Bouche en feu

Bouche en feu names Annette’s conspicuous ease with kissing, but the expression also measures Billie’s distance from the confidence she sees in her sister. Across their encounters, it moves from a striking image of romantic allure to a matter-of-fact description of pleasure, revealing both Billie’s idealization of Annette and the gap between that ideal and Annette’s own experience.

The Expression and Its First Appearance

Billie describes her sister as having a bouche en feu on party nights: when it is not one boy, it is another, and, as Billie understands it, every boy in town finds Annette irresistible. The image belongs to Billie’s admiring, slightly theatrical view of her older sister. It turns kissing into a visible sign of social power, something Annette seems to possess naturally and that Billie hopes she might one day share.

The phrase appears amid Billie’s preparations for an evening out. In the bathroom and bedroom adjoining her own, she applies her mother’s Dior powder, darkens her eyes with mascara, and moistens her lips with root-beer balm. The careful transformation is meant to help repair recent disappointments that have left thorns in her heart. Her cosmetics and her sister’s supposedly effortless allure sharpen the contrast: Billie prepares to attract attention, while Annette seems already to command it.

Annette’s Kissing and Billie’s Envy

At a gathering, Billie gives her sister a more intimate explanation for the image. Annette draws attention in a glittering swimsuit, and later that afternoon she and Simon kiss on a trampoline behind the large spruce trees at the far end of the property. They kiss often from then on. The recurrence makes the expression more than a party-night flourish: in Billie’s eyes, Annette’s romantic ease persists beyond the occasion that first displayed it.

Billie sets that apparent ease against her own frustrated efforts to grow up. While she applies aloe cream to sunburn, paints her nails in colors she considers too pale and too young, and writes poems about Simon and Étienne inside crayon hearts, Annette shines without trying. Billie names the mix of sisterly love and gentle jealousy, then imagines that with age it may become simply love. Her hope to shine like Annette is bound to a larger uncertainty: when sad, Billie becomes a child again; when no longer sad, she feels almost like a woman. The image of the burning mouth thus carries the pressure of a transition Billie cannot yet make steadily.

From Ideal to Ordinary Pleasure

The phrase’s meaning shifts when Annette apologizes for neglecting Billie because she has been busy kissing. She admits that she loves it, without presenting the behavior as proof of perfection or a performance for an audience. Billie reassures her that she is having fun too, and Annette urges her to go dance with Rosine and Juliette. The exchange makes kissing sound like a pleasure Annette can plainly enjoy, rather than the emblem of adult completeness Billie has made of it.

That shift does not erase Billie’s admiration, but it complicates it. The sister she has described as perfect and fully a woman is also someone absorbed in an ordinary activity, capable of acknowledging what she wants and asking Billie to find her own way into the party. Bouche en feu therefore holds two views together: Billie’s heightened image of Annette as irresistible, and Annette’s unembellished account of liking to kiss. The tension between them gives the expression its significance in Billie’s account of longing, envy, and growing up.