Detective and mystery stories, French -- Translations into English
This versatility of mood, the despair, which he had felt to be real,
followed by a light-heartedness which he felt to be equally sincere; all
this bewildered Philippe.
She began to laugh:
"Philippe! Philippe! You look as though you did not understand much
about women ... and even less about girls!"
She rose and went to the next room, which was her bedroom, as he saw by
the white curtains and the arrangement of the furniture; and she
returned with an album, in which she showed him, on the first page, the
photograph of a child, crying:
"Look, Philippe. I haven't changed. At two years old, just as now, I
used to have great big sorrows and eyes that flowed like taps."
He turned the pages of the album. There were portraits of Suzanne at all
ages: Suzanne as a child, Suzanne as a little girl, Suzanne as a young
girl; and each was more bewitching than the last.
At the bottom of one page, he read:
"_Suzanne, twenty._"
"Lord, how pretty you were!" he muttered, dazed by that image of beauty
and gladness.
And he looked at Suzanne, in spite of himself.
"I have grown older," she said. "Three long years...."
He shrugged his shoulders without replying, for, on the contrary, he
thought her lovelier still; and he turned the pages. Two loose
photographs slipped to the floor. She put out her hand to take them, but
did not complete the movement.
"May I?" asked Philippe.
"Yes, certainly."
He was much astonished when he examined one of the portraits:
"This," he said, "makes you look older than you are.... How funny! And
why that old-fashioned dress?... That quaint way of doing your hair....
It's you ... and yet it's not you.... Who is it?"
"Mamma," she said.
He was surprised, knowing Jorance's persistent rancour, that he should
have given his daughter the portrait of a mother whom she had been
taught to believe long dead. And he remembered the riotous adventures of
the divorced wife, now the beautiful Mme. de Glaris, who was celebrated
in the chronicles of fast society for her dresses and her jewellery and
whose photographs were displayed in the shop-windows of the Rue de
Rivoli for the admiration of the passers-by.
"Yes," he said, awkwardly and not quite knowing what he was saying,
"yes, you are like her.... And is this also ...?"
He suppressed a movement of astonishment. This time, he clearly
recognized Suzanne's mother, or rather the Mme. de Glaris of the Rue de
Rivoli, bare-shouldered, decked in her pearls and diamonds, shameless
and magnificent.
Suzanne, who kept her eyes raised to his face, did not speak; and they
remained opposite each other, motionless and silent.
"Does she know the truth?" Philippe asked himself. "No ... no ... it's
not possible.... She must have bought this photograph, because of the
likeness to herself which she saw in it, and she does not suspect
anything...."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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