Henri de Montherlant

PITY FOR WOMEN

The Girls Quartet #2

'God created everything for man's happiness. There's no sin in any of it. An animal, for instance, will sleep in the Tartar reeds or in ours. It makes its home wherever it happens to be; it eats whatever God provides.'

TOLSTOY, The Cossacks

(Spoken by a Chechen peasant, the Chechens being at war with the Tartars.)

In the town of N—, in 1918, there was a little girl of twelve whose family described her as a 'quiet little thing'. She had no friends, and played silently at home by herself for hours on end; she sat through whole meals, too, without saying a word. She was known as a tomboy because she liked going for long, solitary walks or bicycle-rides, and showed little enthusiasm for girlish things. Also because she was brave: in boats, in the dark, or left by herself in some lonely shed, she never showed the slightest fear. And yet she was shy. If the maid forgot to serve her at dinner, she made no complaint and went hungry.

At school she was a fair pupil, though this must be qualified by the fact that she was a year behind. From twelve to fourteen, attempts were made to teach her the piano, without success. From fourteen to sixteen she was tried on the violin: a waste of time. After these four years and the expenditure of thousands of francs, it was at last conceded that this child of silence had not the slightest gift for making noise; later, a wireless set had to be got rid of, so greatly did this machine exasperate her. Then her father, who could wield a pencil rather nicely, thought he would teach her drawing: soon he had to lay down his arms. The fact was, she had neither inclination nor aptitude for anything. M. Dandillot became worried. In order to get her to 'acquire a personality' he would leave her for a whole hour, her cheeks on fire, sweating over a letter to an old uncle or to her godfather: her instructions were to write something 'original'. 'Original'.... M. Dandillot himself was considered something of an original. The son of a public prosecutor, after a year at the bar he had abandoned pettifoggery and with it any idea of ever making money, although his own fortune was no more than adequate. From the earliest days of French athleticism (he had been twenty- one in 1887) he had developed a passion for these things and had founded a sports club in N—. He was particularly keen on swimming, of which he had become the apostle. In his middle years, since he was by no means unintelligent or uncultivated, he had given up sport itself for the wider problems of physical culture, and resigned the presidency of his club - which from then on he condemned as heretical - to throw himself heart and soul into the natural health cults which were then taking root in France: a photograph taken at the Institute of Athletics in Rheims and published in l'Illustration around 1910, shows M. Dandillot heavily bewhiskered and clad as a Greek shepherd. He solemnly broke with his worldly life, went so far as to get rid of his dress-clothes - symbol of all the sins of Babylon - and thereafter concerned himself solely with the open air, the sun, diets, measurings and weighings, immersed in terrifying charts of all the things man must and must not do in order to remain 'natural', and in what might be called the hard labour of the 'natural' life - in short, forever harping on nature, although he could reach it only through the most preposterous artifices, which would have poisoned the life of any reasonable person, even supposing they could be reconciled with the obligations of a normal existence, which clearly they could not. At the age of fifty, still pursuing the path of 'purity', M. Dandillot began to 'tolstoyize': man, in order to be truly 'natural', must also remain chaste, and love his fellow men; thus the hatred M. Dandillot had always had for his father, from being a simple filial hatred, became as it were sanctified by the heads which the prosecutor had been responsible for lopping off. Shrewd, deceitful, stubborn, naïve, with a mind dappled like a panther's skin with patches of luminous intelligence and patches of dark stupidity; a bachelor by vocation though a father and a husband, with the qualities and eccentricities of the bachelor; and singularly uncreative, to the extent of not having managed by the age of sixty to deliver himself of the modest little treatise on the 'natural life' which he had conceived before the war and which would have been a mere compilation of his favourite masters.... But we shall not describe M. Dandillot further; he will do this for himself in what is to follow.

In 1923, Solange's elder brother died in Madagascar, where he had gone farming, and the Dandillots moved to Paris. Solange was made to take a domestic science course.

Nubile at fifteen years and three months, she had gone through puberty without any of the turmoil - the sensation of being physically sullied, the depression, the indignation, the secretiveness, the anxious, furtive glances at the parents, the hurry to get away from them when they are together, the vows to renounce love 'forever' - which one often comes across in pure and sensitive girls at that age. When she had asked her mother how babies were born, she had done so out of boredom, not because she was really interested. Her hair, once golden, had gradually turned black. Her eyes had narrowed a little, and they had a bluish tinge which appeared behind her dark lashes like the Mediterranean behind a curtain of pines. She was so pretty that hardly a day passed without her hearing exclamations from the men who passed her in the street. Like the two workmen in Toulon, for instance: 'Take a look at that! Isn't she a beauty?' It sometimes happened that Southern labourers would stop working one after the other as she went by. For it was in the South particularly that she was a success: she was too natural for the Parisians, who only like grotesquely 'dolled up' women. Yet she remained quite unspoiled. She was always in the back row at church, always a little in the background at family gatherings. And it was incredible to see this ravishing girl going out in the morning wearing an old, dowdy, worn-out dress. Never in her life had she bought a fashion magazine, though if she chanced to find one she would read it with apparent interest. It was not that she did not enjoy being attractive, but her enjoyment was not sufficient for her to go to great lengths in order to achieve it; when she had passed a damp finger along her eyebrows and her tongue over her lips, she felt she had done a great deal. She never went to the hairdresser, wore no jewellery, and did not use scent or lipstick - only powder, which she put on badly. And this was neither affectation - which would have implied pride - nor a matter of principle - for she did sometimes wear jewellery or paint her lips for a few days, or spend a whole afternoon doing her nails, carefully getting together everything she needed and then, when she had finished, scraping off all the varnish and going up to the attic to ruin her hands rummaging in old packing-cases. She always wore royal blue, and nothing would make her give it up: she was greatly praised for this. But one day she set her heart on a wine-coloured dress.

The Lycée at N— was strictly run. In the top form, only one in every six girls had a lover. Solitary practices were unknown and Solange did not even discover what they were until she was twenty-one. Only a few of the girls had 'crushes' on others, and all of them, without exception, were from convent-schools. When Solange, one day, had been caught letting another girl smother her with kisses, her 'But, Madame, there's nothing wrong with it between girls' had been the cry of innocence itself. Once she knew, she repelled the girl's advances. But she remained the ideal confidante to all her friends, who were soothed by her placidity and her good advice. She listened to everything they told her and never said a word about herself. If the truth be told, there was not a great deal to be said.

As for men, nothing. Purveyors of flattery were sent packing, often with a flea in their ears. She liked dancing, but regarded the men who held her in their arms merely as a means of achieving that pleasure: she would as soon have danced alone. In a little book with a rose-pink cover she kept a list of the houses where she had been invited to dances, but she did not keep a list of her partners, even in the cotillions; she merely noted down indiscriminately the names of the young men and girls of her acquaintance whom she met at such parties. When first one, then another confessor in Paris (the provincial ones had been most correct) asked her questions which displeased her, she stopped going to confession altogether. Her religion became that of most Catholics: going to Mass on Sunday. She had no faith, and her life was in no way guided by religion; yet if she had missed Sunday Mass it would have worried her, and she would have gone into a church for a few moments. The habit of not going to confession increased yet further the power she had of keeping her intimate thoughts to herself and also of pondering over everything she did; instead of casting it all into a dark corner, she held on to it and turned it over in her mind. From that day (when she stopped going to confession), she became more intelligent and more conscientious. What may seem strange is the fact that she realized this.

