I don’t think to be wrong when I say that Beatrice does not smoke, and yet, in my memories, she is often pictured with one cigarette between the two fingers of her right hand. And indeed, I think that this accessory would be of great help: when on the edge of a roof, tobacco, just as sleeping, must distract you from feeling giddy.
And Béatrice is prone vertigo even in places where no one is afraid of falling. Her vertigo is bourgeois.
It seldom makes her fall entirely. To her, it preferred to catch hold of the objects which surround her: of glasses, bibelots, ashtrays, and sometimes, of dancers. As for herself, she is affected only in places: her gestures are small falls.
When she wants to shake hands with you, her hand, similar to a plane which engine is switching off, starts to glide, just long enough to locate her landing spot; and, when her hand finally lands on yours, it is never completely in the right place. As for her feet, they fall in the same way in front of her; regularly enough for you to say that she is walking. When she is still, her attitude seems to be the result of an accident which result could have easily been the scattering of her limbs. In a much disorganized way, she is still in the style of the waterfalls.
It is said that Beatrice is clumsy. One is asking oneself whether this clumsiness is the result of a natural negligence and of a sort of judgmental weakness; or if, instead, it could be a sort of cunning, a trick from which Beatrice would be expecting something; just like one expects the starting of an engine from the jerks of a