THE GIRLS: A TETRALOGY OF NOVELS

Henri de Monterlant

Tr. Terence Kilmartin

Introduction by Peter Quennell

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

This tetralogy first appeared in France as four separate volumes published by Grasset—Les jeunes filles (June 1936), Pitié pour les femmes (October 1936), Le Démon du bien (June 1937), and Les Lépreuses (July 1939). The text I have used is Henry de Montherlant's final version, published in one volume by Gallimard (1959), in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

TERENCE KILMARTIN

LES JEUNES FILLES (Les jeunes filles, Pitié pour les femmes, Le Démon du bien, Les Lépreuses). Copyright by Librairie Gallimard, 1954. THE GIRLS: A TETRALOGY OF NOVELS. English translation copyright © 1968 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 49 Hast 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016.

FIRST U.S. EDITION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-28224

INTRODUCTION

Byron often talked of the letters he received from women. They had begun to arrive in 1812, when he took the London world by storm; and they continued to pursue him during the years of Italian exile until he left Genoa bound for Greece and death. Some were from old acquaintances, like Lady Caroline Lamb, whom he remembered far too clearly; others from admirers he had met once or twice, and was anxious not to meet again; but many of his correspondents were total strangers, and wrote simply because they reverenced his genius and believed that he alone, in an unfriendly world, could give them the appreciation that they felt they needed. Though Byron did not always reply, he seldom threw away their scribblings. He was an inveterate hoarder of every kind of written record; and even the wildest and most ridiculous effusion passed at once into his personal archives.

Those archives can still be examined. Here, among others, are the letters of a mad peeress, an unhappy Swiss governess, an ill-starred actress, a disconsolate housemaid, a famous demi-mondaine, and an impressionable day-dreaming girl who addressed Byron as 'My dear Papa'. Some letters are hastily scrawled; some blotted and blistered with tears; some written in a flowing copperplate hand on expensive gilt-edged paper. But all are romantic and enthusiastic; and all do their best to establish an emotional link between the writer and the poet. Every correspondent endeavours to stake out her claim to the great man's sympathy and interest.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I first read through these letters and edited a sheaf for publication, [To Lord Byron by George Paston & Peter Quennell, Murray, 1939.] I was immediately reminded of Henry de Montherlant's sequence, Les jeunes filles, Pitié pour les femmes, Le Démon du bien and Les Lépreuses, of which the last volume had recently appeared. Montherlant, too, describes a celebrated writer beset by wild, enthusiastic women, each of whom has managed to convince herself that only she can understand her hero. Costals' correspondents, however, though just as unfortunate, are less numerous and varied than those of Byron, his chief epistolary persecutors being Thérèse Pantevin, a crack-brained country girl who confuses her passion for Costals with her love of God, and Andrée Hacquebaut, a provincial bluestocking, who aspires one day to become his mistress. Both are rebuffed; of many of their letters the recipient notes : 'Cette lettre est restée sans résponse' Often he does not open the envelope; and, when Andrée eventually visits Paris and makes a forlorn and desperate attempt to force her way into his intimacy, he stages a particularly atrocious scene in which, with another young woman acting as hidden eye-witness, she has her pride demolished and her pretensions humbled. Costals exhibits certain Byronic features; his fund of patience is strictly limited; and, if he is driven too far, his cynical good humour is apt to turn to downright cruelty.

The character of Costals has frequently puzzled critics; and some readers have not unnaturally assumed that it is based upon a self-portrait. This Montherlant has always denied. 'Le caractère de Costals', he remarks at the head of Les jeunes filles, 'est, en partie du moins, un caractère de "libertin" ou de "mauvais sujet" (comme on disait autrefois). Il a donc fallu lui donner des particularités convenables à ce caractère. S'il est sûr que l'auteur a mis de soi dans ce personnage, il reste qu'il y a en celui-ci nombre de traits qui sont du domaine purement objectif ... '

The Avertissement to Pitié pour les femmes includes an equally emphatic declaration : 'L'auteur rappelle ici ... qu'il a peint en Costals un personnage que, de propos délibéré, il a voulu inquiétant, voire par moments odieux. Et que les propos et les actes de ce personnage ne sauraient être, sans injustice, prêtés à celui qui l'a conçu.'

Yet Montherlant admits that there is something of himself in Costals; and his reader will observe that many of Costals' opinions on life are also to be found, more or less accurately reproduced, among his published notebook jottings. To judge from his Carnets, Montherlant bears as much, and as little, resemblance to Costals as Byron bore to Childe Harold; each fictitious character is a literary persona, which incorporates some of the traits of the artist who produced it, but does not pretend to be a full-length likeness. Costals is the moving spirit who controls the story, the exponent of a system of ideas, a voice that denounces and derides, a principle against which the other characters react. Although Montherlant tells us a good deal about his habits, tastes and antecedents, he remains a somewhat enigmatic figure - a personification of the writer's beliefs and prejudices rather than an individual human being.

But then. Les jeunes filles has little in common with the average modern novel; for Montherlant rejects the conventions of story-telling that most novelists have inherited from their nineteenth-century predecessors. 'Si ce roman,' he writes in his second volume, 'sacrifiait aux règles du genre, telles qu'elles sont établies en France, la scène à la cuisine, entre Costals et Solange, y eût été placée à la fin.... Mais la vie, qui ne sait pas vivre, prétend sottement se dérober aux convenances du roman français.' Les jeunes filles is not a 'well-constructed' book in the accepted meaning of the phrase, but follows its own rules of construction and possesses its own interior harmony. It includes a mass of exceedingly diverse material - letters, notes, comments, asides, together with long passages of straightforward narrative - and is written, as the story develops, from several different points of view. One is that of the narrator, who sometimes blends into his imaginary novelist; another is the redoubtable Costals speaking in his proper person. Yet the subsidiary characters are also allowed a hearing; and there comes a moment when the ridiculous Madame Dandillot - a commonplace middle-class matron, described as resembling a policeman's horse - suddenly dominates the scene and exhibits all her hidden virtues. Her intrinsic absurdity and vulgarity are redeemed by the unselfish strength of her maternal love; and, as she looks down on her sleeping daughter, she becomes a great and good woman. Although this is an aspect of his prospective mother-in-law that has escaped Costals, and seems to be strangely at odds with the narrator's previous attitude, it inspires him to produce a particularly moving passage on the theme of love and sleep :

'Brusquement elle se tut, comme une petite boîte à musique qui s'enraye.... Elle dit: "Tu dors?" Pas de réponse. Elle alluma. Solange dormait, un peu de salive au coin de la bouche.... Comme la nuit est grande sur le monde, et comme la terre est silencieuse quand on regarde dormir ce qu'on aime! Celui qu'obsède la disparate enclose dans chaque objet, et qui veut y voir une des ciels de la nature, ne méditera-t-il pas sur la tendresse humaine, qui est à la fois le comble de l'inquiétude et le comble du repos?'

Costals, as it happens, is also a devoted parent; he has an illegitimate son, child of a discarded mistress, for whom he feels a deep, but undemanding, love. Brunet monopolizes his strongest affections; otherwise he distrusts and despises love, more especially romantic love, since he sees it as the arch-foe of his personal integrity and independence; and Costals cherishes the belief that he is, above all else, a free man. 'C'est une de mes grandes forces,' writes Montherlant in his Carnets, 'd'échapper à l'amour en connaissant, mêlées, la sensualité et la tendresse.' Similarly, Costals has done his best to exclude love - at least, as it is understood by the average woman - both from his life and from his work. 'Je connais bien l'amour;' he tells Andrée Hacquebaut. 'C'est un sentiment pour lequel je n'ai pas d'estime. D'ailleurs il n'existe pas dans la nature; il est une invention des femmes. . . . Dans chacun des livres que j'ai publiés vous trouverez, sous une forme ou l'autre, cette affirmation: "Ce qui m'importe par-dessus tout, c'est d'aimer". Mais il ne s'agit jamais de l'amour. Il s'agit d'un composé d'affection et de désir, qui n'est pas l'amour.'

It is the conflict between these two different theories of love that provides the basic drama of Les jeunes filles. According to Costals, love, 'the invention of women', is always enervating and demoralizing: moreover, romantic love may lead to marriage; and marriage is the fatal 'hippogriff'; whereas the emotion that blends desire and tenderness suffuses the heart with peace and the mind with energy. In an interview, the author has claimed that Les jeunes filles has a definitely 'salubrious' message. Nor will he agree that it constitutes an attack on Woman : 'J'y suis souvent dur pour les femmes.

Mais, dans toute mon oeuvre, ne suis-je pas aussi dur pour les hommes?... Ce que j'attaque, ce n'est pas la femme, c'est l'idolâtrie de la femme, c'est la conception "cour d'amour" de la femme, c'est la situation privilégiée de la femme. Dans Les jeunes filles, au lieu de cultiver les imperfections de la femme avec une complaisance béate, j'ai voulu la traiter d'égale à égal....'

This, however, though it may be true of Montherlant - his plays present the opposite sex in a much softer and more advantageous light - is not entirely true of Costals, whose attitude towards women is certainly harsh, and who makes very little attempt to treat his female associates upon an equal footing. The personage Montherlant describes is at once a rake and a misogynist; and, as a 'libertin', he belongs to the same family as Richardson's Lovelace, Choderlos de Laclos' Valmont or, indeed, as Casanova. Like Costals, Lovelace is a 'marriage- hater'; and he believes that, by conquering Clarissa Harlowe, he is merely reconciling 'herself to herself and illustrating the 'triumph of nature' over an outworn social code. He, too, is 'noted for his vivacity and courage', and possesses, we are told, 'sound health and ... a soul and body fitted for and pleased with each other.' Though highly educated, he represents natural man as opposed to sentimental, artificial woman.

Valmont, on the other hand, resembles Costals only in his more Machiavellian aspects; but Montherlant's description of how the novelist humiliates Andrée while Solange lurks behind a curtain, and of the meaner details of his treatment of Solange, might well have been imagined by Laclos. As for Casanova, he had more generous feelings than Costals, but often voices much the same opinions. Thus Costals remarks that, if he had a daughter, ']e la désirerai sûrement un jour'; and Casanova admits that he could never understand 'comment un père pouvait tendrement aimer sa charmante fille sans avoir du moins un fois couché avec elle.' But, in Casanova's life, women were the centre of existence; and Costals announces that, 'à la rigueur, je puis répéter à cent ou cent cinquante femmes les mêmes paroles, en étant sincère à chaque coup, parce que la femme reste dans le superficiel de ma vie.' Casanova was occasionally cruel because he loved too violently and indiscriminately; Costals is cruel because the desire he experiences is apt to conceal a fundamental distaste.

Here he has many distinguished predecessors; a strain of fierce misogyny runs through European thought and writing. Shakespeare himself was not immune from it; and just as Costals is moved to protest against the weakness and untidiness of the flaccid female organism, Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost compares it to an ill-functioning piece of household clockwork:

What I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife! A woman that is like a German clock. Still a-repairing, ever out of frame. And never going aright ...

- an image that Shakespeare apparently derived from a popular sixteenth-century proverb.

Another poetic misogynist was the author of Les Fleurs du mal. He, too, attacked 'l'idolâtrie de la femme', declared that it had always astonished him that women were allowed to enter churches - 'Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?' - and asserted that in a woman's composition physical and spiritual qualities were inextricably bound up together: 'La lemme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps. Elle est simpliste comme les animaux.' In short, Woman was the antithesis of the Dandy; by which Baudelaire, of course, meant not a modern Beau Brummell, but the 'well-born soul', the literary aristocrat, perpetually at war with the world in which he finds himself. To sum up, Woman is essentially a vulgar being; and at this point one recollects Costals' remark on the change that overtakes a woman's personality as soon as she begins to hum : 'Solange fredonna la mélopée des Bateliers.... Costals pensa qu'il y a, en toute femme, une grue prête à ressortir, et qui ressort quand elle chantonne.'

In Les jeunes filles Montherlant expresses his view of the opposite sex more eloquently, forcibly and unreservedly than in any of his earlier or later novels. But it is already obvious in such books as Le Songe and Les Bestaires, published in 1922 and 1926 respectively. Each introduces a young man who represents the noblest type of human comradeship; and each draws the portrait of a girl who stands for the opposing principle, and who offers, not steady, unselfish affection, but self-centred and self-destructive love. Gentillesse - a word difficult to translate - is one of Montherlant's and Costals' favourite virtues; and, among the characters who appear in Les jeunes filles, Brunet, Costals' adolescent son, alone exhibits this redeeming quality. Solange puzzles, distracts and annoys; his association with Brunet is refreshingly uncomplicated and straightforward. 'Je n'aime pas,' reflects Costals, 'ce qui est une occasion de bêtise pour l'homme, et c'est pourquoi je n'aime pas la femme.... Eternelle supériorité des gosses sur les femmes....' This superiority, moreover, is not only spiritual and emotional; the hero suggests that it is also physical. In Solange's embrace, he notes that her body is strangely scentless, and that even her hair has a weak and faded aroma. 'Pourquoi Costals évoqua-t-il l'odeur si bonne et si vivace des cheveux de son fils? Il ignorait que c'est un règle, que les cheveux des jeunes garçons sentent plus fort et meilleur que ceux des femmes.' This comparison temporarily deadens his desire; and soon afterwards, for the first time in his relationship with Solange, he feels a humiliating lack of energy.

During the course of an interview on the subject of Les jeunes filles, from which I have already quoted, Montherlant admits that he may, now and then, have been inclined to generalize much too widely and too freely - 'j'y dis trop "les femmes" et "les hommes"'; and that a certain simplification has at times resulted. With this criticism many of his readers will agree. Costals is an extremely dogmatic personage; and, like most dogmatists, he is apt to assume that he has mastered the whole art of living. Besides being entirely self-sufficient, he is, he repeatedly claims, a thoroughly happy and harmonious character; 'la mélancolie est le petit luxe des âmes pauvres'. Thanks both to his natural lucidity and to his 'discipline d'égoisme', he can confront the universe without alarm : 'Les gens disent qu'on est malheureux quand on voit trop tout ce qui est. Moi, je vois tout ce qui est, et je suis très heureux.' The life he leads is 'perfectly intelligent'; he has neither fears nor misgivings.

Such self-sufficiency, a reader may object, is seldom found in real life; but Montherlant the artist keeps a wary eye on Costals the dogmatic theorist. His hero is slightly incredible only so long as he remains invincible, 'avec sa jeunesse, sa santé, son impudence, son oeuvre, son gracieux fils, son collier de maîtresses très jeunes, et tous les avantages de la puissance ...' But, although Costals never quite vails his sword or drops his intellectual panache, Les jeunes filles is still the story of his successive misadventures. He falls into the trap that has been laid by Solange; he becomes engaged; he is nearly overtaken and devoured by the appalling Hippogriff. In the last volume, having temporarily escaped from Solange, he seeks a refuge among the Atlas Mountains, and there suspects that he has contracted leprosy - a symbolic disaster that sends him hurrying back towards a European hospital.

I have suggested elsewhere that Montherlant is a remarkably gifted comic novelist; and the story of Costals' brush with Death, and of his long struggle against that legendary monster, Marriage, is told with wonderfully enlivening humour. Few characters in fiction have been more savagely treated than Andrée Hacquebaut and Solange Dandillot; but Montherlant is far too good an artist to pass a summary verdict on his own creations. The ridiculous bluestocking has a kind of farouche dignity that even Costals cannot quite extinguish; and one reader at least has never lost his regard for the unhappy young girl. Although Solange has a limited, commonplace mind, she is patient, affectionate and good-natured and, despite Costals' ferocious diatribes, by no means altogether stupid.

Style is a quality that seldom ranks very high in the contemporary critic's scale of values; but it would be impossible to discuss Montherlant the novelist without considering his achievement as a modern master of the French language. His prose style is uncommonly rich and various - tart, idiomatic, incisive, when he attacks some typical or controversial issue; measured, euphonious, poetic, when he deals with wider and less transitory themes. He has always loved nature, and shown a deep understanding of the life of plants and animals. What could be more vivid than his description, in Le Démon du bien, of the four cats whom Costals meets in an Italian restaurant; or, on another plane, his picture, in Les Lépreuses, of the desolate landscape of the High Atlas?

'Rose rougeâtre de la terre. Blanc de la neige. Bleu des ombres aux flancs des monts. Sur le versant d'en dessous, des oueds avaient oubliés leur mission dans la vie . . . étaient devenus des pistes, encombrées de galets, qu'on ne distinguait plus que par leurs rubans de lauriers-roses; et puis un ruisseau de glace rouge, comme un ruisseau de gelée à la groseille, ou comme une tranchée pleine de sang frais coagulé. Des troupeaux de moutons, qui avaient la couleur même de la sécheresse, passaient au-dessus de leurs têtes, se déplaçaient avec le rhythme des ombres, et le chien croquait la neige durcie. Des bergers momifiés étaient là depuis cinq mille ans. Des sauterelles, figées elles aussi, sur les buissons neigeux, guettées par la fluxion de poitrine. Et de grands faucons blancs qui glissaient et viraient avec des grâces d'aimée.'

Like every genuine style, that of Henry de Montherlant is no mere adventitious decoration, but arises naturally from his subject as he enlarges and develops it. Montherlant's efforts as a controversialist should never blind us to the fact that he is primarily an accomplished artist. Les jeunes Riles may be read and enjoyed as a deliberately controversial book - an attack on 'the cult of Woman', on the place that Woman has come to occupy in the modern European world; and as such it may have helped to break down many masculine taboos and phobias. But it is also an imaginative work of art, which, having absorbed and digested its subject matter, presents us with something far more valuable and lasting. Circumstances change; social problems vary; one day the unending War of the Sexes may be fought under completely different standards. But, so long as literature continues to play a part in our lives, Montherlant's story of Les jeunes filles is a book that will retain its youthful freshness.

PETER QUENNELL

FOREWORD

The author would like to point out that in Costals he has deliberately painted a character whom he intended to be disquieting and even, at times, odious; and that this character's words and actions cannot in fairness be attributed to its creator.

The author made the central character of La Rose de sable. Lieutenant Auligny, a man endowed with the highest moral qualities: patriotism, charity, a horror of violence, a passion for justice and an acute sensitivity to injustice (to the point of being made ill by it), an almost excessive sensibility and scrupulousness, a sense of human solidarity, an anxiety, amounting to obsession, to put himself out for others and to avoid injuring them, etc.

This character, as central as that of Costals is here, takes up the major part of a work of nearly six hundred pages, and innumerable details lend it that 'autobiographical' aspect which some have claimed to discern in Costals.

One might well wonder whether the critics and the public, on reading La Rose de sable, would attribute to the author the same abundance of virtues as they attributed to him of vices after reading The Girls.

For thirty years the chains that bar the platforms of Paris buses have let one through if one lifts them at one end. Yet a great many women, when they wish to board these buses, persist in pulling downwards instead of upwards, and eventually throw imploring looks at the passengers standing on the platform to get them to come to their aid, as a cat with a fish-bone stuck in its gums comes to you to have it pulled out after having torn its mouth to shreds trying to get it out itself. Yet never have we witnessed such a scene with a man in the part. I don't wish to infer too much from this. But it struck me as being worth remarking upon, however petty it may seem.

H.M.

Henri de Montherlant

THE GIRLS

The Girls Tetralogy #1

to M. Pierre Costals

Avenue Henri-Martin Paris

Mademoiselle Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne near Avranches (Manche)

26 September 1926

†

A.M.D.G.

Thank you. Monsieur and dearly beloved, for never answering my letters. They were unworthy of me. Three letters in three years, and not a single reply! But now the time has come for me to tell you my secret.

Ever since I first came across your books, I have loved you. When I saw your photograph in a newspaper, my passion was aroused. For three months, from November the nth, 1923, to February the 2nd, 1924, I wrote to you every day. But I did not send the letters, I was too ashamed. I sent only one of them. You did not reply. And yet, as I gazed at your photograph, the look in your eyes, your whole expression, revealed to me my happy fate: you did not love me, no, but you had found a place for me in your thoughts.

With my letter of August the 15th, 1924 - the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin - I reminded you of my existence. And a few days later, I caught a certain gleam on your face in that same photograph which told me that my letter had struck home.

On April the nth last, I wrote to you a third time. But so great was my fear of displeasing you by an excess of boldness that the terms in which I wrote must have left you in doubt as to my feelings. I did not dare tell you of my love, and it was killing me. So then I wrote you a great confession in a six-page letter which I began on the last Saturday of the month of the Rosary and finished on the eve of the Immaculate Conception. But I did not send that either.

I think of you, I suffer, I must tell you all: I love you. I wish you no harm whatsoever.

How I have suffered! When you know me you will understand. I am not a self-sufficient sort of woman. Separated from you I have been nothing, I could do nothing. I have wept, I have prayed, I have meditated, but this inner life is all the life I have had. Why should I take anything out of myself unless it could be dedicated to the man for whom I was made? For God created man for His glory, and woman for the glory of man. Oh! what you could not do for me! Make me live, my friend, for without you I am incapable of living. All I need is to be loved, and I feel capable of so much love.

I love you and I know that in telling you so I am fulfilling God's will. My friend, have you never dreamed of what our love will be in Eternity?

Soon it will be October ... the last flowers are in the fields. I could not bear to see them die in vain. I picked them, making the sign of the Cross as I did so. I put four sprigs of them from us both on the grave of twin kittens that died two years ago. I am sending you three sprigs, and am keeping three more which I shall lay at the foot of my little statue of the Sacred Heart.

This time I beg you to answer me, so that I may give free rein to my tender feelings and, if your heart responds to mine, grow accustomed to my happiness.

My friend, our task is to reconstruct the Kingdom of God. If you desire this Kingdom, and the kingdom of my heart, give me a sign.

I kiss your pen, and sign myself

Marie Paradis

for 'Thérèse Pantevin' no longer exists.

(Do not put your name on your envelope.)

This letter remained unanswered.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Mademoiselle Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

3 October 1926

Dear great Costals,

During the summer I was out of doors nearly all the time.

and the house had ceased to be of any importance to me. With the first cold weather, one fits it out like an ark in which to sail through the deluge of winter, and it is only now, much more than in the spring when my mother died, that I realize what it means to be living in Saint-Léonard (Loiret) with a stupid, deaf old uncle, when one is poor, unmarried, an orphan without brothers or sisters, and pushing thirty.

And yet, this melancholy is, as it were, swallowed up by the anniversary each October brings. It is now four years to the very day since I first read a book of yours. The power you have over people! Last night I wept - real tears - on re-reading Fragility. (Did I tell you I had had an adorable binding made for it in green morocco? The only beautiful thing in the desert of ugliness and mediocrity in which I live. A hundred and fifty francs. Half my month's pocket money....) There are days when I cannot pick up a newspaper without finding your name in it, cannot open my mouth without mentioning you (I pronounce your name more often than a woman pronounces the name of her lover), cannot think without feeling your thoughts intermingled with mine. You are not so much a man as an element in which my life is steeped, as though in air or water. No one else has the 'feel' of you as I have. No, no one, I won't have it! I'm not jealous of the people you love - not even the 'fine ladies' - but of those who love you. Allow me at least the unique position of having loved your work more than anyone. I know it almost by heart, so much so that sentences of yours often spring to my lips or my pen, expressing my thought better than I myself could have done: you speak, and it is myself I hear. This is no doubt the effect of your talent, which conquered me from the very first, but it also has to do with the sort of affinity one notices between oneself and certain persons from whom one might appear to be separated by an abyss. Throughout my life, so joyless and at times so tormented, this mysterious fellow-feeling has uplifted and sustained me. How I have matured through reading you! You have turned over people's souls as one turns over the soil, revealing their own riches to them. For four years, your work has been as it were a mouthpiece for one who has no literary talent, just as your happiness has been a requital for one who is unhappy. Being as eager as you to live life to the full, and yet knowing only self-denial and yearning in this wretched life of mine - wretched and absurdly paradoxical since I have acquired a culture which remains unexploited - fettered as I am by loneliness and lack of money, I had, so to speak, delegated to you all this fervour, all this appetite for life. Far from envying you, as so many others do, I had, if I may say so, something of the feeling of parents whose own lives have been a failure and who live to see their children succeed (so you see you are my son, in spite of your thirty-three years!). Walled in as I was, I was glad that someone should triumph over all obstacles and barriers. That was my recompense. If at any time you had ceased to be yourself, or ceased to be happy, you would have proved yourself unworthy of my trust, you would have betrayed me - me and many others, for I know there were many who felt as I did.

I am proud that you write what you write. I am proud that you live as you live. That a man of your kind should be a success with the public (which is almost unheard of) reconciles me to the world: it means that all is not lost. I could not bear it if you were not loved, and it's now three years since I said to my best friend: 'If you hadn't loved Costals (as a writer), I wouldn't have given much for our friendship.' I am always terrified that you may do something that is not quite 'the thing'. Whenever I read an article of yours in a newspaper I always get the sort of shiver of apprehension my mother apparently used to get when I was a toddler and a neighbour warned her: 'Dédée's playing by the pond.' But what you write is always what I expected, just as, when I met you, you were as I had imagined you. O God, let this miracle never cease! It's a wonderful feeling, you know, to be able to put such trust in a free man.

When I met you! How can I forget your kindness, your straightforwardness, your courtesy! You, the inaccessible Costals! A very big and very famous brother, but a brother all the same. The ideal comrade, with whom one is on an equal footing, provided one holds one's head up a little. I was half afraid you would give me the sort of reception which a writer with your ... all-conquering reputation might give to a young female admirer come to visit him, and anything at all suggestive of physical desire on either side would have humiliated me. Even today I would give you my life, but I cannot imagine myself giving you a kiss. Although religion no longer has any hold over me, something has remained of my very devout and scrupulous childhood (never reading a book on the sly, and never wanting to). Your reserve was an exquisite discovery for me: 'reserve' equals 'power', in a man as much as in a woman. And moreover, it proved to me that in your eyes I was not like all the others. Everything you did for me - advising me what to read, finding me that job in Paris, which I lost through my own fault - showed me how kind you were, something one could not have guessed from your books. (Kind when you choose, be it said. There are things about you that upset me a little, as you know. Although of course you have special prerogatives.)

In a month's time, I shall be going to Paris for a few days on business connected with my mother's estate. Tell me you will be there then.

Yours with a solemn hand-clasp,

A.H.

Forgive the length of this letter. I can't help myself. But I promise not to write again for a fortnight.

This letter remained unanswered.

2501 - Girl, 28, blonde, pretty, Catholic, 20,000 frs. savings, would marry gent, in good situation.

2529- Girl, 25, bronzed, slim, very pretty, good legs, no private means, typist provincial town, would marry gent, with steady job. Seeks above all tenderness.

2530- Aristocratic lady, 40, only daughter, mildly intellectual, living in chateau, 200,000 frs. dowry, would marry distinguished Catholic gent, even without means, pref. nobleman.

2550-Girl, 21, daughter naval officer, orphan, attractive, light-brown hair, hazel eyes, small, slim, good figure, living Finisterre, no financial prospects.

2554-Widow, 49, lively, affectionate, sensitive, warmhearted, rich inner life, distinguished, excellent health, ideal housewife, superior in every way, income 25,000 frs., house- owner, wishes communicate view marriage sincere respectable gentleman similar financial position in order achieve peace and security in mutual trust and affection. Serious. Give exact address.

2563 - Artistic girl, personal qualities, warm-hearted, plucky, independent, living alone, desires marriage nice young man.

2565 - Marchioness, very tall, blue-green eyes, natural blonde hair, good figure, attractive, elegant, distinguished, accustomed fashionable society, good jewellery, would marry good-looking gent. American type.

2574 - Decent, healthy girl, living country with mother, seeks marriage.

2576a - Working girl, brunette, 29, gentle, docile, conscientious, 600 frs. per month, slight curable T.B., would marry gent, under 45 really anxious make her happy. Means unimportant. Would leave provinces.

Extract from Happy Ever After,

monthly matrimonial gazette, October 1926.

1899 - Bachelor, thirtyish, fine physique, 5ft 9ms., well educated, every endowment, would marry girl with substantial dowry.

1907 - Clerk, 23, medium height, sportsman, would marry woman who could make him independent.

1910 - Veterinary surgeon, 24, well-to-do, handsome, tall, fine eyes, Ramon Novarro type, seeks, view marriage, sentimental companion with at least 600,000 frs. dowry.

1929 - Widower, 63, elegant, healthy, Belgian, liberal profession, decorated Order of Leopold, private income 4,000 frs., would marry widow or spinster of good physique, fairly stout, loving, not spendthrift, with minimum income 20,000. Has suffered.

1930-Schoolmaster. Mayenne, 28, due promotion soon, would marry freethinking colleague with substantial means.

1931 - Young man, 5ft 10ins., very smart, very good dancer, fine athlete, wishes meet blonde girl of independent means view marriage. Motor-car trips.

1940 - Gentleman, university graduate, fiftyish, kind, considerate, disinterested, craving tenderness, seeks view marriage young person pref. under 23, genteel, distinguished, well educated, cultured, tender, devoted, character irreproachable, very pretty, good housekeeper, outwardly simple but really seductive, with minimum dowry 500,000 frs. and expectations if poss.

1945-Colonial warrant officer, clean bill of health, slim, blond, curly hair, aquiline nose, oval face, sensitive, violinist, Tunisian outpost, would marry girl 17-20 with dowry who loves radiant sun, eternal azure of the land of mirages and infinite sands.

1947-Mechanic, bachelor, 18, seeks view marriage correspondent who could help him set up in business.

1950 - Captain, 33, horseman, promotion imminent. Officer Legion of Honour, fine physique, brown hair, distinguished, elegant, serious, good-humoured despite having suffered, very straightforward, wishes bring happiness to young person even with a child, tall, pleasant, sentimental and ideal, perfectly educated. Catholic, in order build happy durable home based profound affection and high moral qualities. Situation and means immaterial.

1958-Young man, 21, good-looking, modest means, seeks sister soul with fortune.

1962-Viscount, only son, 27, certified noble ancestry dating back sixteenth century, no personal fortune at present but substantial expectations, perfect in every way, would marry person with very large fortune, religion and age immaterial, whose parents could provide occupation for son-in-law.

1967 - Road mender, 29, no private means, Paris suburbs, hopes find young woman for marriage.

Happy Ever After, October 1926.

A man reading a page of matrimonial advertisements can give rein, one after another, to several of the different men that are in him: the laughing man, the lusting man, the thinking man; and inside the 'thinking man' there is also a man who weeps.

The laughing man. Ah, yes! he will laugh himself sick. The high opinion most of these poor creatures have of themselves. The importance they attach to blond hair and Catholicism. The regulation height of the gentlemen. The 'expectations' of the young ladies - and what expectations! An inexhaustible mine of absurdity.

On the second page of the journal, 'the editors are at the disposal of their readers to provide them with any help they may need for the success of their plans, and if need be to write direct to subscribers in any terms which may be desired, at a fee of 2fr. 50 per letter.'

On the back page, a box advertising a 'lady detective and her sleuths, shadows, etc. ... ' Perfect! One must think of everything when setting up house. (But might not the lady detective be the editor of the journal herself, a Penelope ready to destroy what she has woven?) A good mark, too, for the advertisement for 'quick loans': we all know how expensive women are.

When the laughing man has had a good laugh and a good sneer, etc. ... to the point of thinking, if he is a bit sour: 'Let's have a nice little war to clean up all this riff-raff' (although it's true, adds this deplorable man, that one of the horrors of war, to which attention is never sufficiently drawn, is that women are spared) - when the laughing man has had a good laugh, he turns the switch and the lusting man appears. The man who cannot read 'Girl, 22' without a quiver of excitement.

Behind each of these advertisements a face, a body, an unknown something which, after all, may well be a heart. Behind these printed pages, a hundred and fifty living women, living at this very moment, each of whom wants a man - and why not me? - each of whom, since she is there, is ready for adventure, legal or illegal (the legal being a thousand times worse than the other), each of whom has reached such a pitch of deprivation that she is ready to offer herself to the first comer. The men, for their part, demand 'large fortunes'. We read this, for instance: 'Gentleman wishes meet young pretty woman with large fortune view marriage.' Full stop. You: young, pretty, with large fortune. Me ... well, me, 'a gentleman': aren't you satisfied? Most of the women do at least specify 'gentleman with job' - bed and board. The bed first. And what more natural, what more respect-worthy than this demand? 'You don't feel poverty any more when you're under a blanket', as a Marseilles street-walker once rather splendidly observed. (Sometimes you feel a different sort of poverty. But that's another matter.) The lecherous man, scanning these pages, sees them pulsating as the sea pulsates, swarming as the Roman arena swarmed when the beasts were let loose in it. There are too many of them, and he loses heart - like the art-lover confronted with two thousand pieces in a museum. A herd of women enclosed in the arena. Menacing as the beasts of the arena, and yet, like them, half innocent and defenceless: all victims, even the worst. It is simply a matter of shooting an arrow into the heap. Brutes, cads and perverts, swindlers and blackmailers, all the archers are up there choosing their prey. Every kind of threat against the race of woman. Extremes of candour and baseness, deceptions, disappointments, all the social dramas, even happiness, simmer in the witches' cauldron of a matrimonial gazette. Absurdity and pathos too, as in everything that has to do with life - and this is life itself, a microcosm of life.

As for the thinking man, he sees this matrimonial journal, so ridiculous from one point of view, as an extremely valuable piece of social machinery.

The author remembers coming across the alluring phrase select company in an advertising brochure for some spa hotel. And one often hears people say to each other: 'You should go to the So-and-So's. You'll make a lot of social connections there.' Whereupon every well-born person draws himself up and recalls the remark of the old aristocratic lady who, on her death-bed, pestered no doubt by tiresome visitors, left her grand-children with this final word of advice: 'Above all, avoid social connections.'

And yet, after this initial reaction, one is struck by all the misfortunes engendered by the lack of connections. It seems a trite thing to say; but in fact it is less widely realized than one might think. One is struck by the vast number of agreeable things people lack simply because they have not known which door to knock at. And it is surely tragic to think of those doors simply waiting to be opened on to gardens of Eden which remained closed because people passed them by.

The people who wait all their lives for the one person who was made for them - who always exists - and who die without having met that person: the men who fail to find an outlet for their abilities and waste their lives in inferior jobs: the girls who remain unmarried when they could have made a man happy as well as themselves: the people who sink ever deeper into penury when there are charitable organizations which might have been expressly created for them; and all this because none of them happened to know of this person, that organization, that vacancy - it is a problem that can haunt one.