Her mother and father loved her dearly, and with some intelligence. She loved them too in her way, which at first they had found some difficulty in getting used to. No sudden bursts of affection towards them, never a charming word, never a thoughtful 'attention'. She even disliked the 'attentions' they had for her: 'I hate being fussed over.' If her mother stroked her hair, she would frown and narrow her eyes even more. Her 'No's' were as famous as her silences: she would wake from her dreams at night shouting 'No! No! No!' As a baby, if someone merely glanced at her without saying a word she would scream 'No!', and she used to throw a tantrum immediately on entering the street where her grandmother lived, because the old lady was liable to paw her with maniacal affection. At the Lycée, she had not remained a boarder very long because she pined for her parents so. Yet when her mother came to visit her, the child would sit by her side in the parlour for half an hour without saying a word: it was her way of loving her mother. Her father nicknamed her 'Miss Silence', or sometimes just 'Silence'. 'But why didn't you ever say anything nice to me in the school parlour?' 'It didn't occur to me.' Once, when her brother had tortured a kitten in front of her, squeezing its neck until it no longer gave any sign of life, she had watched it all with her eyes starting out of her head and made no attempt to save the little creature. 'But you loved Misti, didn't you? Why didn't you call somebody?' 'It never occurred to me.' It was true: nothing ever 'occurred to her'. However, once one had resigned oneself to her cold ways, there was nothing to complain of in her behaviour. 'She's cold, but she's gentle,' her mother used to say, 'and she has never given me the slightest trouble.' Indeed, it was not that she did not love her parents, but rather that, while she felt at ease with strangers, she was shy with those she loved. And if, when punished by her father, she kept out of the way and sulked, she was burning inside with the desire to go and kiss him. Only it wouldn't 'come out'.

She really was a 'quiet little thing' until the day when, her brother having slapped her, she had a genuine fit of hysterics (she was fourteen). But even at the height of it, still no tears.

'If you had cried, you would have felt better,' the doctor said.

'But I can't cry!'

'You mean you can't cry in front of other people? Or you can't cry at all?'

'I can't cry at all.'

During the thorough medical check-up that followed this episode (the unexpected violence of her nervous reactions had caused some alarm) it was discovered that her heartbeats were abnormal in number and intensity. Three years later, when she was about to be X-rayed and the electric light was switched off in the laboratory, she had another attack. The family diagnosis was altered. She was no longer a 'quiet little thing'; she was now a 'suppressed hysteric'. The description was not such a bad one: everything that came out of her seemed somehow damped down, like a noise stifled by a wad of cork or cotton-wool.

Whatever their experience to the contrary, men persist in believing that a character must be all of a piece. Yet it is only in artificially-created characters that unity is to be found; whatever remains natural is inconsistent. Mlle Dandillot's principal characteristic was her naturalness. There was great surprise when, an elderly young man having proposed to her, she showed both pride and delight: with the character attributed to her, it was assumed that she would send him packing. And so she did, but only after having granted him two interviews. Later, she refused two other proposals. She only wanted to marry a man who attracted her (she had at least discovered that!). The trouble was that none of them attracted her. Her parents did not want to force her. In this they were right; but they should have taken her out more. As it was, since they did not care for society, she met very few people. So the three of them settled down to wait for the husband the heavens would send. The fact that Mlle Dandillot had firmly and vehemently refused three good matches did not however alter the family's verdict that she 'lacked willpower', any more than the handsome fortune her brother was piling up in Madagascar altered the family's verdict on him - that he was not 'practical'. He had never been able to mend a fuse: therefore he was 'not practical'. In certain circumstances. Mlle Dandillot showed will-power, and in certain circumstances she was fatalistic. It is this 'in certain circumstances' that people always forget. And yet, having so often heard it said that she had no will-power, she had come to believe it herself. But if she exerted her will so seldom, it was perhaps because there was little she desired.

And thus she reached the age of twenty-one, which she had only just arrived at when she slipped into this tale. A good housewife, adept at dealing with the upholsterer or the electrician, an expert on food and liking only the best, thrifty in the house and a spendthrift on herself, squandering her small allowance on silly things that gave her no pleasure, she was nonetheless still very much a child, fighting with her brother, climbing trees, rushing down the stairs four at a time. Disliking dogs - too frisky - and birds - too noisy - she liked cats, being very cat-like herself, and above all aquarium fish, perhaps because they were silent like herself, and cold, with neurotic reflexes (watch them as they twist and turn). She had a continuous succession of them, for after a week they would be found floating belly upwards: she had forgotten to feed them. She read little - a few snippets - and in the forty-odd books that made up her little library there were only three novels, which were there by pure chance; as for poetry, the less said the better: she hated it as she hated music. Even then she was far from having read all her books, though all the pages had been cut and the volumes carefully wrapped in transparent paper. She went to a dance about once a month, and had to force herself to do so, such was her hatred of 'dressing up'. At the last moment she would hesitate whether to make an excuse and not go, but once she was there she was happy as could be, never missing a single dance and always the last to leave: it was enough to wear her poor mother out. Whereas on the days when she did not go out she was in bed by half past nine. In society, she was sometimes thought to be stuck-up, because she carried her chin a little in the air (on account of her very heavy bun, which pulled her head back).

Whereas her brother, at fifteen, had impatiently shaken off everything that reminded him of his childhood, and lived only for the future, she did not think of her future, but awaited it passively, huddling over her past instead, hoarding her school-books, her prizes, her volumes of the Bibliothèque Rose, filing away, as it were, the whole of her childhood, every relic of which she would have preserved in her bedroom had not her father from time to time impounded some beloved toy-rabbit ['But you never talked to your rabbit!' 'I talked to him inside.'] or porcelain Infant Jesus and taken it up to the attic. All of which will no doubt gratify the reader, for a woman without childishness is a horrible monster. And yet, though she remained so close to childhood, she was incapable of talking to children as girls of her age usually can, and felt bored and ill at ease in their company. In her state of romantic solitude, she felt peaceful and happy. Of course she realized that the day would come when all this would change (for, let me repeat, she was not guided by any principle and there was no 'theory' behind her coldness) but she did not yearn for that day, and could not in the least imagine what sort of change it might bring. 'One shouldn't organize one's life, it's unlucky', she used to say. If she had had any precise feeling about her future; it would have been fear, fear of being less happy than she was now, fear of being, as she put it in her typical little-girl idiom, 'disappointed'.

Thus Mlle Dandillot lived, in a placid key which the author has endeavoured to emulate in writing about her.

(We have omitted to mention that from the age of sixteen, that is some twenty years before the age at which a man, and a man of mature understanding, begins to have a few notions as to how he should govern himself, Mlle Dandillot knew how the State should be governed. Not being clever enough to embrace all political convictions at one and the same time, she restricted herself to one: she was madly right-wing. She even belonged to an extreme right-wing group, and had intended to work on one of its charity committees; but she had only gone twice, being too right-wing to be able to settle down to it. We shall not mention the group to which Mlle Dandillot belonged, since she has given herself to a gentleman.)

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

7 June 1927

Dear Costals,

Status quo. The weather's too hot, I haven't the energy to suffer, at least to suffer acutely. I'm certainly unhappy, and prefer to be unhappy because of you than apply myself to being angry with you; but unhappy not with an unhappiness that tears me apart, but with a torpid unhappiness, always the same. The state of mind of one still anaesthetized after an operation, of a detached convalescent, of Lazarus rising from the tomb - a kind of indifference and meekness towards the world. 'Let them do as they like. All that's over for me.' Do not however mistake this meekness for benevolence. I no longer wish to be frank, nor to give pleasure. Thanks to you, I have become like you.

How strange it is, but I must admit it: failure can be satisfying, or at least can give one a feeling of repose not so very different, I imagine, from the feeling achievement brings. I summoned up my courage and took the plunge. And I failed. You denied me the only thing in the world I wanted. And yet, in spite of it all, something has been gained. Now, all that is being reabsorbed ... What difference is there, when all's said and done, between a body that has known pleasure and one that has not? Renunciation! The peace of the woman who has renounced. If you knew how simple it is, when one has renounced all one's life. How quickly one gets used to it. My love for you was always, a priori, counterpoised by renunciation. My only error was to believe that that impossible love was in fact possible, to believe that tenderness and pity were enough to waken desire in a man, to believe that love could be created in another person as water can be got by turning on a tap. My sacrifices have always been made in advance. And self-imposed suffering is almost ecstasy compared to the suffering imposed on one by others. And then (even though I haven't had my fill of memories of you, not by a long way), I have taken so much from you that it makes it easier for me to renounce it all.

