Read Online The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky - Free Book Online

‘ah’ of surprise, experiencing the intense pleasure of intellectual satisfaction at understanding something; she grabbed Mademoiselle Rose’s hand and smiled, staring up at her with an intense, malicious expression in her brown eyes. ‘I understand now,’ she said. ‘She has lovers, doesn’t she?’
    ‘Be quiet, Hélène, be quiet,’ whispered Mademoiselle Rose.
    But Hélène thought to herself, ‘She knew who I meant right away.’
    She let out a happy, birdlike little cry, jumped up on to an old stone boundary marker while cooing, ‘A lover … a lover!She has a lover!’ Then, suddenly weary and seeing the lamp being lit in her room, she remembered how thirsty she was. ‘Oh, Mademoiselle Rose, dearest Mademoiselle Rose,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t I allowed to eat ice cream?’
    But Mademoiselle Rose was lost in thought and so said nothing.

8
    Hélène’s life, like everyone else’s, had its own haven of light. Every year she returned to France with her mother and Mademoiselle Rose. How happy she was to see Paris again. She loved it so much. Now that Karol was getting rich, his wife stayed at the Grand Hotel in Paris, but Hélène stayed in a grim, sordid little guest house behind Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Hélène was growing up; it was necessary to keep her as far away as possible from the life her mother enjoyed. Madame Karol paid for Hélène’s and Mademoiselle Rose’s accommodation out of her personal allowance, thus reconciling her own self-interest with the demands of morality. But Hélène was perfectly happy. For a few months she could mingle with French children of her own age.
    How she envied them! She never grew tired of studying them. To be born in these ordinary, peaceful neighbourhoods where all the houses looked alike – how wonderful that would be. To be born and grow up here. To have Paris as her home. Not to have to see her mother every morning when they metat the Bois de Boulogne, walking slowly beside her down the Allée des Acacias (and having fulfilled this duty, Bella Karol believed she had done what was necessary and had no need to think about her daughter until the next day, unless she fell seriously ill), not to see her mother, with her Irish tweed jacket, her polka-dot veil, her skirt sweeping across the dead leaves, as she walked with all the plumed aplomb of, according to the popular expression of the day, a ‘horse pulling a hearse’ to meet an Argentinian with cigar-coloured skin. Not to have to travel by train for five days to return to a barbaric country where she didn’t really feel at home either, because she spoke French better than Russian, because her hair was done in curls rather than tightly pulled back into shiny little plaits, because her dresses were based on Parisian fashion … Even, if necessary, to be the daughter of one of the shopkeepers near the Gare de Lyon. To wear a black smock and have cheeks as pink as radishes. To be able to ask her mother (a different mother), ‘Mama, where are the penny notebooks?’
    To be that little girl …
    ‘Hélène, stand up straight.’
    ‘Oh, damn!’
    To be called Jeanne Fournier or Loulou Massard or Henriette Durand, a name that was easy to understand, easy to remember … But no. She wasn’t like the others. Not completely. It was such a shame! And yet … She had a richer and fuller life than other children. She had experienced so many things. She had seen so many different places. She sometimes felt that two distinct souls inhabited her body. She was only a little girl, yet she already had so many memories that she had no troubleunderstanding that word that grown-ups used: ‘experience’. Sometimes, when she thought about this, she was filled with an intoxicating feeling of joy. She would walk around Paris in the pinkish dusk, at six o’clock in the evening, when a flood of light filtered down on to the streets; she would hold Mademoiselle Rose’s hand and look at all the faces as they passed by,