And it applies to small things as well as big. There is the book which, at a particular moment, might have raised your spirits, but which you did not know about. There is the place that would have made the perfect setting for your love affair, the treatment that would have cured your illness, the scheme that would have enabled you to gain time. They were all there waiting for you, but no one pointed them out to you because you had too few connections. The promised land is all around you, and you do not know it - like a wasp trying to get out of a room, endlessly beating and buzzing against the window- pane although the window is ajar a few inches away. A man is thrown into the water with his wrists tied, and no one has taught him the knack of freeing himself - yet such a knack exists.

This counterpoint of offers and appeals resembles the flight of birds criss-crossing in the vastness of space until at last some of them meet and they fly off two by two. Montaigne tells us that his father would have liked to see in every town 'a certain place appointed, to which those who needed anything could betake themselves. Such a one desires company for a journey to Paris. Another requires a servant of a certain quality. Yet another a master, etc …' And he cites the example of two 'most excellent persons' who died in penury and who would have been succoured if their sad plight had been known. Truly, the man who first thought of using a gazette to help people find what they seek should have a statue erected in his honour. Anything designed to bring people together deserves encouragement, even when they are brought together for sentimental ends, with all the silliness and triviality that implies.

The old lady who enjoined her family with fierce pride, 'Above all, avoid connections', was condemning anyone who took her at her word to all the miseries of non-fulfilment - of soul as well as body - and an agonizing regret for all that could have been theirs for the asking, but which eluded them. Turning in on oneself is bad for all except strong and exceptional natures, and even then only on condition that it is relative and not continuous. Others pay dearly for it. One cannot shut oneself up in one's room with impunity. One cannot live on oneself alone with impunity. One cannot send one's fellow-creatures 'packing' with impunity. And it is right that this should be so, since turning in on oneself - unless it is dictated by high intellectual or spiritual motives - is more often than not the result of idleness, egotism, impotence, in short that 'fear of living' which has not yet been sufficiently recognized as one of the major evils that afflict humanity.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

6 October 1926

†

A.M.D.G.

My Beloved, once again you have failed to answer me! God has not permitted it; blessed be His Holy Name.

Convinced that your silence means that great things are happening - no doubt you are working - I will respect that silence. Yes, until All Saints Day even. On that date I will send you another De Profundis.

I kiss your right hand, the one that writes.

Marie Paradis

p.s. Do not put your name on the envelope.

This letter remained unanswered.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

All Saints Day

Quick, let me have something to hold in my hands which has felt your breath on it! If you only knew the people around me! If you only knew what a horrible thing it is to be entirely dependent on a power that does not wish you well. Only you can save me. Gjve me life, so that I can be sure of having it for all eternity.

This is a supreme adjuration. You are the breath of life to me: do not let me expire.

Marie

I have had my photo taken, and am sending it to you. As you see, I am young but not pretty. And in fact the photo flatters me.

(Do not put your name on the envelope.)

to Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

Pierre Costals

Paris

Mademoiselle,

I never for a moment imagined that one day I should find myself answering one of your extravagant missives. Alas! I was touched by the most recent ones; the damage is done. You say that your life is in my hands. We know all about that. But the possibility that you may really believe it is one that I must face. Ought I, in that case, to ignore these appeals?

I cannot be so hard-hearted. Let us see what can be done for you.

There is no chance of the feeling you think you have for me ever arousing the slightest echo on my side. Do not persist in it: it would be like beating your head against a wall; you would wear yourself out. And besides, even if you were to reach me, you would get nothing from me, for I have nothing to give to anyone. Let me tell you this once and for all. Do not imagine that I shall ever weaken.

However, if that path is closed to you, it is not the only one. There is obviously a certain force in you, and it would be a pity to waste it on the first oaf you came across, with whom you might become infatuated for want of anyone better. When allowance is made for the element of sentimental gush in your devotion, which comes of your sex and age, what remains is perhaps not wholly bad; though it would be strange if God were to find it acceptable. I do not know exactly what he is, having not an atom of faith. But in him, or in the idea you have of him, you will certainly be better off than in making a 'home'. Homes! Plague centres, every one of them. If there is anything I can do for you, it is to encourage you in this quest, and to follow your progress with sympathy from afar - although, as I say, I believe neither in the divinity of Jesus Christ nor in the divinity of anyone else. But the rarefied heights of non-belief are familiar to me. They will be my prayer for you, if you wish. For it is all the same thing. Luckily.

Do not write me letters eight pages long every three days, as you will no doubt consider yourself entitled to do after this one. I tell you frankly, I shall leave them unread. My interest in you amounts to my being able to read a letter from you about once every three weeks, not every three days. Do not give in to the urge to write to me until you have put up such a fight as will have done you credit. And do not expect me to answer you. I will only answer you if I feel inclined, which is to say that my replies will be few and far between.

Upon which, I remain. Mademoiselle, yours sincerely,

Costals

to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

Carqueiranne (Var)

Pierre Costals

Paris

6 November 1926

Dear Guiguite,

Could I ask you to post from Carqueiranne (with apologies for sending it to you in a sealed envelope) this letter addressed to a young lady in the Loiret who has been wishing me well (from the Loiret) for the past four years. Since she has literally nothing else to do but think about me, you can imagine what a good time she has. Plain, anything but desirable, but intelligent, cultivated, worthy. She is an orphan (her father was a country solicitor of no standing), she learnt Latin all by herself, etc. ... in fact altogether most estimable. I have a certain sympathy for her, being acutely aware of what it must be like to be a penniless spinster approaching thirty, and of a fairly superior type, in Saint-Léonard (Loiret) of all places. It's pathetic to see a woman of this calibre condemned either to turn into a sour old virgin, or to marry a local shopkeeper, or to take a lover (which might not be easy, since nature has not been over-kind to her), and let herself go. I keep up the illusion of friendship with her, because I know it bolsters her up. She is coming to Paris in a day or two, and this time I don't want to see her. A woman who loves you, but whom you neither love nor desire, is just possible as a correspondent. But face to face, ouch! I am giving the strictest orders at home to say I have left for the Midi.

There is another young lady, this time from the Manche, to whom I've just written after leaving unanswered three or four letters she has sent me over the past three years. The other day she sent me her photograph - she's a proper little peasant, in a black orphan's smock; you couldn't imagine anything more ill-favoured. She's completely mad (in the mystical mode), and would be nothing without her madness, which is her only asset. A remark in one of her letters struck a chord in me, and opened, if not my heart, at least that place deep inside one where kindness and pity are thought to dwell: 'If you only knew what a terrible thing it is to be entirely dependent on a power that does not wish you well!' I imagine she means her family. Since it is not easy, with piety, to distinguish the boundary between madness and sublimity, I have plumped for sublimity and would like her to take advice as to whether she may not be made for the convent: anything would be better than that farmyard with all those cow-hands full of contempt for the little mystic. I'm sure that you, dear Guiguite, who are imbued with the humane spirit of Israel, would have approved of my answering her in the end. I know it was rash of me: good deeds are always rash. But I don't like refusing people the little bit of happiness they ask of you when their paths cross yours.

Nothing in particular to say to you, except to thank you for the pleasure you have given me so faithfully for so many months. Now that you are at Carqueiranne (I hope you had a good journey), you will have seen the fishermen's nets held up on the surface of the water by fragments of cork. My nights with you are like those fragments of cork holding me up on the surface of life. Without those nights, and the nights spent with my other little companions, I believe I would sink like a stone, what with the stupidity of my family, the vile- ness of my fellow-writers, and the time my friends make me waste.

I hope the latest of your protectors is a fine figure of a man and a nice chap. Come back to me in good form at the end of the month. I don't think I should mind losing you: it would amuse me to have a gap to fill. But on the whole I should be glad if you stayed.

Dear Guiguite, I love the pleasure I have with you, I love the pleasure I give you; in short, you are eighteen and I like you. Good-bye, my dear.

Your devoted servant,

C.

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

[Letter dated from Carqueiranne and enclosed with the preceding one.]

Pierre Costals

Paris

7 November 1926

Dear Mademoiselle,

What a bore! Here I am in this God-forsaken place, where I shall be stuck all the time you are in Paris. If I had been nearer, I would willingly have popped up to Paris to spare you this disappointment. But from here! ...

If you need help of any kind in Paris, a letter of introduction, or anything, let me know at once at Carqueiranne, 'c/o Mile Rachel Guigui, 14 rue de la Plage.' Mile Guigui is an elderly Jewess with whom I am lodging for a few days. Incorrigible as I am, I shall no doubt end up by falling into her arms, assuming that one can be inflamed by a person called Guigui, which I find hard to believe.

As I write to you, I can see from my window the irradiations of the zenith multiply themselves in sparkling facets on the shimmering methylene-blue of the sea. Then I think what it must be like to spend eleven months of the year at Saint-

Léonard (Loiret)       And the beauty of the sea no longer

seems quite so innocent.

Cordially yours,

C.

Well, no! I've just lied to you. I can't see the sea at all at the moment, for the simple reason that I am writing this in a café in Carqueiranne from which it is not visible. Even to tell you this harmless lie would have been painful to me. It is true that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, it does happen that I do things that are painful to me. Rarely, but sometimes.

to Pierre Costals

Carqueiranne

Mademoiselle Andrée Hacquebaut

Hôtel des Beaux-Arts Paris

11 November 1926

Costals, dear Costals, was your letter from Carqueiranne a disappointment to me? Yes and no. Yes, because to come to Paris and miss you is too idiotic. No, because a little letter like that easily makes up for a few moments of your presence. Your niceness! Still the same after all these years! So you would really, if you had not been so far away, have 'popped up' to Paris simply to see me! And your adorable postscript, the guilt I can detect in you for having told me an insignificant little lie! How could one not love you, in spite of your moods, your weeks of silence, your harsh words, the teasing, rather disturbing side of you, the cruel mischievous- ness, when all this is mitigated and absolved by your truly divine goodness and delicacy of feeling? I have had nothing but joy through you.

I am alone in my room in this little hotel. The fire is roaring; down below, Paris stirs and bustles in the rain. Your letter is on the table in front of me. It will help me to live through these few days in Paris without you. It will help me, too, to say to you everything I have to say. For this is a very solemn letter.

During the summer at Saint-Léonard I find almost acceptable a pattern of life which in winter makes me shudder with horror. There are, even at Saint-Léonard, nice young men to go boating or bathing with, to while away the time with, and they suffice. With the beginning of the cold weather, with lamps and books, all that comes to an end. The cold makes me feel the need for the things of the mind. And then I am drawn to Paris. A few hours in Paris - yesterday Beethoven at the Salle Gaveau, this morning the Fragonards at the Galerie Charpentier - and I say to myself: No, it's impossible! I have no vanity about being what I am, but I must recognize it. And what I am makes me refuse to marry a nonentity. I have always had the idea firmly rooted in my mind that a woman's love cannot be an act of condescension, since in the carnal act it is she who is the victim.

A provincial girl without means and without connections, I cannot make a 'good' marriage which would bring me money and position - for example a marriage in Paris, into a cultivated, well-to-do milieu (to find a cultivated husband I should have to live in Paris half the year, independently, and I can't afford that). A 'good' marriage being impossible, I only want a marriage that will allow me to be overtly in love. If I were to remain equally lonely and deprived, and in addition tied for life to a man who bored me but whom nevertheless I cared for sufficiently not to want to make him feel it, with all the disadvantages I have now, minus my freedom, plus innumerable worries, what would be the point? Only a great love and the knowledge of performing a really fruitful task would make the sacrifice of my liberty worthwhile.

There are two or three young men here who would, I think, willingly marry me. They are not unattractive: young, pleasant, perfectly decent and well-bred. One of them at least I could perhaps succeed in loving if I really put my mind to it. But in what a limited environment - provincial tradespeople - oblivious to poetry, to everything profound or subtle or disinterested. A married man can perhaps detach himself from his environment. But a married woman? She cannot cut herself off either from her husband or from his circle, or even risk shocking them. Can you imagine how devastating it is for a woman to be even the slightest bit superior? That is the crux of my tragedy. The pleasure of disdaining mediocrities has to be paid for. And liking mediocrities must be paid for by the mediocrity of the pleasure one gets from them. Ah! what a wife I would have been for an artist! For to be an artist's wife one must love the artist even more than the man, dedicate oneself to making the former great and the latter happy. And then, how restful to be alone together, to understand each other's unspoken thoughts.

I have a horror of old maids. I pity the unhappily married. Illicit love revolts me. So? ... And I shall be thirty in April! Thirty, the crucial age.... My head spins. I'm terrified of botching everything. Oh Costals, what am I to do with my life?

One thing alone sustains me: your existence. You alone give me the poise a woman needs. If I shut my eyes an instant and tell myself that you exist, I feel assuaged. Yes, one must thank creatures such as you for existing, simply for existing! Is fire diminished by needing something to kindle it? I love you like a torch with which I set myself alight. So what has happened to me is this: you have made every other man uninteresting to me, for the rest of my life, and every other future meaningless. I can no longer envisage any normal happiness - I mean a commonplace marriage - without my whole being revolting against the insipidity of it, because I shall never have the strength to devote my life to a man I scarcely love at all. Imagine a mortal woman who had loved Jupiter, and could not then love any man, though wanting desperately to be able to love one.

How I should have liked to be able to do something for you, for your work! But I can do nothing, nothing! If I could write, I should write articles about you, or a book. I almost wish that you were poor, sickly, unrecognized. I almost wish that you were wandering in search of your life's work, as I am searching for mine. Your weakness would be my strength. But no, you are entirely self-sufficient, you are embedded, as it were, in your solitude, and what makes others hate you - your self-assurance - is for me a matter for regret. There is no hope of my ever being able to feel this bond between us, this unique bond: a conviction on your part that you can put your trust in me absolutely. But tell me, at least, that you will never need such devotion! For if, one day, you did come to need it, how terrible if I could not respond to your appeal because I was bogged down in some dreary task, undertaken out of despair of ever finding anything better to do!

Once, as I was writing to you, this sentence came to the tip of my pen: 'I love you with all my heart.' I did not dare write it, in case you misunderstood. Now that you know me, now that you realize that I am not and never will be 'in love' with you, I can write it with complete confidence, I can write it without the slightest reticence: I love you with all my heart.

You must not answer; you must forget this letter or keep only an impression of tenderness from it, if possible. Above all, you must not make me atone for it by changing your attitude towards me.

A.H.

P.S. I am having a dark-red dress made for the winter, all velvety and light. And I've bought myself a grey coat, very delicate and chic - oh! so chic - which looks as though it might have come from a smart couturier (it is in fact a copy). I shall also buy a tight-fitting grey feather toque, because it is so kind to the face. ... You see how light-hearted I am in spite of you.

To be elegant, perhaps even pretty. ... And all for what, for whom? For the Saint-Léonardins. ...

Goodnight, Monsieur

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Pierre Costals

Paris

26 November 1926

Dear Mademoiselle,

I write in answer to your esteemed letter of the 11th inst. with the regulation fortnight's delay. One week during which I did not even open your envelope (a little quarantine to which I submit all letters from women, after which time there is a chance that they may no longer be contagious). And one week during which I put off replying to you day after day because the thought of it bored me. Forgive me, but I find it difficult to remain completely serious when people tell me they love me.

The fact is that I did not find your letter at all agreeable. Why leave the nice, friendly plane we were on for the vulgarity and tediousness of 'sentiment'? You have now moved on to such exalted heights that I doubt whether I shall be able to follow you. I treated you with complete naturalness, as an intelligent comrade, if you like. Now I shall have to watch my step. Now I shall feel I have obligations towards you: an obligation to show myself worthy of your sublime gift of yourself, an obligation to treat you with infinite consideration (of which this letter is already a sample), an obligation to give you in return something more or less in proportion with what you have done me the honour of offering me. So many obligations! And obligations, alas, have never been my strong suit. I'm afraid you have been both clumsy and rash. You should have kept it all to yourself, so that I could have gone on pretending that I hadn't understood.

To change the subject: you surprised me one day by confessing your ignorance of English literature. I have just inherited the library of an old lady who had, I suppose, a kind of feeling for me which it should be easy for you to reconstruct by analogy. Would you like me to send you a little parcel of English literature in translation? I already have the books in English. And it distresses me to think that a girl like you might spend her whole life without having been brought into contact with the genius of England.

Cordially yours, dear Mademoiselle. But keep a tight rein on yourself, I beg of you.

C.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

November 1926

How absurd you are! Imagine thinking that I wanted to lay hands on you! And immediately you shake with fright, in your ferocious desire for independence.

What, after all, does it all amount to? As I have told you, you are like a god to me. And isn't a god more or less a mirror in which to contemplate oneself and see oneself in a better light? Does one not create him in one's own image, only better? That is what you are, my sublimated double, the strongest, the proudest, the best of me. I have, then, a calm, cold passion for you. And beside this, my friendship. You are at once a god and a chum - isn't that delicious?

What obligations does it impose on you? Give me what you have given me up to now - I ask nothing more. I shall never weigh more than a feather in your life. How small one would be prepared to make oneself, in order to remain close to the man one loves! As long as I can write to you, I shall not be really unhappy. And what do I care even if you grow tired of me, since I shall never grow tired of you, and I shall still have your books? At the worst, even if you no longer gave me anything more than you give everyone else, it would still be a noble gift. Hence my attachment to you is calm and relaxed.

I fancy Mme de Beaumont, who loved Chateaubriand more than Chateaubriand loved her, must have written to him as I am writing to you.

How deep-rooted the idea of mutual obligation is! One tells a person again and again: 'Don't worry. For your sake and for mine, I do not and will not love you. I have a passionate friendship for you, because it gives me pleasure, because I want it, because it makes me happy, because it is gratifying to think about another person, to look after him, to make him happy. I ask nothing of you. You owe me nothing. I love you at my own risk.' And the other person imagines that you love him with an irresistible love and are miserable because it is not requited. Nothing of the kind.

You will not, no, you cannot resent this melancholy half-offering of mine, finer in quality than the offerings of other women. Do not withhold your esteem from me. And write to me sometimes, I beg of you. When you maintain an absolute silence for a long time, I begin to fade away, I lapse into a sort of moral and spiritual lethargy. To understand becomes a matter of indifference to me, if I cannot make you share the fruit of my conquest.

I give you my hand.

A.H.

I accept with gratitude your offer of English books, although I would have preferred not to owe you anything for the moment.

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Pierre Costals

Paris

30 November 1926

I recognize, dear Mademoiselle, that loving me is no fun. The moment I realize that someone cares for me, I'm disconcerted and annoyed. My next impulse is to put myself on the defensive. I have had a deep attachment for three or four people in my life, and they were always people I could have sworn were not even remotely drawn towards me. I think if they had loved me I should have been inclined to steer clear of them.

To be loved more than one loves oneself is one of the crosses of life. Because it obliges one either to feign a reciprocal passion which one does not feel, or to cause pain by one's coldness and the rebuffs one administers. In either case there is constraint (and a man like me cannot feel constrained without the risk of turning nasty), and in either case pain. As Bossuet so powerfully put it: 'To love someone too much is to do him an irreparable wrong.' It's almost what I once wrote myself: 'To love without being loved is to do more harm than good.' The consequence is to be found in La Rochefoucauld: 'We are more prepared to love those who hate us than those who love us more than we would wish.' And your humble servant concludes: one should never tell people one loves them without asking their forgiveness.

Anyone I love takes away part of my freedom, but in that case it is I who wished it; and there is so much pleasure in loving that one gladly sacrifices something for its sake. Anyone who loves me takes away all my freedom. Anyone who admires me (as a writer) threatens to take it away from me. I even fear those who understand me, which is why I spend so much time covering my tracks - both in my private life and in the persona I express through my books. What would have delighted me, had I loved God, is the thought that God gives nothing in return.

I am equally afraid, needless to say, of being the object of a physical desire which I could not reciprocate. I would prefer to have an utterly passive woman, a block of wood, in my arms than a woman who got more pleasure from contact with me than I from contact with her. I can remember some truly hellish nights. ... There will surely be demonesses in hell who desire one without one's desiring them. It is inconceivable that a God who is an expert in torture will not have thought of that.

I know so well how painful it is to be loved more than one loves oneself that I have always kept a careful watch on myself when I felt that I loved more than I was loved. That has happened to me sometimes, of course, and also to feel that my desire was only tolerated out of complaisance: the person concerned had scruples, or else was frigid. How careful I was then to make my presence felt as little as possible, how gingerly I advanced, how attentively I watched for the first sign of lassitude, in order to go into reverse, to meet less frequently! ... Needless to say I suffered. But I knew that it was vital for my own sake, that I would lose everything if I tried to impose myself, and that anyhow it was I who was in the wrong for loving too much.

I know all about love: it's a feeling I have little respect for. Besides, it doesn't exist in nature; it's an invention of women. If a price were put on my head I should feel safer in the wilds, like a hunted animal, than with a woman who was in love with me. But there is affection. And there is affection mixed with desire, a splendid thing. In every one of the books I have published you will find, in one form or another, this affirmation: 'What matters to me above everything is loving.' But it is never a question of 'love'. It is a compound of affection and desire, which is not the same thing. 'A compound of affection and desire - what's that if it isn't love?' Well, no, it isn't love. 'Explain.' ... I don't feel like it. Women do not understand these things.

And finally, I don't like people needing me, intellectually, 'emotionally', or carnally. The inexplicable pleasure which my presence inspires in certain people diminishes them in my eyes. What do I care about having a place in someone else's universe!

I enclose an article I wrote on the subject many years ago. I would write it differently today. It is overstated and lacking in subtlety. But on the basic point I haven't changed.

One word more. You mention Pauline de Beaumont. I suspect Chateaubriand would not have done what he did for her if she hadn't been dying. He knew it was only for a brief moment.

My compliments to you, dear Mademoiselle.

C.

Fragment of an article by Costals

'The ideal in love is to love without being loved in return.'

...For the repugnance which some men feel for being loved, I can see several reasons, contradictory of course, inconsistency being a characteristic of the male.

Pride. - The desire to keep the initiative. In the love that others bear us, there is always something which eludes us, which threatens to catch us off guard, perhaps to overwhelm us, which has designs on us, which seeks to control us. Even in love, even when we are two, we do not want to be two, we want to remain alone.

Humility, or, if this seems too strong a word, absence of conceit. - The humility of a clear-sighted man, who does not think himself especially handsome or especially worthy, and finds it somehow ridiculous that his slightest gesture, word, silence, etc., can create happiness or misery. What an unfair power he is given! I have no great opinion of a man who is conceited enough to think aloud: 'She loves me', who does not try at least to minimize the thing by saying: 'She's getting worked up about me.' Whereby, no doubt, he belittles the woman, but only because he has first of all belittled himself.

An attitude that I would compare, for instance, to that of a writer who finds it ridiculous to have 'disciples', because he knows what his personality is made of, and what his 'message' adds up to. Any man worthy of the name despises the influence he exercises, in whatever direction, and puts up with having to exercise it as the price he must pay for his urge to express himself. We do not want to be dependent. How then can we approve of those who would depend on us? It is an exalted view of human nature that makes one refuse to be a leader.

Dignity. - Embarrassment and shame at the passive role a man who is loved has to play. For him, the state of being loved is suitable only to women, animals and children. For a man to allow himself to be embraced, caressed, held hands with, looked at with swimming eyes - ugh! (Even the majority of children, however effeminate they may be in France, thoroughly dislike being kissed. They put up with it out of politeness, and because they have to, grown-ups being more muscular than they are. Their impatience with these slobberings is obvious to everyone except the slobberer, who thinks they are delighted by it.)

The desire to remain free, to protect oneself. - A man who is loved is a prisoner. No need to dwell on this, since it is well known.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

3 December 1926

†

A.M.D.G.

You have answered me! You have written to me to say that you would be willing to read a letter from me every three weeks! I have read this and kissed these words. Do not let me languish. If you could only see how pale I am! Quick, write some more words for me to kiss.

I crushed your letter against my breast, against my medals, until they hurt me, and the more they hurt the more it did me good. Everything that hurts me does me good. I dream of you coming into my room, but if you really came in I would probably begin to cry.

If I could, I would gladly leave the 'plague centre'. But where could I go? I ought to set out, like Abraham, walking straight ahead without knowing where, in the holy freedom of the children of God. For I dare not go to you. I would not know what to say to you, you would not be able to drag a word out of me ... and yet I await a sign from you, in spite of my terrible fear of disappointing you. But I don't spend all my time in the house; I'm often in the fields. I go to the local town three or four times a year. Last week we went to the fair at N— and I enjoyed myself very much. You see I don't deserve to be a nun, if that is what you meant.

However, do not start thinking I'm a flibbertigibbet. Every day I repose in the Eucharist, as I repose body and soul beside you in the silence of each night, and then everything that exists reposes in me. And I pray for my poor father, who does not believe in God, and who treats me so roughly. Do you know what he said just now at supper? 'It would be better to rear pigs than daughters.' He was looking at me when he said it.

Good-bye, my friend. My heart is heavy with all I have to give you. Love me just one jot as much as I love you, and Eternity will take us to its bosom.

Marie Paradis

to Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

Pierre Costals

Paris

9 December 1926

Mademoiselle,

If you belong to Jesus Christ, you must not belong to him in a muddled way. Granted that God exists, he has given love to human beings only that they may give it back to him and him alone. Must I remind you of St Augustine's words: 'The soul can only reach God by approaching him without human intervention,' or the mystic (Meister Eckhart) who goes so far as to say: 'Do you know why God is God? It is because he is independent of all creatures.' You dishonour God by mixing him up with me. Such sloppiness is nauseating. When I see Jesus Christ mixed up with the human species (mixed, not juxtaposed, for juxtaposition occurs in all of us), I always think of the Princess Palatine's story of the schoolboy who had pictures of saints painted on his bottom so as not to be whipped.

You tell me you don't 'deserve' to take the veil. Say rather 'I am not destined' or 'I have not been chosen'. That is quite possible. But do not speak of deserving. Just as the love of one person for another has no need to be deserved, so the grace God gives a person to consecrate to him is given to that person in preference to an infinity of deserving persons without his having deserved it. I would even go so far as to say that, if I were God, what I should like in a person would be my grace, just because it is privilege. This said, you are right not to be too self-satisfied. To be too firmly convinced that God approves of an action is often a clear sign that it is not being done for him and through his spirit, just as it is often a sign that a human action is defective to be too sure that it will be applauded.

Perhaps there are forces within you that could be harnessed to God's purposes. I don't know what you may have to lose by it, but I know it's negligible. It must have been one of the Fathers of the Church who invented the expression: he who loses wins. It pains me to think of you becoming involved in the imbecility of the world. You go to town, you go to the fair, and far from being overwhelmed with disgust by what you see there, you take pleasure in it. If you believe, what are you doing in the world? There is nothing innocent in the world once one believes (to enjoy the taste of a glass of water is to slap Christ's face); nothing that can even be justified. However trifling your activity, it is ridiculous; I should like to see your actions die out one by one, as lights go out at midnight in a town. One of my fellow-writers having spoken of the 'virtue of contempt', an ecclesiastic, writing in some review or other, danced a veritable fandango of scorn and derision: 'The virtue of contempt! A fine sort of Christian!' But the Gospel is full of Christ's contempt for the world; and this very morning I read somewhere: 'What a joy to know how contemptible the world is! How weak one is not to despise it as much as it deserves!' Who wrote that? The 'gentle' Fénelon, the 'swan'. (Medit. V) But better still - the last word in fact: the dying Jesus prays for his executioners, and refuses to pray for the world. Non pro mundo rogo. 'I pray not for the world.' (St John XVII, 9). There's a thunderbolt that impresses me more than the one that occurred when he expired. He prays for his executioners, because that is an extravagance worthy of his genius, but he refuses to pray for the corrupt and foolish multitude which he cursed in the Gospel. 'I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me.' Wonderful, shattering words - it does me good to hear them! and now. Mademoiselle, be one of those for whom Jesus does not pray.

The sin against the Holy Ghost touches me deeply. Maybe there is at this moment a religious house waiting for you to bury yourself in body and soul, as I bury myself body and soul in my writings; it awaits you as the earth awaits the morning dew. That you are alive, I can believe. But alive with spiritual life? I have no means of knowing what there is in you; perhaps there is nothing. You have no more pressing objective than to find out what your impulses and inclinations amount to. Only a priest can disentangle them. A good confessor is the foundation of the edifice you must build. Go and see Father M— at the monastery of the — at L—. I know Father M—; he has the distinction of having been the greatest sinner in the world - which means that he will understand your sins the better, knowing what sin is. He will induce in you such a state of humility that the confession of those sins will be as enjoyable to you as the flames were to the martyrs. He will never anticipate the grace within you, supposing it to be there, but will follow it humbly and firmly, after testing it with the greatest care. Although today people no longer enter into religion unthinkingly, as they used to do (and as people continue to enter into matrimony), the Church cannot be too careful in making sure of a vocation. You should not be made a nun by men but by God.

You pray for your father? You would do better to pray for yourself. Have you forgotten how insistent the Gospel is on that point? And you would do better to read the Gospel, and understand it, than to go so often to Mass, to Communion, etc. Abuses are often more dangerous than errors, because one is less on one's guard against them. Piety should be devoid of gestures, like sorrow, and, I might almost venture to say, as silent. How eloquent the silence of Moses before God!

Do not cease to remind yourself, whatever I may write to you, that I am not a Christian believer. Faith is darkness - the expression falls frequently from religious pens; and I am all crude brightness. Do not cease to bear in mind that I have no faith, that I do not miss it, that I do not ever expect to have it, that I do not ever wish to have it. 'There is a road which, though it may sometimes appear the right one, leads to hell.' Perhaps I am that road. In imagination and in hope I have damned myself a hundred thousand times. In action - in the total and absolute fulfilment of my desires - I have damned myself another hundred thousand times. And in memories and regrets I have damned myself another hundred thousand times. And that is part of my glory. And I have helped enough women to damnation to help one in the opposite direction. For I am a spirit of grace, and spirits of grace radiate like grace itself, which assumes every form. And I am - essentially - he- who-assumes-every-form.

I have written to you in a language that must be partly incomprehensible to you. You may forage what you can from it.

Forgive me, Mademoiselle, for my presumption.

Costals

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

24 December 1926

You do not write to me for more than three weeks. Then at last a slender post-card with no more than a dozen words on it brings me your greetings and asks for my news. My news? I cannot go on telling you ad infinitum that I'm unhappy. I must, however, find some way out of this state of crisis which is killing me. The day when it is proved to me beyond a shadow of doubt that every outlet is closed to me as far as love is concerned - and that day cannot be far off - I shall persist no longer. It would be horrible to cling on. The only alternative is voluntary renunciation, a pure and dignified life. I belong to the sacrificial generation, the girls whose chances of love were decimated by the war with its toll of young men: we too are widows. As for man-hunting, for adventure, I am not yet ripe for that.

It seems to me that such a renunciation would open up fresh fields for me. 'I'm beaten, it's all over and done with. Therefore, everything that happens to me from now on will be a bonus. Since I no longer seek, it may be that I've already found.' I have often noticed in myself a sudden reversal of this kind when I reach the climax of some experience I've been going through: a burst of furious pride, a sort of emotional desiccation and detachment, a sudden asperity towards fate: 'After all, come what may, I still have myself.'

I still have you, too, of course. In my confusion and despair I have a kind of peace: 'He cannot, he will not be my happiness. But he is my truth. He does not want me to love him - I would fail to please him and would destroy myself. Nevertheless, it fills me with a great peace, in spite of my life's failur3, when so many women will never find the man who would make their hearts throb, or will love heaven knows whom out of the need to love, it fills me with a great peace to have discovered at least this certainty: that there exists a man who is everything to me, whom I could have loved with my whole being. I no longer need to search or to wait - the exhausting fate of lonely women.' Yes, telling myself this appeases me. The impression of having achieved, of having had, of escaping at last from that vague and indefinable torment, from the inordinate appetite for love - the renouncing of a precise treasure, and not innumerable and unknown possible treasures - why, in comparison it's almost tantamount to possessing.

Christmas! An abyss of boredom and mediocrity with the people among whom I have to spend it. A day of rain and nostalgia and misery. Why are there days when all those hostile things which at other times lie dormant and innocuous rise up and assail one all at once? It's agonizing to have to undergo this onslaught. And I think of the Christmases of those who love one another, of the adorable Christmas in Werther. What a pity I can no longer put my shoes in the fireplace! I would have put two pairs, because there are four things I long for madly: a husband (with love), a gramophone, a book about Cosima Wagner, and a hat decorated with an aigrette, a hat I won't describe to you, because you would make fun of me.

A Happy New Year! I'm very fond of you, you know, Costals. And if happiness could be given like a diamond, it would long ago have passed from my hand into yours. Once more I offer you my undying devotion. But when, oh when will you ever make use of it?

A.H.

This letter remained unanswered.

Saint-Léonard. January. Seven degrees of frost. At night, in spite of the stove, the water freezes in the Hacquebaut house.

What is most immediately striking about Andrée's room is that everything in it, furniture, hangings, objects, is at least twenty years old and looks it: for twenty years nothing has been bought, or next to nothing. The only things of any beauty are some reproductions of famous pictures, chosen with taste, and a very unfeminine taste (a taste in which there is a feeling for grandeur).

The sound of a hooter outside. How often this hooter has made her heart miss a beat! In spite of the cold, she opens the window. The postman's big bicycle-lamp lights up the door of the neighbouring house. Then it moves, comes nearer. As the lamp passes Andrée flings out a wish to it as though it were a shooting star: 'O God, make it stop!' But the lamp moves away into the distance. Out there, too, is the man she calls to, who also goes by without stopping.

Already fairly isolated from humanity, she is isolated even more by the cold. The snow-bound atmosphere muffles sounds. Everything lives in slow motion, everything shrivels up. Express trains no longer run. The mail arrives a day late. But what does it matter, after all? Never a letter from Costals. Luckily she knows that in February she will be going to Paris for a month.

She had always suffered from the feeling of having nobody at the other end of the line, from not knowing what person, what cause to dedicate herself to. As a child she already showed symptoms of the disease that Costals, in a neologism worthy of a medical student, called Andrée's 'letteritis'. In those days she used to write letters to herself, rather like the English poet in the last war, who at each port of call on the way to the Dardanelles, hired an urchin to wave a handkerchief when the steamer sailed (Costals professed to find such a trait utterly repulsive: he could not possibly have shaken hands with a man with that sort of sensibility). Later on, she had contributed for some time to the correspondence columns of the women's papers, which are the young girl's substitute for men, as lap- dogs are the grown woman's substitute for babies. This correspondence had ceased when she began writing to Costals.