I must add that if you came to me today and offered me the two months of plenitude I wanted, I should be afraid. I felt passionately that it would be better to lose you after than to lose you before. But now I'm frightened. Some enthusiasm on your part would have been essential. To obtain that from you as an irksome duty ...

You made it clear to me that the greatest gift my love could offer you was to give you nothing unless you desired and asked for it. And I sometimes think that my love was not so much love as a desire for self-glorification. I regarded you, in fact, as an instrument of my pleasure and happiness. True love would have meant searching, not for what pleased me, but for what pleased you; and thus giving up what I wanted of my own free will. No doubt I must have loved you very imperfectly, since I could not bring myself to make this sacrifice. Perhaps you loved me better than I loved you, since you did not love yourself in me. And perhaps it is now that I am giving you the best of my love. But a lot you care about that...

For the first time, I can tell you that there is no need for you to answer me. You would be bound to hurt me, with your genius for sadistic phrases, whereas in your silence I recreate and re-discover you, such as I once loved you.

Yours,

A.H.

I should also like to put to you a rather difficult and delicate question. I should like to know whether it has ever occurred to you that you might perpetuate my love by transposing some aspects of it into one of your books. This desire has nothing to do with vanity. It's simply that it would give me the feeling that so much suffering had not been entirely in vain.

This letter remained unanswered.

On the evenings when Mlle Dandillot came to the flat in the avenue Henri-Martin, the first thing she did was to switch off the light. And a sort of ritual had developed. He would undress her little by little, while she stood there small and upright in front of him, in her habitual pose, her head bowed a little, gazing at him without an atom of false modesty out of her dark blue eyes which seemed even larger and darker - almost black - in the dim light of the room, as if they had absorbed some of the night's darkness (which was why this night hung so clear above the world). And thus, half-naked, she would seem like a new person, and he would say to her: 'My little one, is it really you?' And sometimes she would answer 'Yes', as though it were a question which demanded a precise answer. And already this 'yes' was in her night voice, her voice of love, that extraordinarily changed voice of night and love, veiled and high-pitched like the voices of those who are about to die - her little girl's voice, her baby girl's voice, the voice of a woman newly-born and the voice of a dying woman.

And now behold him, vibrant, enveloping her in his coils, while she remains standing, motionless, wordless, only turning her head to follow him with wide-open, unblinking eyes, as the cobra, motionless on its coils, turns its head according to the movement of the snake-charmer's face. He moves as in more ductile air, in the infinite power he has over her; he kisses her now here, now there, according to his whim or with no whim at all; he rests his eyes now here, now there, and each time, as if bewitched, she removes some flimsy garment from the place his eyes have pointed to. Now she stands naked and utterly pure, and still he enfolds her in his coils. Her legs are warm and fragrant as freshly-baked dough. Her belt has left a red weal at her waist, as though she had been whipped. He pulls out two tiny hair-pins from her chignon, the only two he can find (for he is such a fool). She pulls out the rest and hands them to him, one by one, in silence, and their number never varies. Now she stands with her hair over her shoulders, over her breasts with their soft, dune-like curves, more than ever sunk into her childhood; and sometimes it happens that her hair is still damp, like a forest after rain, because she has come to him straight from the swimming- bath. He takes it in his hands, and first he kisses the ends of it, where it is her without yet being quite her, almost foreign to her, like a river which, at the end of its course, no longer knows its mountain or its source. Tracing it back along its whole length, he at last comes to her and the faint odour of her warm scalp.

He comes back to her face and meets again - like an old acquaintance - the scent of her face-powder which he had forgotten. He wraps her hair around her neck. He spreads it over her mouth and searches for her lips through it. With one lock for the moustache and the rest for the beard, he turns her into a young lady of Saint-Cyr in the role of Joad. And now she is naked in front of the window, practically on the balcony. He warns her, but she does not stir. On crossing his threshold, she has entered a magic circle....

Lying down, she did not seem very different from what she had been the first time. She lay there, innocent and peaceful, as natural as a little goat in the midst of the flock. Nearly always she kept her eyes closed, and when she opened them, light with dark flecks, she created both light and darkness at the same time; and then she would look at him with astonishment, her face so close to his it made her squint a little. And she would give him short, sharp kisses, like a bird pecking, three, four, five at a time, like constellations; and then a single one, sudden, violent, like a ball shot at goal, or like a lightning flash. In between long silences broken only by a half-hour striking or a towel slipping from the towel-rail in the bathroom, he would say:

'What are you thinking about?'

'How nice it is....'

O little girl!

'How silent you are!'

'When I'm happy I never talk.'

O little girl!

(When I'm happy . . . Andrée had written the same thing, but he had not thought it to her credit, because he did not love Andrée.)

Then he would tease her.

'I'm going to switch on the light.'

Whereupon her 'No! No's!' would break out with unexpected violence. And he: 'What do you mean, no? Have we, by any chance, a personality of our own?' (The possibility did not seem to please him; and besides, caressing a woman in the dark is like smoking in the dark: no taste). But when after a moment he asked her: 'What would you do if I suddenly switched on the light?' she answered: 'Nothing ... '

O little girl!

And oh! that night voice as she said it, the incredibly childlike intonations, rising from the depths of her childhood as from a tomb - that other voice that came to her as soon as she was 'horizontal', like those chaste dolls which automatically lower their eyelids when one lays them on their backs.

It was on one of these evenings that he wrote this poem for her:

Since you love me, I you (that's understood)

Since I am wholly yours today - agreed?

Since it appears that either finds it good.

For I suffice you, you are all I need,

Then lay against my breast, sweet age-old child

(Don't fear those other heads; their trace is light)

Your scentless hair and your long eyes, beast-wild,

More deep, more dark, for having drunk of night.

And so it went on, but we shall quote no more, for we do not think it is worth a tinker's curse.

He never failed to express a little more tenderness towards her than he really felt, to add to that tenderness a sort of halo which spread it further. For instance he would sometimes say 'My little darling' at times when the words did not spring spontaneously to his lips, or else he would clasp her in his arms with greater vigour than his natural impulse called for. He knew that women tend to think one loves them less when one does not love them more and more, and that men, being poor at loving, must keep a constant watch over themselves if they do not wish to disappoint.

There were moments when he passionately wanted to be the man who would reveal her to herself. There were other moments when he had no such desire.

He still did not take her completely, for he wished to go on picturing this unknown territory before him, as when on board ship one looks toward that part of the sea where land will appear tomorrow. He would stop at the precise point beyond which he would have hurt her, as a dog that bites its friend in play will check itself delightfully and take care not to go too far. But their kisses were so voracious that the tip of his tongue was split and he had to give up smoking.

He was always afraid she might catch cold while naked, and would willingly have sacrificed part of his pleasure to have her put on some of her clothes again. She would complain a little: 'You treat me like a child.' To which he would reply: 'A person one loves is always a child.' Often he reminded her of the time, but she did not seem to hear. Sometimes they would stay together in this way until that supreme hour of night when the cats settle down in the middle of the road to attend to their toilet. Clocks chimed the hour, answering one another like cock-crows. He had the impression that if he had not said to her, 'Time to go, little one', she would have stayed there all night, as though her mother and father did not exist. In all their relations, it was never she who took the initiative. And he praised her for it. 'I hate women with a will of their own, and that is why you were always made for me.' (And yet, if we are to believe Schopenhauer, who sees a connection between will-power and sexual passion, he would not have been sorry had she willed a little more....)

Now she went off to the bathroom without being told, like a kitten that has been house-trained. Meanwhile he brushed the left shoulder of his jacket, where her cheek had left a cloud of face-powder like a milky way deep in the night sky. And now here she was by his side in the avenue, striking the echoing pavement with her short, mule-like steps. What had happened? Had anything happened? Here she was, exactly the same as she had been when she arrived that evening. Terribly womanly, when a moment before she had been such a schoolgirl. Terribly intact in appearance, and yet no longer intact. Terribly prim and proper.

