errand. Rue Ravel. One of the most elegant of the âMusiciansâ quarterâ, which is considered, broadly, the most desirable place in Strasbourg to live. Much of it is in large ponderous blocks of the late nineteenth century,built during the German occupation and of Kaiser-Wilhelm weight and majesty, and absence of any aesthetic sense whatever. There are also large â and small â villas standing in gardens. Wherever a speculator has got his paws on one of these, he has instantly knocked it down and built an apartment-block designed to milk the space to the last square millimetre.
It wasnât at all far. She could walk, as she often did when feeling ruffled. The weather was afternoon-autumnal, and delicious. What had the silly woman said? âThe Orangerie endâ. Since the Rue Ravel runs parallel to Strasbourgâs prettiest public garden, it wasnât a helpful direction.
One of the new ones: everything bijou. The wretched fellow called in to âlandscape the gardenâ which is the size of a pint pot, employs the little horrors sold by nurserymen to this end; a dwarf cypress, a dwarf weeping ash, and one of those stunted bushes with gold and silver foliage. The entrance is a corkscrew of crazy paving between shelves of artificial stone inadequately clothed with miniature alpines. There is no room for plaster gnomes; they must live in the house, getting their beards caught in all the burglar alarms.
The interior arrangements show the same inadequacy: there seems no provision for anything but drinking, fornicating, and being-in-the-bathroom; activities catered for with a lavishness amounting to frenzy. There are a very few unreadable books, several hideous daubs purporting to be pictures and many of those ugly things florists insist are flowers.
The furniture, generally a mix of oriental, modern and bogus-Louis, is dwarf-size and gossamer-fragile. The slightest rip or chip in the leather or lacquer and you must throw it all away. The owners do not mind. Whatever their pretended profession, they have a great deal of money. One need not feel sorry for them, nor for the cramped and squalid discomfort of their pastures in Passy or Neuilly: they like it this way.
The woman who let Arlette in was called Madame Estelle Laboisserie. There was also a daughter of late teen age, spotty and supercilious, with neither brains, looks, nor character, named Ghislaine. Mama was thin, with a beige face, and a body like the furniture, of kindling wood swathed in beigesuède with gold accessories. On her spindly legs were high boots of glove-leather, coloured violet.
This all sounds, Arlette was later to remark, exceedingly improbable. I swear, she said, itâs all true. I did have such a strong sense of unreality I could hardly concentrate upon what the woman said. And she had one of those voices thought in Passy to be Parisian, that swoops upward upon high at every punctuation mark. Government ministers, those expletive-deleted counter-tenors, adopt this voice in television interviews when taxed therein with peculation.
The one thing real is the story. It comes out very slowly, with a multiplicity of evasions and euphemisms. But this woman is not a plaster dwarf after all. Was once a human being, and produced a baby from between her legs. Has still occasionally remnants of human emotion. Is terribly ashamed of them, but theyâre there. It is a shameful story, and pitiful.
Monsieur Hervé Laboisserie is a consul. The French Foreign Service, still known as the Quai dâOrsay, exactly the way M. de Norpois spoke of Saint-Jamesâs and the Ballplatz, is as snobbish as it is useless, and despises consuls terribly.
âLe service consulaire
Câest une belle carrière,
Je ne dis pas le contraire:
Mais, moi, je suis Ministre.â
Monsieur, and Madame, suffered terribly from this. However, he had grown to become a very grand consul. In one of
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