She scribbled page after page to him, for hours on end, stopping only because of cramp in her hand. As with most women, what she wrote in the form of letters was in fact her diary - huge pages without margins, unnumbered, with words scratched out or written over, and lines added in every direction and even across other lines. Whenever Costals received one of these letters, he would weigh it in his hand with a sigh, assessing the number of pages it must contain: for a man who, like most men, could not read long letters, it was an affliction every time. It was unusual for the envelope not to be held together with bits of stamp paper lest it should burst under the weight. Inside, Costals would often find a photograph of Andrée which he would tear up in a rage and throw into the waste paper basket without even glancing at it. Ah! if she had seen him then it would have been like a dagger in her heart. But also, in an instant, she would have seen the light at last. Unless, incurably, she were to think: 'Only love could account for such a fit of rage. What has he got against me today?' Sometimes she would perfume her letters with such a pungent scent that he was obliged to hang them out on clothes pegs for the night; but even this was not enough, and the drawer of his desk would reek for days on end. If he complained to her, she would complain back: how could friendship be affected by such trifles? She was incapable of realizing (1) that there was no friendship, and (2) if there had been, yes, it would have been affected, because in anything to do with the quality of personal relations, there are no trifles. It was the same with her writing-paper, which was of an 'impossible' format. As Costals kept her letters, he had pointed out to her how awkward they were for his files, overlapping them and destroying their neatness. It was a waste of breath - so much so that he was occasionally provoked into throwing some of her letters away out of sheer exasperation at seeing their edges frayed like lace in his files.

From time to time, Costals would send a reply to these letters - illegible little notes, scribbled as fast as he could manage, in which he put down whatever came into his head - literally anything - and in which he always teased her a little, because it was in his nature to tease. She believed that one only teases people one loves. In her more lucid moments, she found these notes touching in their goodwill, which indeed they were.

At the beginning, she had also sent him little presents - baskets of flowers or fruit. At first he had been weak or lazy or charitable enough to accept them: 'She would be very hurt if I refused them.' When she sent him a rather elegant cigarette- holder, he sent it back with a friendly letter. For a year she stopped sending presents, then began again - eau de Cologne, sachets of lavender. He wrote to her: 'Dear Mademoiselle, I shall not return your little presents any more. I shall give them automatically to my mistresses' (which was what he had done). That did it. There were no more little presents.

Andrée's other cure for boredom was reading. Books borrowed, books ordered from a lending library, books even bought (mad extravagance - books costing thirty francs! ): she read until her eyes ached. Almost always worth-while books. And almost always something interesting in the reflections she scribbled in the margins.

Letter-writing, reading, what else? She ordered prospectuses from travel agencies, catalogues of rare books, manuscripts, records, catalogues from big stores, and thumbed through them interminably, marking what she would have liked to have, almost without bitterness. She did not resent the fact that millions of fools, thanks to their ill-gotten fortunes, could enjoy the art, the luxury, the things of the mind, which were denied to her. She had tried to 'write', but soon realized that she had no literary talent. Sometimes, at the end of her tether, she would go out and walk aimlessly in the countryside, although she had no feeling for nature, at least the nature round Saint- Léonard. She would only have liked it as a background for living people.

There were times when this life was bearable, when, if she did not feel happy, she was not exactly unhappy. Reading a good book, she would say to herself: 'To think that there are women who work seven hours a day in an office!' At other times she was bored to distraction - so much time on her hands that she did not know what to do with - but nonetheless she resisted manual work, from an acute sense of the value of time. While her mother was alive she had never wanted to help her with the housework, to darn, or sew her dresses. 'Imagine making jam when I could spend the time improving my mind, discovering a great writer I haven't read, learning something, no matter what, if only from reading Larousse!' Only an acute attack of misery would drive her to take up a manual chore. Thus, whenever she felt particularly distressed, she took to darning her stockings. It had become a formula: great unhappiness = darning of stockings - so much so that the crimson 'egg' she used for this purpose gave her a twinge when she came across it in her more serene moments. Since her mother's death, she had had to get down to minor household chores - but never without a feeling of vehement impatience. It was something she simply could not accept.

One day Costals had said to her: 'If I had had the misfortune to have a daughter, I should have been stiff with anxiety until she was married off, all the more so if she had no money. Parents are terribly proud of themselves when they produce a brat, and go round trumpeting it to the world, but when it comes to bringing it up with a little intelligence, nothing doing. Of course I realize how awful it must be for decent people to do what has to be done to get a daughter settled - intrigue, entertain, etc. - because everything connected with marriage is unquestionably the greatest nonsense that can happen in the life of a human being. But they shouldn't have got themselves into the mess in the first place! It's always the same - producing children, and then not knowing what to do with them. So much care and attention and conscientiousness about birth, and so much frivolity, blindness and stupidity about education. And then we come to the parents who haven't enough money to get their daughters married off, and go on waiting, waiting for God knows what, waiting until she becomes crabbed and can't afford to be so choosy. I know some really criminal parents, whose daughter was made for marriage, but who condemned her to celibacy in order to keep her with them. All this is simply to explain to you that there is only one thing for you to do - to take a job in Paris that is not too exacting and that provides you with your bread and butter, and to concentrate, to the exclusion of everything else, on meeting people, in other words looking for a husband. Your sole aim, for the time being, should be to make social contacts.'

Mademoiselle had taken offence at these words. She was like those bogus artists who rail against the bourgeoisie but who are more bourgeois than anyone. 'Make social contacts' - so that was the advice he gave to a superior girl like her!

'You who despise society, you who wallow in solitude, you tell me that!'

'I live in solitude because I've won and paid for the right to live in solitude. When I was twenty-five I "met people" too. It's because I did things that bored me then that I can now do what I like. It's not a question of whether "meeting people" is fun. It's a question of whether you want to remain a penniless spinster in Saint-Léonard (Loiret). If not, you must make a suitable marriage, and you will only make a suitable marriage if you have an inexhaustible supply of suitable gentlemen parading in front of you, like stallions parading round a paddock. Which you can only do in Paris. Find a job there. If you like, I can help you to find one.'

'I'll be saddled with her the whole time,' Costals had thought to himself. In spite of which, in this unfortunate fit of altruism he not only told her, 'I'll help you to find a job', but went further: 'I'll introduce you to people.' She agreed.

If she had not been in love with him, he might perhaps have taken her on as his secretary, his own having just left him. But imagine taking on as secretary a woman who is in love with you! ... Costals had a friend called M. Armand Pailhès, an excellent man, a splendid paterfamilias, who was secretary- general of a big firm of robbers (a company formed for the reconstruction of the war-devastated North). He offered a job as a typist, and so Andrée landed in Paris.

But when it came to doing a job that encroached on her inner life, Andrée bridled - she could not help it. She could not work for half an hour without heaving sighs which infuriated her boss. She would spend twenty minutes at a time in the lavatory reading Nietzsche. She arrived late and left early. After three or four days, with a volume of Valéry lying in her half-open drawer, she would bury herself in 'pure poetry' as soon as her boss's back was turned. Her habit of suddenly closing the drawer if he looked round gave her away. Apart from this, although she considered that her tact was nothing less than heroic, her notes to Costals, at the rate of one every three days ('Won't you come to the concert of Spanish music on Sunday? . . .' 'I'm going to the exhibition of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale on Saturday. If by any chance you were free. ...') exasperated him. He excused himself two or three times, did not reply to the next few letters, and finished by tearing them up without opening them. And it must be admitted that he did nothing about 'introducing her to people'. He too considered himself heroic, for having got her settled in Paris, and his heroism was strictly limited. Take Andrée to parties! He would rather die. In short, both regarded themselves as heroic, which is always a bad sign. When, at the end of the month, enlightened about the girl's behaviour, M. Pailhès found a pretext to give her back her cherished freedom, everyone was happy, Andrée included. To live in Paris but to be imprisoned in that stupid office, to have everything she loved within arm's reach but to be unable to enjoy it, was worse than the provinces, where at least, if she suffered, she suffered without irritation. It was almost with a sigh of relief that she took the train back to Saint-Léonard.

In the waiting-room of the War Pensioners' Review Board, awaiting examination, two hundred average Frenchmen, ex- service men, neither bourgeois nor plebeian, but of that intermediate class which is the backbone of France, with their characteristic French tendency to be buttoned up to the eyebrows, and their pallid and, my God, so unprepossessing Parisian faces.

A restless crowd, with men coming and going, edging in and out, like bulls in a herd when they sense a man approaching; the one-legged men in particular stubbornly refuse to sit down. One man jumps at every name that is called; another asks the way to the lavatory: the thought that his request for a renewal of his pension will be refused has upset his inside. But there are also some quiet little men, old lags, reading their newspapers. How wonderfully brave of that one over there to open the Action Française in the middle of the crowd! (If they don't reduce his disablement scale, there's no government left.) And the doleful faces of the seriously wounded, escorted by their 'good ladies'. And the bourgeois with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, sitting not with the common herd but a little apart, on the only chair in the room, in order to make it clear that his respectability has remained intact throughout this grim ordeal. (Costals, on entering, had put his gloves in his pocket so as not to be the only person there wearing them.)

Costals imagined all these men in uniform, and then he loved them, whereas in their civilian clothes he had a tendency, typically ruling class, to regard them as malingerers. 'That fat one, for instance. ... Is it possible,' our professional psychologist asks himself, 'to be ill and fat at the same time? And this one here with his shifty look, there's obviously nothing wrong with him, absolutely nothing.' Whereupon the man with the shifty look turns round and shows the professional psychologist an empty coat-sleeve.

A wave of respect, hope, fear, a sudden sharpening of attention, as a doctor passes through. Some of them salute him, to remind him who they are, although he has never seen them in his life. He passes by with his cigarette in the air - not that he is a smoker (he is nothing of the sort), but because smoking being forbidden here, it is a sign of his power. To two or three poor devils who are particularly keen saluters he offers, or rather tenders his hand, without stopping or turning his head. As he goes through, the man of power moves the men aside by taking them by the arm with an air of affable superiority, as one touches the backs of sheep when one is trying to make one's way through a flock. At first, when they do not know who is taking their arm from behind, they start indignantly; but as soon as they see who it is, their faces light up: the man of power has touched them, unworthy as they are! Ah yes, they are in good hands!

If the doctor stops to speak to one of them, he is suddenly surrounded by three or four, then six, then ten, who crowd around him shamelessly and listen, hoping to pick up a hint which will help them to obtain something, or simply hasten their turn. They are suddenly so humble, so insanely, incorrigibly respectful towards people in authority, so ready to accept anything, that it is painful to see.

A placard warns: 'Doctors are strictly forbidden to accept fees on the premises of the Review Board.' Why, O Administration, do you have to put the idea into our heads that there may be something shady about such fees? We know perfectly well that everything to do with pensions is as pure as the driven snow.

What a superb play of expressions on the face of one of the men when a doctor leaves the room by the outer door! He struggles against his natural shyness, finally overcomes it, and quickly makes for the exit behind the doctor, whom he will buttonhole outside; and he lowers his eyes, feigning indifference, so that the others will not spot his game and follow him in order to accost the doctor at the same time.

Some men leave, but more come in - so much so that (utterly convinced as one is that one will be the last to go in) one tells oneself that there will never be an end to it. Which is indeed a very 'wartime' sentiment.

From time to time an assistant appears at the door of one of the consulting rooms and calls out the names of the men whose turn it is. Those whose civilian lives are on a par with their military ones for wretchedness, the eternal second-raters, answer 'Present!' like keen young recruits. When one of the assistants shouts the names in a stentorian voice, some of the men laugh, and the others, realizing that it was funny, laugh too. A great wave of laughter. They are suddenly right back at the Front.

Some of the men hunch their backs on the way into the consulting-room to make themselves look iller. Others preen themselves and look ingratiating, thinking that this will make the best impression. The room concerned with the 'respiratory and circulatory systems' is much the most popular, because malingering is easiest there. Through the open door, the surgery appears bathed in a limpid, greenish glow, like an aquarium or an oriental night. One can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the consulting-room. One man tries to read what the doctor is writing about him, and goes on talking, lying into the void, while the doctor stands there casually turning his back on him. Another breathes heavily, oppressively. Another comes out pulling up his trousers, and the price-tag is still to be seen on his underpants, bought only yesterday because he was ashamed of his old ones. His furtive look betrays the fact that he has hoodwinked the doctor, or thinks he has hoodwinked him, and he walks with his eyes lowered, like a man going to the Communion rail, to hide the gleam of triumph in his eyes which might give him away. Others come out with collars and ties undone, which accentuates the guard-room aspect of the place (on his way here Costals had made the taxi-driver hurry, thinking that if he were five minutes late he would be court-martialled). Some of the men argue the toss as they come out, with their rapacious, tubercular Parisian faces. But they are peaceable rebels, very French. A swig of white wine and it will all be over - or another doctor has only to cross the room for that awful gleam of humility to appear in their eyes again. They hope to get something out of him, so they cease to be rebels. One only rebels when one has nothing to lose by it.

As the hours go by, exhaustion begins to set in. Even the cripples have given up standing. The herd has become stupefied. When one sees how they have acquiesced, how one has acquiesced oneself, in waiting from half-past eight until ten minutes to twelve, one understands how it lasted four and a half years…

A blind man came out of one of the rooms, led by a girl - and for Costals the war atmosphere collapsed there and then like a burst balloon. She had slender, slanting eyes - bluish below her black hair, as in Andalusia, and as disturbing as dark eyes in a real blonde; a tiny forehead (ah, nice and stupid!); curls down her neck - and although he had always proclaimed that he only liked clean-shaven necks, the pleasure of contradicting himself (his privilege, like God's) now made him adore these curls. Her skin was stretched so tight that it might have been marble, and it was matt, though her nose shone a little, as marble statues are polished in places where they have been kissed a great deal. She held her head a little to one side, as though to indicate the point on her neck where she should be kissed. He loved the way she patted and rearranged her hair: the gesture of the midinette. He liked this community of gestures among women. Her body was well-rounded and yet slender: what is known as morbidezza, is it not?

As she passed by, Costals sniffed the odour she left in her wake, his nose quivering like a dog's. The couple went out. Without a moment's hesitation, Costals followed them. He would concoct a pretty lie for the head of the Review Board.

He was about to offer to find them a taxi. But they were hardly in the street before an empty taxi drew up. They hailed it, and it was the distinguished novelist who was left standing on the pavement.

He was delighted. 'Now I shall be able to work in peace,' he said to himself.

On the very day she arrived in Paris Andrée went to a concert. In the past these hours of music had meant so much to her in her loveless life. They were a substitute for all the other ecstasies. It was as though thousands of lovers clasped her in their arms. What a let-down it was, afterwards, from this seventh heaven to the Parisian street! At such moments she felt strongly that she could never marry an ordinary person. This time she was bored at the concert - a mixture of dejection and indifference. This music, which she had once loved so desperately, for want of anything else to love, now seemed to her so insipid by comparison with the proximity of Costals.

Costals spoiled her taste for everything else, demolished everything around her, everything she relied on, created a vacuum as though he wanted her to love nothing but himself. It was no longer Beethoven, it was he, his 'music of perdition'. Listening to the Pastoral Symphony, with its imitations of bird calls, she found it puerile. The sounds reached her across a layer of distraction and boredom. Actually, she was not listening, she could not listen. The most trashy music would have accompanied her daydreams quite as well.

Costals had invited her to dinner the following night. The restaurant was a little twenty-franc bistro. They talked of nothing but literature. Flanked on either side by other diners a few feet away, she did not dare speak of what lay nearest her heart. But in fact she scarcely felt the need to. She was in Paris for a month: there was no hurry. And moreover, now that she was with him she felt a profound sense of unison, as though they were brother and sister. (She kept coming back to the phrase 'brother and sister' - although now she was thinking 'Byron and Augusta', which was to give it an extra twist.) Such peace, such well-being, such security, such abandon! An impression of the futility of words, and a feeling of being marvellously alone, almost more alone than when she was by herself...

She was astonished to find herself unperturbed. It must, she thought, be due to their profound intellectual understanding, stronger than love and superior to it. And also because, ever since Costals' harsh letter, she was trying hard to keep to the plane of virile friendship on which he wanted her to remain, and to hold romance at bay. She had no desire, even, when she was with him, to indulge in those chaste caresses which girls love, except for an occasional longing to kiss his hand. And even this did not seem to her to be an amorous gesture, but rather an overflowing of gratitude, as though she could not find words to express her feelings, or dared not, or could not say them.

As for him, at the other side of the table, his eyes never rested on her, but looked over her head; but she did not notice it. Besides, he never looked at anyone he did not desire; always beyond them.

At one point, however, his eyes fell on the girl's bare forearms - and he could not take them away. Her arms were dirty. He tried in vain to persuade himself that their greyish tinge was the natural colour of the skin: the illusion was impossible. For a long while he kept his eyes glued to her arms, unable to utter another word. Perhaps, if he had desired her at all, he might have found her even more desirable (a big 'if'). Since he did not desire her, the sight froze him.

The atmosphere of cheerful banter created by Costals (and quickly recaptured) became even more animated towards the end of the meal. Andrée thought it must be the effect of the wine, or even of her presence. In fact this gaiety had sprung up suddenly in Costals the moment he had decided he was going to cut the evening short and pretend he had to get away early: it was the gaiety of the horse that sniffs the stable.

She accepted her dismissal with good grace, and went home on foot. This calm and serenity sustained her at each of their meetings. After the agonies induced by Costals' long silences, during which she longed for something shattering to happen to cure her of her love - silences which might have driven her to all kinds of folly - when she saw him again everything became simple and peaceful, everything happened in the same natural, easy rhythm - so much so that she found herself being almost cold with him.

On leaving her, Costals had said: 'I'll get in touch with you in two or three days.' A week having elapsed, she wrote to him. Costals groaned, but decided that it would be cruel to go on depriving her of another meeting during this paltry month in Paris by which she had set so much store. He had two appointments in the same district, the avenue Marceau, two days later, one at four o'clock, the other at eight. Between them he would be free. He arranged to meet her at half past five in the rue Quentin-Bauchart, on the pavement in front of number 5. He would be leaving this house at that time, after visiting some friends.

On the pavement in the rue Quentin-Bauchart at twenty-five past five, Andrée was already accusing Costals of being late. Obviously he had forgotten their appointment; he had come out early and gone away. She was a little surprised at this rendezvous in the street after dark, on a bitterly cold day in early February. 'Would he make such a rendezvous with a woman he really loved, or who meant anything at all to him?' But he emerged, her heart leapt, and off they went side by side down the dark street with its red and white lights.

'I'm not in very good form,' Costals said straight off. 'The other day I saw in a shop a piece of jade which I coveted. A thousand francs. I decided to go back to the shop that evening and buy it. And then I ran into an old lady who used to keep a flower stall where I bought violets for my girl-friends a few years ago. She's a widow; she told me her two children were both ill, her brother treated her badly, and she was destitute. Crash! There I was, utterly disarmed. I was ashamed to buy my piece of jade, and pressed the thousand-franc note into her hand. I haven't got over it yet.'

'What do you mean?'

'I haven't yet got over the irritation I felt at giving her the thousand francs instead of buying the piece of jade.'

'What was to stop you buying the jade as well?'

'Oh! I bought it all right, but it wasn't the same thing. What annoys me is to have given away a thousand francs out of pure charity. It's ruined my week.'

'Nonsense, the satisfaction of ... no, I won't say "of duty done" - that would be too pompous. But after all, don't you feel a certain satisfaction at having given pleasure to an old woman you were sorry for?'

'No. I feel.

'Go on, say it: you feel regret.'

'Yes, regret. I'm ashamed. And at the same time there's something else that worries me. I feel that a thousand francs.... What's a thousand francs? I'm tormented by the desire to give her more.'

'How complicated you are!'

'But you don't know what pity is. It's a feeling that can ruin your life. Luckily I know how to protect myself. I have a very strict egotist's discipline. If I hadn't I wouldn't have written my books. I had to choose. You'll be able to test this egotism one day, God willing ... '

'Did he do what he has done for me out of pity?' she wondered. She believed that he was fond of her, but could not make out in what way. Perhaps he would have been just as kind, just as devoted, to a male friend. Yet there were times when she thought to herself that one isn't as helpful and sensitive as that simply out of kindness. Had she not been afraid of annoying him, she would have asked him whether he treated her as he did out of pure comradeship - an exquisite sense of comradeship - or whether there was an element of love in it. In other words - how could she put it? - whether he was attracted to her.

But Costals, having caught sight of a notice-board advertising a flat to let, glanced up at the building and said:

'I've been haunted by the idea of moving ever since I can remember. Would you mind coming with me while I have a look at this place? I've rather fallen for the house.'

A few minutes later the concierge was showing them round the flat. What a strange sensation for Andrée! Almost as though they were a young married couple, or engaged. It made her feel dizzy ... and it was even more extraordinary when the concierge said to her:

'Everything works very well. Perhaps Madame would care to see ... the hot water ... '

'Madame'. . . . And in the bathroom! Was it really possible that Costals did not realize how provocative it was for a girl - and a girl of whose love for him he was well aware - to be shown round a flat which he thought of making his home? Was it possible that he had no ulterior motive? And she was not too badly dressed to be taken for his wife! Meanwhile he was asking her advice: should that window be walled up, this wall knocked through? She answered mechanically, like a good housewife, but her soul was elsewhere, borne away as though on a gust of wind to a realm so unexpected and improbable that it frightened her.

'Six rooms . . .' she said for the sake of saying something. 'Isn't it rather on the large side?'

'Not at all. Drawing-room, dining-room, my study, my bedroom, a junk-room, and then the other bedroom, the "tomb of the unknown woman"...

'Tomb? Are you a Bluebeard?'

'No, "tomb" in another sense - a double sense. [Untranslatable pun on the words tomber, to fall, and tombeau, tomb (Translator's note).] The room in which women fall. And the room in which their illusions tumble down.'

Was it really possible that he could be so lacking in tact if. . . . She felt as though in a dream, in an abyss. On the way downstairs, she was afraid she might lose her balance.

Outside, the cold gripped her. She shivered. Now he was walking beside her, and his long overcoat, tight at the waist, flapped against his legs like a skirt (like a German officer's great-coat, she thought) to the rhythm of his footsteps which rang out with a power and majesty which startled her. His gloved hands were clasped together over his stomach in an attitude which he maintained almost throughout their entire meeting - an attitude Andrée found somehow hieratic. It seemed to her that she was walking beside a Homeric hero.

'What torture all these domestic problems are,' he was saying. 'My family are always on at me: "You must get married, you need a woman to look after you." That's a moral way of looking at marriage, don't you think? Marry for social or family reasons, or to make a girl happy - not at all. It's simply a question of having someone there to see that you're not swindled when you buy the upholstery. Fancy getting married on those terms! One might just as well engage a housekeeper, whom one can always get rid of if she won't do. Whereas a wife....'

Costals was obsessed with the idea of the wrongness of marriage for a writer - a real writer, who takes his art seriously. He was inexhaustible on the subject. For five minutes, without drawing breath, he railed against marriage, extravagantly and, it must be said, tastelessly. Truths, half-truths and sophistries welled from his lips, accompanied by bitter jibes. A great burst of eloquence. He was like a cup full to the brim and continually overflowing, like the basins of Moroccan fountains.

'You see how I trust you,' he said at the end. 'I talk to you as I would to a man.' Regardless of the fact that almost everything he had said had wounded the woman who walked at his side, numb with cold, hurrying to keep up with him along the dark avenues. Had he not raised her to the seventh heaven, only to plunge her back into the abyss? At first she had ventured a few remarks in favour of writers marrying. She was sure these remarks were sound, but she felt so self-conscious that now she did not know what to say, the words refused to 'come out'; she was like a schoolboy being tortured by a sadistic examiner, knowing the answers perfectly well but standing there like an idiot, overcome with nerves, his mind a blank. Nevertheless, incapable of rejecting the idea that the visit to the flat was not unintentional, she began to think that he was only saying all this to provoke her into taking the opposite view, and to hear it from her lips. She allowed herself to indulge in this fantasy, this madness, this senseless daydream. ... Then she thought it would be cunning to switch from wives to children.

'Yes, but what about children! How can a man like you, Costals, who are a sort of fertility god, have no children? I must confess that it's always surprised me. Your personality is incomplete without them. Even if only from the point of view of your work, think what riches you're depriving yourself of!'

To every word she had said before, the fertility god had been ready with a lightning retort: a vicious thrust of the foil, and each time a hit. Now, for the first time, he did not answer. She thought she had found his Achilles heel. She turned towards him, saw his upturned face and his limpid eyes, in which she seemed to see an expression of sadness, intensely moving in a man as overconfident as he. Ah! how she adored him when she saw him weakened!

'Your son, Costals! His little arms around your neck.... Think how he would need you.... All the messages you send out into the void, for a crowd of indifferent people, concentrated on a person who was flesh of your flesh, a person you loved.... No, you're not a complete man if you haven't experienced that. But I can tell that you regret it. No, don't deny it! You can't hide it from me any more. Women have these intuitions, you know....'

He was like a punch-drunk boxer, who can no longer defend himself, his eyes staring into space, those eyes in which Andrée seemed to read a message of defeat. Sensing her opportunity, she brought the conversation round from children to herself. The darkness gave her courage, and the fact of not looking at him. She looked only at their two shadows, side by side, which loomed up, turned, vanished, reappeared, according to the play of the street lamps. And she thrilled at the thought of all the passers-by who knew nothing about them, suspected nothing. For she still imagined that there was something to 'know'.

'Sometimes I think that, whatever you may say, you need to be loved, you don't dislike being loved, in spite of all your blasphemies against love. But something tells me that you may perhaps relent a little. You gave yourself away, Costals, unwittingly: I saw your look of sadness and longing when I spoke to you about that non-existent son and about the element of sterility in your love life. Something tells me that you hanker after another form of tenderness. I can understand how one might feel ill at ease if one were loved the wrong way. But I, for instance, do I love you the wrong way? Isn't my affection for you a source of sweetness and not an infliction? Don't you understand that it's the most ardent and passionate love that is most capable of renunciation and self-sacrifice? Let me love you, so that I can stop having to hold back for fear of displeasing you, saying "affection" when I mean "love". What do I want? More warmth, more life, more activity. Oh, to be able to do things for you - anything! Not to have to go away again in three weeks' time with so cruelly little to treasure.... Because what suffices me here, once I'm far away … I should like, for instance - how shall I put it - should like you to call me by my Christian name, or even "my dear". It's been "dear Mademoiselle" for four years! You might be talking to your piano teacher. I should like you to write to me more often - a few lines every fortnight (it isn't much to ask). I should like you to treat me as a little girl, if only a stupid and sulky little girl. I should like to see you in places that are more appropriate, more suited to you - gardens, the country, art galleries. ... I don't know what I want exactly.

But I don't want things as they were, as they are, as you've wished them to be. I don't demand that it should last forever, only that I should enjoy you more, be closer to you, as long as it does last. And I should still like an answer to the question: has my affection given you some happiness? Have I the right to think that I'm to some extent necessary to you? Have you felt less alone for the assurance I've brought you of being passionately understood and loved, loved in everything that makes you what you are, in the quintessence of your being as in your smallest idiosyncrasies, your irony, your fooling, your unkindnesses even, God forgive me? If you don't give me the terrible answer Satan gave to Eloa, it will be happiness enough for me.'

'What a fantasy world she lives in!' thought Costals. 'Andrée Hacquebaut's affection giving me happiness! She has a mania for denying the obvious, and another typically feminine mania - wanting me to be unhappy so as to be able to console me. The idea of her consoling me for my alleged unhappiness, when it's she and her kind, meaning all those women who give you a love you haven't asked for, who are responsible for spoiling my happiness! No, the whole thing is too farcical. And yet at the same time one can respect and pity it. How can I get out of it without hurting her?' The thought of the harm he could do her by simply telling her, in one short sentence, how things stood, paralysed him - like a man playing at boxing with a child and hardly daring to move for fear of hurting it. 'God, how maddening the girl is! What a mess I've got myself into!'

He was still dragging her along with his long strides. In the past twenty minutes they had passed through one gloomy and almost deserted street after another (rue Christophe Colomb, rue Georges-Bizet, rue Magellan, etc.). These streets, with their blocks of expensive flats and private houses, and very few shops, were almost entirely plunged in darkness. The rare passers-by were hunched up against the cold. Cars were parked along the edge of the pavement. Andrée wondered why Costals did not take her into a tea-shop or a café, as any other man would have done. But no - walk! walk! (Costals had in fact thought of going into a café, but in the restaurant the other day Andrée had got stuck in the revolving doors so that she could neither get in nor out, and the waiters had laughed. And she was so dowdy and frumpish - let's face it, he was a little ashamed of her. So he preferred to let her catch pneumonia rather than suffer an affront to his vanity on her account.) Each new street they took seemed to Andrée even darker than the one before, and, although at first she braced herself against this glimpse of sky amidst her inner clouds, she ended up by thinking that the object of this Wandering Jew act of Costals' was simply to find a suitable place to kiss her; and if the expedition was becoming rather prolonged, it was because he could not make up his mind - a proof that he really loved her. As they turned into the rue Keppler, a particularly dark and deserted street, she was certain that it was there that her destiny would be fulfilled. Never would she forget those details: the terrier seated beside a chauffeur in a parked limousine, staring at her with an almost human intensity; the lantern on a heap of paving- stones, as moving as a sanctuary lamp. But they came out of that insidious street without anything having happened. Then Costals said:

'I've listened to you with great interest, and I'm extremely touched by what you say. But I've already given you my answer. Our friendship was a very excellent thing. But the heart infects everything. On the plane of friendship, or on the plane of sensuality, things are healthy, and wounds, if they develop, are clean-cut. When the heart intervenes, the wound spreads, everything goes wrong. I've seen it happen so often.'

'What you say is absurd. The heart infects nothing; on the contrary, it purifies everything. It's really too idiotic! So it's "the plane of sensuality" that is pure? If I had a great physical passion for you, you'd forgive me for it. If I were provocative, if I gave you to understand that it was only pleasure I was after, you might despise me perhaps, but you'd accept it. But when I offer you love, how embarrassing, how boring! If only people would leave one in peace with their love! When I offer you my love as the very basis of my life, the life of a girl still intact and (though I say it who shouldn't) fairly superior, how dull and ridiculous! You don't care for my love. You don't want everything from me, you only want a little. And I can't give you only a little. You have treated me as a sister. You have given me a privileged position at your side, as a sultan chooses his favourite concubine or his vizier from the crowd, and now you want me to stay there like a good girl without raising my voice, and content myself with what you give me - with delightful generosity, true, but that isn't enough for me anymore. Imagine having the right to nothing more than friendship! Friendships can be beautiful, marvellous even - like yours - sweet, consoling, touching, fraternal, but they are inadequate nonetheless, terribly inadequate. I cannot survive with you through friendship alone, nor indeed will I. There is something buoyant in me that transcends all that - transcends it utterly. So much inner strength that remains untapped. . . . I'm brimming over with the desire to give. I demand everything, and by "everything" I don't mean necessarily that you should abandon the disinterestedness you exploit so cleverly. ..('Ah!' he thought to himself, 'a touch of asperity! Here's a little mouse who's asking to be eaten up. That, too, might have been expected.') 'No. I'm quite sincere when I tell you, as I've told you many times, that you have never penetrated to the source of my inmost feelings, or you've touched it only fleetingly, when you were feeling particularly kind and sweet. What I ask is the right to love you, to cherish you with all my strength and all my heart. Your coldness has always restrained me. I cannot love you if you do not want me to.'

'How can I be so frivolous as to allow you to give me a love I can't respond to? You see, I've used up all my feelings. I gave everything in a first love affair, at sixteen. From seventeen onwards I would have answered you as I do today: "Friendship, yes. Love, ecstasy, the whole shooting match: too late"'

'Too late! Always the same devastating words: too late! Ah! well, my life is finished.'

He felt sorry for her. 'When I was seventeen,' he said gravely, 'and was beginning to move in society, I immediately began flirting a great deal, and I remember my mother saying to me then: "You mustn't excite young girls when your intentions aren't serious. It isn't fair." I'm beginning to wonder whether I haven't behaved badly towards you.'

'Good heavens, you haven't behaved badly towards me at all, not voluntarily. You're the most upright of men....'

'Me, upright! I lie the whole time.'

He blinked his eyelids. Why had this cry escaped his lips? He felt a violent flush rise to his cheeks, and bowed his head.

'Of course you sometimes lie, like everyone else. All the same you're the most upright, the most noble of men.'

'Nobility again! You're going to make me take a violent dislike to myself one of these days with all this talk of nobility, and it would be a bore for me to dislike myself. I shall have to say to you what I said to an Italian servant who had worked for some prince or other and who, when he came to work for me, used to call me "Your Honour" at every turn. "If Your Honour would care...." "I think Your Honour had better. . . ." Finally I got so irritated that I said to him: "Don't keep talking about my honour. You'll end up by making it real".'

'How impossible you are! Always joking at the most solemn moments ... Anyway, whether you like it or not, I repeat: you're an absolutely upright man. But you've been guilty of a certain rashness as far as I'm concerned. You shouldn't have let me get to this point.'

It was on the tip of his tongue to answer: 'Haven't I given you enough proofs of my indifference?' but he could not bring himself to do so. What he said was:

'So friendship isn't possible between a young man and a young woman?'

'Oh yes, the sort of impotence such a friendship represents must be possible in certain cases. With a very young girl for instance. When I was eighteen, I should have asked for nothing better than what I have now: a masculine friendship, especially with you, would have been everything I desired. But being the woman I am, a woman of whose age, loneliness, anguish, desperation and need for love you are not unaware, how could I help falling in love with such a magnificent friend as you? I offered you my love; you rejected it. But when I told you I was coming to Paris, far from making it clear to me that you did not want to see me again, as you ought to have done . . .' ('There's my reward!' thought Costals), 'you invited me to dinner. You encouraged me to think about you, you showed me that I wasn't unattractive to you. . . ('That's a good one!') 'You've done everything you possibly could to make me lose my heart to you. Because in refusing yourself, dear sir, you offer yourself. And that is what you will not see. To allow oneself to be loved is tantamount to loving. You are wrong in thinking that one can only offer oneself by promises or caresses. You have offered yourself without either promises or caresses, but just as surely, in your good-natured frivolity. ... Do you know what your trouble is, Costals? Not being able to be nasty to me.'

'Well, well, how profound we are! So that's it, I'm "too nice"?'

