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La Juive
- Abstract
Decades later, it’s Madame’s apartment they’ll remember—the light filtering in from the rue de Vaugirard, the fringed lampshades, the piano with its flowered Spanish shawl, the smells of cooking and musty furniture. More than the Seine or Notre Dame or the Louvre, this layered, redolent dimness will be Paris for them.
Pam and Emily are sharing a room with pension chez Madame Bouvard. California girls used to light, air, and space, they are at first disoriented by the crepuscular gloom of Madame’s apartment, with its dark corridor, its forbidden rooms, its objets à ne pas toucher—painted fans, ormolu clocks, dusty china shepherdesses, lace doilies in profusion. Some rooms are blocked off by tea trays set lengthwise between the doorjambs, to keep the cat from escaping through the front door or falling out the window, according to Madame, but Kikou leaps nonchalantly over these barriers, which are really for Pam and Emily, who are not allowed in the salon unless invited by Madame, the kitchen except when Madame is in it, or the closet with the telephone unless Madame is there to time the call. This labyrinthine interior, with its arbitrary arrangement of free and forbidden zones, dense with Madame’s past and bristling with her fetishes, seems to represent the very architecture of her soul.
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