He knew she never told them at home why she got back so late at night. The thought that she lied to her parents was infinitely pleasing to him. 'That way, we can talk.' He felt that this made her somehow more human.

Sometimes they walked hand in hand, like well-brought-up children who have been told to go and play in the park and be good - or like Tunisian gendarmes.

At about that time he had just published a new book, which brought him many flattering letters and reviews. He had taken as his motto Gobineau's phrase, which he twisted round to read thus: 'First love, then work, then nothing.' But his work was his writing, not the relationship between his writing and the public. To this he was more or less indifferent. He skimmed rapidly through both reviews and letters mechanically, without getting involved. Praise was to him like musical instruments being played in a silent film: he knew that they must be producing a pleasant noise, but he could not hear it.

He was saying to her:

'You really must try and see things as they are. Michelet says that it's most humiliating for the loved one to keep enough composure to be able to distinguish the truth behind the lover's fine words. There's a piece of nonsense worthy of the 'stupid' nineteenth century. To keep one's composure is never humiliating. And to see things as they are is always admirable. The fact, in our case, is that I am not in love with you. What I feel towards you is, on the one hand, affection tinged with tenderness, together with esteem, and on the other hand, desire. But all this does not constitute love, thank God. It makes up something which is my own particular formula, in which I am entirely myself, and which is wholly commendable: this last point alone would be sufficient to prove that it isn't love. For one likes a woman because, and one loves her although. Besides, experience leads me to believe that my formula pleases women, because according to my own observation they seem to need affection and tenderness more than love properly so called. You're not in love with me either, are you?'

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders slightly, with an amused expression on her face - all this very young-lady like and full of charm. And she said:

'Not exactly, no, I don't think so.... I mean I don't love you in a sentimental way.'

'There's one sure sign that you don't love me; you never ask me questions about my life. And you don't blush when your parents talk about me, do you? You've never looked me up in Who's Who? You never came round to the avenue Henri- Martin when we first met, to see the house I lived in? You've never scribbled my name on a sheet of note-paper for no reason at all?'

To each question she shook her head with the same gentle and amused expression on her face. True, the night after he had kissed her for the first time, she had gone to sleep with one of his books under her sheet. But that was right at the beginning; nature had blundered because it had been caught unawares. Never again had Solange done anything of the kind.

'It's true, isn't it? Before I brought you here myself, you never had enough curiosity to come and see where I lived? Then that settles it: you've never been in love with me. And that's how I want you to be. A loving girl, not a girl in love. I don't want you to get worked up about me. You would be bound to suffer, and it would be absurd for you to suffer on my account when all I want is your happiness. One must know how to handle the absurd, my dear, and I think I can say I'm a master of the art, but it should at least give you some pleasure. It's always stupid to suffer. To say that suffering is something great and remarkable is one of the worst lies spread around by the leaders of the masses (for political ends) and then taken up by the intellectuals (from sheer stupidity). At the end of your first fairly intimate letter you assured me of your 'tender affection'. I don't know whether it was a phrase you just happened to use by chance or whether you had weighed its meaning, but if it represented what you really felt, then it was magnificent, since it corresponds exactly both to what I feel towards you and what I expect from you.'

'I wrote that because it seemed to convey just what I felt.'

'Then, my dear, it's splendid, and I can see that we shall get on famously.'

And yet, that same evening... .

That same evening, when he asked her: 'Will you come to my flat for a while, later on?' she answered: 'Not tonight if you don't mind ... Perhaps we ought to space out our meetings a little....'

And she added:

'When I come to visit you, afterwards I feel you're further away from me

Although disappointed, he did not take her up on this. They were crossing the Place de la Concorde. He made a few remarks about the colour of the sky at that twilight hour. But inwardly he was turning to stone. Not only was he wounded in his male vanity, but it seemed to him as though she had locked the door on the future: how could he ever make love to her again after that?

There was a long silence, and then he asked her:

'Would you like me to take you home, or would you like to go somewhere?'

It was a terrible thing to suggest leaving her so early, contrary to all their habits, merely because of frustrated desire - terrible for a girl of Mlle Dandillot's temperament; and terrible for him too. He had hoped she would answer: 'Take me home.' How could she not have realized that she had made the evening untenable? He was surprised at what he deemed her lack of tact when she said: 'Let's go somewhere.'

The cinema is the cesspool of the twentieth century. Whenever there is something vile between two people, it always leads to a session at the pictures. In the cinema near the Invalides where they finally landed up, she tried from time to time to make small talk. He, as though the muscles of his tongue had been severed, found it literally impossible to say a word. He was convinced that they were meeting for the last time. No, never had a woman said anything so humiliating to her lover; he had thought his caresses brought them infinitely closer to each other, but they made her feel he was further away! Now he wanted to wound her in his turn. 'She may as well know what I'm really like?' During the two and a half hours the show lasted, he never once opened his lips. As it was very hot, she sometimes put her handkerchief (her minute little girl's handkerchief) to her forehead, to her nose - to her eyes perhaps - and he wondered whether she wanted to cry. He noticed that one of her hands was resting in a rather unnatural way on the arm of her seat next to him, and thought she must have put it there so that he would take it and hold it in his. He did no such thing. Once or twice, too, she turned her face towards him without saying anything, as though asking to be kissed. The more he realized how base and vulgar, how petty and ridiculous - how bourgeois, in short - his attitude towards her was, the more he stuck to it. During the intervals he could read the thoughts on the faces of those around him: 'Such an exquisite little thing, and such a ghastly, sulking brute! Talk about pearls and swine!' What sickened him most about the 'scene' he was creating was that it seemed to him the very image of a conjugal row.

At last, the torture came to an end. They went out, still silent. Then she did something she had never done before: she put her arm through his. He was touched. This gesture seemed to say, with the utmost simplicity: 'Come back to me. Can't you see I'm not cross with you?' Yet, touched as he was by her gesture, at the same time he saw in it a way of hurting her even more: simply by not responding to it. However, when they reached the avenue de Villiers and passed her door without her showing any sign of stopping, he exploded. In a jerky, unrecognizable voice he blurted out: 'You have wounded me deeply. You have said the very worst thing a woman can say to a man. Now I can never touch you again. I shall always think that you let me make love to you out of complaisance, when in fact you feel nothing but disgust....'

'Of course not, you know very well.'

'To hell with girls - especially winsome, frigid little French girls who never know what pleasure is before they're twenty- six! After all, nobody has yet found any other way for a man to show his affection for a woman. No, there's no way out of it. I can't make love to you any more now. And as for playing at brother and sister, frankly it's impossible; I'm not that kind of man. You gave yourself, and now you've taken yourself back; but you did give yourself, and the taste of it will always remain. You opened the door on to a room filled with music, and now you have shut it again.'

She said nothing. They went on walking, going round the block for the third time.

'And then, how can I dare talk to you again? What value can you ever again attach to what I say? I told you a dozen times: "Above all, you must be frank with me." And it's by being frank that you've destroyed everything. You're being punished for being what I asked you to be. And so from now on I can neither talk nor act with you. It isn't your fault. It's simply that our temperaments are incompatible. But I repeat, there's no way out of it.'

Once again they reached her door. She would have gone on; it was he who stopped. He held out his hand:

'Since we're seeing each other at the d'Hautecourts' tomorrow, we're bound to talk to each other again. But in fact everything is over between us.'

He saw her raise her beautiful eyes towards him, full of surprise, sadness and reproach, as a bitch gazes at the brute of a master who has struck her for no reason. A taxi passed, and he hailed it. His voice was so strangled that he had to repeat his address several times before the driver understood it.

At home he found the bed prepared, and the armfuls of flowers he had arranged for her. He threw himself on the bed in an agony of suffering. Suffering from having made her suffer. Suffering from having made her suffer although he loved her. Suffering from having made her suffer for being honest with him. Suffering from having deprived himself of her body. Suffering because he suffered from having deprived himself of her body, although her body gave him so little pleasure. Suffering because he suffered only in the basest part of his male self (his sexual vanity) and because this male suffering was so very puerile. Suffering, not least, because the room was so hot (eighty degrees Fahrenheit). At intervals, a petal fell from a vase like the chime of the half-hour. The intimate odour of the girl's body came back to him obsessively, exacerbating his resentment, a wisp of fragrance that seemed to float about the room like seeds borne on the summer air. Finally he thought of going to the larder for a cold chicken which he knew was there. He ate it, and his anguish died away. He even felt glad that he had suffered a little. One must try everything once.