'Yes, you are "too nice". In future, Costals, in your relations with women, don't be "too nice". Out of pity for them. And then you should drum this axiom into your head: "No friendships with unmarried girls." Because each one of them will believe you like her best. And because, unconsciously, you will give each of them the impression that you like her best. Even when you aren't trying to seduce, you behave like a seducer - and then you're genuinely astonished and furious afterwards, when the harm is done. You're so extraordinarily lacking in conceit! Perhaps that's what causes the trouble.'

'But after all, I can't pretend there aren't thousands of men as intelligent as I am, and much better looking. Just look around, and you will surely find one who will give you back as much as you give and more.'

'How exasperating you are! I'd like to give you a good shaking. I'm sick and tired of telling you that a woman only loves once, and that for me you are that once, you are irreplaceable as far as I'm concerned. You refuse to face the reality, which is that my true life is my love for you.'

'I don't know which of the two of us won't face up to reality,' he said gently.

'And besides, what a charming answer: "Why don't you look elsewhere?" to a woman who tells you: "I love you more than my life. Or rather, quite simply, you are my life".'

'How lucky you are to find that simple. As far as I'm concerned we're in a stew, a real sentimental stew.'

'You talk about love like a schoolboy. You ought to be ashamed of your childishness about such a subject.'

'A man without childishness is a monster.'

'You're a monster because you're too childish.'

Her voice was full of tears. Costals went on in a more affable tone:

'You're the one who's absurd, my poor girl, for giving me the power to make you unhappy. Do you know how I'd like you to be? I'd like to be able to say the most cruel and wounding things to you without your minding in the least.'

Her only reply was a shrug of the shoulders. Then she added:

'"My poor girl." Careful, don't start being "too nice" again.'

'Well, I must say you really are maddening! If I'm brusque with you it won't do. If I'm nice to you it won't do. I'm getting fed up with all this slop. After all, what am I doing here?'

Costals had never taken much part in the emotional brawling which women try to impose on any man who comes near them, not even with the ones he liked. And to have to indulge in it with a woman he was indifferent to....

But it was too much for Andrée. The tears gushed from her eyes.

'There, there, my dear girl! Stop crying. If women only knew how much they lose by their whimperings. A man has to be a saint, when he sees they're hurt, not to want to hurt them more. But I am such a saint. Although ... women have to be continually enlightened (I mean one always has to be explaining to them), enlightened, pampered, consoled, petted, appeased. I must admit I've no vocation for wet-nursing or for handling cases of porcelain. I like the things of the heart to be treated fairly briskly, without too much fuss, without going on about it as if there weren't other things in life. I believe that the more one really loves, the less one talks about it. … You silly girl, do you want to kill yourself!' (He had grasped her by the arm. She was so distraught that in crossing the street she had allowed a car to brush past her in a quite terrifying way.) 'Well, you're lucky I didn't push you under it! It's a sort of reflex I have with women when a car goes by. Especially with those I like best. However, up to now I've always resisted the impulse. And in your case, as you see, I had the reflex to protect you. And yet you complain!'

'No, Costals, I don't complain. I know you're fond of me. There are moments when I think of you as a kindly father figure, and of how nice it would have been to be created, re-created by you from scratch. Have I reproached you? If so, forget it. I can't imagine what nonsense I must have talked … I'm not myself today … I don't want you to feel under any obligation towards me. Even if, one day, by some miracle of fate, I were to acquire a privileged position with you, I wouldn't wish for any other bond between us but your tenderness, never your pity or your charity, as with the flower-seller . ..'

'What she doesn't want is the one thing I can give her,' Costals thought to himself. 'And what's this "miracle of fate" that might give her a privileged position with me? What new chimera is she riding off on now?'

It was perhaps the third or fourth time they had walked round the square des Etats-Unis, marked by the dainty feet of countesses and dotted with statues of Liberators and Benefactors and Enthusiasts. The leaves of the spindle-trees glowed in the nocturnal gloom, as though each manservant daily polished the foliage opposite the house of his noble master. The windows with their closed shutters called to mind a row of strong-boxes in the vaults of a bank. There were a few humble people about who, in this opulent setting, looked like prisoners-of-war working for the enemy: black-faced coal-men, paid to be disfigured; a little butcher's boy bringing the countesses' meat, slipping down through a tiny tradesmen's entrance, like a cat through a hole in a door. It was Costals who noticed these things, because his mind was free. Andrée noticed nothing. Novelists have always gone into elaborate detail about the settings in which their lovers meet; but only the novelists notice these details; the lovers see nothing, immersed as they are in their slop.

As they circled the square des Etats-Unis, Andrée noticed only the darkness of its green arbours, its lonely paths, and that almost suspect nook with its benches (just behind the statue of the Enthusiast), and her crazy hopes revived: here she was among these groves at night with this man, and - whether he kissed her or not - he could not have brought her there by chance. And he had called her 'my dear'. Would a man say 'my dear' to a woman he was indifferent to, to a woman with whom he did not feel to some extent intimate? Perhaps he would, after all (when one lives at Saint-Léonard one ends up by not knowing what's done and what isn't). And he had taken her by the arm and said 'Silly girl!' For the first time, he had touched her. (At that moment she had raised her eyes to see if she could read the plaque bearing the name of the street, so that for the rest of her life this memory should be linked to a precise spot.) She began to believe that he had held her arm for a long time, squeezing it in a meaningful way, and that a man did not say 'Silly girl!' unless he felt a certain tenderness. All her earlier clear-sightedness - 'You give each one the impression that you like her best' - had dimmed, like a sky clouding over. Passionately she wished that he would take her arm, or that she could dare to take his. But they left the square with its dark thickets, and her hopes subsided. Where was he leading her now? Were they going to resume their fearful chase through those streets in which there was nothing but chemists and flower-shops? [A symbol, perhaps, of the ruling class (Author's note).] Once, indeed, she had complained of the cold, but he had replied with a winning air: 'A nice dry cold … Very healthy!'

'Anyhow,' he said, 'we must clear up this question of friendship between men and women.'

'No, no, let's forget it, there's no point … '

'Well then, here we have an intelligent, shrewd (when she chooses to be), cultivated, self-made girl, a girl who knows my work better than I do myself, and knows it intelligently – in short, a girl worthy of the highest praise. She vegetates in Saint-Léonard (Loiret), that is to say in an indescribable backwater … '

'I beg your pardon,' she said with a smile, 'Saint-Léonard (Loiret) has three thousand one hundred and eighty inhabitants. Important textile mills. Birthplace of the great agronomist Leveilley …'

Now she was trying to adopt his tone. She felt rather ridiculous being a woman, and thought he was quite right to be a healthy, cheerful overgrown schoolboy made for bachelor friendships and easy-going love affairs, whose only fault was to be too down-to-earth and not to take himself seriously enough.

'I offer this interesting young woman the sympathy which is her due. She seems very pleased. For years she goes on telling me in a thousand different ways that I have saved her,

that I "have given her nothing but joy" … You see, I know your letters by heart too,' he interjected, succumbing once more to his natural imprudence.... 'One fine day, I realize she's going to fall in love with me, and that I shall be unable to respond adequately to her love, because I'm not a man of love but a man of pleasure. (Yes, there it is, I like pleasure. And pleasure likes me too.) So I take up my finest pen and I write to her and say: "Dear Mademoiselle, I have regretfully perceived that you were about to fall in love with me. Don't deny it: I saw it with my lynx-like eye (am I, or am I not, our 'eminent psychologist'?) And so, from today onwards, nothing doing. I shall write to you no more. I shall return your letters unopened. When you come to Paris, 'Monsieur is away'. I opened the door of enlightenment to you; now I am closing it again. I dragged you away from the birthplace of the great agronomist Leveilley; now I am sending you back there. Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. The best of luck to you." I ask you to consider a moment, quite calmly, what you would have thought of such a letter. You don't answer? Well, you would have thought this: "He's a swine. What a fine friendship he must have had for me, when it can be destroyed at one blow! And what conceit! He thinks every woman wants to fling herself at him. Just like men. You talk to them of friendship: they assume you mean sex. Afterwards they accuse you of thinking of nothing else." You would have suffered then what you are suffering now, and with good reason. Why didn't I write you that letter? Because I didn't want to lose your friendship, because I knew that my friendship was a help to you, and because I should have loathed

myself for plunging a dagger into your heart ... Well, then, did I behave badly in not breaking with you?'

'Of course not, I know very well how kind you are.'

'You'll have to pay a forfeit every time you mention my kindness.'

'Oh, you're really too mischievous,' she said, half laughing.

It was true, she no longer knew whether he was kind or cruel. Now she was rather inclined to think that it was she who was in the wrong. But she no longer really knew; everything was getting mixed up in her mind. What she would have liked would have been to be back at her hotel; alone with herself, decanting all the happiness and all the pain he had poured into her, to see which, the happiness or the pain, would float above the other. What she would have liked most of all was not to feel cold any more. But at the hotel she would still be cold. She repeated to herself a saying of Costals': 'Cold is a disease of the planet', and more especially a remark of St Thérèse of Lisieux, a remark so ordinary on the surface, but in reality most moving: 'You don't know what it's like to have been cold for seven years.' She was worn out (they had been walking for two hours) and her fatigue was befuddling her brain; her eyelids were aching, and she could feel a headache coming on. She said to herself: 'What a night it's going to be!' But having invoked his presence month after month at Saint-Léonard, she could never be the first to put an end to it. She would collapse, exhausted, on to the pavement rather than give the signal for his 'Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. I'll get in touch with you one of these days.'

In the avenue Marceau the north wind swept out from each side-street with a bombastic flourish. From the top of the avenue Pierre-Ier the Champs-Elysées could be seen below, a valley of light. She longed for him to decide to go down there. She would be warmed by those lights, those human beings.

the noise, the movement, the luxury. They would go into a café and listen to some music: she would show him a shop where there were 'ensembles' for 390 francs - incredible, they might have come from one of the big fashion houses ... but no, that would be impossible, it might look like cadging.... Suddenly, for the first time, it struck her that he had not thought of buying her a few francs' worth of flowers at any of the florists they had passed, even though they had stopped in front of one of them. No, not even One of those bunches of violets which, he had so tactfully informed her, he used to buy 'for his girl-friends'. In fact he had never given her anything at all except books - oh yes, he was generous enough with books ('You see, I'm an intellectual girl ... so naturally!...'). She fought against the unexpected bitterness it caused her, considering it naïve and vulgar. But Costals turned his back on the Champs-Elysées, the Promised Land, and plunged once more down one of the drearier streets, as though he took pleasure in pacing up and down like a caged beast, as though he enjoyed this spasmodic, nightmarish flight, like some legendary descent into hell. Almost fainting, her thighs aching with fatigue, dabbing at a drip on the end of her nose ('I'm sure my nose is red'), biting her lips from which she thought the cold and the pain must have drained all colour, and, with all this, a pressing need to obey a little call of nature, she heard him hold forth ('hold forth' was the word that came to her mind, she was so weary of him):

'According to your theory, then, the magnificent realm of friendship between man and woman would become forbidden territory. Women would be penned in the "heart and senses" domain, incapable of being raised to a nobler, more rarefied world. And, for fear of disappointing them, a man would have to avoid social contact with any young women not destined for his bed, licit or illicit - in other words, when all is said and done, the vast majority of women. He would have to rush past them with lowered eyes like a seminarist: "Noli me tangere, ladies! Because you might think I was in love with you, which I'm very far from being - no offence meant." Or like the young Kabyles. A Kabyle once told me that, in his village, boys who had reached the age of fifteen and were not yet married were packed off by their parents to Algiers, so as not to be an object of temptation to the girls of the village. And whenever they returned to the village for a few days (on the occasion of a funeral, a wedding, or for the feast of A'id) they had to give warning of their comings and goings by shouting "tree, tree, tree", so that the girls could go and hide, such a temptation were boys to them. In future I too shall say "tree, tree, tree", so that the girls can take cover. Or rather I shall have a rattle, like a leper.... '

He went on to say something rather cruel: 'Girls are like those stray dogs you can't throw a friendly glance at without their assuming that you're calling them and will welcome them with open arms, and without their wagging their tails and scrabbling at your trouser-legs.'

He embroidered on this. As always when he was talking or writing to someone he was indifferent to, he said more or less anything that came into his head (Andrée had never been aware of this in their relations with each other). Just as matadors regard anything that happens to them in bull-rings outside Spain, successes as well as failures, as non-existent, so Costals, a born writer, really only took trouble with one of his modes of expression - books. Conversation and correspondence belonged to the sphere of relaxation and spare time; in those spheres he did not mind what he said; it did not count.

Suddenly he stopped dead.

'Do you understand what I'm saying?'

'Of course.'

'Well, I don't. For some time now it's ceased to have any meaning - pure word-spinning. If you can't see that, what's the use of talking to you? In short,' he concluded, 'since, according to you, it was my duty to break with you, and I've delayed all too long, it's quite simple.... I cannot give you what you want from me. Let us, therefore, cease to know one another.'

'No! No!' cried Andrée, springing up from the depths of her torpor, 'you have no right to desert me now. But you're not serious, are you?'

' "Have no right",' Costals thought. 'Ah, well, as I've always said, the trouble with charity is that you have to go on with it.'

As though she had read his thoughts, she went on:

'Loving commits one, doing good commits one. One hasn't the right to love people in the same way as one dispenses charity, anonymously, without entering their lives.

'Let's stay as we are, then. Only, from now on, don't complain of the situation. You're the one who wants it.'

'I shall never complain of anything again, I give you my solemn word. There's only one thing I want: not to lose you.

You know what the key to it all is,' she said point-blank. 'The fact that you're a man who has always jilted and never been jilted. One can sense it.'

'It's not true. I've been jilted twice, and in the most cruel way.'

'And ... you were hurt?'

'No, I found it quite natural. What could be more legitimate than to have had enough of someone? I've felt it too often myself not to understand it in others. When I see a woman with whom I've had months of intimacy drop me from her life overnight, no longer want to have anything to do with me, I recognize myself.'

She was silent, as though stunned. But then he said:

'Goodness! I must leave you. I'm dining with some people at eight, and it's now ten to.'

'Shall we see each other again?' she asked, feeling at the end of her tether, incapable of further speech, of uttering anything more than a few banal remarks.

'Of course. I'll get in touch with you.'

'Don't leave it too long.... If I write to you, you probably won't answer. To think that you've never given me your telephone number!'

'I thought you were supposed not to complain anymore.'

'Sorry.'

'Even if I did give you my telephone number it wouldn't make any difference, because it's permanently switched off: "the silence of those infinite spaces" reassures me. And do you know who drove me to take this step, which is irritating for friends or business people who want to talk to me, and inconvenient for me since I'm liable to miss things that might be important? Women, and women only. Women in general, with their daily or twice-daily calls, each one lasting a quarter of an hour, and always about nothing. And a particular category of women, who are the most dangerous of all: the women who love me and whom I do not love. Result: I get three express letters from women per day, always about nothing, of course. And there's nothing more exasperating than to be pestered with letters from people one doesn't love when one expects every post to bring a letter from somebody one does. Well, good-bye, dear Mademoiselle, and don't catch cold.'

He had spoken to her in a tone that froze her to such an extent that she wondered whether she might not faint. She gave him her hand mechanically. She had no feeling left.

She walked away. He called after her: 'Hey!'

She stopped. He came up to her. Alternating waves of sincerity and trickery, of gravity and mockery, flashed across his features. And it was true that he felt more lively and restless than she, like a mischievous dog jumping round a sheep and having the greatest fun teasing it.

'Am I a swine?'

'I don't know. Leave me alone.... Leave me alone...."

'Good-bye.'

He went off, and after a few steps lit a cigarette. He felt ten years younger now that she was no longer there. A woman going away and leaving him alone meant ten years' reprieve if he did not love her. One or two years if he did.

Andrée did not sleep a wink. Lying in bed, she turned over on her right side, and her anguish fell to the right, then on her left side, and her anguish fell to the left, like a lump inside her body. She kept wanting to change the position of her legs, which were still aching after the evening's frantic trek. The too-narrow sheet added to her misery: she kept finding herself uncovered, and felt (or believed) she was catching cold. In the morning, she cried from seven o'clock until twenty-five past. How cruel he had been, and at the same time how gentle! At all costs she must know 'where she stood' with him. She sent him an express letter, telling him she had cried from six to eight, and 'beseeching' him to telephone her at noon at the hotel. Having paid for the letter with a two- franc piece, she left the change to the post office clerk, who muttered a few sardonic words about forsaken women.

Costals did not telephone. The express letter had made him furious. The mere sight of Andrée's handwriting exasperated him. 'She means nothing to me. I owe her nothing. I've put myself out for her dozens of times. I take her out to dinner and then on top of that I give up two and a half hours of my life to her - yes, two and a half hours! I rack my brains trying to find a way out of the ridiculous position she has put me in without hurting her feelings. And now she comes back at me with express letters, tearful letters. So I'm expected to see her three hours running every other day! Well, this time, no.' At noon, he sent her a telegram saying he had to leave for Besançon to see a sick uncle, and would write to her on his return.

Andrée sat and waited in her room on the sixth floor of her squalid hotel (she had asked the prices of six hotels before deciding on this one), with its draughty windows, its stinking bedside table, the drawer in which she had found some old bits of soiled cotton-wool. Sitting on the only chair beside a meagre wood fire, her overcoat round her shoulders, she thought she could never have experienced such an agony of distress. Oh, God! if only she knew what was in his mind! She guessed that she must have irritated him by writing, but it would have been impossible for her not to write. Her mind swung back and forth like a pair of maladjusted scales. One moment she thought of them Walking, walking like lost souls along those lugubrious avenues in the frightful cold, and his every word seemed like a knife twisted in a wound. The next moment she was at the other extreme, exaggerating and inventing as she went along: 'Those minutes will have been the only happy minutes of my life. Even when he teased me, he was so kind, so tender and serious, perhaps unwittingly. He was unhappy about not having any children, he wanted to confide in me, seemed to be looking for sympathy. How touching he was when he talked about his mother! Has he ever spoken to another woman about his mother?' Just as she imagined that Costals had been confiding in her, when he had merely been thinking aloud, no more and no less than when he prostituted himself to fifty thousand readers, in the same way she genuinely believed that, because she had held his hand for rather a long time when they shook hands on meeting, it was he who had held hers. She could still hear the clatter of 'his German officer's footsteps' on the asphalt; she could still see him listening to her with 'the imperceptible smile of the gods' on his lips. The idea that he had contemplated marrying her - even in a moment of aberration - seemed to her less probable than the day before, and yet: 'I know I'm unworthy of such luck; I realize all that divides us, if only from the social point of view; I'm neither crazy nor romantic. So there must have been something for this eventuality, which I had never, never dreamed of, to have suddenly seemed plausible.' She even reached the point of wanting passionately to walk with him again one evening through those gloomy avenues, to walk and walk until she had to beg for mercy; and what had seemed to her 'frightful' and 'lugubrious' a moment before was what she now pinned all her hopes on.

At half past eleven she went down to the reception to wait for the telephone call, her eyes glued to her wrist-watch. Nothing happened. At one o'clock she returned to her room, incapable of lunching, and went on waiting. She was in Paris for only a month, and yet she was waiting for the time to go by! At two o'clock she received Costals' message, and sensed that he was lying. She went round to the avenue Henri- Martin, and inquired of the concierge: 'Is M. Costals in Paris?' 'Yes, Mademoiselle.' But upstairs the servant told her: 'M. Costals is in Besançon.'

Next morning she went back to the avenue Henri-Martin. She had no doubt that he was there, but could not bear not to know. She needed a verdict one way or the other, however unpleasant, to rest upon a certainty, or die upon it.

'Is M. Costals back?'

'No, Mademoiselle. We don't know when he'll be back.'

She went away and wandered around, unable to bring herself to leave the neighbourhood, looking everywhere for Costals, wallowing in the bitter thought that he and she were both in Paris and the days were flowing by in an emptiness no different from Saint-Léonard. And soon she would have to return to Saint-Léonard, return without a ray of hope to a hell of loneliness and despair. Her peregrinations (no question about it, she was born to tramp the streets!) were aimed not so much at meeting Costals as at providing her with a sort of opiate: sitting idly in her hotel room she might have had a fit of hysterics. She went into a church, the name of which she did not know, and spent an hour there, half frozen, repeating to herself: 'Oh, no, God cannot make one suffer more than a man can.' She wrote this sentence on a piece of paper she found in her bag, bought a cheap envelope, slipped it inside it and took it round to Costals' concierge.

She paced up and down outside the house for an hour, just as, when she happened to be in Paris and Costals was away, she used to pass underneath his windows nearly every night to see if they were lit up. She went pale when she saw a man whom she took for him. She caught sight of herself in a shop window, and was horrified by her ugliness: 'My God, what have you done to me? Who is this stranger?' (she had not thought of God when she was in the church). She met a woman selling violets and bought a bunch - 'I shall be more generous than he' - and going back to Costals' house, laid them on the floor of the landing against the door of his flat. Out in the street again she realized, too late, that her gesture would only do her harm, that the servant would find the flowers and make fun of her. She thought of going up to take them back, but it would be the fifth time the concierge had seen her in two days.... She dared not.

At nightfall, frozen stiff, she made her way to the underground. But oh! the temptation to take a taxi. She would have done so for a short trip. But her hotel was so far that it would cost her at least twelve francs. It was typical of her, this habit of stopping short amid the storms of her emotional life to tot up money. In the underground, people stared at her: people wear their sadness as they do a garment. She felt full of compassion, all kindness, weakness and abandon; she offered her seat (an unconscious reflex action, for she could see nothing) to an old man who was standing. She changed trains in a state of utter bewilderment, horrified by the labyrinthine passages, the rush for the automatic gates which shut in your face, those automatic gates that corral people like animals, as though they were a herd of pigs being sorted out by machines in an American factory. And she thought she was going to faint when she finally got off, what with her utter exhaustion, the nervous tension, her sleepless night, and no lunch. It seemed to her that only the strength of her heartbeats sustained her. Her eyelids were aching. All her anguish and distress seemed to be concentrated in this pain in her eyeballs. She went into a bar and ordered a coffee, despite her fear of being taken for a whore. There was a crowd of workmen at the counter. She had to stand behind them, stretching her arm between two men to reach her glass. But she felt that, without the coffee, she could not have stood up a moment longer. Suddenly one of the workmen smiled at her, and his smile eased her pain. But it only lasted a moment; outside, the pain welled up again.

Back at the hotel, she noticed that a forty-franc bottle of scent had been stolen from her room. During the last few days this scent had been her only consolation: she had sniffed it when she was feeling particularly tormented. She also learned from the waiter that she was being charged three francs a day more for her room than other guests had to pay for it (because of her smart appearance, of course!). She attracted blow after blow, like a wounded hen being pecked by the whole poultry-yard.

She would cheerfully have spent hundreds of francs in a single day if she had been happy. When she was unhappy, the thought of money spent - or wasted - gnawed at her, and there were moments when she told herself that she must leave Paris simply in order to stop the leakage.

She wept.... Tears of uncertainty - it was too stupid. After all, it would be time enough to shed them when it all came to an end. She began to think that he was putting her to the test, teasing her rather cruelly, in order to dazzle her the more with joy for all the suffering he had inflicted on her. She applied to him the remark made about M. de Chavigny in Musset's Un Caprice: 'He is mischievous, but he is not bad.' In the end she drew some consolation from her suffering, telling herself that it was a decisive test, that she now knew better than ever how much she loved this man, and what the quality of her love was, since she could put up with his behaviour in this way. For all her horrible doubts about him, she had never felt a moment's anger or resentment. She loved him just as much, but simply did not understand. She also told herself: 'Anything that happens to me now will be paradise after all this.' In spite of the grinding neuralgia which had not left her for two days and upon which all the pills in the world had failed to make an impression, she settled down to write him a long letter, scribbling, scribbling away across the calm paper. But the ceiling light was too high and too dim, and she had to give up.

Next morning, at a quarter to eight, Costals heard a ring at the door of his flat. His servant did not come down until eight o'clock, and anyhow had a key. Costals went from the bathroom into the hall with the lather still on his cheeks.

'What is it?' he asked through the door.

'It's me.'

'Who's "me"?'

'Andrée.'

'Andrée? Andrée who?'

He knew only too well. But he wanted to punish her. Ringing at his door at a quarter to eight! And that note: 'God cannot make one suffer more than a man can'! And those flowers on his doorstep, as though it were a tombstone! Enough to cover him with ridicule in the eyes of all the tenants! He had thrown them in the dustbin at once, after crushing them in his rage.

'Andrée Hacquebaut.'

'I can't let you in. I got back last night. But I haven't shaved.'

'What difference does that make? Let me in, please.' 'You must say "for the love of God".'

'For the love of God!'

'I'd be delighted to let you in. Only I'm stark naked.'

'You refuse to see me?'

'At this moment, yes.'

'Is that your last word?'

'Please don't insist.'

'All right. I shall take the eight fifty-six train to Saint- Léonard. You'll have nothing more to fear from me.'

'No, no. I'll telephone you at noon.'

'Yes, just like the other day! Good-bye!'

He heard her footsteps receding. After a while he half-opened the door. He wondered whether he might not find her still there, crouching on the stairs. There was no one. But in front of the door were the fresh imprints of her wet shoes, going in every direction, as though a hunted beast had trampled there.

At eleven o'clock he heaved a sigh and telephoned the hotel. He was told that she had paid her bill and left.

At first he was profoundly relieved. Then he felt remorse. She was to have spent a month in Paris, and it was going to be such a treat for her! As a novelist he was too accustomed to putting himself in other people's skins not to realize how much she must have suffered, and he was moved by it. He wrote to her:

Dear Mademoiselle,

Your sudden departure has left me puzzled. I cannot for a moment believe that it was due to my not receiving you at half past seven in the morning. Once, my mother refused to let me into her room. Being a sensitive child, I was upset and wondered in what way I could have incurred her displeasure. When she came home that evening, she called me in, kissed me, treated me exactly as usual, but refused to explain why her door had been closed to me that morning. Years later she confessed to me: she had run out of face-powder, and did not want me to see her without any powder on. And I was fourteen! When she was about to die, she gave orders that I was not to be allowed into her room after she was dead until they had bandaged her chin ... Well, I'm her son. You accuse me of not being vain enough: and yet, in certain respects, I'm terribly punctilious. This morning, for example, even if you had been in flames on the landing as a result of some heater exploding or God knows what, I probably wouldn't have gone to your help because I hadn't shaved. The fact that I was naked had nothing to do with it, mind you. No doubt you know how men are made: you must have seen statues. And besides, I was dressed.

Your absurd departure has deprived me of the pleasure of taking you to the Monet exhibition, as I had planned. I was so looking forward to it.

Cordially yours.

How very like him Andrée found this letter! Kindliness, jokes, and even a touch of impropriety, which she smiled at without being disturbed by it. And again the allusions to his mother, which she found so moving . . . But she did not regret having returned to Saint-Léonard. She had a feeling that, had she stayed in Paris, he would have continued to make her suffer. Whereas this friendly letter mysteriously - yes, really unaccountably - dissolved her pain. Full, as always, of Costals' books, she remembered a saying in one of them: 'Absence brings people closer.' Why did he understand everything so well in his books and pretend not to understand in life?

One morning, some days after this scene, Costals was in Cannes. The sea could be seen from the villa, still grey after the riotous winter storms. The novelist was reading Malebranche - La Recherche de la Vérité.

From the next room came the sound of a clear young voice singing to itself. Costals raised his head. When he heard his son singing in the house, he felt as though the house were flying through the air. Sometimes both father and son would sing, each on a different floor. He listened for a while, then could not resist any longer and made his way to the child's room.

As soon as he opened the door the voice stopped. The boy pretended to be asleep. Costals was familiar with this trick. As with all boys of his age (he would be fourteen in three months' time), Philippe's jokes and gags, though they did not last long, and were buried forever from one day to the next, were persistent while they did last. Even if he had not heard him singing, Costals would have known that his son was not asleep: his face was dry, and he always perspired in his sleep.

'Open your eyes, donkey, or I'll drop my cigarette ash on your face.'

Costals sat down on the bed ... and jumped up again. He turned back the sheet and found a foil. Philippe had discovered fencing a fortnight before and, still in the first flush of this discovery, took his foil to bed with him - as Cardinal de Maillé, newly promoted to the Sacred College, slept with his red hat, according to Saint-Simon.

Sitting down again, Costals took his son's hands, never quite clean, with their long, delicate fingers (Les jeunes garçons aux mains larges et limpides, he had written one day when he had a penchant for alexandrines), and kissed them. The boy had a tanned face and straight black hair. On the front of his pyjamas the stains of breakfast chocolate were proudly displayed. He was still pretending to be asleep. One could see at once that if he had no wings it was because he had wished it so (but what about the cloven hoof?). Scattered on the floor around the bed, like gobs of spittle around an Arab, was a large quantity of small change (Philippe insisted on having his pocket money in this form so that he could jingle it in his pocket - 'But why?' - 'To show off, of course!'), a comb (broken), a mirror (broken), a fountain-pen (broken), a wallet, an empty scent bottle - all the things which boys' pockets are eternally stuffed with, and which slip out whenever they lie down. There was also a padlock, for Philippe did not want his rabbits to be killed, and every time the cook brought their food. Master Philippe had to be fetched to open and shut the hutch himself.

Suddenly Philippe seized his father's head, pulled it down, and kissed it. Then he squeezed it violently between his arms, no longer the caressing child but a child who fancies himself as a wrestling champion. There followed a great deal of horseplay, which he liked best of all, being very sensitive to touch. Whenever Costals warned him that he was going to break something, or that he was ruining the pillow, he replied: That's a detail' - it was the catch-phrase of the moment. Finally Philippe pinned down his father's shoulders with his knees (the sheet, by this time, was all over the place), and in that position bent forward and nibbled his nose.

'You've hurt me, you idiot!'

'Cry-baby! Sissy, sissy!' (and he made faces at him).

Eventually the excitement died down. Philippe got back under the sheet and buried himself in Cri-Cri [A boys' magazine of the 1920's (Translator's note).] Costals, stretched out on top of the bed, returned to his Malebranche.

Costals had had this bastard son at the age of twenty-one. The chosen intermediary was a woman who in law was an adulteress so that there could be no question of her having any rights whatever over the child. At the age of six Philippe had been entrusted to the care of an old friend of Costals, Mlle du Peyron de Larchant, a spinster of about fifty, who had all the advantages of maternal love for the brat without any of its grave drawbacks. Although she also loved Costals like a son, she had never been in love with him, and this guaranteed the stability and probity of her affection. Costals had arranged things in this way because it seemed to him disgraceful that anyone but he should have any rights over his son. He was, moreover, convinced of the pernicious influence mothers generally have on children, a view shared by a large number of educationists and moralists, who dare not admit it openly for fear of offending time-honoured conventions, which are always exquisitely chivalrous.

Philippe lived partly in Marseilles, partly in Cannes. Costals spent ten days or so with him every month, being convinced from experience that a highly-strung man cannot love a person with whom he cohabits, or even merely sees every day. The arrangement had worked extremely satisfactorily for fourteen years. Which proves nothing.

Philippe, who was known as Brunet because of his brown skin (he called his father 'La Dine', a nickname for which no explanation, sensible or otherwise, was forthcoming), was still, at the age of nearly fourteen, physically very much a child: undeveloped, and his voice still unbroken. In character also he was very much a child, but at the same time terribly quickwitted and alert: a little backward physically, very advanced mentally. He was not an adolescent, he was a precocious child: not at all the same thing. One day in Paris at the age of ten, finding himself without enough money to go home by underground, he had gone and sung in people's courtyards until he had made enough for his fare. When he was eleven, Costals, who himself had not been born innocent (innocents do not notice such things), had discovered a hole made by Philippe in the door of Mlle du Peyron's bathroom.

He was not a rebellious or ill-natured or even wearisome child - wearisome as children are in their high spirits. Not one of those children whose mien one studies anxiously when they wake up in the morning to see if they are in a good or a bad mood and whether the day will be possible or unbearable. He was a little highly-seasoned, but he was straight. He was not pure, but he was healthy. He zigzagged violently, but without ever leaving the road. Disinterested; warm-hearted; intelligent, in a down-to-earth way (all Costals' efforts to inject him with a more high-flown conception of the universe - a philosophy of the universe - had failed); and with the restfulness one finds in boys who are not interested in sport. Although at first sight he appeared to be a typical French boy of 1927 - in other words a horrible little guttersnipe - he was not a guttersnipe, for he was never mean or nasty: he never did anything despicable.

The surest way of winning the confidence and friendship of a young boy is not to be his father. Brunet, however, confided in his father far more than most boys. He also lied to him less than is usual. Costals did not always understand his son, and he was sometimes annoyed by this, or rather irritated with himself on account of it. Whereas with women he could tell almost without fail what was going to be produced out of the hat, what was going to be their reaction in any given circumstance, with Philippe he was not so sure. Perhaps it was because women's reactions have something mass-produced, or - shall we say? – traditional ['In France, women are too much alike. They have the same way of being pretty, of entering a room, of writing, of loving, of quarrelling. No matter how often you change from one to another, it always seems to be the same one.' - Prince de Ligne] about them. Perhaps it was simply because what happened inside their heads did not seem worth bothering about. He considered them far less mysterious than men, especially in childhood. There is no comparison, from this point of view, between boys and girls. Who was it (Vauvenargues or Chamfort?) who said, cruelly, that one must choose between loving women and understanding them? Costals loved them, and had never tried to understand them, had never even wondered whether there was anything in them to understand.

'La Dine!'

'Shut up! Let me read Malebranche.'

'You make me sick with your branch! I say, I had a lovely dream last night.'

'What did you dream?'

'I dreamt I was eating noodles with tomato sauce.'

'Is that what you interrupted me for? What a pain in the neck the child is!'

There was more horse-play. Suddenly, at the height of the struggle, Brunet, with his face a few inches away from his father's, stopped and studied it attentively.

'I'm looking at you. I'd forgotten your face. Yesterday at the station I wondered if I'd recognize you when you got off the puff-puff. Luckily I remembered your overcoat. It's a pretty awful one! A fifteen-hundred-franc overcoat! Really, you have no taste. I shall have to come with you when you buy your togs.'

'He too forgets faces ... ' Costals mused. He himself was liable to forget the faces of his mistresses, his best friends, to forget everything, in fact. When one of his own traits came back at him like this from his son, he felt a bit uneasy. 'Nonsense! he's a good kid, and I love him - so we should get by all right.' (Which was anticipating a bit.)

