The first time Éléonore asked that the woman be shown up, the manservant thought he had misheard. Many were received at her husband’s house, but those who entered through the carriage-entrance were accustomed to sending their names before their faces; this caller had provided neither, merely a folded billet whose paper the mistress of the house had recognised.
“In the small salon,” she said.
She added that they were on no account to be disturbed, then immediately regretted the command, which lent the very complexion of secrecy to an encounter whose significance she wished to diminish. The servant bowed. He had been in good service too long to enquire into what was kept hidden; he would doubtless have been paid better had he been less adept at guessing it.
The caller entered without haste. She wore a dark gown, worn at the elbows, and gloves whose fingertips she had mended herself. A chair was indicated near the door; she preferred the one facing the window.
“My husband is an excellent man,” Éléonore began.
“Then I have come to the wrong address.”
A Singular Recommendation
In the Palermo here evoked, the name of Giovanna Bonanno was destined to remain bound to an affair of poison, whereof the archives preserve in particular a deposition dated the 9th of October, 1788. Around real causes célèbres, fear and desire give birth to other tales: women exchange names, addresses, hopes they would never dare utter before their kindred. The visit that concerns us belongs to these imaginary paths; it began with a recommendation so obscure that Éléonore had never enquired what was being recommended to her in truth.
Her cousin had told her: “This person knows of ways out.” The phrase had haunted her through several nights. A way out might be a door, a journey, a death; she had left her imagination to choose and had congratulated herself on having asked no compromising question.
The woman now waited for her to put one.
“I was told you assist persons in my condition.”
“What condition?”
Éléonore glanced at the two cups arranged upon the tray. She had called for coffee to lend the interview an ordinary air; yet since the stranger’s arrival, she found in these household objects an almost malevolent gravity. The sugar-bowl, in particular, appeared placed too close to her hand.
“I should wish certain things to cease.”
“You must tell me which. I do not vend happiness in phials.”
The Hand Withheld
Her husband did not beat her. That was the first argument advanced against her whenever she complained, and it had become, among her family, a species of definitive proof that nothing of gravity befell her. He paid for her gowns, chose her acquaintance, determined her sojourns; he knew even how to explain, with exquisite gentleness, why the decisions he made were those she ought to have desired.
When she spoke of joining her sister, he laughed. When she asked for money that might truly belong to her, he kissed her hand. Before their friends, he would sometimes hold that hand in his own with an affection so prolonged that she could not rise; everyone then marvelled at a devotion which she, for her part, felt even unto her numbed fingers.
She spoke of this hand before speaking of the rest. The caller listened without interruption. This silence, which sought neither to excuse her nor to find her in the wrong, at last unloosed Éléonore’s tongue; she spoke of opened correspondence, of scrutinized expenses, of letters she had ceased to write because every sentence would thereafter require explanation.
“And you would have him hold you no longer,” said the woman.
“I would live.”
She had answered too quickly. The word frightened her, as though it must perforce summon its opposite for someone else. The visitor opened her reticule; Éléonore drew back into her armchair.
From it emerged an envelope.
The Price of Freedom
“A lady seeks a companion to read to her mother. She provides lodging and pays each month. I told her you read passably well.”
Éléonore stared at the paper without taking it. She had prepared herself for a dreadful proposal, for some arrangement whose name she would spend the rest of her days refusing to utter; she had not prepared herself to seek employment.
“You have misunderstood.”
“On the contrary, I am beginning to understand.”
“I cannot quit this house like a dismissed housemaid.”
“A dismissed housemaid does not always have another house to go to.”
The remark wounded her all the more for containing no explicit reproach. Suddenly she saw the woman seated before her—the mended gloves, the hem of the sleeve frayed by labours into whose nature she had never enquired. She had hoped that a poor woman would sell her the means to remain wealthy without remaining captive. The other was offering her a key that did not keep the furniture.
In the corridor, a footstep halted. The servant announced that the master had returned earlier than expected. Éléonore looked toward the door; the visitor did not stir.
“You are a tradeswoman,” she whispered.
“If it suits you.”
“In lace.”
“It will prove very costly, then.”
The Master Returns
The husband entered with the easy manner of a man to whom no room in his house ought ever to remain foreign. He beheld the stranger, the envelope, the cooled coffee, and his curiosity at once assumed the forms of benevolence.
“An expense one wished to conceal from me?”
Éléonore might have accepted the banter. She knew what followed: a petty fault confessed, a pleasant pardon, the caller dismissed, then this envelope slipped into a drawer she would never open again. Her entire life hitherto had been fashioned from these modest occasions wherein one put off until later the essential thing.
She took the paper.
“An address,” she replied.
“For what purpose?”
The woman with the darned gloves rose. She had no need to remain for the choice to become real; she had even understood that her presence would yet allow Éléonore to surrender the decision to her.
“I shall call again tomorrow,” she said simply.
The husband smiled, persuaded he was dealing with some patient petitioner. He held out a coin. She looked at it, then looked at Éléonore, who, for the first time since the interview began, did not lower her eyes.
“Madame knows where to find me.”
She went out. In the salon, the silence assumed proportions to which neither spouse was accustomed. The husband asked once more what the envelope contained. Éléonore pressed it against herself; it was remarkable that so thin a sheet had become more difficult to wrest from her than all the jewels he had chosen for her.
“The possibility of leaving,” she said.
He began to laugh. This time, she let him laugh to the end.