Rézi
The beautiful married woman Claudine falls for — the center of the affair, and of the disillusion that follows.
Claudine, on terms that are daily and private. She says so plainly and often, and what she asks for again and again is not a declaration but a room with a door that shuts.
The book
At a glance
- The woman Claudine falls in love with; she arrives at Renaud's at-home about a third of the way in
- Madame Lambrook in Paris. Rézi is a pet name from her Viennese mother
- Eight years, by her own count, to Lambrook, a former English colonel; she was very young at the wedding
- An apartment on the avenue Kléber, with a long dark bedroom; she dresses in a passage off it
- Rich, and by her own account never rich enough
- Small, white-skinned, blonde with green glints in her hair, grey short-sighted eyes; she smells of fern and iris
- Lambrook came back from India a good-looking shell, stops answering when India is mentioned, and walks into rooms without knocking
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRézi is the woman that Claudine, the young narrator of this novel, falls in love with. To the rest of Paris she is Madame Lambrook. She arrives at one of Renaud's Friday at-homes in black panne velvet with a diamond star pinned in her hat: small, blonde, very short-sighted, and unhurried in a room full of people talking over each other. Her mother was Viennese and gave her the name, which Rézi says is about as distinguished in Vienna as Nana or Titine is in Paris. She has been married eight years to a former English colonel who came back from India without his strength or his energy of mind.
The first thing Claudine notices is that Rézi moves in circles. A turn of the hips, a hand going up to her hair, the way she sits down: every gesture leaves a curve, and Claudine spends their first conversation reading the shapes in the air. The second thing is speed. Rézi can get dressed or undressed in about a minute, corset, petticoat, hat and all, and she does it in front of Claudine as a performance, with the lights blazing in an overheated dressing room off a passage.
She pursues Claudine steadily for months and does not hide it. She is rich, bored, and has had women before, which she says out loud at the moment when saying it is the more useful move. Claudine's verdict, arrived at early, is that Rézi does not exactly lie. She stores things away, neatly, the way a cat buries what it does not want found.
How the book draws them
- Everything she does is a curveClaudine's first note on her is geometric: the movements trace circles, interlocking rings, the spirals of sea shells. Her hair turns on her neck, her ear coils, her eyelashes sit in rays, and the feathers on her hat lie round in a ring as if flung out by something spinning.
- She dresses in a minuteClaudine sits in a low chair and watches her get ready, and describes it as conjuring. The corset, the drawers and the silent petticoat come down on her like birds; a comb goes through the loose gold hair and it is up and twisted; then she is in a dark cloth dress and a hat and ready to go out. Undressing goes the same way, everything falling at once as if the clothes were tied together.
- The hatShe keeps her hat on. She pins it before she puts on her corset and takes it off after her stockings, and she tells Claudine she bathes in one. Asked why, she says it may be a question of modesty: if the house caught fire at night she would not mind running into the street with nothing on, but not without a hat.
- Three suitors in one afternoonShe turns up at Claudine's sighing that she has had three men declare themselves in a single afternoon, and that she nearly hit the third for using the same words as the second half an hour later. Claudine suggests keeping only one, as more varied. More tiring too, says Rézi.
- The half-eaten toastClaudine once left a bitten piece of toast on a plate at Rézi's, a crescent taken out of it. While they went on talking, Rézi picked it up and bit into the same crescent, widening it. She looked up and saw that Claudine had seen her, went red, and said she was greedy.
- A kiss counted out in her husband's footstepsLambrook takes to pacing the length of a darkened drawing room, turning on his heel a few inches from Claudine's chair and walking off again. Rézi times him. She kisses Claudine on the mouth with her own eyes open and her free hand beating the rhythm of the retreating steps, and is back sitting at Claudine's feet, apparently looking into the fire, before he turns round.
- She writes that it was a joke, then says she liedA note arrives the next day asking Claudine to forget it: a game, a tease, the mad wish to fool the man walking past them. When Claudine comes round to make her pay for that, Rézi cuts her off. The note was a lie, written out of pure cowardice so that she could see her again. It had not been a joke.
- Her account of the women beforePressed for her history, she gives it. First a singing teacher, a dyed blonde built like a horse who wore art-nouveau scarves and played at being an Anglo-Saxon sphinx; Rézi worked at her voice and at the whole scale of perversities for exactly one month, and stopped after watching through a half-open door as the sphinx bullied her cook over eighty-five centimes. After that a young girl, whom she loved, and who left her waiting for weeks at a time as punishment for arriving five minutes late.
- She is the one who says to ask RenaudIt is Rézi who works out that Claudine's husband is the way through, and she presses the point week after week until Claudine gives in and asks him. She says she feels no shame at all in front of him, and that the three of them are living a rather unusual little chapter. Claudine, who does feel something close to shame, wants to bite her tongue out for saying it.
Rézi and Renaud begin using the flat on the rue Gœthe themselves. On the day Claudine catches them, Rézi has left her sickroom saying she must go out and buy her husband a present for the anniversary of their engagement.
Claudine finds her in the bedroom in a corset and drawers with her hat already on, and watches her face come apart. Rézi cannot reach her dress. She puts her elbows up to protect her face, backs away round the tea table with her eyes fixed on Claudine, feels for the curtain and slips out through it. That is the last of her. She never appears again, and the closing chapters mention her only as a memory Claudine finds she can put down more easily than she expected.