Meanwhile Brunet was still staring at his father. 'I'm fond of you, you know. You're a good sort,' he said at last, and kissed him. Costals kissed him back, on his eyelids, rather from a sort of sense of the proprieties, of the necessary reciprocities, than from any keen impulse.

'Is that the way you kiss women?' the boy asked. 'Go on, show me how you do it.'

'Shh.... Now, now.'

'Had you ever kissed a woman by the time you were fourteen?'

'Of course.'

'I kissed Francine Finoune. She said to me: "Give me a kiss and I'll take you to the cinema." So I kissed her.'

'Where?'

'There.' (He pointed to a spot on his cheek.)

'And did you like it?'

Philippe eyed his father as though, by the mere suggestion that this kiss might have given pleasure, he had insulted him.

'Oh, come off it.'

'The day you find you like kissing Francine Finoune, you must let me know, because I shall have one or two things to tell you.'

'Catch me telling you that! Anyway, we've quarrelled. She asked me for ten francs. So I gave her a clout.'

'She takes you to the cinema, and yet you refuse her ten francs. Is that fair?'

'Oh, that's a detail.'

Costals searched his pocket for a cigarette ... and found a roll of peppermints. Hardly a week ever passed without Brunet giving his father some such 'surprise', a little present slipped into his pocket - sweets, a packet of cigarettes, or some such thing. Costals gave the child a light. This was the signal for another standing joke - Brunet blowing, rapidly one after the other, several puffs of smoke into Costals' hair. The latter then had to don his son's beret as quickly as possible. When he took it off, his head would be smoking. Vast amusement, each time as fresh as ever. The smouldering skull of the genius!

'Poor La Dine, I'm wasting your time.'

'It's never a waste of time being with you.'

Costals had stretched himself out on the bed again; having abandoned La Recherche de la Vérité, he was reading Cri-Cri over his son's shoulder. Philippe burst out laughing every other minute. He seemed to be not quite himself unless he had a pretext for laughing, and everything was a pretext. He would throw his head right back, and in the middle of his brown face, at the summit of his whole being, his dazzling white teeth, small and regular as the incisors of a cat, shone like snow on a mountain top. Scarcely for a moment, during the hour they had been together, had he ceased to laugh - radiating sweetness and good humour. One could see at once that he was a child who was rid of his parents. All this was well attuned to Costals' own constant good humour - the natural condition of a man of sense.

A wire-haired fox terrier appeared in the doorway, gave a muffled 'woof of approval, and disappeared after this benison. The terrier, who answered to the name Hairynose, was the only person in the house who maintained a high moral tone. He often watched with a look of severity as Costals and his son played the fool; it was obvious that he was judging them. The examination would end with a deep sigh. Then this paragon would put his nose to his behind and go back to sleep.

Several times Costals tried to get up, but Brunet held out his arms towards him, stretching them as a cat stretches out its fore-paws, and Costals, who knew this gesture well and found it touching, gave in.

After a time, Brunet crumpled up his Cri-Cri and threw it aside violently, as though suddenly horrified at having enjoyed it; then he bent down and laid his head on his father's chest. With him there was always, beneath the playfulness, a desire for physical contact; he was always finding reasons for rubbing against his father, either in their rough-and-tumbles, or by suddenly clasping him in his arms and trying to make him dance the fox-trot, or jumping on his back, or taking his arm in the street. (And then there was his girlish way of giving a start and turning away his head whenever anything painful or cruel was mentioned, such as an operation, or even a thermometer.) Costals, finding himself close to him like this, and touched by his need for affection, felt that the least he could do was to kiss him again. He thought to himself: 'He's charming, he's cuddly, he smells good, the softness of his skin is not of this world. And yet I haven't the same sort of tenderness for him that I have for a woman. Why? It's strange.' The fact was that Costals was capable of feeling strong tenderness only for people he desired. He thought the bridge of Philippe's nose, just below the eyes, was too wide (like a lion cub, perhaps), and this single small feature that he did not like prevented him from responding with complete spontaneity to his son's caresses. And he watched himself, afraid of appearing cold - for he was very fond of his son - and making sure that, in the matter of caresses, he would always have something to spare. He also wondered, as he wondered about women: 'Why does he enjoy embracing me?' And he could not understand.

At this point Old Mother Hubbard (their nickname for the old lady) poked her head round the half-open door like a little tousled field mouse and beamed at the charming spectacle they presented.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

15 March 1927

Not a day has passed since my return without the tears springing to my eyes under the impact of a painful memory. But it only lasts a few seconds. The rest of the time I live, I laugh, I talk, I write. Apparently unscathed. What brings my wound home to me is the fact that I can no longer sing. Before, I used to sing all the time, even in my worst moments. Now it not only won't 'come' to me, but if I make an effort it won't 'come out'. Oh Costals, what makes men suffer? There is only one suffering: loneliness of heart. I have made a list of my blessings: freedom, health, leisure, my daily bread (dry bread, but still), comparative youth, and so on. And yet, telling myself that other human beings might passionately envy all this does not make me any happier. Even if the list could be extended ad infinitum, I would only have to put down the absence of love on the debit side for the whole of the credit column to be reduced to zero. The truth is that I no longer enjoy anything. Only on Saturday did I find a little peace, when I went to Confession in order not to break completely with the practice of religion. With God and yourself together forbidding me to love you, I ought to be convinced!

I had a dream the other night. Its origin is easy to guess. We were walking through Paris in the rain. And I kept forgetting things - once it was a fur - and I would climb back up interminable staircases while you waited for me below at the corner of the street. I would rejoin you, we would set off again, once again I would find I had forgotten something, I would go back, climb the stairs again, search again.... And, as usual in dreams, the search involved unbelievable trouble, I had to rummage through a mass of things, there was no end to it, and I was obsessed all the time with the fear that you would have got tired of waiting. But I always found you on the pavement waiting for me, your face contorted with impatience, like an angry little cat. This dream consoled me a little, as a sign that you were not lost to me.

And yet, if I were to judge by your silence....

Oh, no reproach intended, no sulking (I know what sulking costs me). I cannot conceive of there ever being the slightest shadow of reproach between us. Whatever you do, whatever happens, nothing will ever weaken my admiration for you, my devotion and gratitude. But my affection is beginning to succumb, from anaemia, because it feels wasted. It cannot go on living off itself for ever. That would be a superhuman task, like having to go on filling the Danaids' bottomless barrel, until one collapses. It might be possible for a girl of twenty. At thirty (minus thirty-nine days! ) one no longer has the energy. I can sense that you are deeply involved elsewhere. All my enthusiasm is dead. Permanently wrapped up in you as I am, how could I possibly endure without torment those long deserts in our friendship?

What have I had from you? Such meagre oases! Not an hour of intimacy. Two years ago, you had me to your house several times. Since then, always outside - at concerts, in restaurants, in the street. It's as though you were afraid of something. There remained your letters, rare as they were.

(I would have far preferred you to do nothing for me in the practical sphere but to write to me more often. My correspondence with you is an eternal monologue.) But if even the letters disappear! Remove both physical presence and letters from a friendship, and what remains? I know there are men who go for weeks, even months, without seeing or writing to one another, and yet remain firm and devoted friends. But I am not a man. Each empty post leaves me crushed for a whole hour, and upsets my entire day. A word from you, on the other hand, is like a drop of oil on a fire: it kindles a passionate fervour in me ...

If I am to keep a small corner in your heart, I must first of all write you shorter letters, mustn't I?

Your Andrée.

I have decided to laugh as little as possible from now on, because of my wrinkles.

This letter remained unanswered.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

31 March 1927

What does this silence mean - this barrier of silence that I have to break through to reach you? I love you as one loves a child who has a heart disease and is doomed to die at twenty. I know I shall lose what little I have of you, that is to say the right to correspond with you, etc. - your presence in my life, the slight interest you have in me. I also know that I shall make no attempt to cling on to you. All I ask is not to be stabbed in the back: it's the only expression I can think of to describe these appalling betrayals through silence, which leave me floundering in ignorance and incomprehension, groping in the void like a blind man with his stick, or a mystic seeking God in the darkness of spiritual desolation. Even the mystics have need of the sacraments, which are a substitute for the real presence. I love everything about you: even your raillery and your harshness give me happiness, and anyway they fortify me against you; whereas your silence paralyses and destroys me. You can deal me blow after blow and I shall be able to withstand them. But do not take a cowardly advantage of the weapons of silence and absence.

If you only knew what it is not to have any contact with you - either in person or through letters - that is not broken up by these weeks of total separation! The lack of continuity between us! All these things that come to nothing, that absence makes abortive, when it was essential to strike while the iron was hot. Everything evaporates through absence, like the heat of a room through an open door. How do you expect anything to develop, or even survive, between us in such a disjointed situation? No sooner have I left you than I find the words I ought to have said to you (such a stream of things I ought to tell you to explain this or that, to rectify the idea you have of me ...), but I cannot say them because we see each other so rarely. So I am reduced to my letters, which irritate you and which have no effect on you, and it is only in my room, alone, that I speak out to you and convince you.

It is not your behaviour I'm complaining of, you understand. It isn't even your indifference to my distress. It isn't you at all, it's the uncertainty — that abyss of absolute uncertainty within whose depths anything can lie hidden without one's knowing: accident, illness, changes of heart, ill-founded grievances, misunderstandings....

Write to me anything you like, but write to me. Be it only an empty envelope - like those the Maréchal de Luxembourg asked Rousseau to send him - so that I know you are still alive.

I believe in you in spite of everything, as one must, our preacher used to say, believe in God in spite of everything.

Andrée.

This letter remained unanswered.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

23 April 1927 9 p.m.

I am thirty years old today, Costals.

It is Sunday. Sunday, a bad day for me even at the best of times. The weather has been divine, too divine. Alas, I'm beginning to know them, these desolate springtimes, these summers that go by one after the other like empty baskets: not one of them, not one, has fulfilled its promise. How terrible it is, this sensation of sterility in a season when everything aspires towards renewal. Must one always see these intoxicating things through a horrible veil of deprivation? What is the point of being pretty? (For how much longer?)

This afternoon there was the usual hubbub of the boule- players. Seven times, from my room, I heard the hotel gramophone play the famous tune from Louise: Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée ... From time to time there were cheers and rounds of applause, for there was some kind of reunion party going on. Before dinner there was a thunderstorm. Now everything at the hotel is lit up al giorno, the tables on the terrace glistening, rain-soaked. The soft air brings me the sound of dance music, and the sweet orange smell from a languishing acacia branch. I can see two young men in dinner jackets coming out of the hotel, their shirt-fronts shining, too, and their patent leather shoes in the mud. Their carefree happiness pains me.

I am thirty. That's that. The age of waiting is over, the age of realization has begun: I have reached the turning-point. What I need now is a past rather than a future, memories rather than hopes. This is the age at which film stars in America commit suicide, because they have nothing more to expect from life. I still have everything.

In my mind's eye I see myself at the bedside of a dead child or a dead husband. Of course it must be terrible to have had and then to have no longer; but not to have had at all is worse. If only I were younger, or older! Younger, I wouldn't yet have had enough of this purely cerebral life and this purely platonic, intellectual, cold friendship: when I first met you, I didn't care about love, I didn't need it, I was sufficient unto myself, my body didn't interest me. Older, I should no longer be in a position to 'make a life' for myself, I should no longer have anything to lose by resigning myself to friendship pure and simple, I could even be quite happy with it. Thirty, for me, is either too early or too late.

Costals, I tell you quite simply and sadly: I am not trying to cling on to you. I have always known that, whatever I did, I would not attract you forever. I have lived, I am still living, in the constant expectation of your growing weary of me, forgetting me, and the silence in which you have immured yourself during the past two months confirms my fears. Perhaps this is a psychological error: you have stuck so faithfully to your 'good works' on my behalf for four years! But I don't want to rely on the past as a gauge for the future. And besides, I don't even know if it was a question of 'good works' on your part or a genuine inclination. You have never cared to enlighten me on that point.

This being so, why should I go on being discreet and circumspect with you? Why should I go on being adroit? I'm inclined to think I've been only too discreet, and I know very well that no sort of finesse means anything to you. You get tired of things for no reason, simply because they have 'gone on long enough', because they have 'served their purpose', because 'one must have a change'. There's no point in trying to deserve well of you; it's simply a matter of trying to make the best of the short period during which one has a place in your life and if possible turn it into something more solid, beautiful, and happy.

Never, never, never will you be able to accuse me of being the female enemy. Never, no matter what you do, will you see me turn against you, or reproach you. I am your friend. But I cannot go on being nothing but a friend. I am like a soul in Purgatory, a woman of thirty, highly-strung, unhappy, with none of the outlets men have: brief affairs, travel, work, vanity, ambition. For twenty years I've walked in a straight line between two high banks. So you must be a little indulgent when you hear what I have to say to you.

What I have to say to you is this. Your friendship can do nothing more for my happiness. It is like a pearl found in the desert by a Bedouin dying of thirst. I am no longer at an age when half-measures and half-attachments can suffice; I must have total happiness or total despair. I am hungry for plenitude, and it is a passionate plenitude that I need. I am no longer interested in all those spiritual values which I prized so highly when I was younger; I am no longer interested in you in that sense; I have had enough of being loved fastidiously. This pure friendship is a beautiful thing, but it isn't a tangible thing of which I can be sure as I am sure of what I eat or what I drink; it's a fleshless thing, arid, stifling, intermittent, spasmodic, and in any case flagging, exhausting itself in the long run - all absence, waiting, emptiness - in which I have all the self-denials of love without any of its benefits. A sterile, spent thing, unless it can be infused with new sap. To be loved is to be at once desired, cossetted, possessed and cherished. All the rest is moonshine.

I should like to have my share of you, to take my fill of you, to be able to live on my repletion. Here, then, is what I propose. I do so calmly and coolly: I've thought a great deal about what I am going to write to you. I propose that we exchange this moribund friendship for two months during which you would give yourself to me passionately, during which I would be entirely yours. I am ready to give you my solemn word that once this time had elapsed you would never hear from me again if that was your wish.

These brief weeks of desperate plenitude (desperate for me) might perhaps give you some pleasure. For me they would be everything - everything, that is to say something, in this life of mine in which there is nothing, something for me to hold on to, the memory of which would remain with me, inviolate, which nothing and nobody could take away from me, a satisfaction of a different kind from the psychological satisfaction you have, it's true, given me up to now. With such a memory, I could snap my fingers at the banal happiness of married women. Having possessed you once, my life will not have been wasted. What dazzling peace for the rest of my days!

You must not think that, even at thirty, I have an inordinate need of physical love. A cerebral need, rather. It is really my conscience that tells me I ought to experience it. To get it over with. To be inoculated. Appeased. Mentally appeased, I mean. Like settling down in a train one was afraid of-missing. As far as the senses are concerned, I am still a very little girl. Everything I have to offer you is fresh and new as at the break of day, completely worthy, in its simplicity, of your greatness. I would never forgive you if you forced me to offer it without love.

And please do not bring up that word 'affair' which you sometimes use so crudely. For me, everything that comes within your aura loses its ordinary meaning. Lover, mistress, liaison, affair - these words no longer mean anything: there is simply love. And, within the context of love, every liberty, every audacity, all consumed by its radiance.

Yes, it is I who have written this letter! Only two years ago, I should have died rather than contemplate the step which I am taking towards you. But what do I care about the world's opinion, when I know that what I would give you is radiantly pure and perhaps sublime?

Andrée

This letter remained unanswered.

The most striking thing about man's - the male's - conception of happiness is that no such conception exists. There is a book of Alain's entitled: Propos sur le bonheur. But nowhere in this book is there any mention of happiness. This is highly significant. Most men have no conception of happiness.

Saint-Preux, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, cries out: 'O God, my soul was made for suffering: give me one that is made for happiness!' Well, God did not hear his prayer: the soul of the male is not made for happiness. In his eyes, happiness is a negative state - insipid in the literal sense of the word - which one only becomes aware of as a result of a glaring un-happiness; happiness is obtainable only by not thinking about it. One day you take a look at yourself and realize that you are not too badly off: so you tell yourself you are happy. And you take as your guiding principle the famous platitude that happiness comes only to those who do not seek it. To look for happiness, to speak of it as of something concrete, is regarded as unmanly. It was a man, Goethe, who spoke of 'the duty of happiness'. And it was also a man, Stendhal, who made that magnificent remark, so far-reaching it embodies a whole philosophy and a whole ethic: 'There is nothing in the world I respect as much as happiness.' But these were superior men, and it is precisely because they transcend the ordinary human categories that they think like this. To the average man, anyone who admits to a respect for happiness is suspect. As for 'the duty of happiness', in spite of Goethe it has always received, together with the notion of 'live and let live', the worst possible press. You may say to a man, even a young man: 'One empty hour, one wasted hour - think of the remorse, as death draws near, for not having devoted it to the pursuit of happiness!' and he will be taken aback. 'Whose happiness do you mean?' he will ask. 'Other people's? The country's?' And if you answer fiercely: 'No! MINE!' he will be shocked. He cannot understand how you can think of your own happiness; he has never thought of his. The male is always telling himself, quite cheerfully: 'Tomorrow you'll start living.' And if he knows what he means by 'living' it is already quite an achievement. Another young man, almost a youth, with everything in his favour, having heard someone use the word 'living', in the sense of making the most of life, asks him: 'But what do you mean by "living"?' For him, to live means to work, to scratch a living. If he were asked what happiness was, he would no doubt reply: 'Doing one's duty, finding a task to fulfil, a discipline, etc.' In other words, what he means by happiness is the method he has chosen, or, more probably, has had imposed on him, of killing time. And even this is not enough; when men kill time in too easy and pleasant a way they grow sick of it. One has often heard of the sort of malaise that comes over a man when he reaches a standstill, a state of quiescent equilibrium in which he no longer feels any desires: it is similar to the sort of malaise one feels in a motor-boat on a dead calm sea when the engine fails. Whence the fact that the consciousness of happiness gives such a powerful sensation of loneliness. This is often misunderstood.

However, it does sometimes happen that a man has a positive conception of happiness. In this case happiness lies in the satisfaction of vanity (with all kinds of individual variations, of course, since each man's idea of his own happiness is absolutely incomprehensible to everyone else). Vanity is man's predominant passion. It is not true that one can make a man do absolutely anything for money. But one can make most men do anything one wants by appealing to their vanity. Most men would go without food and drink for a whole day if by doing so they were to obtain a sop to their vanity at the end of it. A man without vanity is a bit of a freak: he casts a chill, and is given a wide berth. Thus for men it is not so much a question of being happy as of making people believe they are. A young doctor in the North African desert, recently married, once remarked ingenuously, without realizing how splendid his remark was: 'I'm extremely happy. But if only I could tell someone about it.' Most men would be only too delighted with the happiness of the sage. Fundamentally, that is what they like: how they all yearn to go into retreat! But people would not believe they were happy, people would think they had given up, or were incompetent, so off they go on the other tack, giving themselves airs, plunging into the shameful and ridiculous bustle we normally find them in, making lots of telephone calls, and soon a day of happiness for them is a day on which they have made plenty of telephone calls, in other words a day on which they have been very important. And in this way happiness-as-the-satisfaction-of-vanity merges with the happiness-which-comes-without-thinking-about-it which we mentioned earlier.

Women, on the other hand, have a positive idea of happiness. For, if man is more restless, woman is more alive. No woman would ask, like the afore-mentioned young man: 'What do you mean by "living"?' She has no need of explanations. To live, for her, is to feel. All women prefer to burn themselves out rather than be extinguished; all women prefer to be devoured rather than ignored. And in their 'feeling', what mobility, what profuseness of reaction! When one sees how a woman, if the man she loves seems to love her less - even a little less - suffers as much as if he no longer loved her at all; when one sees how, later, if she realizes that he still loves her as much as ever, not only does she feel wonderfully happy, but her joy is redoubled by the joy of being forgiven for having suspected him - when one sees this and compares it with the sluggishness of men, one grasps the meaning of the word 'alive'.

In fact, the succession of minor pleasures which, according to men, is what ultimately constitutes happiness, as a mass of little stars makes up the Milky Way, seems no more capable of doing so in women's eyes than, for Christians, a thousand venial sins are capable of making up one mortal sin. For women, happiness is a clearly defined state, endowed with its own individual personality, a tangible reality that is extremely alive, powerful and sensitive. A woman will tell you she is happy as she will tell you she is hot or cold. 'What are you thinking?' - 'That I'm happy.' 'Why do you want to do this or that?' - 'In order to be happy!' (this in such a vehement tone, with an 'of course' implied). 'I'm afraid of your doing this or that.' - 'Do you think I want to ruin my happiness?' She will give you a description of her happiness, telling you, for example: 'When I'm happy, I don't talk', or 'When I'm happy I always feel well.' She will know precisely when it begins and when it ends. There is a book in the Bibliothèque Rose entitled A Fortnight of Happiness. It is a book by a woman, and this is obvious from the title alone: no man would ever have had the notion that happiness can be cut into slices like a cake. And a woman will enjoy this 'fortnight of happiness' - meaning any limited period of happiness, any obviously ephemeral happiness - much more than a man would. For a woman any happiness, however short-lived, is better than nothing. If you tell a girl you would love to marry her but for one reason or another it is inevitable that she will begin to be unhappy within a year, she is sure to reply: 'Well then, I shall have had a year of happiness.' A man in her place would think of the threat to his future, and would weigh up the risks. The idea of happiness is so strong in women that they can see nothing else; all risks are blotted out.

The only acceptable future for a woman is a happy marriage. Thus she is dependent on men, and knows it from an early age. However true it is that male adolescents suffer from their impotence, as boys they live in the present, as young men they think of the future as a substance they will fashion by themselves. Girls, on the other hand, are afraid of the future. A boy knows that his future will be what he wants it to be; a girl knows that her future will be what a man wants it to be. Her dreams of happiness during this period of uncertainty will be all the more ardent if this happiness is threatened in advance.

Similarly, women attach far more importance than men to the conditions of happiness. It was a woman who once wrote that, as room thermometers indicate the correct temperature for orange-trees, silk-worms, etc., the word happiness ought to be opposite the 25 degrees centigrade line. When one returns from long stays in North Africa, Spain or Italy to the leprous Parisian winter, ten degrees below, to the darkness, the dirt, the ugliness, the inconveniences, the nastiness, the strained unhealthy life, what astonishes one is not so much this accumulation of horrors as the fact that most men put up with it: thanks to them, life goes on. But women, in the midst of this hell on earth, daydream of other things, pine away for other things, and sometimes fall into despair. There was once a novel for girls entitled L'Age où l'on croit aux îles. Women are always at the age when one believes in islands, in other words the age when one believes in happiness.

This positive idea of happiness that women have, and the demands they make on it, no doubt arise from the state of unsatisfaction which is their lot. Not that all women are martyrs by any means! Nevertheless, when one thinks of the condition of the sexes in society, the word that springs to mind for women is unhappiness, and for men worries. There is a striking custom in the Moslem marriage ceremony as celebrated in Algiers. A woman advances towards the young couple and pours jasmine water into the cupped hands of the bride. The groom bends down and drinks it. The woman proceeds to do the same with the bridegroom; but just as the bride is about to drink from his hands, he opens them and lets the water escape. What an appalling custom - laying it down as a principle that man should be happy and woman not. There is something about the picture of the little girl bending down to drink the water and being refused it that makes one shudder. True, that is the Moslem world; in Europe the unhappiness of woman is not laid down as a sacred principle in advance. But even in Europe, whereas the happiness of women is dependent on that of men, men are not much concerned about making women happy. It is rare to find a public man risking his career, an industrialist endangering his business, a writer sacrificing his work, to make a woman happy (by marrying her, for instance). In fact, quite apart from any question of sacrifice, one never sees a man marrying a woman who wants to marry him more than he wants to marry her, simply in order to make her happy. Whereas there are millions of women who dream of marriage simply in order to discharge an overflow of loving devotion on a husband and children.

Dreams are born of dissatisfaction: no satisfied person dreams (or, if he is an artist, he dreams only in a calculated way.) Where do people (even men) dream of happiness? In slums, in hospitals, in prisons. Women dream of happiness and think about it, because they have not got it. If a man suffers through a woman, he has everything else to console himself with. But what has she got? A woman can never realize herself completely: she is too dependent on men. She therefore dreams continually of the unattainable. A poetess once wrote a book under the title Waiting - a title as feminine as our Fortnight of Happiness. Women are always waiting, hopefully up to a certain age, hopelessly thereafter. This dreaming of happiness, so peculiar to women, is incomprehensible to men. They call it naivety, emotionalism, romanticism, Bovaryism - always with a suggestion of superiority and disdain. There is an even more contemptuous word: soulfulness. If a woman admits to being happy, a man will tell her it's exhibitionism. If she sings all day long, a man will say she is a bit simple-minded - for him, she could not possibly be happy unless she was simple. If a poet writes that he would rather not go to the Italian lakes at all than go there without his beloved, there will always be a critic ready to say: 'Shop-girl's talk ' (If it is 'shop-girl's talk' for a woman to say: 'It would be absolute torture for me to see, for example, a Titian I like when I'm in the company of someone I dislike', so much the better for shop-girls.) The girl who waits for a husband a little too long, and vainly decorates the unknown beloved's altar in her heart, would simply appear comic to that same beloved: he thinks, or pretends to think, that it is simply a drama of the flesh, when in fact it is the soul consumed with the desire to give itself. (Whether this unhappiness is greater than that of many married women is another question.) A young woman who dreams of a happiness she does not possess interests him only to the extent that he can hope to benefit from it: he has no more respect for her longing because of this. As for the old maid and all her regrets, for them he has only jeers, not to say insults: the attitude of men towards spinsters, in France at least, is a disgrace.

The feminine conception of happiness suffers the fate of all feminine conceptions: it does not interest men. Men are not interested in women when their senses are satisfied, and the day she realizes this for the first time is one of the tragedies in a woman's life. Galatea flees into the willows, hoping to be caught; a moment later the man runs from the willows, but this time it's for good - he does not want to be caught. Men are bored or irritated by women as soon as they have ceased to enjoy them, just as the smoke from a cigarette inhaled with pleasure a few moments ago is bothersome when it rises from the cigarette after one has put it down three-quarters finished with no intention of taking it up again. It is because they have nothing to say to each other that couples quarrel; it is a way of passing the time. A man has to make an effort, out of politeness, or good nature, or a sense of duty, to devote some of his time to the woman who has satisfied his desires; when he does so, he always has the feeling that he is doing her a favour. Only rakes are permanently interested in women, because with them curiosity - the soul of desire - is permanently alive: hence the indulgent attitude of women towards them, even the most serious women. 'The happiness of women,' a character in a novel has perceptively remarked, the happiness of women comes from men, but the happiness of men comes from themselves. The only thing a woman can do for a man is avoid disturbing his happiness.' The terrible thing is that women - powerless and naïve - long to do for men what men do for them. A woman who is happy and loved (and who loves) asks for nothing more. A man who loves and is loved needs something else as well. Leaving aside the question of money, a man always makes a present to a woman by marrying her, because marriage is a vital necessity for her but not for him. Women marry because marriage is for them the only key to happiness, whereas men marry because Tom, Dick and Harry do; they marry out of habitude, if not hebetude. Naturally they do not admit this, because they are unaware of it. Thoughtlessness makes men marry, just as thoughtlessness makes them go to war. One shudders at the thought of what would become of society if men began to be governed by reason; it would perish, as we see peoples perish before our very eyes because they are too intelligent.

Man and woman confront each other, and society says to them: 'You know nothing about him? You know nothing about her? Well, have a try. Go ahead and make the best of it.' Indeed, were it not for the mating urge, each sex would stay where it was. Not out of shyness, as in Vigny's poem, but simply like two species impervious to each other and with nothing to say to each other. Nature has made them antithetical, incapable of agreeing, or capable of agreeing only on the ruin of something, and we watch this strange spectacle of beings who are driven towards each other although they seem not to be made for each other.

Woman is made for one man; man is made for life, and incidentally for all women. Woman is made to arrive and stay put; man is made to act and move on: she begins loving when he has finished; people talk of women 'teasing' when they ought to talk of men. Man takes and throws away again; woman gives herself, and, what has once been given cannot be taken back, or only with difficulty. Woman thinks love can do everything - not only her love, but the love man bears her, which she always exaggerates. She will eloquently maintain that love has no limits; man sees the limits not only of woman's love but of his own, whose poverty he is only too well aware of. Not only are they out of step, but supply and demand are badly synchronized between them. Men seldom feel anything for women except desire, which women find tiresome; women seldom feel anything for men except tenderness, which men find tiresome. Women offer more tenderness than men can stand; fortunately there are children to absorb the surplus, as long as they need it. Women say: 'Ah, how foolish men are to sacrifice, for the sake of ideas, or glory, or money, time that should be devoted to love, to true love! It teaches one so many things! Think how many men fail to attain to the highest spheres (intellectual, social, religious, etc.) because they have not allowed love to live and grow in them!' And men reply: 'How can love live and grow in me? It can only die there. These embers cannot be fanned into flame: artifice is worse than useless. Why ask me to be other than what nature made me? Nature made me a man - that is, a member of a loveless species.'

Such is this hybrid couple from whom spring most of the ills of mankind without either of them being to blame, but only nature, which brought them together without matching them, throwing in the best and the worst as in all her other works, wherein nothing is not muddled, confused, impure, two-sided, pace the ignorant and the sage, who never see more than one side.

'What!' you will say, '"the source of most of the ills of mankind" - what an exaggeration!' But just open your newspaper. Dramas of jealousy, dramas of adultery, dramas of divorce, dramas of abortion, crimes of passion. And all those family dramas which would not exist without an initial couple. And all the things one never hears about. It is not the free union that seems to be cursed, it is the couple, whatever form it takes, and perhaps more especially in marriage. At the basis of it a monstrous gamble: the man being forced to take a partner for life when there is no good reason why it should be this one rather than the next, since millions of others are equally worthy of his love. The man driven by nature to repeat the same words of love to a dozen women including the one who is destined for him - false if he hides the truth from her, cruel if he admits it. The man driven by nature to deceive his wife, with all the lies and baseness this entails - culpable if he yields to nature's commands, unhappy if he resists them. The girl who grows to womanhood in the midst of tears, and to motherhood in the midst of sighs. The child, a natural occurrence that makes woman ugly and deformed. The act which is supposed to be supremely natural, but which can only be performed at certain periods, in certain conditions, with certain precautions. The terror of pregnancy, or the terror of disease, hovering like a spectre above every love-bed. The so-called supremely natural act surrounded by a whole pharmacopoeia which sullies it and poisons it and makes it ridiculous. What man, indeed, if he only stops to think for a moment, will not admit to himself, when he approaches a woman, that he is entangling himself in a mesh of misfortunes, or at any rate risks, and that he is tempting Providence? And yet he wants it, women want it, society wants it, and nature, if she were capable of wanting anything, would want it too. For that is what love is - the thread of fire which binds the living to the earth and justifies the Creation. You will ask me, dear reader, what I am driving at. The answer is that I am simply registering my astonishment at the fact that an impulse so basic as that of one sex towards the other should be forced by its very nature to cause so many ills. It seems to me that what nature should condemn is what is done against her, not what she prescribes. But no, she reserves all her severity for those who follow her and without whom she would not exist. Unless everything is nature's, and we are mistaken in seeing her in one place rather than another.

to M. Armand Pailhès

Toulouse

Pierre Costals

Paris

27 April 1927

My dear Pailhès,

A letter from poor Andrée H. She offers herself to me in the most formal terms. If she persists, I shall of course be obliged to refuse her, in no less formal terms.

In so far as I understand the French attitude in these matters, I should guess that her reaction will be as follows: 'A real man does not behave in such a way. Either he's a cad, or he's impotent. It is disgraceful to insult a woman in such a way.'

What do you think? But first of all, here is my defence.

Totally lacking in worldly wisdom, Andrée is incapable of distinguishing the element of civility pure and simple, of complaisance, of good-nature if you like, in my attitude towards her. Where I am concerned, she takes politeness for keen interest, benevolence for predilection, pity for friendship. God forgive me, I suspect that at times she thinks I'm in love with her. If I send a book to a colleague with whom I am on perfectly amicable terms, with the dedication 'affectionate regards', it does not enter his head for a moment that I really have any affection for him. A similar dedication would make Andrée swoon with joy: 'He has declared his love!'

The truth is that I regard her with sympathy, respect, and a certain admiration. That is all, and it's a great deal.

All? No, understanding too. I know that people find Andrée antipathetic. They complain that she thinks herself superior - but supposing she is, in some respects? That she is 'literary' - but in fact, although she is stuffed with reading, she is still perfectly natural, completely devoid of affectation, unlike so many of these female bookworms who adopt, more or less unconsciously, opinions and attitudes which they think will impress. Andrée's writing is also revealing: simplicity itself, flowing like water from a spring. The fact is that, unlike all those others, she has a simple, powerful temperament, she's a Natur (and you know that to call anyone eine Natur was for Goethe the highest praise). And I even forgive her, up to a point, her lack of dignity. For after all, the girl loves, and love and dignity make bad bed-fellows. She wants to be happy: what could be more natural? I too, when I want to be happy, go at it as hard as I can. In short, she irritates me but I understand her, and defend her when she is attacked, for I could not swear that in her position I wouldn't be irritating too - more discreetly than she, of course, or at least so I hope.

When all this is said, the fact remains that she is ugly, graceless, badly dressed, and utterly unfeminine. As you yourself said to me: 'She looks like a housemaid.' The human face is a curious invention: it must be very nice, or else!

And then, even if she were not obviously unprepossessing, she doesn't attract me, and that in itself is enough to justify my attitude. There are women who have nothing to recommend them, but this nothing arouses my desire. Andrée's nothing gets me down. Drain that cup to the dregs [An untranslatable pun here: Boire cette coupe jusqu'au lit (bed) instead of lie (dregs) (Translator's note).] - no, never!

I am capable of making the gesture of taking this woman. To succeed in something one despises is a noble and difficult thing - because one must conquer oneself as well as others - but it has always been within my power. To succeed in something that disgusts me is something I am also capable of. I should escape with nothing worse than that deadly depression one experiences after having consummated the carnal act with somebody who doesn't appeal to one. But what I cannot do is feign love. In being possessed by me, she would feel my disgust, and it would stab her to the heart. I should have undergone this harrowing ordeal, and to what end? To make her suffer!