That night he had a dream. He dreamed of the old English governess he had had as a boy. Never in his life had he dreamed of her before. And try as he might, he could find no clue to what the dream meant.

He began to think about the woman, and a strange memory came back to him. He remembered his terror when, waking up in the early morning, he used to imagine that perhaps, during the night, she had gone away for ever. Then he would get up and go barefooted to the governess's room. Objects, clothes, everything would be in place: the Englishwoman had simply gone to Mass, as she did every day. But such irrefutable evidence was not enough to reassure him. He would tiptoe on to the landing and wait there with beating heart for the rattle of the returning governess's key in the front door (for, after all, he must have realized that she was at Mass). Then as soon as he heard the noise of the key, he would rush back to bed and pretend to be asleep ...

All this would have been easy to understand if he had had some sort of childish crush on his governess (he was then seven or eight years old). But nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he rather disliked her. She rapped his knuckles with a ruler when he made mistakes in his piano lessons, she left him - without a word - crying for half an hour at a time because he could not make head or tail of his arithmetic, she took the currants out of his fruit cake at tea-time, pretending they were bad for him when really she wanted them herself... He liked her so little that when she retired, although she settled in Paris, he had never once been to see her. No, however carefully he ransacked his memory, he could find nothing in his feelings for her except indifference tinged with resentment - nothing but indifference, with here and there those wild uprushes of passionate feeling, those torments of the tiny lover, at half past six in the morning, in the great, slumbering house.... Costals began to wonder whether he did not love Solange.

The next day, a hop at the d'Hautecourts'. A few women's bodies would make it bearable. What would society be without bodies? One could see it wiped out without a murmur.

Arriving after her, he followed her with his eyes without letting her see him. He would have liked her discreetly to show her contempt for all these people; but no, she seemed at ease among them; was she, perhaps, one of them? She danced three times with a young buck. 'If they go and sit behind the buffet, or on the stairs, I feel - yes, I feel it as if it were happening at this very moment - that all the blood will drain from my face, will drain from my legs as if it were flowing away under the ballroom floor.'

He came towards her with an ugly expression on his face - an unwonted ugliness, a husband's ugliness. She greeted him, suddenly transformed, her face open, her eyes radiant with tenderness, as though nothing had happened the day before. He was touched by her unquestioning trust.

They danced. He was thinking: 'Am I going to be the ignoble male to the bitter end? Yesterday I was cruel and unjust because my petty sexual pride had been hurt. Tomorrow I shall debase myself by resuming my love-making, knowing that she merely tolerates it. This body in my arms in front of two hundred people - I have laid my head on its naked belly (an exquisite sensation); with my cheek against that belly, I have heard the rumbling of her intestines, like the faint sound of thawing snow.... In fact, by God, she's mine!'

And he let them see it all right. The dance over, an astonishing thing occurred. No sooner had they sat down beside each other than he put his hand on the girl's thigh (over her dress), and then let it rest on her midriff, as a lion spreads out its paw over the chunk of meat it has conquered.

Not in some secluded corner, but right in the middle of the room, surrounded by two hundred people. Not for a brief instant, but for a good half-minute, perhaps. Not in any dubious or 'advanced' company, but among well-bred, respectable people. That's what comes of inviting poets to your house!

He was deeply aware of the element of the grandiose in his gesture. Nothing licentious. The gesture of the couple. The primitive gesture of the lord and master, that of the ape with its mate: the essence of the couple. And he was also aware of the grandeur there was in the fact that she accepted it, that this reserved and modest girl did not flinch under his gesture, did not offer the least resistance, in the heart of that crowd, as though she did not care in the least, as though she were pleased even, that it should be demonstrated in this extraordinary manner, in front of everybody, what she was to the man she had chosen.

When he drew his hand away, yet another link had been forged between them. Invisibly, his hand was still upon her. That same evening she came to his house at the accustomed hour.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

15 June 1927

Please read the whole of this letter.

Dear Costals,

I am far away, defenceless, sick with loneliness, crushed by such heat that it reminds me of that line of yours:

'The heat of the day sits, man-like, upon the earth.'

There was a big thunderstorm last night, and I was glad it woke me up since it gave me the chance to think about you. What was I saying in my last letter? I don't make a rough draft of my letters to you, and I'm afraid they must contradict one another terribly. I think I was telling you I had found a kind of peace ... Yes, I wanted, with genuine good-will, to safeguard our friendship through this ghastly business, although I know only too well how little a man cares for a woman's friendship when he cares nothing for her love. When you refused me, I thought: 'For him, of course, the woman who refuses herself is desirable, and the woman who offers herself is disdained. How childish!' But it has to be admitted: a disappointment, a refusal, makes what was desirable a thousand times more desirable. I can see it now with you.

Besides, how could I forget you? The fact that you are now a public figure (the same word for a 'public figure' and a 'public woman'! How appropriate ... ) makes it physically impossible.

In order to-be free of you completely, I ought never to open a newspaper or a magazine. And by the way, there's something I'd like to know.... Yesterday's Nouvelles littéraires (which I read - horror of horrors - in the deserted church, because it's the only cool place here) brought me your poem:

'Since you love me, I you ... '

and I should like to know whether, when you wrote it, you did not have me partly in mind. I very much doubt it, and yet.... But no, of course not, it's addressed to someone else, and I can just see you sneer: 'How naïve the girl is!' Naïve! You have only yourself to blame: you could have made me a woman, but you did not choose to. These amorous confidences you spread around in the weeklies (isn't it nice to be able to indulge one's exhibitionism in the sacred name of Art?) twist the dagger in my wound, filling me with jealousy and desire. It's too obvious: my love for you fills you with horror. But what am I supposed to do about it? I think of you from morning till night. It oozes out of me. I was about to say like an emanation, but the word is too pretentious; like sweat, rather. You passed too close to me, you swept me, lonely little star that I am, into your orbit, and you scorched me with your fires. In all good faith, I still want to believe it is so. Manslaughter, not murder. You have annihilated me; I'm not humiliated, I'm not torn apart, I'm stunned. You have made me unfit for everyday life. I am like one of those antiques about which dealers say to one: 'Yes, it's beautiful. It's worth a lot. I can't buy it from you, though; they're not in demand just now. But it's lovely, hang on to it.' I know I'm worth something, but no one has a use for me. And I shall end up by hating myself, by destroying myself perhaps, as one ends by hating and sometimes destroying those objects which antique dealers find so beautiful but which nothing on earth would make them buy. Yes, unusable. Because of you, I have nothing to offer the man who might now come along expecting and desiring someone intact; I would be giving him an empty husk. It's exactly as if I had had a lover or a husband; my moral virginity no longer exists. How can you not feel that all this gives you a responsibility towards me, that you must make amends? And by making amends I mean giving me the satisfactions of the flesh to which I am entitled.

Your disinterestedness is a subtle form of perversion. You told me once, parodying the motto of l'Action Française: 'We stand for everything natural.' Oh, no! you are not close to nature; that is perhaps your greatest illusion. It is saintliness you stand nearest to, but a sort of inverted saintliness, a diabolical saintliness. Ceaselessly preoccupied with you as I am, I learn a little more about you each day, in spite of your silence. I learn more about myself too. You once admitted to a certain 'curiosity' about me (and I have come to believe that it is the only feeling - a professional one at that! - you have ever had towards me). You might perhaps have desired me if I had not revealed so much of myself in my letters: it is the great misfortune of my life that, owing to my loneliness, nearly everything between us has happened by way of letters. But are you sure you really know me? Do you know whether, even professionally, a more intimate relationship between us might not reveal much more? Are you sure you don't actually need me?

