Maupassant, I told him, is the only passion of my life

Riff on an Isaac Babel story

Maupassant, I told him, is the only passion of my life. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, my husband, yes, that lout, his passion is making money, and he is good at that. A lawyer, what more can you ask? When we were younger he used to come to me once a week. Sundays at 9 – you could set your clock by him – he’d be in and out of my room in 10 minutes. Now it’s been months. No wonder I melt at the slightest glimmer of interest.

That day it took one lusty gaze from an open-mouthed lad in a shapeless coat two sizes too big for him, and there I was, a nymph awakening to the sight of the satyr, looking up at him with half-closed eyes. Madame Dufour swaying her generous hips to Pan’s flute. Like her, I crave the dizziness that comes from the back-and-forth movement of the swing as it rises into the sky and swoops back down to earth – ah Maupassant, what a writer! I often feel he knows me intimately – the real me. My husband, I have to give him credit for that, understood this at least, he knew it would make me happy to spend time with my cher Maupassant, and he put his money on the line. The publisher was only too happy to oblige.

I began translating, as beginners do, by copying out the text, Russian word for French word, dictionary at hand; I so much wanted to get it right! How to marshal in Russian those crisp metaphors so precisely laid out on the Frenchman’s table? I was proud of what I had done but I knew I needed help serving it up.

Well, I tell you, that young man took my words and made them sing. When he came back the next morning and read them aloud to me in his deep voice, savoring the melody of each phrase, the timbre of each syllable, I was as much under his spell as Maupassant’s, my eyes fixed on him, my heart beating so violently that it made the lace on my bodice heave and dance.

Then one evening after dinner, he showed up at our house with, under his arm, the manuscript for The Confession. Though I was already plastered, I told him I wanted to work. Chortling at the idea (“you’ve never worked a day in your life, my dear”), my husband left with our guests – my sisters and their husbands, all of them chattering gaily – to hear Chaliapin sing the part of Holofernes. Alone with the boy, he and I drank glass after glass of Muscatel ’83 while he initiated me into the mysteries of syntax and prosody. He was so close that when he spoke I could feel his alcohol-scented breath. He moved in to kiss me but I pushed him away, causing him to lose his balance and sit down hard in my husband’s blue armchair. Leaping up, he stumbled against the bookshelf, and after he knocked over the twenty-nine volumes of Maupassant, it was work we did, on hands and knees, gathering them, riffling their pages to sort out the folds and standing them back up.

When he left sometime after eleven, my cheeks were flushed and I was warbling an aria from Judith.

Text from March 2024. Thank you, Story Clubbers and What Nowers!