Even supposing she doesn't suffer, should one take a woman out of pity? It's 'a good talking point', as my fellow-writers say. Of course it can happen that one takes a woman because one is sorry for her, just as it can happen that one takes a woman because she has made one angry. But there must be a basis of desire, which there is not, and never will be, between me and Andrée. One of my friends, who is very unhappily married, said to me one day à propos of his wife: 'I go on with her out of pity. She's young. She needs it.' I've never forgotten that remark, which seemed to me to be appalling. But you can satisfy a woman out of pity, even though she makes you unhappy, if she is your wife, if she is part of your life, someone you see continually. You cannot satisfy, out of pity alone, a stranger who repels you physically and for whom you feel no affection.

Furthermore, whatever anyone may say, it really is something to make a woman of a well-brought-up young lady, even one of thirty. It creates a bond, involves risks, perhaps responsibilities, perhaps long-term consequences: nothing can alter the fact that the thing has happened. And so, I consider it the purest folly to incur all this for the sake of somebody to whom I am indifferent. Colette's mother used to say to her: 'Don't do anything foolish unless it's really going to give you pleasure.' And I don't want to feel under any obligations to her.

One final reason, a shabby one if you like, but after all I'm not a saint. By disposition and on principle I have, since adolescence, kept all my love affairs secret, even the most flattering ones. By disposition, being naturally secretive (which goes hand in hand with false confidences). On principle, because a young woman will yield to me all the more easily if she knows that nothing will leak out, and because my reputation as a libertine, since no names can be attached to it, remains on the whole vague enough not to interfere with my enterprises. And inevitably Andrée, who is as incontinent in speech as on paper, would go round advertising the fact that she was my mistress. I have always prided myself on the fact that, with a few rare exceptions, nobody has been able to name my women-friends. And the whole of Paris, faced with an ugly duckling like Andrée, would exclaim: 'Now we know what excites him', and from this one sample imagine the rest!

And lastly, even without all that, there is something else which in itself would be enough to restrain me from becoming her lover: something about the shape of her face and her forehead reminds me of my great-uncle Costals de Pradels, and you will appreciate that I don't want the family mixed up in all this ... Who would have believed it? I too have my scruples ...  [The rest of this letter has no bearing on our subject (Author's note).]

Costals

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

30 April 1927

You have left unanswered the most solemn letter a proud and pure young woman could write to a man. My other letters did not necessarily call for replies; this one demanded one. If you do not answer the letter I am writing to you now, I shall consider that, for the first time, you have behaved badly towards me. It will be the first real crack in my esteem for you.

I am thirty; I have no experience of love, and unless you change your attitude, I never shall. Because you have occupied too great a place in my heart. Who else could love you as I do? No one - it wouldn't be possible. Not one of your mistresses loves you as I do. (Indeed, this is one reason why you prefer them to me.) You are the being one meets once in a lifetime, the decisive, the definitive being who leaves his mark for ever, without whom a woman's life is bound to be abortive, truncated, without flower or fruit. You are my master. God knows I haven't the soul of a slave, and yet I submit to you without the slightest effort or the slightest humility, remaining nevertheless on the same plane as you, at once your subject and your equal. I do not believe there could possibly be a more delicious sensation than that, for a woman like me, if you were my master in the full sense of the word. Which is to explain that I could not, even if I wanted to, offer to another man a sort of residuum of myself, when all that is best in me belongs to you: in my view, it would be a defilement. And besides, I am now incapable of taking an interest in another man. Men who are not you bore me. They do not dominate me. It is I who would dominate them. And I cannot belong to a man who does not dominate me in everything; it would be impossible, everything inside me rebels against it. My destiny as a woman is to love in submission and respect; I must feel myself transcended. You see, even if I were offered the most tempting marriages, now.... Like women who have a religious vocation, I've weighed it all up. On one side of the scale, all the material goods of this world, and on the other my vocation, which is to love you. And my vocation wins hands down.

You are both too much and too little in my life. Too much for me to be able to love anyone else. Too little for me to be fulfilled and satisfied. You give me too much for me to be able to break off relations with you without a terrible wrench. You give me too little for it not to be as painfully inadequate as nothing at all. Your friendship is a torture to me, and the rupture of that friendship would be torture too. You are like a knife in my heart. To leave it there is painful; but to pull it out would be to drain my life away. I am torn between my friendship for you, my spiritual need of you, my need to be loved spiritually by you - and my desire for love, my desire to live, if only for a few months: my flesh, too, has a legitimate need to be loved. If I do not want to lose you, I must sacrifice my flesh. I must die a virgin, or forget your very name. I must forgo marriage, sexual pleasure, motherhood, a healthy, normal life, and exhaust myself in a hopeless passion for someone who is fond of me, no doubt, but who has no need of me, either as a person to give to or as a person to take from. For you do not want even my self-sacrifice. You want nothing of me.

You once told me that women who looked at you with melting eyes 'sent you up the wall'. Have you ever seen me look at you like that? Do I ever foist myself on you or cling to you? If that were the case, I would understand your resistance: one owes nothing to people who bore one. But it is not the case, and I would take good care that it wasn't: a man's boredom is far too humiliating for a woman. My love is a loving comradeship. I do not desire you, but you are the only man whose desires I could accept without revulsion. I repeat, I can only love someone who is superior to me. I would rather be tortured by self-denial than give myself beneath me. I would prefer marriage, even a mediocre marriage, to a mediocre love affair. What then? Marriage, and your friendship on the side? First of all, no husband would tolerate such a friendship. And then, the mere thought of a man touching me sends me back to you, and I imagine all the heart-rending regrets for what might have been.

I have wanted, and I still want, with all my strength, your well-being and mine. Is it possible that it has all been to no purpose? Hurt me, if honesty demands it of you, but do not let me down. Let us assume that in these two months of intimacy there would be no pleasure for you who are surfeited elsewhere; they might at least be a psychological experiment from which your books could reap some benefit. I should be your guinea-pig, a guinea-pig of a particularly rare and precious species: a thinking guinea-pig, a guinea-pig which could if necessary take notes on what it felt and pass them on to you. In default of pleasure, you would be furthering your work, and as for me, if I knew that I was contributing towards it in however small a way, my happiness would be redoubled. And then, who knows, pleasure may come: your catalogue of women perhaps does not include a thirty-year- old provincial girl, as cultivated in mind as she is intact in body (and much prettier in body than in face). You have so often written that a man's only motive in love is curiosity, how could you not feel curiosity for that sort of object? And after all, me or another ...

One of two things. Either you have a genuine affection for me, in which case no harm would be done, for you would know you were making me happy, and your affection would be gratified; and perhaps our relationship, begun in friendship, would end in friendship; love would have been deliciously enclosed between two layers of friendship, like a jewel between two layers of tissue paper. If not, if you are indifferent to me, then what have you to fear? It would cause you no regret to see this experiment detach you completely from me.

I have the impression of beating against a wall. The wall hasn't given yet, but by dint of perseverance.... You have no idea what a woman's will-power can be.

Andrée

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Pierre Costals

Paris

2 May 1927

Dear Mademoiselle,

This is to acknowledge your two March letters in which you complain of my silence, and your two April letters in which you offer yourself to me. So you see that I've read you.

You are obsessed with the idea of happiness. So am I. You have no idea how keenly I feel the tragedy of a situation in which neither body nor soul obtains what it desires. I could write page after page on the subject, even more forcefully than you. If in this matter we are in complete sympathy - sumpathein: to suffer with, to suffer from the same suffering as - it is because, from this point of view, I have been you. Not only during adolescence, bound hand and foot as I was by my shyness and my ignorance of the world, but even later, when I was already a man, during certain desolate periods of my life. True, they did not last long. Today I have everything I like, and I like everything I have.

And so, I repeat, your suffering is not of the kind I need to imagine in order to be able to sympathize with. I know what it's like; it's intolerable, and your situation is intolerable. You are really very unlucky.

That said, if I understand your last two letters aright, you wish to give yourself to me. Allow me to say, dear Mademoiselle, that this idea does not seem to me a happy one.

Physiologically I am somewhat peculiar. I only desire: (a) girls of under twenty-two years of age; (b) passive, bovine girls; (c) long, thin girls with raven hair. So you see that you do not at all fulfil the required conditions, which are an absolute sine qua non. Whatever your attractions, upon which I will not expatiate - you know them only too well - I do not feel capable of responding to the desire which you do me the honour of conceiving for me. Nature (the wretch! ) would remain deaf to my appeals. And, as they say, you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

(Just for the record.) The act which you have in mind would be an immense disappointment to you, especially after the way you have worked yourself up to it. You have no idea what these apish antics are like. A love-scene overheard through a partition sounds like a session at the dentist's. I don't know whether you have ever heard the things a woman murmurs when she gives herself. No? Well, it's a pity, because you would have become a Carmelite there and then. (But let's be fair; I ought to add "... and what a man says when he's trying to pick up a woman?' Surely not, because you would have shot yourself long since.)

I must also put you on your guard against your belief in the efficacy of desire and will-power. You know my views on the ineptitude of women. One example of this seems to me to be their faith in the power of persistence. No doubt there are men with whom it works. But I belong to the opposite species. And I tell you: no, never!

Come now, be brave! Please believe that I am wholeheartedly with you in your affliction. But anyway, why be so set on me when the world is full of gentlemen with multifarious assets whom you could make supremely happy? You beat against me like a bird against the window of a lighthouse. You will not break this window. You will break yourself against it, and you will fall to the ground. Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. I hope I can still count on your friendship, with no ill-feelings. You know I am determined to be forgiven everything.

Sincerely yours,

C.

p.s. - You did not put enough stamps on your last letter. It is the fourth time at least that this has happened, and it's inevitable with the packed envelopes you send me. So I have to pay exorbitant surcharges. You should buy yourself some scales.

to M. Armand Pailhès

Toulouse

Pierre Costals

Paris

2 May 1927

... Another letter from poor Andrée, offering herself right, left and centre. She loves me so much I'm amazed she hasn't yet murdered me. But let her try! She'll get a hot reception. I'm not so easy to get rid of. And I would leap at the opportunity getting rid of her. I don't blame her. I understand her and pity her. She once wrote to me: 'To understand is to love. If I understand you so well, it's because I love you.' Well, I understand her and I don't love her. I'm profoundly indifferent to her; even the thought of making her suffer gives me no pleasure. Which is why I will not give her her two months of love. Or a week of love ('charity week'). Or a night of love. Not even 'an hour with'. [The reference is to a well-known book entitled Une heure avec …. published in the 1920's - a collection of interviews with famous people (Translator's note).]

I wish you had read the letter I wrote her! Not wishing to give the poor girl my reasons, which could all be summed up as follows: 'I will not love you and I will not take you, because I do not love you and I do not want you', I racked my brains to find a way of refusing her without being too wounding.

This is not the first time I've been in such a jam. As a young man I had to get a doctor friend of mine to tell an over-enthusiastic American lady that the Venus of the streets had not left me unscathed - which was pure invention. Three years ago I was pestered by the Baroness Fléchier, a woman of fifty years and more. One evening, around midnight, at the end of a tête-à-tête which until then, by sheer strength of will, I had managed to maintain on an exalted level, she put her scrawny old arms under my nose and said: 'You're the first man I've entertained at such an hour who hasn't kissed my arms.' In this predicament, I naturally had to concoct some excuse. I was ashamed of the one I had used against the lady from Alabama, so I told her that unfortunately I was not attracted by women. Since I keep my love affairs a dead secret, I thought this might get by. She believed me, or at any rate pretended to, and I, in a fit of good humour at the thought of my let-off, went and overdid it by swearing to her that never in my life had I held a woman in my arms! On this basis we remained good friends.

I was loth to give either of these excuses to a 'young' girl, and I wrote to Andrée the most unbelievable nonsense. I told her I only liked tall, thin, twenty-year-olds with raven hair, and that they must also be totally inert. And I told her the act of love was apish. Which it is. But it's also something else.

And to think that it's all so simple! A single spark of desire, and the thing would have happened four years ago. You know my cosmogony? 'In the beginning was Desire.' Yes, and if there's no desire, there's no beginning.... Incidentally, I saw a stunning girl at the Doignys' last night. Such a ravishing little creature! I had noticed her and followed her for a moment last February at the Review Board, where she was escorting a blind man (an orphaned cousin, she will tell me). While everyone else was jabbering away and paralysing me with compliments, she said nothing. To say nothing to me is, as you know, the surest way of 'saying' a lot to me. Simplicity always scores a point with me - especially after 'remarkable' persons of the Andrée type. I guessed from the very first that this child was not very intelligent, because she's too pretty. (You know I've never - never - found the two things together in a woman: intelligence and beauty.) Eventually she addressed a few words to me - banality itself, of the choicest kind. Naturally I couldn't help teasing her.

'You say you've read me. What have you read of mine, Mademoiselle?'

She thought ...

'Let me see.... Ah, yes. Rien que la terre.'

'Sorry. That's by Morand.'

She was quite unruffled:

'I know I've read something of yours. I can't remember either the title or the subject, but I remember liking it.'

Bravo! But her ordeal was not yet over. I threw her a sombre look:

'And ... and ... have you any reservations about my art. Mademoiselle?'

She opened her eyes wide. 'No, you haven't any reservations, have you?' I repeated in an impassioned voice. She shook her head. So all was well.

And how ravishing she is! A little round head, like a bird's, and perfectly made hands, literally translucent at the fingertips, like onyx. The beauty of these extremities, and of her nails, would suggest that she was of noble blood, which unfortunately she isn't.

I contrived to leave with her, and we found ourselves in the avenue de Wagram. Her conversation was as flat as the pavement, and her acidulous voice made a bad impression on me. But I was touched by her little mule's steps as she walked along beside me - I walking like a mountain, and she like a shrub (there's a good pair of similes for you). All the women stared at her - without warmth - and men turned round. And as for me, there was that prompt familiarity which showed that she attracted me. And the old, vulgar vanity of walking beside a pretty girl knowing that one is taken for her lover. 'Yes, but they must realize from the sound of her voice that she's still a virgin.' And that was a bit of a dampener.

I felt slightly awkward not knowing her name. When you desire a woman whose name you don't know, learning her name is a kind of preliminary sketch for the act of possessing her. The name is already a soul. She is called Solange Dandillot. Sol: ground, and ange: angel - the two extremes, and I'm equally at home with both!

And she's the granddaughter of a public prosecutor! That alone would have been enough to make me want her.

She told me a little about her life, with a characteristically French directness, very refreshing after the eternal self-romanticizing of German virgins. I escorted her home to the avenue de Villiers. Good address; that helped to make me love her. (Oh! ...) She tells me she has no girl-friends. And there's nothing better for a girl than to have no girl-friends - except to have no parents. I offered to take her to the Piérards' next week, and she accepted. I wrote at once to the Piérards, simply for the pleasure of writing her name.

Why am I telling you all this? Because here is an angel who will not get away from me. Her wings are weighted with lead; all one has to do is to leave her to tire herself out. And this is the answer to the divagations of poor Andrée, who spends her time seeking God knows what God knows where. The Andrée story can be summed up in a single phrase, which would make a good title for a light comedy: If only she had been pretty.

(I put 'angel' in the feminine. And indeed, since angels are pure spirits, I don't see why they are invariably represented in male form, unless it is to satisfy the unacknowledged homosexuality of the human species.)

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Friday, 4 May

I once showed a letter of yours to one of my friends who is a graphologist, without telling her who the writer was. 'Beware of this man', she told me. 'He is of the race of serpents.' And it's quite true: you are the masculine serpent in all its hideousness. Another of my friends once swallowed a snake's egg while drinking from a well. The egg hatched in her digestive system, and it was not till long afterwards, when she was X-rayed, that they found she had a snake inside her body. In the same way, I let you into my heart some time ago in all innocence. And now I see the reptile there.

Treacherous and hard-hearted killer! Oh, no complaints, it's a nice clean job. No blood, nothing compromising. And a wonderful alibi: 'What, me! After all I've done for her! I who even now am "in complete sympathy" with her, I who understand her suffering so well, I who have lavished encouragement and condolence and consolation on her!' Your condolences make me want to slap your face - your charitable advice, your insulting detachment, your disinterestedness, which is nothing more than impotence or sadism. 'Never!' you say. And why? Because I'm thirty years old, because I'm not 'passive', etc., etc. The most squalid street-girl has enjoyed your caresses as she might enjoy those of any other man, whereas a woman for whom you are everything, a woman for whom those caresses would have been the summit of human happiness, not for what she would have received from you (you're not God's gift to women), but for what she would have given you.... The woman of the gutter or the brothel, whom you despise, gets that from you, whilst I, whom you love with your heart, with your kindness.... Your kindness! What does it amount to? The kindness of a man who watches his friend drown without lifting a finger! But it isn't even a question of kindness, but of fairness. Fairness means responding to the love that is offered to you with an equal love.

'I can only love girls of under twenty-two.' Rubbish! In Fragility, Maurice says to Christine: 'You no longer have the eyes of a girl, but those of a woman. Now there's something behind them' (p. 211). That is not the sort of thing one tosses off idly. One must have felt it. You can only love 'passive, bovine' women? Do you want them made of wood, or stone, or iron, or reinforced concrete? But anyhow you're lying. Remember what you wrote about the Polish girl: 'I love the (physical) pleasure I give her. Even if that were all, it would be enough' (Purple, p. 162). You can only love 'long, thin' persons? That's a good one! Must I remind you of the description of Hélène in Fragility or Lydia in Purple! [A number of quotations from Costals' work, all with the same object of proving his inconsistency, have been omitted here. They occupy two whole pages, back and front, of Andrée's letter (Author's note).] And my 'persistence'? Me, persist! Me, want to intrude on your life, when I spend my own trying to extricate myself from you and you from me; when I have reached the point of longing for you to offend me even more deeply than you have already, so that my wounded pride may assuage the pain of losing you,- when, in exchange for something durable, our friendship, I offer you the means of getting rid of me forever! 'The act which you have in mind would be an immense disappointment to you.' Why? That's a typically masculine idea. Woman excels in enlarging, ennobling everything with her imagination and heart, while man belittles everything with his carping spirit, not to say his natural pettiness. A woman loves more than ever after being physically possessed, especially by the man who initiated her. The opposite is unheard of, if my friends are to be believed. And even if it did turn out to be a disappointment, wouldn't this be infinitely preferable to the slow poison of unfulfilment, which makes it impossible to free yourself from the other person? And even if it did turn out to be distasteful, what a relief to have got it out of one's system at last! No more Costals! Disappointment, I welcome you! Disgust, I welcome you! But of course such a solution would offend your pride. You do not want me, since you cheerfully allow me to disappear from your life, but you want to lose me with all the honours of war. No woman must be allowed to see you as other than a hero. You're afraid of being deglamorized, poor angel. Well, I can tell you that the true hero is the man who dispenses happiness. And if I were to be disgusted by anything, it would not be 'the act of love' with you, it would be your cowardice in avoiding it. My admiration for you has been shaken, for the first time, by your pathetic excuses. Yes indeed, I have nothing but pity and contempt for your miserable affection, which is too lukewarm to assimilate the flesh, for fear of having to cope with its ferments. There's my fertility God! People envy you, and yet your life is mean and shabby - yes, do you realize that? Oh, all those 'superior' men! Impotent parasites! It would serve them right if the common people, the horny-handed sons of toil, cut off their heads - and other parts as well, since they don't know how to use them to give happiness to those who need happiness more than life itself. Ah! why did you not take me if only to humiliate me? You could cure me of a love that is killing me, and you won't! So one must suffer 'nobly', eh? One must be sublime. Monsieur is very strong on sacrifice - the sacrifice of others, of course. 'In any case we'll remain friends, won't we?' In other words: 'It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to give you the happiness you desire. But I do not wish to. Nevertheless I want you to remain in my life, just enough to gratify me without inconveniencing me or complicating my existence. I don't like your face or your body or your appearance; you can give that vulgar part of yourself to whomsover you like. But please, dear Mademoiselle, keep the more ethereal parts exclusively for me. Not to mention (for the record) the right to make you suffer.' Well, I've had enough of heroism. You've cured me of heroism. For life.

I used to have dreams of a man dominating me, sweeping me off my feet. I chose a conquistador, a solitary prince, a man ten times more masculine, more intelligent, more self-sufficient, more wonderful than anyone else, the man who said in reply to the Catholic interviewer who reproached him with having abused the gift of pleasure: 'Well, what of it! I've rejoiced in God's creation.' To him I would have given my mind, my youth, my virgin body, my lips which have never once been kissed. Him I should have been only too happy to obey. For him I was ready to sacrifice everything, my life, even my honour. I offer him all this, and he will have none of it! I foresaw everything, accepted everything: during, the loss of my peace of mind; afterwards, the wrenching apart, his infidelity, his neglect, my despair, my lost reputation. I foresaw it all, except that my offering might be rejected. I foresaw everything that would happen afterwards: what I did not foresee was that there would be no afterwards. I wanted your embrace, and all I got was your 'kindness' and your pity: either a patronizing and paternal old man, or a capricious, teasing boy. My psychology was that of simple, humble people, who believe that desire is inevitable between a man and a woman who are young and normal and fond of each other. I hadn't thought of the affectations of the upper classes and the 'intellectual élite.' There, you make me talk like a Communist.

Saturday

'Never!' Your 'never!' You know, even if you knocked that 'never' into my head like a nail, I should still rebound under the hammer. For if I really believed in that 'never', there would be nothing for it but to lie down and die: there are things one could die of, literally, without much effort; one has only to let oneself go. But I don't believe in it, I can't believe in it. One day you'll suffer, you'll pay the penalty for never in your life having forgone a single desire, not even a passing whim, and for having forced a creature who adores you to forgo a desire that for her was unique, irreplaceable, vital. And when that day comes, Costals, there will be no more 'nevers'. No, I cannot believe that if, one day, I were reduced to crawling at your feet and begging you to give me, not two months, but a single week of illusory happiness, you would refuse me. It's not that in itself it means so very much to me. But to know that it will happen some time, some day. All I ask of you is one week, and then it will be finished forever, if you so wish. During that week I should be capable of burning up my whole life and dying, like Lucifer, in the flames. No, no, no, I cannot believe you will go on refusing me forever. Even if you took me without either love or desire, like a woman you picked up in the street ...

Sunday

It's First Communion Day. Bright sunshine. A dazzling May morning... I wept as I listened to those little girls' voices. A few years more, and, like me.... I flung myself on to my knees beside my bed, and said: 'My God, give me the strength to convince him!'

In a little while I shall be taking this letter to the post in the same hand as my missal. You see what you drive me to. I would not have to write such things if I were yours.

This letter crossed the following one.

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Pierre Costals

Paris

6 May 1927

Dear Mademoiselle,

My last letter was more cavalier than chivalrous. Almost as soon as it had gone, I was smitten with remorse. Forgive me for it.

Logically, that letter must have given you the impression that I was making fun of your predicament. In fact, not only do I not find it funny, but I feel it personally and respect it. However, I must tell you why, and you must take my word for it; for you will never understand how a man of my sort came to find himself in a similar situation to yours. I will not try and explain it to you. Apart from the fact that it touches all too closely on my private life, I cannot really explain it to myself. I have come to the conclusion that it was an ordeal of the kind that initiates have to undergo, or like the descent into Hades of the gods of antiquity who alternated between a sojourn on earth and a sojourn in the underworld.

Years ago, for several months - say six months - I was 'walled in' like you. I had a solid mass of tenderness all ready, God knows, to be given to more or less anybody as long as they aroused my desire (for I have never seriously loved anyone I did not desire). But I could not make contact. And I felt certain that the world was full of girls who would have been only too happy to receive the tenderness and the pleasure that I was only too happy to give them; and they longed for it in vain, as I longed for it in vain. But still I could not make contact.

Do you know, Mademoiselle, I brushed against people in the street simply out of the need for human contact. I really did. I was younger than I am today; my freedom was unlimited; I had money to burn, and I've always been ready to pay for my pleasures - and for the pleasures of those I love. But I could not make contact. They were afraid of my desire, I don't know why. I saw people steer clear of me to whom I only wished to give and from whom I asked nothing in return, except what they themselves desired. And yet it seemed to me that my tenderness must be visible on my face, like perspiration, or like mist on a window-pane, blurring it.... I suppose it cannot be seen in this way. People fled as I approached, like sheep scuttling down the embankment on either side of a road as a car approaches. The whole human race was trickling through my fingers. There was something unforgettable about the expression of fear in eyes one would have liked to close with almost paternal kisses. Those girls one would have treated like goddesses.... I don't know what was wrong with me. Perhaps I had been guilty of some terrible infringement of the law, and it showed on my face. Perhaps it was merely the result of some misunderstanding, some calumny.... All around me I saw people coming together and going off two by two. But I could still make no contact. And it was spring, then summer; these things always happen in summer (August is a terrible month for the unsatisfied): the days are 'too beautiful', nature seems happier than one is oneself - Heaven knows I went through it. And all the time this one obsession, and a total inability to work, to tear myself away from this obsession. Loveless days going by one after the other. Another loveless day. Another day of defeat. And yet it counted, each day counted and brought me nearer to the grave - a right that only happy days should have. I have a horrifying memory of those days, and a strong desire to help others who long to give but can find no one to give to. It is a particularly tragic thing for women, for all sorts of obvious reasons: their youth passes more quickly, they are more dependent, more susceptible to other people's opinion of them, etc. I could almost take you to task for not complaining loudly enough about your case, as though you were not fully aware of your tragedy.

How did I get over it? I don't know. It just 'happened'. How? Just 'like that'. You will say this is a strange answer from a man who prides himself on being clear-sighted. But there it is. Nature, for a time, was against me; then she was on my side. Like a wind that changes during a game: now against you, now for you. Since then, I have put more trust in nature.

Let me conclude with a comparison similar to the one I made in my last letter. A bird flies into a room by mistake. It flutters around, seeking a way out. But there is none. Or rather there is, but the bird cannot see it, because birds cannot see everything, poor things. Suddenly it sees a thin streak of light - a half-open door. It swoops, and finds itself in a lumber- room lit by a paraffin lamp. But there again there is no way out, and again it beats against the walls. That bird is you, and the lumber-room with its paraffin lamp is me (you recognize my well-known modesty).

For, of course, nothing has changed as far as our relationship is concerned. Me, 'take' you (as you so nicely put it)? No, never.

Good heavens! For once, this is a long letter.

Believe me, yours sympathetically,

C.

p.s. I forgot to tell you that during the time I was unable to 'make contact' with women, I had four little sleeping companions, each one nicer than the next, whom I was very fond of. So I was only 'walled in' by a sort of mental blockage.

Costals' Notebook

At the Piérards'! O charming one! I want to lift her up in the palms of my hands, like a marine Venus in her shell. Exactly the right size for me: if she were smaller, I would overwhelm her; if bigger, there would be too much of her. She is much admired, which pleases me as though I were her papa. Dance with her. She dances so demurely that I wonder if she does it to tease me.

She came with the Saulniers. So, neither father nor mother. Divine absence! May it last for ever! If only girls knew how much they would gain by being foundlings.

No profound desire for her body. No sign of the tornado of desire - dry mouth, tottering legs, etc. An urge to say sweet, caressing things - an urge aroused by her, though these words could well have fallen on other ears than hers ...

How like a little cat as she watches me write my name in a book I had brought her, as if she expected to see a little bird fly out of my pen. (Before setting out, I had solemnly kissed the cover of this book that I was about to give her.) Exactly like a cat perched on your desk watching you write. And again like a cat when we were sitting side by side and I felt her body leaning lightly against mine, like a river against its bank.

My hand on the arm of her chair in a caressing gesture, a gesture of possession almost. Once, but fleetingly, almost imperceptibly, she put her hand on my arm. Yet she is very reserved. Obviously she is pleased that she attracts me, but with an entrancing simplicity and naturalness. Not a grain of coquetry, in spite of her looks. Simply, almost negligently dressed. Is this an affectation? She claims not to like social life, not to like luxury, etc. Making allowances for a bit of affectation, which is conceivable, there must be some truth in this, for, being what she is, if she liked social life one would meet her everywhere.

Apart from what she says about her own character (she speaks from the heart when she speaks about herself-like most young girls), nothing, literally nothing memorable about her conversation. Her intellectual education is nil. But so much the better: schooling is for fools. A girl who has obtained some diploma or other, even if she later forgets all she has learnt, will still retain, it seems to me, like a pretty vase which once contained a nauseous liquid, the bad smell of the half-knowledge she once ingurgitated.

She is twenty-one, it appears. Let's say twenty-two. One wouldn't think it: she looks really young.

She spoke of her father: 'Papa used to be very interested in physical culture. He's a real enthusiast.'

'Is he...does he have a profession?'

'No, he does nothing ... ' As she said this, she was visibly embarrassed. She's ashamed that her father lives on a private income! When she pronounced the word 'enthusiast' I gave a shudder, as though I had touched a snake.

She talked of one of her cousins. The fact that she had a cousin seemed to me strange, offensive, almost a provocation. O foundlings!

My behaviour was as bad as hers was good - taking her by the arm, propelling her to the buffet with my hands round her waist, trying to show off urbi et orbi that she was mine. How coarse and vulgar and naively pleased with myself! Like a cavalry sergeant. One often sees a man with a pleasant and intelligent face suddenly transformed into an idiot, his smile at once inane and conceited, his whole attitude at once awkward and affected. What has happened? He has just met a woman who attracts him. And inside him it is just the same. For the apparition of an attractive woman instantly lowers a man's self-respect, as sharply as a lump of ice lowers the temperature of a drink. Which is why anyone who loves humanity cannot love women. But I don't care a damn for humanity, and I love women.

I would have invited her to the cinema, but to have her see a film full of half-naked gigolos - no thanks! And anyhow, it wouldn't suit such an 1890-ish young person. The Opéra- Comique seemed rather to suggest itself. I told her I had a box for Tuesday. 'I'll ask my parents and telephone you.'

The box will be a baignoire,[ Big ground-floor box (behind the stalls) (Translator's note).] and I shall have booked all the seats in it. Unfortunately we shall have those maddening musicians to reckon with, with their passion for noise. Ah well, if words are forbidden, gestures will have to do instead.

Of course, she may well refuse: because she hasn't the same degree of vitality as I have.

Next day - At one o'clock last night, my heart was still beating as fast as at eight o'clock in the evening when I left her. And then I was visited by a dream in which this chit of a girl betrayed me, as though I must realize that she was already capable of making me suffer. Oh, I didn't really suffer, but I felt a twinge.

Waiting for her telephone call: anxious all morning, convinced that the telephone would be out of order just at the moment she called, starting up at every bicycle bell in the street.

The telephone! She'll come! When I hear her voice on the telephone, Priapus himself could not outreach me - whereas, even when I was dancing with her, I could echo the words of the prophet: 'Tyre, though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again.'

I think of the day that voice will get on my nerves when I hear it on the telephone - and I shall leave France in order not to hear it any more.

How disgraceful of her parents to let her go out alone with Pierre Costals! A fine way to behave! Now, if anything happens, whose fault will it be? It's disheartening to see all moral standards crumbling like this in the France of 1927.

Wednesday - Opéra-Comique. Madame Butterfly.

After Madame Butterfly, Ouch!

Yesterday a sergeant, today an undergraduate.

Not a sign of life from the object. Or rather, yes, one: in the second act she moved her chair a little away from mine. Can the object be virtuous? The thought sent a shiver down my spine. I was crestfallen: 'I'll have to start again from scratch ... '

Paralysed. By her reserve. By the absurdity of a novelist kissing a girl in a box at the Opéra-Comique. I wanted to be 'ninetyish', but I had gone too far. A telltale remark by the usherette had revealed that I had reserved every seat in the box; how could the object not have guessed? The absurdity of this too carefully planned evening!

Not even the knowledge of my superiority over her from so many points of view could lift me out of my doldrums.

This knowledge became blurred, and I could only see what made me her inferior. She, a pretty twenty-year-old, and I an intellectual, an old thinking-pot of thirty-four.

Our conversation was a veritable swamp of platitude. I watched her hands, as though I hoped to see her twisting them in her anxiety at my failure to declare myself. When I said: 'It's frantically boring', she answered: 'Yes'. This 'yes' cut me to the quick; doubtless I expected her to throw herself into my arms, saying: 'How could anything be boring with you, my beloved?' The situation became so intolerable that I suggested we should leave. She said 'yes' once more without a moment's hesitation, which cut me to the quick once more. (How childish her 'yeses' are! The intonation of a doll when one squeezes its stomach.) We left, eyed by the usherettes with looks that powerfully suggested this thought: 'Well, well! There's a couple who must have been having a good time. But they can't hold out any longer, so off they go to the hotel.'

In short: a cold douche in the baignoire.[A pun here: baignoire = 'bath' as well as 'box' (Translator's note).]

The evening has made two things clear at least: that she is not in love with me, and that I am not in love with her.

Perhaps it was simply that, like racing cyclists, neither of us wanted to be the first to start. Perhaps her behaviour was calculated, to keep me in suspense. A rash calculation, then, for what's to prevent me from dropping her here and now? I'm not the man to persist if a woman refuses; there are a hundred more where she came from; they're all interchangeable. I'm glad to find that I don't love her any more than I did, and am therefore still free: I can take what I want from this game.

If today's set-back is not the sort of disaster from which one never recovers, it is the rock-bottom from which one may spring up even higher than before. What a leap it will be, with the impetus gained from the recoil. As a matter of fact I'm going to write to her: thus keeping the undergraduate touch. By means of this letter, I shall be reversing the situation, giving her back the initiative, driving her into a corner. My cards are on the table; now it's up to her.

The ethics of honour, or simply the proprieties, were invented to provide an exact counterpart to natural ethics, thus allowing us to win both ways.

If Rosine is ugly and importunate, natural ethics to the fore: 'How could I be such a monster! Me, do such a thing to your venerable father! (or your husband, my best friend!).' But if she is attractive and aloof: 'How could I be such a boor as to remain insensible to your charms? I refuse to be so insulting.'

One finds the two alternatives in every field. If someone insults you: 'What! kill someone for such a trifle? Is that what honour demands?' or else, contrariwise: 'I killed him because I was insulted. My honour.... ' Etc.

to Mademoiselle Solange Dandillot

Avenue de Villiers, Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

12 May 1927

You must admit, dear Mademoiselle, that last night was not quite the thing, and that indeed we provided a somewhat distressing spectacle. You made me very nervous - froze me in fact. Did you do it on purpose? Or am I simply a donkey?