You will never find me again unless, some day, you feel that need - but it must be total. I shall be your mistress or your wife, never again your friend. You will come back to me, if you do, knowing that I love you, that I adore you, that I have never wanted and do not want anything but your kisses and your arms around me. Are you satisfied? Is that clear enough? I feel a kind of wild relief in reaching these depths of self-abasement, in renewing the written proof of it, in giving you these weapons you will always be able to use against me.

Andrée

This letter remained unanswered.

'Just her legs alone, and I go mad!' he exclaimed, heedless of syntax. 'Look at that lovely little creature, old thing. Extraordinary how a pretty face can make you sit up. Suddenly, when you were sated to the point of not caring if you died, you want to go on living. Suddenly, if you had to write, you'd have forgotten how to spell. Eighteen, think of it! And arms even prettier than yours. And those vaccination marks! Enough to drive the archangel Gabriel to perdition. Quite frankly, my dear, I could gobble her up. She blows her little nose behind her newspaper (rather conservative in tone) so that I shan't see her do anything so unbecoming. Then with her rosy fingers she stuffs the handkerchief back into her bag. Every time she catches me eyeing her, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. And the way her shoulders shake when she laughs! And the parting in her hair, meandering all over the place! And her ears - I bet they've never known earache! And there's a hint of poverty in the cloth of her dress, in her little wrist-watch, that makes me swoon with desire. What power on earth could prevent me from desiring her? I'd like to know what her hair would taste like if I chewed it. I'd like.... She's worthy of desire, and so I desire her: it's only nature, after all, damn it! Oh, only desire her, you understand: I'm not breaking things up. But when I see those rather heavy veins on her pulpy feet in those sandals, then I tell you, old girl, I begin to feel like a man. Am I being wounding? Yes, I see I am.... I'm so sorry.... But what can I do, old girl? I belong to a sex which is the complete opposite of yours; I belong to the lecherous breed of men. What I enjoy is seeing what women are like when they surrender, and then comparing ... What is happiness, for those of my race? Happiness is the moment when someone surrenders. And incidentally, mystics often change their women, because attachment to one person is what is most contrary to the spiritual life. You too are a tiny star among thousands of others. And at dawn you'll fade away.... Ah! so I have wounded you? I recognize that way you have of smiling when something's gone wrong.... I haven't said anything unpleasant, though, have I?'

'Oh, no! Nothing at all!'

'And anyway, what I've been telling you was set to dance music, so to speak. You're not much of a sport, are you?'

'What's the good of explaining? You refuse to understand what you mean to me.'

'Yes, I do refuse. Because I ought not to mean too much to you.'

She turned her face towards him sharply, with a look of reproach. Then he said:

'I'm glad you love me, but I don't want you to love me too much. I'm glad my desire pleases you, but I don't want it to please you too much. For that would force me to exaggerate, to go beyond what comes to me naturally; in both spheres it would saddle me with a duty to reciprocate exactly; and this I dread, not only because it's duty (and duty doesn't suit me) but because it would drive me to artifice, which for the moment I'm entirely devoid of. What I want is for you to love me and to welcome my desire precisely to the extent that I love and desire you. And believe me, that's a great deal.'

Written the next day by Costals in the Bois, on the blank page of l'Education des Filles, which he was reading:

Two ravishing little things, fifteen and sixteen, straight out of Meleager, sitting on a bench with their mother who obviously. ... Well, with their mother who knows a thing or two. (They were each swinging one leg, like two little donkeys swinging their tails in unison. Oh, to spend a night with one of those feet in my hands!) And it seems to me that merely by looking at them as I do, over there in the avenue de Villiers, suddenly, without knowing why, while she is sewing, her heart is pierced and it bleeds. O Nature, spare me from desiring others as long as I love her!

Mlle Dandillot's predominant feeling now she was in love was the fear that Costals might not love her enough and might abandon her. Faced with her first man, she was like a bas-relief changed into a statue - deprived of its support, suddenly alone and threatened on all sides. Before she loved, her nights had been uneventful. Now each night brought its dreams, always unpleasant dreams, though they never developed into nightmares. For instance, she dreamed that, cycling down a slope, she lost control of her bicycle; but that was all: there was no fall, no precipice. Or she dreamed that a cow broke away from the herd and approached until it was almost touching her, but did not attack her. Costals, the cause of all these dreams, never appeared in them: he was the hidden demon behind them. Sometimes, however, she dreamed, not about him, but that she was thinking about him.

There are women who are invigorated by love, particularly a first love. Mlle Dandillot, on the contrary, ever since she had been in love, had physically declined. And it was fear of losing Costals that had weakened her. Often she felt below par, tired out, needing to sit down; when she had been standing for a while, her thighs ached.

At meals, the need to find an outlet for her nervous energy made her chew rapidly and vigorously. Having thus finished each course before her mother, she took second helpings to fill the gaps, and found herself eating appreciably more than usual. Then she noticed that she felt stronger after these large meals, and that as soon as she started over-eating, it was again in her thighs that she first felt better.

From then on, whenever she was due to meet Costals later in the day, she systematically took second helpings, which brought a smile to the face of the maid serving at table, a smile to which Solange responded sweetly, not knowing quite whether Suzanne had guessed her secret. She also had two cups of coffee, and could easily have managed two breakfasts. She was to be seen chewing away at peach-stones till they were worn down and cracked, as a dog worries a croquet-ball with its slobbery mouth. And although she was normally a non-smoker, she would now sometimes smoke two strong cigarettes one after the other. Yet Mme Dandillot noticed nothing (and as for her husband!...). Thus the servant saw what the mother didn't. It is said that mother-love is blind. Yes, indeed.

If Mlle Dandillot had not been such a good little girl, she would have known that a few drops of alcohol would have produced the same factitious vitality she obtained by ever so slightly stuffing herself. But she did not know this, or even guess it. And in any case the world in general does not know it either. Or rather it knows it a little, which is tantamount to not at all. A war-leader knows that, in battle, a good army is an army that is slightly the worse for drink. But he does not generalize from the fact as he should. A man who knew that there is no torment of love that a really good meal cannot dispel, at least for a few hours, a man who knew that physical and moral courage, poetic inspiration, devotion, sacrifice, may all depend on a good meal - that the most sublime flights of the soul may be due to the rotting flesh of dead animals - a man who knew all this could never be fooled by anyone. But the man who is on the brink of knowing all this shrinks from the knowledge. And if he does know it, he behaves as if he didn't. For man must live in the clouds.

On the other hand, Costals' meals before his meetings with Solange were very light. He was naturally so healthy and eupeptic that a little hotting-up would merely have decreased his lucidity, which he prized above everything. At these meals he even refrained from drinking, and thus weighing himself down, and only drank on the days when he did not love her so much. So that, when Solange was getting ready to leave, the first thing he did was to go to the wash-basin for a drink of water. And if Solange had failed to turn up at the rendezvous he had given her, which was always a few steps away from the house in the avenue de Villiers, his disappointment would have been offset by the fact that, after waiting twenty minutes, he could dive into the nearest wine-shop. He had elevated into a philosophy of life what had at first been no more than a delightful characteristic: to love (and to be capable of doing) in everything its opposite. Thus fate, whether it gave him a yes or a no, satisfied him equally. And he was always on velvet, which was very pleasant for him, and even satisfied his mind, for he held that only dullards and mock philosophers conceive of life as a struggle.

She had said: 'Come and have tea with me on Sunday. Mummy and Daddy are spending the day with some cousins of ours in Fontainebleau, and it's the servants' day off. We shall be alone in the flat.' The idea of making love to her in her own house, in her own little-girl's bedroom, had set him on fire.

It was an exquisite sensation to find her alone in the empty house and to see her switch off the front door-bell. But soon he noticed a slight sore on her lip, and dark rings under her eyes which intensified the depth of her gaze. She confirmed what he had guessed; and his feelings took on a new note of solemnity, as when the piano pedal is pressed down. These were the times he always loved best in women, when he knew them to be unwell: this weakness in them fanned his heart as much as his senses. However much they protested that they hardly felt it, he fussed and worried, convinced that they were simply being brave and really needed nursing. He had always had a tendency to pamper women, even sports-women, in spite of the impression they sometimes give of having more stamina than men.

