Herbert d'Espivant
Julie's charming, unscrupulous ex-husband, now married to money and gravely ill, who reactivates their old bond to serve a scheme.
Money that is actually his, and the country, so that he can stop being kept. He says both out loud, in that order, in the same conversation.
The book
At a glance
- Forty-nine, five months short of fifty
- Count, and a deputy of the right in the French parliament
- Julie de Carneilhan for eight years, unfaithfully; then Marianne, three years before the novel opens
- A private house with a courtyard garden on the rue Saint-Sabas — the house Julie furnished when she was his wife
- Heart. Professors Hattoutant and Giscard have told him to leave Paris and give up politics
- Cousteix, his secretary; Beaupied, the chauffeur he has kept on into old age; a nurse in white
- Nothing. His wife's property was put at his disposal, and the fortune is run by an office he cannot get past
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeHerbert d'Espivant is the second husband of Julie de Carneilhan, the woman this 1941 novel by Colette is named after. He is a count, a right-wing member of the French parliament, and five months short of fifty. He and Julie were married for eight years, he was unfaithful throughout, and they divorced. Three years before the book opens he married a rich widow called Marianne, and the novel begins on the afternoon he collapses in the street and is carried home.
The money side of him is simple once it is said plainly. He married Marianne because he had four months to fight an election and his own finances were wrecked. She did not hand him a dowry; she put all her property at his disposal, which sounds the same and is not. Nothing in the house is his, he cannot sell anything, and every purchase has to get past the office that runs her fortune, where an asthmatic old clerk named Saillard keeps saying no. His doctors have now told him to leave Paris and give up politics, and he would like to do it with money of his own for once.
That is where Julie comes in. Years ago, during her divorce from her first husband, she sold her diamond necklace and gave him the million francs it raised, and he wrote her a receipt for it on stamped paper with the words 'as a loan' in it. He remembers the wording exactly. His suggestion is that she produce the paper and claim the debt from him in front of his wife, because Marianne hates his debts and will believe a document she can see. He says the two of them would divide whatever comes of it.
He is also, throughout, working on Julie. He is charming to her by pure habit, tells her he is done for, gets her laughing, reminds her of things they did together, and takes a visible pleasure in still being able to hurt her. Colette does not present this as a great love that went wrong. She presents a man who knows exactly which sentence, on which notes, has always worked on this particular woman.
How the book draws them
- The collapse that starts the bookHe falls at three in the afternoon, face first, and is carried home. By evening it is in the sixth edition of the papers: the doctors cannot yet say how serious it is. The following morning the papers say it seems not to be serious at all, which is untrue.
- What is actually wrong with himHis heart. He faints repeatedly and briefly, and Julie learns to wave an ether-soaked napkin under his nose fast enough to cut the faint short. He calls these episodes his little death and says the strange thing is the feeling of well-being and optimism that follows each one. He tells her flatly that he is finished, in a light voice, and asks her to pour the coffee.
- How he looks nowA fine dark Gascon face with slightly pretty features under a masculine forehead, brown eyes with the shadows under them that women liked, a small moustache in no current fashion. Illness has swelled what used to be hollow and turned his forehead, temples and mouth a greenish white. When sunlight catches his hand, the puffiness of it stops Julie mid-sentence.
- The narrow bedHe receives Julie in a child's bedroom on an eighty-centimetre bed, the width of a servant's. It is not an accident. He sleeps there three nights a week and calls it his defensive bed. He then performs for Julie, in his own voice, the tender speech he makes to his wife to be allowed it: do not change anything in this ugly room, my darling, you know I want no bedroom but yours, only tonight I have work, tonight I feel ugly and tired.
- Why he married herHe explains it without embarrassment. He had four months to run an election campaign, a beautiful widow was courting him, and his own affairs were badly in the red. If he had only been her lover, he says, everyone would have been singing the same question: where does the money come from?
- He owns nothingNothing in the house is his, by a decision he took out of prudence when he married and now cannot undo. His wife's fortune, he tells Julie, is not money at all but an administration: paperwork, filing cabinets, adding machines, freezing offices in bad districts, well-dressed attorneys who say they do not deal with the Count d'Espivant but with the widow Hortiz. At the end of a corridor sits Saillard, an old man full of asthma with no title, who has refused four million for an estate and one million eight hundred thousand for a small Fragonard.
- The things he wanted and did not getA château called Maucombe, which he describes to Julie with real feeling — too many turrets, too many spires, too much fifteenth century, and the whole of it reflected in the pond it stands on. Also a sheaf of unpublished Corneille manuscripts to make a book out of, cars like a rich acquaintance's, and Venetian parties like another family's. He got the Guardis and the Panini already hanging on the walls, which belong to his wife.
- The watch off his own wristHaving no money to give her, he unclips a platinum chain bracelet with a watch on it and hands it over: sell it, pawn it, it presses on a vein and tires him. He would like her to treat it as a link between them. Julie supplies the more accurate word, which is instalment, and later sells it and spends the proceeds on clothes.
- The one thing that makes him lose his temperMarianne's seventeen-year-old son has fallen in love with Julie. When Julie disposes of the boy in front of him in crude physical terms, Herbert tells her to stop, then shouts that she may do as she likes outside but will not stand in his house appraising another male. She is the field he mowed and trampled, he says, and if others have done the same since, she will not come here and show him the marks. Then he tells her to get out.
Julie sends him the receipt with four words: do as you like. He does not answer, and he does not go to her. He goes to his wife instead, and tells her that Julie is threatening him — that the claim came wrapped in hints about his name and his honour — and he backdates it by a fortnight so that it cannot be traced to the letter Julie sent two days earlier.
Then he sends Marianne to Julie's flat to deal with it. Julie, given the chance to expose him, confirms his story instead and takes the character he has invented for her. Marianne leaves an envelope on the table containing a hundred thousand francs and no note. Julie understands at once that Herbert has cut the two shares himself and given her the smaller one, and she works out the rate: ten per cent, what an agent takes for letting a flat.
He is never seen again in the book. The last thing Julie hears from him is the word she got at the end of their quarrel, which was 'go'. She waits by the telephone for something better and it does not come, and in the morning she leaves Paris.