The Happy Marriage

We always gave people the impression we were a happy couple. Those who didn’t know us well held us up as an example of a model couple. I suffered under the weight of this impression, which bore no relation to reality. My husband acquired the habit of shutting me up whenever we had guests over. He behaved toward me in a way that he would never allowed himself to do with anyone else. One day, when he’d been entertaining his nieces and their husbands, he’d had the insolence to translate my words into “proper French,” adding that he always had to provide subtitles for whatever I said! At which point his guests had laughed, amused by the way he treated me, and I just let him to do it, like the fool I was.

On another occasion, he told an English painter who was represented by the same gallery that he never took me abroad because he loved to travel free and without any luggage, that he didn’t want to be encumbered by a wife who would doubtless have caused him a thousand problems. The painter had been confused by why Foulane would feel the need to talk about me like that, but since Foulane had given his words a comedic inflection, he’d limited himself to a polite laugh. Then there had been the time when a musician friend of his had come to see us to tell us he’d gotten married, at which point Foulane had cracked a few stupid jokes about marriage and quoted Schopenhauer’s gloomy aphorisms on the subject.

He didn’t just disrespect me in public, he also never stuck up for me in front of his family. He sometimes even joined the choir, fueling their rejection of me, not to mention their hatred.

And so our marriage began badly, continued badly, and ended badly.

Money

This is a painful, complicated topic. Foulane got angry whenever I talked about money. A typical reaction for a cheapskate.

Thanks to time and experience, I can safely say that this artist who made a lot of money was in fact a miser. At first I had thought he was thrifty. But now I know he was cheap. I spent my entire life tightening my belt, looking for bargains, and waiting until the sales so I could buy clothes for the children. Although we had a joint account, he hardly ever put any money in it. I was always short of cash. He would love to brandish the letters from the bank saying the account was overdrawn. “You see? Your reckless spending is going to ruin us!” What reckless spending? It was barely enough to cover the basics, I didn’t spend it on anything superfluous or extravagant. My friends would buy designer clothes at full retail prices whereas I got by thanks to clearance sales. I never wore designer clothes or expensive jewelry.

Each time he went abroad Foulane would give me a small sum of money and tell me to “be careful with it” as though I were one of his children. He never paid for anything while he was abroad because he was always somebody’s guest. But whenever we traveled together, he would forbid me from using the minibar because he didn’t want to pay for the additional charges. He was completely miserly. When we would leave the hotel, he would pull his usual scene and complain about all the luggage I’d brought with me. Even though I would try to explain that it was full of the children’s clothes, he would say: “Oh, stop it, will you, I’m perfectly aware that those suitcases are full of presents for your family, I’ve had it up to here!”

Foulane wasn’t generous. You’re not going to believe me because the impression he gave you was the complete opposite. He kept track of every single penny. He never spent a dime unthinkingly. He had a calculator in his heart. Nothing eluded him. He accused me of being an obsessive consumerist, someone who couldn’t tell the difference between different kinds of banknotes and who thought a credit card was a bottomless well of money, and that since I’d never worked much, I didn’t even know the value of money, and that I’d never even learned how to count properly. He also believed that I would have been far happier and more satisfied if I’d married a man who was as poor as I was. But what did he know about that?

I’ve lost track of how many times he went abroad without leaving us any money. I even had to turn to one of our friends so that I could borrow enough money to run some errands and feed the children.