And now they were in the drawing-room, sitting side by side on a sofa. The cloudy summer day seemed more like autumn. At first they had talked about trivialities (but how touching she was when, gazing straight in front of her, she would swiftly turn her head towards him whenever he said something particularly nice or striking). He had asked her to take him into her bedroom, but she, who usually agreed to anything he asked, had this time firmly refused. He had asked her to show him some photographs of herself, but she had not been photographed since she was fourteen - so lacking in vanity all these people were! Eventually he came to a subject which was very much on his mind. The last time she had been to his house, he had embraced her with an ardour so intense and so frequently renewed that at the end of the evening, while he was getting dressed, he had been overcome with a sort of nervous prostration: he had suddenly gone silent and numb, and heavy with weariness. He had to make a real effort to drag out a few commonplace remarks as he escorted her home. So now he explained that men, after having given too generously of themselves, are subject at times to such temporary diminutions of vitality, that this is a normal and recognized phenomenon, and that, assuming she had noticed it, she should excuse it in him. But had she in fact noticed it?

He had put the question almost casually, and was surprised and a little worried when she said 'Yes'. Did she notice everything, then?

'What about the other occasions?'

'Then, too.'

His surprise increased. On other occasions, either this collapse did not occur, or if it did, it was so slight and fleeting that he thought he had managed to conceal it under a renewed outburst of caresses. 'Goodness! The girl sees everything!'

'But how astonishing! You really did find me distant, those other times, when I was taking you home?'

'Yes. I wondered why. Whether I'd disappointed you.... '

He started explaining afresh, citing the Omne animal post ..., offering to show her medical textbooks. Meanwhile he kept gently tugging at the little hairs above her elbow (a detail worth mentioning, after all). Suddenly he fell silent. It seemed to him as though his eyes were being opened at last.

'But then, when you said to me: "Afterwards you seem further away from me", is that what you meant?'

'Yes.'

He repeated the words to himself: 'Afterwards, you seem further away from me.' For the first time he realized it could be interpreted in two different ways: either that, after their love-making was over, Solange felt colder towards him, or else that she felt that he was colder towards her. An abyss separated the two meanings. How had he managed to see only the first and not the second?

'Look here, Solange, this is extremely important: did you feel you were further away from me after we'd made love, or did you, on the other hand, find that I was further away from you, colder towards you?'

'I found you colder towards me. I could sense in you the reactions which you've just described, as a blind man feels a Braille text with his fingertips. But I didn't know there was a purely physical reason for it.'

'What an incredible misunderstanding! I understood just the opposite. But why on earth didn't you explain? You let me sulk for hours and make a frightful scene, and all the time you say nothing, you just stand there gaping at me like a sick calf.... When all you had to say was: "It's you I find so cold, afterwards.... " '

She made a slightly impatient, rueful gesture.

'You know how hopeless I am at explaining. I've told you often enough. The more I saw you going off on the wrong tack, the more paralysed I became. Often when I'm with you, I feel stupefied.... The first time, in the Bois ... if you had told me to jump into the water, I would have done it.'

'Yes, I know. And may I point out to you that I did not do so. But still, I've never known such an incredible misunderstanding. You could never put anything like it into a novel. Nobody would believe that a twenty-one-year-old Parisienne, in the year 1927, could allow herself to be upbraided for hours by her lover for having said something which merely expressed her fear of seeing him grow cooler towards her, in other words for expressing nothing but affection, and all because she's hopeless at explaining? But you're crazy, my dear girl, absolutely crazy! A real little artichoke, on a railway embankment!'

'Why a railway embankment?'

'Because that's much nicer, of course!'

With a feeling of deep tenderness he took her in his arms. Never, no, never had she seemed to him so like a child, so defenceless, so vulnerable, so susceptible to the suffering which everything in life, and especially he, would ultimately inflict on her. He remembered the gesture she had made when, not knowing how to break down his moody silence, she had - for the first time - slipped her arm through his, as a scolded dog puts out a paw to obtain forgiveness. In that instant, a complete upheaval occurred inside him: he saw that she was infinitely weaker than he had imagined, and he realized too that he loved her far more than he had imagined - while at the same time the only complaint he had ever been able to make against her had lost its justification. In that short moment she came really close to him, to what was essential in him. What joy he would have felt in killing anyone who harmed her now! Then he bent down and kissed, not the top of her shoulder, which was bare (for this might have seemed like sensuality), but that part of her shoulder which was covered by her clothes.

Then the conversation drifted. With the same kind of feeling that had caused him to kiss her blouse and not her skin, he was now holding the edge of her dress. Eventually, prompted by their surroundings, the talk settled on Solange's family.

'My brother wasn't very clever: the only thing he was capable of was making money ... I don't love Mummy and Daddy in the same way. I love Mummy in an indulgent way: she's so superficial! Daddy has much more finesse. Besides, he's so ill...." (M. Dandillot was suffering from cancer of the prostate and his days were numbered.) 'The point about men like my uncle Louis is to get the maximum of approbation for the minimum of risk.' ('What a splendid definition of the bourgeoisie!' thought Costals.) 'My religion? I'm not a believer, but when I see a paper like' (there followed the name of a weekly with a particularly 'Parisian' tone) 'it makes me almost want to be a Christian again. I tell myself there must be more to things than that.'

And finally, this scrap of dialogue:

'None of the young men of my generation seem to have a sense of duty. Whereas a man like you ... '

'Seriously, do I look like a man with a sense of duty?'

'No. But you are.'

'You're a sly one! Yes, of course, as soon as one's in love, one can't help having a sense of duty.'

At first, Costals had seen Solange as a doll. He had taken her as one takes a woman for a waltz and then brings her back to her chair. Later, when he knew her better, she seemed the product of the kind of upbringing which teaches that it is impolite to express one's own opinion, and that one should always agree with the other person. He had snubbed her when she said, as girls so often do: 'I'm a bit of a freak.' 'You're not in the least a freak. You're exactly like any other girl.' He had snubbed her again when she said she was 'misunderstood': 'That's what all women say when there's nothing in them to understand.' He had regretted not being able to tease her to his heart's content, because she wasn't witty enough to answer back: 'She would only feel offended and hurt.' He had once paid her this compliment - a considerable one, though its limits are obvious: 'I have never heard her say anything either stupid or vulgar.' He had seen her as soft and self-effacing, in fact an ideal heroine for a French novel. And yet, confirming from his own observations in society that she was telling the truth when she said she had no friends, he was inclined to infer that she must be worth something, since solitude and worth are synonymous. This worth did not, however, go further than 'magnificent negative qualities', and he still thought of her what St Teresa says of herself: 'Thou art she who is not.' His predominant feeling towards her was admiration for her beauty.

But now it was as though he were watching a photographic plate in a bath of developer: gradually, as on the plate, new details of Solange's personality emerged; gradually her complete image was taking shape, and this image reflected great credit on her. Her qualities of perception and judgement, so shrewd and so sensible, were not in themselves so very unusual. But he did not expect to find them in her. He discovered how little he knew about her, and in particular how much better she was than he. Even her voice was a new discovery. Until then, he had known three voices of hers. Her society voice, rather affected, which she adopted not as a pose but on the contrary because she was shy. The voice she used when she talked to him, about which there was little to be said. Her 'night voice', full of pathos, a voice from another world, with its childish words springing from the depths of her past like birds from the bottom of a well. And now there was this new voice, calm, utterly simple and serious, with its soothing quality, its indefinable intonations which made him think: 'Exactly the way girls of the aristocracy speak.' He said to her:

'I'm talking to you as if I'd known you for years, and I'm glad. I'm ashamed of the coarse way I treated you at first. As though you were a tart. Forgive me....'

'It doesn't matter. I would have overlooked everything, since I love you. As a matter of fact I did overlook everything.