It will come as no surprise to you, I think, to learn that I have a rather special feeling towards you. If you find it objectionable, let us leave it at that. I shall feel some regret, perhaps a twinge of pain, but I do not want to be importunate, and after all, the world is big enough. If, on the other hand, like an intelligent girl, you would like us to try our luck again, just tell me. Only in that case you must also tell me that you will allow me a certain degree of familiarity with you, and a modicum of those gestures which not only Nature, but Society itself, expected of us last night. Those august moral personages are at present overcome with amazement and wrath at our attitude; it is up to us to appease them. But you must make your intentions clear to me, for I do not feel inclined to offer you a purely platonic friendship, and even less do I feel inclined to be spurned by a woman, something that has never happened to me in my life. [This is a lie (Author's note).]

Write to me or telephone me. But I'd prefer a nice letter; letters are more substantial. Not to mention all the advantages of the written word (I know what I mean, even if you don't).

Once more: failing a note or a telephone call from you telling me whether I behaved well or whether I behaved in an awkward and ill-bred manner last night, we shall not see each other again. It depends entirely on you.

Au revoir, my dear Mademoiselle, or adieu. It is possible that I am about to entertain for you a feeling with a touch of profundity about it (but I'm not yet absolutely sure). There is an impulse there that it would be a pity to waste. See if it displeases you or not, without considering my pleasure but thinking only of your own. And give me your answer with the same frankness and trust that I pride myself on having shown here.

Costals

Written by Costals in his diary

Have written her a letter that isn't up to much. How strange it is that when I write to an unknown or scarcely known woman who attracts me, I can avoid flannel only through passion or cynicism. The language of passion being out of the question, this missive is a compromise between twaddle and impertinence. She will enjoy the twaddle, will fail to notice the impertinence, and will telephone me within 24 hours.

(In fact I have no idea. I'm incapable of foreseeing her reactions in any given circumstance. In dealing with her I have the impression that I'm the Quai d'Orsay [The French Foreign Office (Translator's note).]: I do everything gropingly and by the grace of God.)

There's something poignant for me in imagining the happiness I might have given to other women with such a letter but have refused them. And this feeling has a great deal of charm.

The fact that I find it charming ought to make me feel that I'm a cad. Am I a cad? Brunet, at any rate, pays me compliments: 'Don't you think it's terrific to have a pater like you?' In fact, he's amazed: 'Why are you so nice?'

The thing is that there are some people I love and some I don't. That sounds too simple. But it's the key to it all.

No, the heart is not affected, nor the flesh, but something is. Whence comes this obscure and passionate desire to please her? If only I could hear a tremor in her voice ...

Mademoiselle Dandillot did not write a 'nice letter'. She telephoned. The gist of her reply was: 'I must confess that I didn't really understand your letter. But I like you very much. So why don't we meet again?' They arranged to go to a concert. Costals chose the most expensive in Paris, because when one goes out with a woman it does not matter whether a thing is good or bad, but only that it should cost a great deal of money.

The entry of the female chorus conjured up a vision of lady prisoners at the gates of Saint-Lazare: ancient, deformed, sinister, incredibly frumpish. Then came the musicians, squat little fellows with handkerchiefs tucked into their necks like diners: Froggy for ever! [ In English in the original (Translator's note).] The efforts of these poor wretches to look like artists (long hair down their necks, locks falling over their temples) were enough to bring tears to one's eyes. Sitting on metal garden chairs in an unbelievable church-hall décor - squalid 'foliage' and peeling 'pilasters' - they offered a spectacle which seemed so enchanting to some of the audience that they examined it through opera-glasses. [Need I point out that this chapter is a sort of leg-pull written by someone who allows himself an occasional flight of fancy, and that only those without a sense of humour could take offence at it ? One can caricature what one loves all the more sharply the more one loves it. The things I have written or could have written about Algeria and Spain! Sympathy with music-lovers, gratitude towards musicians : such being my sincere feelings, I can allow myself to cut a few capers. And I seem to remember that in some of my other books I have spoken of music (church music, Russian, Spanish and Arab music, etc.) with a seriousness and enthusiasm which should, if necessary, excuse these pages (Author's note).]

'If music softens manners', said Costals, 'it doesn't ennoble faces. There are about sixty musicians there, so I realize they can't all be expected to have genius written all over their faces. But why don't they give them masks, as in the theatre of antiquity, or hide them in a pit as at Bayreuth?'

Monsieur was very fastidious. However, Solange seemed to approve. But he felt that she was in a mood to approve of everything he said. He cast his eyes over the audience, and the extraordinary ugliness of these men and women, the squalid, grotesque and antiquated décor of the hall, made him look away. Literally repelled, his eyes swivelled up to the ceiling, in the hope of seeing the forms of a nobler humanity painted there. But on the ceiling too there was nothing but fussily decorated gilt plaster, blackened with dirt as though by factory smoke. It was obvious that generations had breathed in this hall. If Costals had not been with Solange, he would have left at once: it was almost more than he could bear.

Soon, the lights were switched on and platform and auditorium were brilliantly illuminated. It was a monstrous idea; both, in fact, should have been plunged in darkness.

As there was some delay in starting, people began to grow impatient and to drum their feet. But after a few seconds it died down. Then there was another little outburst, equally short-lived. Odd little gusts of bad temper in this crowd, odd because so brief. Even an outburst of patriotism would have lasted a few seconds longer.

At last the conductor lowered his baton and all the people on the platform began simultaneously to make a noise.

As the musicians frenziedly wielded their bows it seemed to Costals that he could smell the lady-violinists' armpits, and he was moved by this; it was the best part of the show, he thought.

Solange, sitting sideways, had moved closer to him. He stroked her smooth, clear neck. He noticed that she had brought her face close to his, as thought to enter his aura. Little islands of skin showed here and there through her blouse, like sand-banks in a white salt flat. The features of her face that he found unattractive he saw as emergency exits through which he could escape should the occasion arise, or as ambiguous clauses in a contract: that rather heavy chin would one day allow him to leave her with a light heart. He kissed the nape of her neck; she did not flinch (that little-girl odour of her hair!) And his blood stirred like foliage as his hand traced, through her dress, her suspenders and her long thighs. He was surprised that such a respectable girl allowed her thighs to be stroked in public. He had not realized that already she wanted anything he wanted.

'I think there's something ... how shall I put it? oppressive about that first movement (of the symphony),' said Mile Dandillot, who was indeed oppressed, but for other reasons. 'Don't you?'

'I don't think anything.... Look here, tell me honestly, do you like music?' he asked after a moment with a suspicious look.

She raised her eyebrows as if to say: 'So so....' Then she said:

'What I don't like is church music.'

'Ah!' he thought, 'how unaffected she is! The delightful thing about her is that she has no interest in anything. So she doesn't try to dazzle you with specialized knowledge. And also that she hasn't an idea in her head, which for a woman, is the surest way of not having wrong ones.'

He put his arm around her. She was leaning right over now, almost lying on him. Pretending to pick something up from the floor, he kissed her body, scenting the rubbery odour of her suspender-belt through her skirt. From time to time he pressed his face against the nape of her neck and kept it there, as though to absorb, slowly, everything this woman had to give. 'No', he told himself delightedly, 'never has anyone behaved as badly as this with a woman in public!' He had always enjoyed being self-contradictory, and it pleased him to think that if he had seen another couple behaving in this way, he would have found it difficult to restrain himself from calling out to them: 'I say, what are hotels for?'

Leaning back a little, he saw behind Solange's back the young woman in the seat next to her; she was sitting well back in her seat, listening with her mouth half-open and her eyes closed. She was not pretty, but Costals desired her: (1) because he found it appropriate that, at the very moment he was caressing one young woman for the first time, he should desire another; (2) because she appeared to be asleep and this inevitably aroused in him the idea of taking advantage of her sleep; and (3) because it struck him that in order to experience such ecstasy from something as insipid as this music, she must be mentally deranged, and since he only liked simple, healthy girls like Solange there was something agreeable about wanting a deranged woman.

Suddenly the young woman flung her head back in a wild gesture, like the caracara bird when it has finished its call, the very picture of sensual delight. It was obvious that one of those sounds had penetrated to the most sensitive point of her being.

So Costals stretched his arm behind Solange's seat and placed his hand on the back of the other seat in such a way that the other woman's shoulder leaned against it. But the gentle pressure he imparted to it produced no reaction from the young woman, who was completely engrossed in her semiquavers. He gave up. And in any case, since these contortions gave him cramp in his arm, the game was not worth the candle. Anyone foolish enough to imagine that all this was just a try-on, a sly and underhanded sacristan's trick, will be disconcerted to know that: (1) Costals really wanted to embark on a serious adventure with the unknown woman, to arrange a meeting with her, and (2) to do so without attracting Solange's attention (for example by passing a note to the unknown woman behind Solange's back) would have been excellent sport, like one of those feats at the circus during which the band stops, and therefore not at all the work of a sacristan but rather of an archangel.

The noise from the platform ceased and there was some applause, accompanied by demonstrations of hatred on the part of a few members of the audience against those who were applauding.

Thereafter the music took a new turn from which it was clear that this was the real classical thing.

'Well, do you like this!' Costals asked Solange.

'I don't mind it.'

'You don't ... Splendid! Absolutely splendid!'

'You don't understand,' she said, a bit nettled. 'The cubist music they were playing before this gave me the creeps. But this I don't mind.'

'I can see you don't care two hoots for it,' said Costals, 'and that's as it should be. You're a good child.'

'But I do care!' said Solange, with the woman's genius for squandering her advantage.

'No, no,' said Costals, chivalrous as ever, 'You don't care two hoots.' He was interrupted by a chorus of 'Ssh!'

Suddenly the most terrible cries rang out on the platform. It was as though a woman, at the very instant of giving birth, learned that she had not only lost all her money but that her lover had abandoned her. On hearing these yelps, Costals screwed up his face and instinctively tried to block his ears, but the hall exploded in a thunder of cheers. Such profound disagreements bring home to a man that a society is no longer for him. Costals remembered the truly 'immortal' pages in La Nouvelle Héloïse on the Frenchman's idea of music. 'They can appreciate no other effects but vocal outbursts; they are sensitive only to noise,' writes Rousseau.

'I don't think women are made for singing,' said Solange. 'Could that be profound?' the writer wondered. 'But 'what is profundity? A chamber pot is profound, too.'

Raucous voices (young people's?) were shouting 'Encore!' and people were still clapping: public manifestations of admiration in Europe are more or less what one would expect from the savages of Oceania. Three or four times the singers returned to take a bow. And Costals thought: 'Poor fellows!' The conductor, who was an obvious charlatan (for which reason he was admired, especially by the women), left the platform and returned several times, doubtless in order to receive several rations of applause. These re-entries were exactly like those of a clown. And yet the entire audience was in the seventh heaven.

Thereafter, as though to cure everyone's eardrums, the genii of music, or rather the bank clerks, played very softly: it might have been a clyster-pipe band. There were even moments when, literally, not a sound could be heard. These moments were magnificent.

Costals looked round the audience. A third of it was made up of people who spontaneously enjoyed the noise they heard; another third of people who enjoyed it only through an intellectual effort, remembering everything they had heard and read about each piece; the remaining third consisting of people who felt nothing, but absolutely nothing. All of them, however, adopted the most elegant poses in order to receive this manna. Pig-faced men with eye-glasses pretended that the slightest whisper in the hall spoiled their ecstasy. Pig-faced men in spectacles bent down towards their brats (for six-year-old children were to be seen in the audience, evidently brought there as a punishment for some grave misdemeanour) to draw their attention to some sacrosanct passage so that they should know once and for all that that was where they ought to feel moved. A number of women, like Solange's neighbour, considered it unseemly to do otherwise than keep their eyes closed. In unanimous mutual mimicry these people aped one another's earnest expressions, while from the platform the miasma of sound continued inexhaustibly to spread.

They're depraved,' said Costals, casting a look of reprobation round the hall. 'Apart from the simpletons - for the donkey must have his bran. [An untranslatable pun here. The French has son, which = 'sound' or 'bran' (Translator's note).] At all events, an unhealthy place, and I wouldn't like to take the responsibility of chaperoning you here any longer. Shall we go?'

'Yes.'

Always that 'yes'! Had he said to her: 'Let's stay', or 'Come to my flat', or 'Let's go to Kamchatka', it seemed to him that her answer would have been the same: 'Yes.' And when he repeated it to himself with the same intonation she used, something stirred in his heart, like a bird in its nest.

So they left this temple of collective auto-suggestion. Costals remembered that when he was twelve years old his grandmother had taken him to another temple of the same sort. They were doing Le Malade imaginaire. When it came to the scene in which the actors pursue each other into the auditorium, the old lady, who from the beginning had shown signs of impatience, got up and said: 'Come on, let's go. It's too stupid.' An unforgettable impression it had made, on a child who was already only too inclined to judge for himself. There was a family in which received ideas cut no ice.

He could have taken a taxi, but preferred to see her home on foot: they both needed time to recover. He was so confident of obtaining whatever he wanted from her that he thought it advisable to keep something to look forward to: what, after all, would be left once he had taken her? Besides, for him it was a matter of principle that a self-respecting man should let a few opportunities slip. Accustomed to success in everything, he took pride in loading the dice against himself.

Not far from her house he stopped her underneath a street- lamp and stood in front of her, gripping her arms. Assuming no doubt that he was about to kiss her, she took a few steps backwards into the shadow - out of shyness or modesty. He drew her towards him; her arms hung limp, and she did not lift her face. As he bent down to kiss her on the mouth, she suddenly let her head fall so low that Costals' lips brushed the fringe of her hair. Putting a finger under her chin, he lifted her head and kissed her on the forehead; she remained quite still. Feeling a little dampened, he walked on, and she followed him. He had to force himself a bit in order to sound friendly as he asked: 'Do you want to go to the Bois after dinner on Friday?' Calmly, but with an eager expression on her face, she agreed. 'Your nose is shiny,' he told her. 'Powder it.'

As soon as Costals had turned away from her after saying good-bye, Mademoiselle Dandillot, instead of following him with her eyes until he had disappeared, which would have been the recognized thing to do, pressed the button on the outer door and climbed the stairway, the lift being out of order. As soon as she began the ascent, she had a painful intuition that she would be unable to reach the fourth floor, on which she lived, without something happening which she dreaded but could not define. She went up gripping the banister with one hand while the other kept contact with the wall, against which she scraped her hand-bag, tearing the leather on a nail. She reached the door of her flat, like an exhausted swimmer reaching a buoy, opened it, went into her bedroom, and sat down on her bed. 'What's the matter with me?' she said out loud, making a face. A late tram rattled past below; she winced and said, again out loud: 'Oh, those trams!' then winced again on hearing a motor-horn. Then she thought she had left the electric light on, not only in the hall but even in the rooms where she had not been; she went to see. By now her whole body was shot through with the sort of vibration that shakes a steamer when it pitches heavily and the propeller revolves outside the water. She lay down, her hands gripping the edges of the mattress, rolled over first to the right and then to the left, like the carcass of a dog being rolled over by the surf. She got up and removed her dress, so impatiently that she forgot to unfasten it and her head got stuck in it. She snatched a magazine from the table and tore it in two, her face still contorted, then tore the pieces in two. 'Am I going to have a fit of hysterics?' A sudden wave of nausea overcame her, and she felt herself turn pale. She went over to the mirror, overcome with an obscure desire to give herself a fright. Then her stomach heaved violently and sent her flying to the wash-stand, where, clutching the basin with one hand and holding her forehead with the other, she vomited.

When she felt better, she put on her night-dress and lay down on her bed without taking off her shoes. Her love for Costals became confused in her mind with the relief of having vomited. A sentence engraved itself in her head, mysterious and inevitable as an inscription in a phylactery: 'He has given me profound peace.' The whole of her life until these last few days seemed to her like a broad stretch of landscape, even and serene. Then a shell had fallen. And now the countryside was shattered and transformed, but the calm and the light remained the same. She turned over and stretched herself out on her stomach in a familiar, childish position, burying her fore-arms under the bolster to seek the coolness there, as one buries them in the desert sand, which becomes colder and colder the deeper one goes. She said again: 'He has given me profound peace,' and dropped her shoes off by scraping the heels against the side of the bed. Then she went to the book-shelf, took down the novel Costals had given her, got into bed, put out the light, and lay down still holding the book, which she slid under the sheet, a finger between the pages.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

15 May 1927

My Beloved,

I suffer, I am plagued with temptations, I suffer. Yesterday in church, while the priest was reciting the litany of the Blessed Virgin, I interspersed her name with yours. 'Heart most gentle. Heart most mild. Heart most wonderful. Heart without stain.' And I thought to myself that I ought to add: Miserere mei, 'Have pity on me.'

Have pity on me, Monsieur. I am a poor girl. Pity is the real miracle, not Our Lord's walking on the water. Pity is all-embracing and sufficient to itself. I think it can even dispense with an object.

Take me in your lap so that I do not die.

Marie

Write to me and tell me you have pity on me.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Tuesday, 19 May 1927

Your last letter crossed with mine. It has softened my rancour without reviving my ardour. You have a way of rubbing salt in wounds which you're ostensibly trying to heal.... You're a past master at distilling the sugar and the acid at one and the same time, at simultaneously licking and biting, like a wild animal. Are you by nature fundamentally good, but corrupted by a perverse intellect? Or fundamentally bad, but with enough decency to feel some remorse? Do you play at being good, or do you play at being bad, or do you just play? Perhaps it's a terrible law of nature that the superior man lends but never gives himself. In fact you've written as much: 'A creator who gives himself surrenders himself.' But you take the art of self-withdrawal to the ultimate pitch of refinement. Everything that comes from you is equivocal, double-edged. And the disturbing thing is that the first impression you give is one of simplicity and directness. You pour out poison and medicine in turn, almost simultaneously, but in such a subtle way that one is neither killed by the poison nor cured by the medicine. One remains in an ambiguous state which would be suffering enough in itself even if the elements of suffering were not dominant in it. Before your last letter I sustained myself on the horror I felt for you: for the one before was a masterpiece of pure malice. (Malice, that supreme banality, from a person one has placed above everyone else! And all that time wasted in fighting against one another, when it could be spent fighting side by side!) That horror had something solid about it, which I found almost restful. Your last letter - apart from the postscript, which must be a joke - shows so much understanding that one no longer knows where one is.... My heart goes out to you in spite of myself, as from a little sister to a big brother - that feeling which used to be so familiar to me. You stab me to the heart, yet it is with you that I am tempted to seek refuge. Then one says to oneself: 'If he understands so well, and yet does not lift a finger to save me, he is all the more criminal.' One feels more resentful towards you, and yet one cannot help having a sort of insane confidence in you. One can neither hate you wholeheartedly nor love you wholeheartedly: one adores you in a fog of anger and reproach, one hates you without being absolutely sure that it isn't love. Is that what you wanted, you who appear so passionate but are in fact so much in control of everything you do? Are you a sort of satanic alchemist concocting the feelings you want people to have for you with the same icy indifference as you measure out the feelings you entertain for others? Or is your attitude spontaneous, natural, guileless, unaware? Whatever it is, I don't know what you're like to those who do not love you, but I do know what you're like to those who do. Flagellum amantibus: a scourge to those who love him.

As for me, if you're playing some abominable game with me, which at this moment I'm inclined to believe you are (I mean at the very moment of writing these words, for at other moments I tell myself you're merely a child juxtaposed with a man rich in solemn meditation and weighty experience, Faust and Eliakim inextricably merged, in other words a monster - though if you are such a monster you cannot help yourself and are forgiven) - if you're playing a game with me quite consciously, I can only tell you I'm not strong enough for you, and cry 'Pax'. And in any case I'm not playing any more. You were once an element of vitality, of inner fecundity, of active torment in my life. Now there's nothing. You dry everything up, like the wind. You have mummified the tenderness, so fresh, so deep, so absolute, which I felt for you. Like a sort of white frost, you have blighted feelings which, had they flowered, could have brought forth wonderful fruit. So much so that you have relieved me (in this at least you operated a cure) of the misery and the fear of growing old. I wanted to stay young during the time I loved and was loved, because to my mind a woman of forty in bed.... But now, what does it matter? There are moments now when it seems to me that I can no longer give you anything at all, moments when it seems to me that you have pulled out by the roots everything that blossomed inside me, and that you could fall ill, even die, without my feeling anything. Quite honestly, even that time in Paris I wasn't all that sorry to leave you. I went home drunk, as it were, with a sort of deliverance, and for a week I was almost happy by comparison. As soon as I got home, I removed your photograph from the wall of my room. But it was really only a gesture. I put it back later. Why not? It was doing me neither good nor harm. I can see myself writing you a solemn farewell, and next time I come to Paris, asking you to kiss me like a sister, so that at least I shall have had one kiss from you. It would be the only thing I should ever have asked of you. Because I would have you know once and for all that I have never begged anything from you, your company, your friendship, your intimacy, or your love. I offered, and you turned me down; quite a different matter. My pride permitted me to offer. It would not permit me to beg.

Wednesday

As I have said: all I feel towards you now is emptiness, exhaustion - the very thing you wanted. And yet, this emptiness is itself a feeling, is still superfluous in my life. As long as you are still in my life, as long as I have still not cut all the threads that bind me to you, I shall not be available for anyone else. I shall never dissociate - my body to another, my heart to you. And if another should give me or allow me love, or its semblance, I shall not keep my friendship for you.

(Not much loss ... For to have from a man what I have from you is to have lost him already. Nothing in the present, nothing in the future, nothing to remember.... And anyhow, a woman doesn't go on giving her friendship to a man who has refused it.) You are the only friend I could not keep in a normal life. Costals, the friend of the family, my children's favourite uncle, no, never! The reverse side of my feeling for you is nothingness, just as the reverse side of your sensual excesses is Jansenism. You will represent lost love for me, not friendship. You won't turn the torrent into an irrigation channel, nor the wild pony into a plough-horse. And so desperately, at the moment, do I need that normal life in which you can have no part, so desperately do I need to embrace reality rather than dreams, to hold in my arms a man or a child of my own, so grateful will I be to the nice ordinary chap who allows me to love him, that I shall give myself to him entirely, with my will at least. Even more than this, though I don't much care for children, in my desperation I have reached the point of wanting a child without a husband. Because, since the man refuses to be loved, and one cannot bear him if one does not love him, only the child can take one out of oneself. And so, whatever happened, I should no longer need you. Yes, I should infinitely prefer to have a beloved creature in my arms, even if he didn't love me at all, than to have his purest, most exclusive tenderness in his absence.

Friday

I can bear it no longer, I can bear it no longer. A human being has a certain capacity for suffering; beyond that, he dies or finds release no matter how. Suffering cannot indefinitely remain suffering; it changes into something else. For four months - ever since Paris - you have kept me living in a house on fire. Either I had to die of asphyxiation, or jump out of the window and break my back - which is what I have done.

I don't beg, I shall never beg anything at all from you. But I tell you again, solemnly, irrevocably: if I have to give up hope of being yours some day, life will no longer have any meaning for me. After all, Costals, after all, I must live! Is there not a single sentence in the hundreds of letters I've written to you that might touch your heart even now? I want to go on hoping, persuading myself that your attitude is the result of scruples. When you come to realize, in six months' or a year's time, that you're ruining my life, perhaps ... Perhaps between now and then you'll give me your love. Perhaps you'll have ceased to believe that I'm a 'nice person' whom it would be wrong to 'lead astray'. Perhaps curiosity - for my body and what it can offer you - will have got the better of you. If you had met me in a railway carriage, perhaps, for the fun of it... If I hadn't loved you, and had wounded you or angered you, perhaps you would have done violence to me, for the sheer pleasure of overcoming me and dominating me.... (It's true that if I didn't love you I wouldn't want to be yours.) I can still wait. A year or two more, perhaps ... My youth is not yet over. I don't look my age, I've often been told. If I hadn't admitted my age to you, you would think me younger. All you can see in me is a black-clad provincial, an earnest intellectual. Whereas, if I were at all happy, however illusorily, I would still be capable of so much playfulness, such a blossoming out.

With you, as far as I'm concerned, it must be everything or nothing. As I have told you, I no longer have any feeling for you, nothing live, nothing that moves. But if you yourself were to move, it would move. For what is latent beneath it is not friendship but love. It could burst forth again, as a flame springs up from what seemed to be nothing but dead wood and ashes. If the worst came to the worst I could kill this latent love, or at least stifle it, prevent it from coming to the surface; what I cannot do is dilute it. In order to go on feeling anything for you at all, I must have the certitude that one day you will be more than a friend. One evening we exchanged a lot of fine phrases, you and I - especially you - about friendship between men and women. Friendship between men and women is what music is to the instrument that produces it. Friendship between men and women is something totally disembodied and ethereal, something totally different from sensuality, but which can only exist through sensuality. Friendship is no longer possible between us without a pact, a solemn promise that one day it will be something else. One day? When? Whenever you like - in six months, in a year, if that is your whim. But what I must have is your firm promise, your promise on everything you hold most sacred. Then I can wait. Otherwise I can bear it no longer, not a moment longer. Unless I change the present, in which I am torn between hope and despair, into irrevocable past or potential future, unless I pull out the knife, I shall go mad.

A.

This letter remained unanswered.

The scene took place in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. (Each of these restaurants in the Bois evoked contradictory memories for Costals: hours of intoxication when he was there with a woman he had not yet enjoyed; hours of deadly boredom when he was there with a woman who was already his.) Birds could be heard flitting from branch to branch, their shadows streaking the trunks of the trees as they passed. Above a lawless world, they flew to kill time.

He was saying to Solange:

'I'm not in love with you, nor you with me, and that's as it should be. For God's sake, don't let's alter it! So, you've never had any feelings for a man?'

'Never.'

'Never been kissed?'

'Sometimes, by surprise. And I fled at once. But never twice, If you only saw me snubbing people!'

'But look at those handsome young men. Why wouldn't you want them to love you?'

'I realize they have handsome faces. But what difference do you think that makes to me? What connection is there between my affection and a handsome face?'

'And yet I only fell for you because of your face!'

'Ah, but you're a man.'

'Never been deeply unhappy either?'

'No.'

'Never cried?'

'I don't know what it means.'

'Well, well!' he thought, 'here's the ideal cold fish.' At the same time he was surprised that she should allow him to stroke her hair and her legs and kiss her in public. 'It's all very inconsistent. ... But what is consistent, except the behaviour of characters in novels and plays?'

As they were sitting down to table, a small child who was walking past with some other diners caught sight of Solange and stopped, entranced by her face. 'I don't know why children always like me,' she remarked. Costals, seeing the child's expression, understood why: because they were dazzled by her beauty. And this took him back, full of wonderment, to those days of old when beauty had a power of its own.

When the waiter said: 'As Madame wishes...." Costals frowned: this 'Madame' raised the spectre of the nuptial Hippogriff. 'What's at the back of her mind? And her parents'? Mistress? Wife? Bah! Never mind all that. If the Hippogriff rears its head there'll be plenty of time to try conclusions once more with my old enemy.'

Costals had always been struck, not so much by the (perfectly legitimate) tendency of girls to see matrimony wherever they go, and to want men to marry them, as by their obstinate belief that he might consider marrying them, even if such a contingency was so improbable as to verge on the grotesque. It seemed to him that each one of them was accompanied by a Chimera - remember, a Chimera has claws - which they mounted at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all, to gallop around in an element in which they were so much at home that they seemed to be capable of anything - that is to say in a cloud of unreality. He had christened this Chimera 'the Hippogriff', and the word had become a familiar one on his lips and on those of the young ladies who did him the honour of having designs on him. According to whether the idea of a possible marriage gained or lost ground in their imaginations (for in Costals' it was always in neutral) the Hippogriff was said to be thriving or losing weight. Sometimes Costals would 'feed the Hippogriff', sometimes the Hippogriff was 'insatiable', and one of the most chaste of these girls had even gone so far as to designate a certain part of her anatomy, with which she was obsessed, the 'hippogriffic part'. Costals spent his time fighting against the Hippogriff, endeavouring to kill the monster - in other words to convince his girl-friends that nothing in the world would persuade him to marry them. But, like all good mythical creatures, the Hippogriff, brought low, had no sooner breathed its last than it came to life again more fiery than ever. Nothing is more difficult than to persuade a young woman that one has no desire - none whatsoever - to dedicate one's life to her.

After dinner, when night had fallen, they strolled down the avenue des Acacias. Hardly a bench there had not been turned into a bed for a couple glued together; yet nobody threw a bucket of water over them, as over rutting mongrels. 'Perhaps they'll teach me some new tricks,' thought Costals. But no; at each gesture they made he scoffed: 'Why, I know that one, fat-head!' Dismal how limited the register of caresses is. These couples, as identical in their reactions as in their postures, exasperated him in the end, with their apparent conviction that they were the only people in the world, and the smiles they gave you to invite you to admire their happiness, which would end up with the vitriol bottle and the intravenous injection. Truly a gigantic miasma of vulgarity (literature, films, newspapers, sentimental songs ... ) bore down on this unhappy man-woman combination. How bitter it was to be unable to escape it! After the tenth pair, Costals felt paralysed. 'In ten minutes' time, I shall be one of these puppets. Come on, I must take the plunge. Four or five more of these ecstatic couples and I'll no longer have the heart.'

He indicated a secluded path, making sure it was not one he already had memories of (no super-impressions - he was already too inclined to mix everything up).

'Shall we go down there?'

'If you like.'

They made their way through the trees, and came to a sort of clearing, where two iron chairs awaited them side by side, by special arrangement of the goddess Prema.

All at once he had her on his shoulder, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, offering her half-open mouth, not returning his kisses but letting him devour the inside of her mouth and her lips, never opening her eyes, never uttering a word. How was it possible that this slender form had become so solid and heavy in his arms? She was all corseted in rubber, armoured like a young Menelaus. At one moment she gave a little moan, as though she were about to burst into tears; from the way she clenched her lips against his, he guessed that she would one day have an aptitude for biting, and he felt her pointed nails scrape on his jacket, like the claws of a cat he had been holding in his arms thinking it was happy when in fact it was impatient to be off and would scratch him at any minute and escape. She took his wrist and gripped it more and more tightly, evidently trying to stop his embraces but failing to do so; and then a shudder ran through her. And all the time the paradise of her face lay open, motionless, and he was everywhere upon it with his mouth. She did not embrace him, did not even make the slightest show of doing so; she did not move her lips, never once returned a kiss. When he knelt down, she bowed her head completely, hiding her face. That she was his for the taking was patently obvious, but, as we have seen, he liked to proceed by degrees; besides, at that moment, sentiment was stronger in him than sensuality. And all the time he heard her rapid breathing.

From time to time he raised his head to recover his breath. A deep, protective silence seemed to have shaped itself to the very contours of their embrace. He caught sight of a stretch of water on their left that he had not noticed before; perhaps it had approached noiselessly so as not to take them by surprise. It glistened, motionless, beneath the thirsty trees. Fifty yards away from them there was a lighted car, with people who must have been picnicking on the grass, and children playing.

Never would he forget her face when she opened her eyes for the first time and drew herself up - her eyes, normally rather screwed up, but now dilated, immense, staring at him without blinking. He scarcely recognized her; and she was seeing him for the first time; they were discovering each other. He said to her, as though she were really unrecognizable: 'Is it still you?' She said 'Yes', in a voice that was scarcely audible.

His watch pointed to half past midnight. 'We must go.' She got up without a word. Her hair had come undone, making her look like a little girl. She tidied it - in what a silence! It was he who handed her her hairpins, on the tips of his fingers. Then she stood in front of him, as she had stood the other day outside her house, smaller than he, her forehead bowed a little shyly, but her eyes still looking up at him without blinking, literally rooted in his. An unforgettable look, heart-rending in its directness. An unforgettable disharmony - or rather harmony - between her bowed, seemingly submissive head and this look of candour, almost provocative in its pride. She sought no higher than the face that was before her; her world stopped there.

He took her in his arms again, this time standing up, she with her head on his shoulder, he so intent on her mouth that he no longer knew who she was save by the taste of her mouth. He moved her from his left to his right shoulder with the same gesture - exactly the same - as that by which the matador transfers the bull from his left to his right side in the close toreo; with the same pose - exactly the same - as the matador adopts at that moment, feet firmly planted, slightly apart, back slightly arched; with the same grave expression - exactly the same - as the matador wears, and in his soul the same absolute mastery over himself and the other: intoxication and self-possession compounded in him as earth and water are compounded in clay. His domination over her was absolute, and he knew it. If he had said to her: 'Let's stay here all night', she would have stayed. If he had said 'Undress,' she would have stripped herself naked. She was subjugated. But if anything was equal to his domination over her it was his desire not to take advantage of it, or even to hurt her by pressing her too closely to him - for he could feel the play of his muscles, all that strength which, even if he were divested of intelligence, talent, money, would go on living within him for years to come, and tomorrow would make her happy. And his only precise sensations were the hardness of Solange's teeth, which he touched with his lips, and the scraping of her nails down his jacket, like one of those gestures people make in their death-throes.

They walked away unsteadily. He was holding her by the wrist. The lights had been turned off in the Bois; they had to go back as far as the Porte Maillot on foot, looking for a taxi. Now he was holding her left breast in the palm of his hand, and he felt it beat, as though it were the heart of creation beating in his palm. He made a few remarks, about the inconvenience of not being able to find a taxi. She made no reply. The impression she gave was of someone in a stupor, under some sort of spell. A little worried by her silence, he kissed her on the nape of the neck, as if to show her he still loved her. A young man called to them from a passing car: 'Not like that! On the mouth!' She did not laugh.

Still more worried, he asked her: 'What are you thinking about?' She replied: 'About this evening ... ' O little girl!

At last they hailed a taxi.

From the avenue des Acacias to the avenue de Villiers, the taxi brought back a dead girl. No sooner was she inside it than she threw back her head. During the quarter of an hour the journey took she said not a single word, her eyes closed, her mouth glued to his, as though it were from there that she drew her breath and if she left it for an instant she would expire. Once, the taxi slowed down and almost stopped under the multi-coloured lights at a crossroads, and a face only a few inches away looked in at them through the rear window. He disengaged himself and brought her little bunched fist to his lips and kissed her nails and fingers. But then she lifted her face a little for him to take once more, and this slight movement was the only sign she gave to prove that she was not unconscious. In the avenue de Villiers he woke her. He said good-bye to her and added: 'I'll telephone you the day after tomorrow.' She got out without saying a word, like a sleepwalker, or like a ghost.

