Farou
The charming, productive, habitually unfaithful playwright at the center of the household and the edge of his own drama.
To be left alone to finish the play, with the household within calling distance. He tells Fanny to go away and let him work, and to send him Jane, a glass of orangeade and some grapes — things with no weight.
The book
At a glance
- The playwright at the centre of the household: husband, employer and father
- Forty-eight
- Atalante, Le Logis sans Femme, Le Raisin volé, the failed Le Troc, and L'Impossible Innocence, the new one opening at the Vaudeville
- Farou is a name people give to sheepdogs. He knows, and thinks it is funny
- Married to Fanny for twelve years; one son, Jean, by a woman he says he barely knew
- Rented houses well away from other theatre people. He wants to spend them with no shoes on and no collar
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFarou is the playwright at the centre of Colette's 1929 novel The Other One, and the man both women in the book have arranged their lives around. He is forty-eight, he writes for the big commercial theatres of Paris, and he has been married to Fanny for twelve years. Jane, who types his plays and lives in the flat, has been his mistress for nearly four. Colette keeps him at the edge of his own story: almost everything the reader learns about him is watched from across a room.
He is about six feet tall, with greying curls that fall into his eyebrows, yellow eyes and a broad nose. Colette calls him big, tired, robust, possibly ugly and certain of his ability to please. He walks as though he were on his way to a fight or a fire, and when he crosses the village to buy cigarettes the mothers call their children back against their skirts. Coming into a room he sings the same line every time: all these women, all these women, the number of women he has in his house.
He works behind half-closed shutters, muttering, chewing and roaring his third act out loud, and from the terrace it sounds like a mass, or a crowd at prayer, or the opening of a riot. He comes out at the end of a day to announce that he has thrown the entire scene away, and that this is good work. His father taught history to twelve-year-olds in an obscure school, a fact he keeps quiet in front of people to whom he would rather look like a tramp or a foundling.
The infidelities are neither hidden nor discussed. He writes home from a tour about the young actress he has taken up with, and his wife reads the letter aloud at lunch. He does not think of himself as doing anything, and his wife long ago decided that thinking otherwise would change nothing.
How the book draws them
- What he looks likeSix feet of him, a greying curly head, hair falling into the eyebrows and shading yellow eyes, a broad nose, wide-set eyes and gappy teeth. Colette's summary is that he is big, tired, robust, perhaps ugly, and sure of pleasing.
- How he comes into a roomHe chants the same improvised line about the number of women in his house, then yawns, hitches up his trousers and appears to discover the universe. If he catches sight of his son on the way in, he plays the same joke every time and shouts that the police are here.
- How he writesBehind half-shut shutters, out loud, for whole days: a murmur like a church service broken by a rasping animal cry. He comes out having destroyed his own scene, calls that good work, and tells Jane to be ready to type the final version.
- What he is like to work forHe tells Jane he would like her to add graphology to her many accomplishments, because a graphologist studies the crossed t's and the looped l's and is incapable of understanding the text put in front of him. When she flushes and asks whether that is a reprimand, he tells her not to put on her face of a dressmaker hired by the day. It is Fanny who calls him a brute and makes him stop.
- The other womenThe little Asselin on tour, Vivica who danced in the third act of Le Raisin volé, and the blonde beginner Inès Irrigoyen, who is given three lines at a party and has lost them again a week later. Fanny keeps count without complaining. Her fur coats are named after the plays that bought them.
- What he says about loving his wifeFanny asks him quietly, without daring much, whether he loves her. He says he has no idea — « Non, je ne m’aperçois pas toujours que je t’aime. Mais si je cessais de t’aimer, je m’en apercevrais immédiatement. Et je deviendrais très malheureux… » He does not always notice that he loves her, but he would notice at once if he stopped, and it would make him very unhappy.
- What he says when asked about JaneThe theatre crowd wants to know who the ash-blonde secretary belongs to. Farou tells an old actress of the Comédie-Française that Jane is his natural daughter, and that the business between them is only a nice, simple little bit of incest. Nobody asks again.
- He cannot remember his son's motherFanny asks whether he kept a photograph of her, because she would like to see the woman's face. He opens his arms — the gesture that releases him from all memories and all responsibilities — says he could not lay hands on one, that she was a nice creature and not very strong, poor thing, and that he knew her very little.
- What his son says about himThe boy says his father is timid: that Farou hides his work in the theatre the way a cat hides its business in sand, and that the schoolmasterly tone he uses to explain a new play to his wife is nerves. Fanny, twelve years married, has never once thought of it, and decides the boy is right.
- Where the money comes fromFifty thousand from America for the film rights to Atalante, in a summer when he had been putting off buying his son shirts. Then the box-office sheets for the first week of the new play, which Fanny reads out under her breath: sixteen, seventeen thousand four, eighteen thousand four, twenty thousand and thirty-two.
He does not shout. His first question is which of the two of them raised it. His second is why, having concealed it for so long, she does not simply go on concealing it — he says he is quite sure she could. He then declares himself ready to assume every responsibility, points out that he has never withdrawn any part of his tenderness from her in twelve years, and says those twelve years guarantee that she will treat considerately the person who deserves consideration. Jane, standing behind Fanny, purses her mouth into a silent whistle of admiration.
He asks whether they would like him to wait in the next room, collects a promise that nothing will reach the servants or the newspapers, and backs out through the door keeping both women in view. That evening he shaves close, powders his face, puts on a dinner jacket and slips out to a preview at the Gymnase so smoothly that neither of them sees him go. Fanny says afterwards that he was beneath everything, and asks Jane why.
Jane's answer is the closest the novel comes to a verdict on him. Not one man in a hundred gets out of that situation to his advantage, she says, let alone his honour. They are timid. And in what a woman calls a scene, a man sees straight away the chance of being rid of her for good.