Tender Shoots Page 8

  “Aurora has created a pogrom,” says Fred very calmly from the piano.

  I try to intervene.

  “Leave me alone, you,” says Aurora. “I hate you.”

  And before any of us could have lifted a finger, she jumps through the window into the little ground-floor garden and disappears.

  When I enter her studio, Aurora is sitting on her bed, her chin in her hands, her elbows on her clenched knees. She does not turn her head towards me, I walk straight over to her, in the direction of her eyes, but her gaze goes through me and remains fixed to the wall.

  I place my hands on her shoulders: she flinches.

  “Leave me. Leave me. I don’t want to see you anymore. Go away.”

  I sit down.

  “Go away.”

  I stand up.

  She softens and reaches out her hand to me.

  “Sit down. I only wanted to tell you that it would be best to leave me alone from now on. You are of no use to me. I don’t want to say more.”

  She pokes the tip of her umbrella through the straps of her sandals.

  “I was beginning to reap the fruits of all my voluntary labour. I am not a nun. I have to both invent the rule and observe it at the same time. And abnegation is not easy for the wild creature I am. You who have not been aware of this long struggle wouldn’t be able to understand … Parties like the one last night don’t help matters …”

  Tears flow down her cheeks. I want to say … But she interrupts me as she gets to her feet and covers herself with a violet veil.

  Large zinc clouds jut through the rays of the setting sun. It thunders. Taxis rush madly by.

  As soon as we are out of her neighbourhood, people start to look round. Aurora stops, places her hand on mine. Between us this layer of very skimpy veil.

  Aurora trembles.

  “Will you forgive me, Aurora?”

  A vague gesture from Aurora which I interpret:

  “It’s not your fault.”

  She waves her hand. The number 19 bus draws up obediently at her feet, by the edge of the pavement. She climbs up to the top deck as if she were walking on a length of unrolled frieze.

  The panel states that she can go as far as Islington.

  I am very sad. I feel that I shall not really be upset until after dinner.

  1916

  AFTERWORD

  Michel Déon

  PAUL MORAND was thirty-three when Gallimard published Tendres stocks (Tender Shoots) in 1921, a debut that may seem tardy in these days of untold geniuses of eighteen, and younger. The three novellas that make up this slim book date, in fact, from a few years earlier and we may not be incorrect in thinking that Morand kept them on his back burner, polishing and improving them, precisely in order that they should appear effortless.

  Are they, in any case, novellas? No, not really, not in the true sense of the word, and I would feel more inclined to place these first three trial attempts, by a writer who had not yet found his path, among the ‘portraits’ that he may have considered as an exercise in style, a sort of trial gallop before the future work of his full maturity. Proust was dazzled, as was the high-priest of Surrealism, André Breton, who would later feel disillusioned when his followers supported Moscow.

  The astonishment aroused by Tendres stocks was huge. Europe was emerging from an appalling war, gathering its breath to overturn the idols of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Morand burst forth without warning, accurate, fluent, clever, poetic, cruel. The early years of his life as a diplomat had shunted him between Rome, Madrid and London until he had acquired sufficient know-how to have himself recalled to Paris and to spend the last year of the world war under the command of the most brilliant operator in French politics—Phillipe Berthelot. The names of his friends were Giraudoux, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and, even more so, le tout-Paris, including a few ladies of already mature age who held open table at the Ritz, at Meurice’s, chez Larue or Maxim’s. Here they talked of politics, here they swapped the latest gossip and even the substance of the top-secret government meeting held that very morning. At those luncheons Morand would meet the woman who was to become his wife, Hélène, Princesse Soutzo, half-Greek, half-Romanian, to whom he was deeply unfaithful but whom he would also deeply mourn when she died.

  All these fortunate circumstances helped mould a man who was not just someone always in-the-know, but who was also a citizen of the world, an inquisitor, a voyeur and a collector of civilizations. From 1918, once peace was declared, he would parade his curiosity more or less everywhere, resign from the diplomatic service, only to return once more, nevertheless, in 1939, as Président de la Commission du Blocus in London, a rather amusing about-turn for a man who, during twenty years of leisure activity between the two wars, had never stopped roaming the planet and bringing home books about ‘things seen’—Rien que la terre, Londres, Bucarest, New York, not forgetting his writings about China and both the Americas. A compulsive!

  There is no reason for what followed to feature in this brief sketch of such a protean figure, apart from the fact that the three portraits etched in Tendres stocks herald works of fiction that bided their time impatiently, waiting for peace and the freedom to unleash their creator. Everything is in fermentation, including an unsparing self-portrait, L’Homme pressé, in which those who were close to him, as well as his readers, would identify him before the time came for him to bid farewell to everything that he loved, which he did in Venises (Venices, published in Euan Cameron’s translation by Pushkin Press), but also in the profoundly moving Le Flagellant de Séville which, regardless of its author, deserves to be ranked among the masterpieces of the twentieth century, as a masterpiece for all time.

  Let there be no mistake—Morand was still writing about himself, just as he was in Tendres stocks.

  2011

  Copyright

  Original text © Éditions Gallimard

  English translation © Euan Cameron 2011

  Afterword © Michel Déon 2011

  Tender Shoots first published in French as

  Tendres Stocks in 1921.

  This edition first published in 2011 by

  Pushkin Press

  12 Chester Terrace

  London NW1 4ND

  ISBN 978 1 906548 98 8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

  Cover Illustration: Three Women Marie Laurencin

  © ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2011

  Frontispiece Paul Morand 1935

  © Roger-Viollet Rex Features

  Set in 11 on 14 Monotype Baskerville

  by Tetragon

  and printed in Great Britain on Munken Premium White 90 gsm

  by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  www.pushkinpress.com