The taxi drove off. At the first bar that was still open, he said to the driver: 'Would you like a drink?' At the counter, he drank two glasses of white wine. He stopped the taxi before they arrived at his house, to get some air. It seemed to him that the terrestrial globe was rotating far below him, and that he walked stepping from cloud to cloud.

to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

23 May 1927

Well, dear Guiguite, this is it: we're going to drop you. We've taken up with an angel of heaven, and we've decided to concentrate on her, being no longer of an age when each one has her share of us but all have us in full. [Paraphrase of a line from Victor Hugo's Feuilles d'automne (Part I) on the subject of mother-love: 'Chacun en a sa part et tous l'ont tout entier.' cf. p. 347 (Translator's note).] We would come to her half-heartedly, our palate would be jaded - and we want to experience the sensation in all its glory. We expected a long night, pierced at last by the dawn of her consent, but this angel was carried off her feet forthwith: we scarcely had time to desire her. It's very serious; physically not perhaps pure gold, but emotionally pure gold, and if we make light of it that is because it's our way. In short, my dear, we are in the heart of the sublime, and since that is a region where you have no place, we will keep you in suspended animation, with your consent, until the day, which cannot be far off, when our angel in her turn will have to clear out: the sublime, alas, cannot be sustained indefinitely. Upon which, we send you our love, together with some cash (provision has been made).

C.

p.s. We use the pronoun we because we're accused of being conceited when we say I. It's true, we sounds much more natural - one should have thought of it before.

Extract from the Diary of Mademoiselle Germaine Rival, Paris

Tuesday. - My last day here. Beautiful store-house dust that I shall inhale no more, behind these blocked-up, barricaded windows, amid the noise and disorder of crates being feverishly unpacked. And the little wooden staircase with its brass rail, that I shall descend once more but never climb again. It was like a companion-ladder in a ship. When I climbed it, I used to think the house was about to get under way and sail out to sea.

It was bound to come to this. When I took this job, C. did not reproach me in the least, although he must have been displeased: even when he's paying no attention to me, he wants to feel that I'm within reach. My new job was not likely to be more than a mild inconvenience to him, but the merest shadow of an inconvenience is for him a crushing burden. At the time he simply said to me: 'You won't stay a month. Imagine, a teacher! You're not one of them. They'll find an excuse to fire you.' He was getting at me through my pride. Three days later he became even more insidious: 'When they've thrown you out, I might perhaps take you to Italy.'

'Is that a promise?'

'A promise! Does a man like me ever promise anything?'

It isn't true, he promises all the time, but a man like him rarely keeps his promises. And never apologizes. 'I'm afraid I've changed my mind. You must take me as I am. Anyway, it comes under a statute of limitations.'

Even without promising, he put the idea of Italy into my head: that was all he wanted. Every time we saw each other he brought it up again: 'If you're sacked, and if we go to Italy, which, mind you, I don't promise....' It was because of that 'if' that I eventually found a pretext and demonstrated with the others. I could have got myself fired for 'professional incompetence' (in other words, sabotage), but I couldn't face that: I, too, must be taken as I am. The motives of the demonstration were debatable. And anyhow I couldn't care less whether L—'s common law sentence was transformed into political expulsion or not. I didn't like L—'s face. Now I've been forced into giving the impression that I'm 'red'. Mummy is heart-broken. 'You who were brought up by the nuns!' and so on.

In this firm it isn't the manager who represents God for me, it's the cashier in his iron cage: deaf, dumb, blind - God personified. Another woman waiting on one of the benches in the hall, looking for a job, and there's nothing for her. That Renaud girl has just arrived with her narrow shoulders, her little face like a shrivelled lemon. It's hard at first, when you're only sixteen, and not used to it . . . She never stops thinking about her home, her pauper's lodgings, where at least she's not tied down and where she's sheltered from coarseness and abuse. That one over there has something wrong with her machine. She looks at me despairingly, appealing to me to come and help her.

'I don't know what's wrong, Mademoiselle.'

'Your driving-belt has slipped. I'll fix it.'

Now it's Lucienne, the one who says: 'I detest God.' (She'll get over that.)

'Mademoiselle, I've got a head-ache.'

'Go out into the yard, and come back in five minutes.'

'What if the manager sees me?'

'You can tell him I gave you permission.' She goes off. Then another says: 'Mademoiselle, Lucienne won't come back.' (Even the 'reds' are always sneaking on one another.) I reply: 'Of course, I hadn't expected anything else.' I can't get used to acting the part of a red. To show that I'm on their side, I should have to surrender my authority, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

(Yes, Andrée Barbot, you can stare at me, my girl. You won't get me to lower my eyes. You may drag a nervous smile out of me, but no more. You see, it's you who've lowered your eyes first. Nasty little beast!)

The five minutes are up, and Lucienne returns. I know quite well they're afraid of me. And I'm afraid of myself for having come to loathe these poor wretches. But apparently it's essential. 'Regard them as enemies. Be harsh.' They'll be talking for years about the hard-hearted overseer. As miserable as they. Perhaps even more so. Definitely more. But they don't rebel. What a flop, after all the drama! What a lot of 'no's' on the petition! Hardly a single 'yes', and a few signatures without either 'yes' or 'no'. And yet there were a large number of us who voted 'for'. What strikes one about nearly all of them is their lack of courage. Why should they rebel? Not only are they not shocked by tyranny and injustice, they actually like it: what they like is the fact of authority. And they don't like kindness either. If you're not unkind to them, they despise you.

I work with four men and sixteen women here. When I ask myself how many of them I shall say goodbye to, I can think of two men and three women. An interesting ratio.

Perhaps there's a password I don't know which would have made it possible for me to win them over. To be leaving without having discovered it.... To have received no help from anyone.... C., when I spoke to him about it, exploded: 'Me! Secrets of leadership from me! I neither give orders nor take them.' Of course, there's only one thing he wants: to escape.

Next day. - Worse than anything I had imagined:

'You know, we won't be seeing each other for a while.'

He could have told me anything he liked - that he was ill or something. But no, he always has to tell the truth.

'I've found a marvellous girl. Pure gold! I mustn't dissipate my energies right and left. I must come to her fresh. But when it's all over with her, we'll start again. It will be a matter of six weeks or so.'

He wanted to give me a thousand francs. His wretched money! I refused.

'You refuse? Just like an Arab!'

'What do you mean, like an Arab?'

'When an Arab is dissatisfied with the amount you give him, he flings it to the ground. And he doesn't pick it up again. But you'll pick up the thousand francs. Because you're French. Because you're a woman. And because you have no reason to refuse it. I do something that annoys you. To make up for it, I do something that pleases you. What could be more reasonable? '

If he lied, I should feel strong enough to stand up to him.

But the way he puts things, there's nothing one can say. I didn't even mention Italy.

In the end I accepted. I shall buy a radio set with the money, and tell Mother I won it in the lottery. It's a 1,450- franc set, but I can get it for a thousand through Pierrette's boy friend. I asked C. to send me some records too, because he knows more about the latest music than I do.

No sooner had Costals and Solange sat down to dinner in the garden of this bogus 'hostelry' not far from the forest of Montmorency than Costals began to suffer. He hated all their fellow-diners, the men with their 'distinguished' airs ('Dear lady, doesn't this sky remind you of that Canaletto we saw in the gallery at Verona?'), the women with their faces set in a mould of boredom, stupidity and malevolence - all of them eaten up with self-esteem, and never more so, strange to say, than when they were apologizing to one another, all of them entrenched behind the barricades of their private language, their esoteric rites, their conviction of being a race apart, all of them irremediably exiled from everything natural and human, so much so that there were moments when they almost aroused pity, as though they were somehow cursed. There were a hundred and fifty people inside this enclosure, and the only sign of dignity was in the faces of the waiters, and the only sign of purity - a sublime purity - in a white greyhound.

It was not because they were rich that they disgusted Costals, but because they were so unworthy of their riches. Truly, it was a case of pearls before swine. There was not the slightest hint of envy in him, for the good reason that he himself either had what they had, or could have had it if he wanted it. But it was only by consorting with such people that he could obtain the things a writer of average talent can normally expect in France - honours, employment, 'position'. And he was incapable of consorting with them without feeling a disgust that was so painful to him that it was wiser to avoid occasions for it. As a result it was often said of him in those circles that he was aloof. And he was indeed aloof from 'those circles'.

There came a moment when his disgust grew so intense that the slightest pretext was enough to turn it into a physical revulsion. Seeing the expression of unbelievable stupidity on the face of one of these women, an expression intended to make it quite clear that she despised her husband (she was trying to look like Marlene Dietrich, and succeeding), Costals pushed his plate away and threw his head back....

'What's wrong?' asked Solange. 'Do you feel ill?'

He had turned so pale that she was frightened. He apologized without giving any explanation, and changed his place at the table so that he faced towards the forest and there were no longer any diners within his field of vision. It was not the first time that excessive disgust had caused this sort of revulsion. He had turned pale in the same way one day in the boulevard Saint Michel on seeing a parade of students, all wearing canary-yellow bow ties (a symbol?) and walking along with their arms round each other's shoulders bawling something, behind a placard on which the figure 69 was scrawled. They were escorted by policemen, with one of whom Costals had exchanged a smile of gloomy commiseration; he could not bear to think that these men of the people might suspect him of indulgence towards the demonstrators. How, incidentally, had the policeman managed to smile? In his shoes, Costals thought to himself, forced by the exigencies of the service to accompany these brats of the rich and to watch the obscene mummeries inspired by their idleness and stupidity, he could not have restrained himself from hitting them over the head.

He had always been surprised by the patience of those who, in 'good families', were charitably referred to as the lower orders. He had always wondered why it was that the humble people of Europe and the natives of the colonies did not hate more. For it was obvious that many of them felt no hatred; and he was touched by this, without understanding why it was. Periods of social peace, he thought, are neither natural nor logical, however agreeable they may be for some people; revolt is the natural order of things. Whatever its excesses and incidental injustices (lamentable though they be) the day of revolt is the day when the situation becomes normal again and therefore satisfying to the mind: the age of miracles is over.

If Costals had been alone in these surroundings, or with old friends, or with his son, he would have gone to dine with the chauffeurs. Even supposing their language was not particularly fastidious, which was certain to be the case, they at least had an excuse, having had no education, no culture, no leisure. Whereas these people, who were spiritually so impoverished, had had every opportunity. And moreover the chauffeurs were concerned with something other than making a good impression and repeating what they thought it was the smart thing to say.

From time to time Costals gave Solange a sombre look. It was because of her that he was here. This was the price he had to pay for his liaisons with women, unless they were women of the people - the necessity to take them to vile places, fashionable drawing-rooms, grand hotels, night-clubs, theatres, smart beaches. They knew, of course, that they had to affect to despise these places when they were with him. They repeated what he said about them himself, and went even further. Such splendid indignations. But you had only to see them in these pleasure spots, livening up at once, preening themselves, strutting about, to realize that this was what they loved, this was where they felt most alive - even the nicest and the most decent of them, even the simplest. There was nothing to be done about the equation: woman = chichi. And Costals' past was full of relationships weighed down, not to say poisoned, by the shame he had felt at having to belie himself in order to amuse women by accompanying them in a way of life which he despised. Just as a man, thirty years after having left his adolescence behind, no matter how loving and devoted his parents may have been, associates them first and foremost with infinitesimal grievances - 'They made me spend a year studying law for nothing', or 'They made me wear flannel vests at the height of summer' - in the same way, no matter how much pleasure a woman had given him, Costals could not help thinking: 'The days she made me waste (not to mention the money) doing shameful things! For instance, it's because of her that - I still blush to think of it - I spent a week at Deauville.' For the moment he did not hold it against Solange that he had felt obliged, because he was with her, to dine in a pretentious restaurant, but he carefully put aside this motive for resentment - a generous resentment, so to speak - to take it up again on the day he wanted to break with her.

Earlier that evening, as they drove through the forest of Montmorency (passing motorists laughed as they saw him kissing her like mad, and Costals laughed back at them in a youthful, plebeian complicity he enjoyed), he had said to her: 'After dinner, at the hostelry, supposing I took a room ... would you come up with me for a while?' She had answered 'yes'. Still the same yes! And now their dinner, begun in ill-humour, was coming to an end with a sort of secret melancholy. There were times when he had taken girls in a sort of Jove-like whirlwind which left no room for anything but the glory of rape. At other times, such as now, he felt a twinge of uneasiness at the thought that an act of such cardinal significance in the life of a virtuous woman was bound to have so much less importance for him. And then he thought: 'In an hour's time I shall know how she does it.' Thereafter curiosity would cease to sustain his feelings for her, and he wondered what would become of those feelings once they were left on their own.

'Did your mother ask you any awkward questions about what happened between us in the Bois the other night?'

'Fortunately, no.'

'If she had asked you: "How did he behave to you?" what would you have answered?'

She remained silent.

'I can see by your silence that you wouldn't have spared her a single detail.'

'I've never kept anything from my mother.'

'Well, well, that's nice! You really have been well brought up!'

'I've never kept anything from my mother because I never had anything to hide.'

'Which means that if.... Ah! I see you have a grain of intelligence after all.'

Now there occurred an enchanting scene similar to the one the other night in the Bois. A little girl of about five broke away from a party of diners who were settling down to table and advanced towards Solange, gazing at her with an expression of wonder and delight. When her mother came to fetch her, she cried. Thereafter, they could not make her eat, because her eyes were steadily fixed on Solange. And Costals remembered what she had told him about the mysterious attraction she exercised over children.

She went upstairs to the room with great simplicity, without the slightest embarrassment. He was struck by this, and thought to himself (an ugly thought? no, the thought of a man who has lived): 'You'd think she had been doing nothing else all her life.' At first there were great photogenic embraces on the balcony, opposite the trees which glowed a sickly green in the lamp-light, while the sound of the orchestra rose from below. Costals applied himself. 'I must do it well. I must leave her a beautiful memory, worthy of this dear old moon and those rascally violins. Let's get it into our head that éternité is the anagram of étreinte. [étreinte=embrace (Translator's note).] Let's give her a whiff of eternity.'

Now she was lying on the bed, naked except for her shoes, which she had kept on, and her stockings which she had rolled down over them. She had undressed, at his request, without either coquetry or prudishness, with the same naturalness, the same simplicity which she had shown as she climbed the stairs under the noses of the hotel staff. Her legs were a little hairy - a charming trait in a young lady, provided she does not overdo it.

She embraced this gentleman awkwardly and without conviction, and the kisses she gave him - her first since they had known each other - were tight-lipped and decorous. She seemed to be saying to herself each time: 'I must kiss him. It's the thing to do.' But when, with his mouth on hers, he imparted to her the rudiments of the art, he sensed that, among all these caresses, she had at last found the one which suited her, which really gave her pleasure, and that now it was clear that her day had not been wasted. For minutes on end, in this unofficial intercourse of mouths, she gave herself quite as fully as in intercourse under its official form. When he asked: 'Would you like me to turn on the light?' (the first thing she had done on entering the room had been to switch off the light, but the room was flooded with moonlight), she said 'No, please don't', in a new voice, a voice transformed by emotion, the voice of a little girl, at once high and low, as though it came from far away, from a little Dandillot of another age who had remained in the depths of her being. Afterwards he was to call this voice her 'night voice', because she only put it on when they were making love - and the ship of love, when one is on it with little girls, always sails with its lights out.

Now he could no longer see anything of Solange's body, could see nothing of her but her face surrounded by her dishevelled hair, like the heart of a flower surrounded by its petals. It was as if the whole of this woman were concentrated in this great corolla: a woman-corolla.... At first she let him do what he wished, but soon she began to cry. 'No! No!' She cried for some time, with real sobs, while he fondled her without withdrawing from her, and he thought to himself: 'We know all about this.' Partly out of reluctance to hurt her, but mainly in order to keep some of the mystery and attraction for future occasions - while at the same time gratifying his fad of never taking advantage of an easy opportunity - when he let go of her he had not taken the decisive step. It is rare to be able thus to combine pleasure and virtue. Her sobs continued for a while after he had drawn away from her, then grew fainter, then stopped at last; in him, meanwhile, sensation was still as sharp as a fresh wound. They remained motionless and silent, lying there side by side, and he wondered if she was angry. Perhaps she was a false ingénue (it was a hypothesis which his mind could not entirely reject), piqued at not having been taken completely; perhaps, on the other hand, merely a little girl, vexed with him for having gone so far ... But suddenly, turning her head - cloc! – she kissed him on the cheek. The noise of a tree-frog jumping into the water.

He lay there for several minutes, silent by her side, and his thoughts began to take wing. There are elevations, religious or otherwise, which are provoked by fasting. Others - through the identity of opposites - can arise from the digestion of a rich meal, a process that transports us into a better world. With Costals, such elevations often took shape as soon as the carnal act had been accomplished, and they were all the more intense the more wholeheartedly he had thrown himself into that act. This was either because, having used up all his sensuality in the act, only the spiritual part of him remained, or because no sooner was he physically plugged in to a woman than he was filled with light - as when one plugs in an electric lamp - and this light was total: the absolute of sensation followed by the absolute of sentiment (there are certain souls that flow towards the absolute as water flows towards the sea). Almost all his most inspired work had been conceived during these post-coital periods. So now, as he lay by Solange's side, his thoughts turned to Thérèse, and he saw her soul threatened (from the Catholic point of view) without her suspecting it in the least. Yet he had had more than enough pity on her, and was weary of it.

The orchestra had stopped playing. The windows were wide open on to the warm night, and the dark foliage (the lamps had been put out) made a continuous rustling sound as it stirred, like the sound of rain. Now it seemed to Costals that Andrée was standing at the foot of the bed with her tormented face. 'I who feel, know, understand! I who have penetrated to the heart of your work more profoundly than if I were you yourself! And you refuse me what you offer unreservedly to this insignificant little creature, simply because she was born pretty!' Often the injustice of one of his actions would cause him a kind of enthusiasm: the pleasure that God feels when he contemplates his creation. This time, it weighed on him. Nevertheless, he began caressing Solange once more; since it was understood that he was biased in her favour, why make any bones about it? But he made up his mind to write Andrée a nice letter next day. (He did not in fact do so, being exclusively preoccupied with the religious thoughts evoked by a letter he was writing to Thérèse.)

In the taxi, she was less stupefied than she had been on the previous occasion. Several times she raised her head from her lover's breast and gazed into his eyes in silence, as though, after the event, she felt the need to get to know this person to whom she had given herself. And he, suffering her gaze, said to himself: 'My face is that of a man of thirty-four who thinks. How ugly people are who think, or profess to think!' He remained thus, under her scrutiny, like a soldier forcing himself to keep his head above the parapet: the terrible nakedness of a man's face, without powder, without paint, so brave compared with women's faces, which are always patched up. This lasted for what seemed to him a long time. Then she put her head back on his shoulder, as though she were surrendering for a second time.

As he felt he had the right to use the familiar form of address to her, whereas she still said vous, he asked, smilingly: Tu? Vous?' And she replied, quite simply (without in the least meaning to be ungracious):

'I don't know how to say tu.'

He liked this remark, in which he saw a mixture of shyness and pride: the remark of an infanta.

Suddenly, after a silence, she asked him point-blank:

'Do you really love me?'

Rather foolishly, without thinking - and yet perhaps because he still had the feeling at the back of his mind that she might not be sincere - he said to her:

'It's I who should be asking you that question.'

She leapt up at this, and with a violence that he had neither seen nor suspected in her, she said:

'You have no right to say that to me! Haven't I given you enough proofs?'

She had drawn herself up like a little snake.

'You have no right!' Never would he have believed that she could use such a phrase. Might she be capable of passion? He also asked himself, with typical male cruelty, 'What proofs?'

'I,' she went on, 'I shall love you always, I know I shall And you, how long?'

'A long time.'

She made a face. Then he said to her:

'When I was sixteen - sixteen, do you hear - I had a little girl-friend of fourteen. I loved her as one loves for the first time, which is to say with a fervour one never recaptures.

And of course she said to me exactly what you've just said, which is a classic remark: "With me, it's for life. What about you?" And I replied: "For as long as possible." I loved her madly, and I was only sixteen; but I was as clear-sighted as that. I need scarcely add that six months later we had forgotten each other. You see, I like reality. I like to see things as they are,' he insisted passionately. 'People say one's unhappy when one sees things too clearly. I see everything clearly, and I'm very happy. But because I know what reality is, I know that one must never commit the future. What will your feelings be in a year's time? In six months? In three months? What will mine be? That's why I don't give you that "forever", which nevertheless I find quite natural on the lips of a young girl, and which touches me profoundly. I merely say "a long time", and I say it to you as a man who knows what "a long time" means. And it means a great deal. To know that one will love someone for a long time is a great deal, believe me.'

She did not answer.

When they parted, he wanted to give her some sign of encouragement, and said to her with a nice smile:

'I don't feel a bit tired of you, you know ... '

Later, he felt sorry for having doubted her. Not that he had doubted her in the strict sense of the word. He believed her to be pure of heart; he knew her to be intact of body. But he found it impossible, when faced with the 'no, no's' and the tears, and even the night voice, that unforgettable little schoolgirl's voice, not to think of all the counterfeits of these that abound among the fair sex. He was so convinced that Solange was 'genuine' that he found it almost vile of himself to have occasional doubts about her, even if these doubts were, so to speak, forced on him. For Costals' past injected into the present a whole accumulation of knowledge and experience that modified his vision of Solange, and there was nothing to be done about that. Nothing could alter the fact that for him she was only the latest, whereas for her he was the first. Nothing could alter the fact that he had known a great many copies before he knew the original, and that the original seemed less original after these copies. And whereas his attitude towards Andrée caused him no compunction, he felt guilty towards Solange, although he had done her no other wrong than being what he was. For it is a fact that everything conspires to the advantage of that which we love.

But there was another feeling that tended to make him doubt Solange a little: he was astonished that she could love him. Costals was devoid of literary vanity, and one of the things he liked most about Solange was that she never spoke to him about his books and never uttered the faintest word of admiration. His vanity as a male, on the other hand, ran to extremes. His first impulse was to assume that no woman he desired would refuse to give herself to him. But whenever one of them fell into his arms, at the same time surrendering something of her heart, he was taken aback, and repeated to himself the remark of Louis XV: 'I find it hard to understand why they love me so much.' In this way he savoured alternately the pleasure of believing himself invincible and the pleasure of proving himself humble: there is a time for everything, says the sage. That Solange could really love him he found hard to believe. 'She's incapable of appreciating what is great and superior in me. Poor darling, she has the brain of a water-flea. So what can she find to love in me? What is there about me, physically, that's worth loving? It's not at all clear.' This was to ignore the fact that women, unlike men, go from affection to desire. Thus two elements played a part in his distrust: one which could be stigmatized in these terms: 'the disillusionment of a cynic who corrupts simple innocence', and another which it is difficult not to describe as genuine modesty. So his feelings were partly good and partly bad. Like three- quarters of our feelings. Which is what society - which prefers people to be either black or white, so that one 'knows where one is' with them - will not have. But what nature - which loves nothing so much as confusion - will.

'Nothing can alter the fact that I am by nature clearsighted - and clear-sighted always,' he said to himself as he thought of the 'long time' he had opposed to her naïve assurance. 'And moreover nothing can possibly make me want not to be. My clear-sightedness frightens people, but it never frightens me. I'm amused by it; it is a monster I've tamed.

But why "a monster"? Call it rather my tutelary spirit. It's thanks to this clear-sightedness that I lead a thoroughly intelligent life, doing only what I know I can do, and concentrating on that, never going off on the wrong tack, never wasting time, never being taken in either by others or by myself, never letting people cause me suffering and only very rarely being even put out by them. And as this lucidity of mine is combined with all the powers of imagination and poetry, through poetry I can enter the domain of dreams, and through the imagination I can enter the feelings of people who are not clear-sighted; and this allows me to take controlled holidays from my clear-sightedness when I think fit, and thus to win both ways. My life is not a superior life because, although my senses never fail me, my mind, my character and my heart are full of lacunae; but these elements are such that a superior life could be built upon them. As for my dear Dandillot, who is not me, I must see that she does not suffer on my account, and I shall do this sometimes by lying to her and sometimes by not lying to her, in short by letting myself be governed not by principles but by expediency, by flair and tact, with my affection as my guide. It is possible that in other circumstances I might muffle her up with illusions. But I had, at least once, to make her face up to things as they are, even though in future I may conceal from her a spectacle which it would be in the worst possible taste to impose uninterruptedly on a girl of twenty.'

to Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

Pierre Costals

Paris

19 May 1927

Mademoiselle,

I have had great pity on you before God of late, as you requested me to, and a few hours ago, by virtue of some rather special circumstances, I saw your soul in a dream, and I saw that it was in grave peril. You are like those people who, on the eve of a revolution, believe they are safe because they are liberals. 'Afraid of the revolutionaries? Why should I be? They know I'm with them at heart. And besides, if they condemn me, they'll have to condemn everybody.' The revolution occurs; they are left in peace; they are exultant. Then they are arrested and killed. You sleep in peace, seeing yourself surrounded by such a crowd of petty sinners and false innocents that God must be obliged to spare them. But you ignore the example of the Jews, who all perished in the wilderness save two, and the whole of Scripture, which tends towards the establishment of this doctrine. Jesus Christ tells us that 'few are chosen'; he warns that the way is narrow and rare those who will find it. Christians read this with indifference: they think it's all part of Christ's rhetoric.

A multitude of the damned can be seen in the churches at eleven o'clock Mass, genuflecting and putting money in the plate. Their extenuating circumstances are granted by the Church itself, which has left them in their fools' paradise in order to keep up the numbers on its lists. The contemporary Church has no more right to invoke the example of a St Augustine or the doctrine of a St Thomas without making itself ridiculous than the dead humanism of our universities has the right to claim descent from Greece or Rome: the ancient world and the Middle Ages were tabernacles of a spirituality which no religion or philosophy has been able to continue or to transform.

The Church of Christ lasted a thousand years or so. I believe (erroneously perhaps) that it survives only in monasteries and convents. I dreamed of seeing you completely cut off from the outside world, in a place where the affairs of the world would revolve beneath your feet, as the affairs of heaven revolve above our heads. Even if nothing in Catholic doctrine were true, you would have given me thereby a noble idea of yourself, and that was not to be despised. If you were damned in any case, it were better to be damned in a lofty and singular quest than in the squalor that surrounds you now. But you do not seem to have followed the advice I gave you, to go and see a priest and let him probe your hidden depths. I will not, therefore, pursue the matter. I cannot waste endless time on you. The living, who merely pass by, can only interest me in passing. And besides, if you yourself turn aside from this path, so much the better: it is a sign that God did not intend you for it. There may be false stirrings of life in a dead soul: some people know this - from experience. I may have been mistaken about you.

You tell me you suffer. That could stand you in lieu of prayer, if you had no other way. Suffering is the prayer of those who neither think nor pray. I do not know the nature of your temptations, but I believe that to be tempted is a sign of God's grace; if you did not interest him, he would leave you in peace. Perhaps, in the state of peril in which I saw you, this temptation will save you. Even supposing that the temptation means not God's presence but his absence, there is probably not a single saint who doesn't feel God appear and disappear in his soul in rapid succession. The soul is like a sunny sky dotted with little clouds which veil it from one moment to the next.

I too have my temptations regarding you, and I am torn between them: the temptation to point you towards God, as one takes a dog by the collar and points it: 'Fool, that's where it got up', and the temptation to abandon you to your nothingness - which you will feel at last when I am no longer there.

Believe me. Mademoiselle, yours sincerely,

Costals

I must remind you that I am not a believer ... If I looked for God, I should find myself.

I reopen my letter to add this. I make no secret of the fact that last night, when I wrote the above, I intended to abandon you. You had let me down. But the other alternative remains. I shall have pity on you next Saturday at six o'clock in the evening; and I specify this hour because I shall be with someone from whom I can draw this power of pity. But beware - I shall have pity on you in a certain way, and in a particular direction. And you have no idea of the mysteries of pity. I know all about them.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

1 June 1927

'Another endless letter! The girl must be mad! God, how mad the girl is! And how right Ecclesiastes (or Solomon) is when he speaks of the misfortune of falling into the dreams of an ardent woman!' That's what you're thinking, isn't it? Well, no, for once I'm not going to bore you this morning. I feel a little better.

Why do I feel better? I have the impression that in my last few letters I've rambled a good deal, and that now I see the situation more clearly for what it really is. First of all because I went to the hairdresser two days ago, which means that my hair now looks nice (it takes at least that long!), and looking at myself in the mirror with the thought that these horrible days must have added ten years to my age, I find my face more or less the same (indeed it's unbelievable how often I've been told since my trip to Paris how young and smart I look). And then because the weather has become overcast, there's no longer that intoxication of summer that seemed to mock my suffering - today's weather is like autumn, and next autumn, for me, will be different: I shall have other clothes than those in which I've suffered so much ... a kind of superstition. ... Hope has hoisted sail once more. Would you ever have thought that dull, grey weather could bring the promise of happiness?

Hope ... promise.... That pact of hope constantly renewed with myself! That perpetual waiting! For four years now I've waited for a sign from you. I've given you everything, and had nothing in return. You haven't kissed me once in four years. If I were dead, would you give me a kiss at last? Why, oh! why, since it would cost you so little to leave me at least one souvenir which I passionately desire, when you have hundreds of such souvenirs and I shall never have another in the whole of my arid life? For one spontaneous kiss from you I would have given ten years of your friendship without a moment's hesitation.

There's an anomaly in your attitude: you love and yet you give nothing. When one loves, one gives; it's a natural impulse. Your motto seems to be: 'Avoid giving at all costs.' It's so abnormal that I might be tempted to believe that you do not love me. But there's no question that you love me; I should have to be very blind not to have noticed it: women have an infallible instinct in these matters.

You tell me you do not love me. You try as hard as you can to persuade yourself of it. If I knew that you didn't love me, if I was certain that making love to me would be a penance for you, then I would give up of my own free will, for I'm too proud ever to beg for anyone's love. But there it is. I'm certain that the opposite is the case. I know that, without having a devouring passion for me, you love me all the same. Was I dreaming when I read the tenderness in your eyes? Did I dream that the idea of our marrying crossed your mind when we visited the flat in the rue Quentin-Bauchart? Did I dream that you held my hand in yours on the 16th of May last year, that you held my arm and pressed close to me as we walked that day in the square des Etats-Unis, that you confided in me that same day, poured out your heart to me (about your regrets at not being a father)? Did I dream that once, when you were late for an appointment with me and I asked you why, you replied: 'Ask me rather why I came at all!' Do you know what made me aware of your affection? In May 1926, our legs touched in a taxi, and at once you drew yours away, sharply. I realized then that you loved me with your soul. 'The woman one does not enjoy is the woman one loves.' (Baudelaire)

If you are so sure that you do not love me, kissing me would be like kissing a stone. Why, then, do you resist so vehemently? Why don't you invite me to your house any more? Why don't you take me somewhere where we could dance and drink champagne? Then we would see what happened. It really is too stupid of you to pretend that you don't desire me, when you do everything in your power to exorcize this desire.

For four years, in your company, I have felt overwhelmed by your shyness. You want to make an advance, but you dare not. With women whom you don't love with your soul, you can dare all right. With me, you lose your head. Perhaps, too, you think me frigid! It was delightful for a time, but it has gone on too long. It's too absurd to be afraid of me.

If I were to take you at your word, if - however improbable it may seem - you did not want my love, there would be only one way of breaking it off, and that would be to convince me that you do not love me. But you couldn't because you do love me. You see what an inextricable jungle-growth you've got yourself entangled in! Inextricable for you - though a child of two could get out of it. You make me smile, you know. It just shows that a person of genius can be at the same time an idiot. Nothing could be more ludicrous than your attitude towards me - always on the defensive.... You poor, poor child!

Do, please, let yourself go at last. You hold yourself back, and you suffer from doing so. Is this wise? How can you allow the light I kindled in you to fade? How can you return to your barren, loveless solitude, when salvation is there, close by, with its naked arms outstretched, and its fresh face, and all the deep-down things inviolate? Never again will you find a woman like me. Never again will God hold out his hand to you.

Yours,

Andrée

P.S. My friend Raymonde has just left. I have always kept her informed - in a general way - about our liaison. She asked me how things stood. When I told her there was nothing new, she exclaimed: 'Don't you realize that he couldn't care two hoots about you?' When I explained to her that your reserve was a proof of your love, she laughed in my face. I'm ashamed of being a woman when I see women as coarse as that. However, I would like you to authorize me to write to her - after a suitable lapse of time - and tell her that at last you have made me yours. Thus I shall feel more at ease when I speak to her again. Yes, authorize me to say, not only to Raymonde but to one or two other reliable friends: 'Costals is my lover.' You would be giving me the shadow of that happiness of which you refuse me the substance. And after all, you owe me that much at least.

This letter remained unanswered.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Thérèse Pantevin

La Vallée Maurienne

Sunday

Yesterday, Saturday, at the hour when you were having pity on me - six o'clock - I was seized with violent palpitations. The Angelus went, and I knew then, by an inspiration from you, that those who were ringing it were among the 'false innocents', that they were the Gentiles preparing to go through the pretence of celebrating Corpus Christi tomorrow with lying pomp, and I was horrified by the noise of the bell. I was seized with a violent shuddering - my body quivered like the withers of a horse - and fierce stirrings of the bowels. Then I gave a loud shepherd's cry - they must have heard it as far as Noison's. I began to groan, and lay down prostrate on the floor with my arms outstretched; I felt it was the only place where I would be at ease. I shook my head from side to side, as though dazed and befuddled by the state I was in. Meanwhile, as soon as I had prostrated myself, little Marcel (my sister's child, he's two) began to cry so loud that they couldn't pacify him, so I had to sit up and fondle him. Then I lay back on the floor, which made the child start crying again. I took him on top of me, and he stayed there quietly. But I went on groaning, I felt my bowels stirring, I said all sorts of things, about the spirit of Babylon, you, our marriage, 'Sigara, who is the symbol of thirst', Lucifer, 'created in rejoicing'. I pressed little Marcel against my breast, against my face, between my legs, I kissed him over and over again, he splashed about in me, he was our son, I was drunk with child. Mamma wondered if they ought to call the priest, but Barbiat said no. So then Mamma got the missal and read the prayers of the Mass, the Te Deum and the Magnificat. After a time Barbiat took little Marcel away from me. Then I began punching myself repeatedly and violently on both breasts at once, and that relieved me a little. I was still talking, but I can't remember anything I said. I hid in a corner. I crawled about on my knees. I clapped my hands. I asked Barbiat to breathe on me, which he did, and then the same thing with Mamma. All the time I was crying to myself and moaning: 'Ah, I'm dying.' I must have looked frightful (it's a pity you can't see how ugly I am). Eventually, when I had suffered enough, I told Barbiat to beat my breasts with a bundle of firewood. He did so, very hard, and I was delivered.

My beloved, I can say no more. Let me know when you have another great pity on me. Oh, how I long for it! But not for a few days - it's too shattering for me.

Marie

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