Léa de Lonval

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• The woman he takes for a strangerA young maid shows him into a room lit pink by the late sun. A woman is writing at a desk with her back to him: a broad back, a grey stubble of hair cut short like his mother's. He assumes Léa has a visitor and wonders who the old woman is. Then she turns round and he takes her blue eyes full in the face.
• What Colette says she looks likeNot monstrous, the book says, but vast, and thickened everywhere at once. Her arms are like round thighs and are held out from her hips by their own bulk. She has wide jowls, a second chin, a red complexion she no longer bothers to powder, and a mouth full of gold when she laughs. She carries the weight herself, without stays or supports, and Colette calls the result a healthy old woman.
• Dressed for goodShe wears a plain skirt and a long jacket of no particular character over frilled linen. When Chéri asks whether he is keeping her from dressing to go out, she says she is dressed, permanently. Blouses, good underlinen, this uniform over the top, and she is ready for dinner at a restaurant, the cinema, bridge or a walk in the Bois. She says it as though a weight had been taken off her.
• She says out loud that she loved himHer friend Valérie Cheniaguine, who is in the room, remarks that Léa used to be very proud of Chéri. Léa says no, quietly: «Je l'aimais.» She loved him. Then she turns her whole body round to look at him and adds that it is true, and still is. He stares at the floor, humiliated at being told he was this fat old woman's lover in front of a stranger, while the sound of her voice goes through him.
• She likes her life«J'aime bien mon passé. J'aime bien mon présent.» She likes her past and she likes her present, she tells him, she is not ashamed of what she had and not sorry about what she no longer has, and she asks him whether he thinks she is wrong. He says of course not, in the voice of a man whose foot has been trodden on.
• She gives him medical adviceWithin a few minutes of his arrival she tells him he does not look well, that his colour and the pinched look around his mouth mean he is neglecting his kidney and ought to have his urine analysed, and that he is ten pounds underweight whatever people say about good cockerels being lean. He offers to take ten pounds off her. She says she could spare them.
• The restaurant on the avenue des GobelinsShe wants to take him to a bistro she has found where the woman of the house does the cooking herself, and says they should hurry, before the fashionable set decides the place is smart and a chef is installed. She has a theory to go with it: romanticism, low spirits and disgust with life are all a question of the stomach, and there is well-fed love and badly-fed love and the rest is literature.
• The pearlsOne thing in the flat has not changed. Out of a fold of her white silk scarf comes the long rope of pearls, and Chéri recognises them individually: the one with a dimple in it, the slightly egg-shaped one, the largest with its particular pink. He says, stupidly, that she still has her pearls. She says the war left them to her and asks why on earth she would have sold them.
• Two women pricing a young manValérie Cheniaguine has come back from Deauville having finally seen the famous new lover of a woman they both know, and the two of them take him apart in front of Chéri: too tall, something too round and silly in the cheek, the ear set low, the thigh too long for the lower leg. Léa defends the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose and concedes the chin, which will run to fat. Chéri, listening, thinks they would have done well judging livestock for the army supply corps.
• The one thing that gets throughWhen she lists her pleasures he asks what about love, is she forgetting love. She goes red under her permanent flush and says he knows she has never liked dirty talk or jokes that are not funny. Chéri, who enjoyed saying it for about a second, is ashamed. She does not hold it against him, but she asks him not to leave anything ugly behind him in the short time he is there.
• She is still in businessLéa has not vanished from anyone's life but his. She has gone on seeing Charlotte Peloux, his mother, throughout, and at lunch Charlotte complains loudly that Léa took half the profit on a deal in blankets. The baroness Camille de La Berche sends her cases of wine. Everyone in the house has been talking about her in front of Chéri for a year and he simply has not been listening.