'Overlook what, for God's sake?' he wondered. 'Bah! the fact of having given herself, no doubt.' It was clear that she had judged him - perhaps with the same 'indulgence' with which she judged her mother. At other times he would have found this rather irritating. Now it only raised her in his estimation.

'You're in a lower key today. What's happened?'

'Only that I feel more at ease with you now our misunderstanding has been cleared up. Before I knew you, I was afraid of the future. Then, when I was with you, I wasn't afraid any more. And then that misunderstanding occurred and, ever since, I've felt like a bunch of flowers tied too tight. Now you've loosened the string and the flowers can breathe again.'

'Oh! we're in full poetic flight, I see ... I'm sorry! Even when I'm very serious, moved in fact, I can't help joking. Besides, I love teasing you.'

'I know. I'm beginning to know you.'

'You said something a moment ago.... What was it that you "overlooked" out of affection for me?'

'Don't you know?'

'I can guess. It's true: you, such a good girl, to give yourself to me like that, like a falling leaf ... When I think of the moving speech I had prepared to make you give in! And lo and behold! Like a falling leaf.... It must have been written in the stars. You have every virtue, including the principal one of having given yourself without any nonsense. For a woman who isn't easy isn't a real woman as far as I'm concerned. And I ask you, what would all those virtues have been to me if you hadn't given yourself with such dazzling promptitude?'

'When I gave myself to you, I had already given you everything.'

'Cosi fan tutte.'

'To tell you the truth, it wasn't the act itself I "overlooked". But... all the secrecy ... that hotel, the first time ... '

'Like a falling leaf,' he said again. 'Like a little artichoke one picks.... And yet there are women who put up a show of resistance even when they've made up their minds to surrender. The last stand ... '

'I loved you too much to resist you. That at least is not a cosi fan tutte.'

'It's very extraordinary indeed,' he said gravely.

Languidly, with the sickness of the lunar cycle upon her, she was half reclining in the crook of her lover's arm, like a small strip of moss in the damp hollow of a rock. When Costals had entered, two cats had fled: not all cats are heroes. Now they kept coming back, walking across the room, going out again, coming and going as silently as ghosts. At moments their presence could be guessed by the sound of a creaking floorboard, now here, now there.

'You really ought to be taken in hand; you'd be well worth moulding,' he said, after a silence. 'That's quite clear to me now.'

'That's always the way. The man shapes the woman as he wants her to be, and she acquiesces.'

'Except that the man doesn't know what he wants. Is there anything more foolish than the male? And besides, he may not be interested. I love you, I want your happiness, and yet I don't feel like moulding you. Do you know why?'

'Yes.'

'What do you mean, "yes"? I bet you haven't the slightest idea.'

'You're not interested in moulding me because you have enough to do moulding your books.'

'Really, you are fantastic! You've hit the nail on the head. I have better things to do than to create individuals. The reason why Rousseau put his kids in an orphanage was that he wanted to write Emile. All the same, it's rather horrible. You've backed the wrong horse, old girl.'

'Oh! no, I haven't.' (She put her hand on his.)

'Yes, you say that now! We'll talk about it again in two years' time.

'But shouldn't love go on increasing all the time? That's the only way I can imagine it.'

'That sort of love isn't my line at all. Mine is more like a waterchute.'

He smiled as he said this, so she smiled, too. And they ended up in one another's arms.

'She lacks inspiration,' he thought to himself. 'Yes, I've put my finger on it. But she's a fine girl all the same.' How openly she had always behaved towards him! Trying to please him (changing her way of dressing, for instance, in accordance with chance remarks he made) but without a trace of coquetry; giving herself without affectation or artifice or pretended flight; so discreet (never asking him anything about his life or telephoning him first, or, on the telephone, saying more than was strictly necessary); not obtrusive or 'interfering' in the least, when there are so many women one eventually has to push away with practically the same gesture one made to pull them towards one; completely devoid of 'pose'; so far removed from the easy tricks used by others to captivate him, in an age when it is the men who are pursued by the girls; and even going to the unbelievable lengths of never - not once - making the slightest allusion to his literary work, whereas all the women who tried to worm their way into his life first tried to unlock the door with the key of admiration. He was grateful to her, too, for knowing nothing about the mediocre literature of the day and, knowing nothing, keeping quiet about it rather than trotting out the usual clichés, grateful to her for being so innocent of all snobbery, of all unhealthy - or even healthy - curiosity, of any wish to play a part or push herself forward, of any admiration for false values or false riches, for being so different, in a word - and apparently to her detriment, although she was infinitely superior to them - from all those bogus, snobbish, loud-mouthed, empty-headed bitches who were the flashy partners of so many prominent men in Parisian society. He was grateful to her for all this, and his spirit soared in an uprush of simplicity and trust.

'You see,' he said, 'the fact that you're a decent person is far more important than you probably imagine. For a long time now, a very long time, people have been working both inside and outside the country - and God knows with what calculated hatred - to make France a place where anyone with any decency must feel an exile. It's been a long and arduous business, because France was a good nation, basically sound. But at last it has been done. Dare I admit it? I who identified myself so passionately with my country in my youth and during the war, find that there are moments now when I not only feel no loyalty to it, but I even feel a violent need - which arises, and this is the serious part of it, from all that is best in me - to reject it entirely. Well, meeting someone like you, who are French, checks this impulse, and one thinks: "No, I can't desert" ... '

'But there's nothing extraordinary about me. I can assure you that I know lots of girls like me, and there must be many more who are better.'

'It's possible - although, believe me, I tried a good many before I found you: "maiden trials", in racing parlance. But the whole effort of society - perhaps the whole effort of mankind - seems directed at showing off worthless women and making them appear interesting. Women complain of being misjudged. Why then do they allow the worst of their sex to take the limelight? And why do they swallow so easily every male suggestion that tends to make them appear grotesque and degraded? Why such a failure to recognize their own interests? Nearly always when women debase themselves - by some hideous fashion, some obscene dance, some idiotic way of thinking or talking, it's men who have put them up to it. But why don't they resist? Everyone knows that a woman's body, when it's no longer young, tends to become a ridiculous and often repulsive object, a joy for cartoonists, whereas a man's body, as old age draws near, keeps in much better shape. Morally it's the same thing. When a woman is morally not much good, she becomes abominable: it's either one thing or the other. When a woman is ill-bred, lacks decorum, she is a harpy.'

'I thought you only liked easy women.'

'I like women with a sense of decorum who are easy at the same time.'

'Oh, I see.'

'Do you know what a harpy is? Well, I should say bitch, if I were the sort of man who used such expressions. All the women who put on airs, the vamps, the flirts, the "Hallo, darling!" women, all the women who get their pictures into the glossy magazines, all the women I include under the heading of women-who-want-their-faces-slapped are harpies. It is the harpies that all the theologians, the philosophers, the moralists have been aiming at for thousands of years in heaping scorn and anathema on women; but they were wrong in not indicating clearly that it was those women, and them alone, whom they condemned. Which brings me back to my question: why don't decent, sensible women defend themselves against these harpies? Don't they realize the harm the harpies do to them? Women's worst enemies are women. I was telling you just now that, when I meet the sort of woman I take you to be, I feel more kindly towards my country. But it goes further: I feel more kindly towards the whole of your sex and ready to treat it more honourably. For if men behave badly towards women it's because they're afraid of them, because they're obsessed by the harpies. Most of the caddishness, the desertions, broken engagements, etc., that women suffer from are due to the fact that, however sweet and loving a woman may be, the man thinks he can detect the harpy in her, either hidden or potential. So he turns on her, or else he bolts: either way he treats his natural companion as an enemy. And that is why, among your sex, the good pay for the bad.'

'All the same, hasn't there ever been a harpy in your life?'

'Never. And I take no credit for keeping them at bay, as I can't stand them anyway. Me, have anything to do with people like that? Never! As far as they're concerned at least, I shall die intact. I have never loved and I cannot love - more, I cannot bear - any woman who is not simple and straightforward. When I was out in Indo-China, I saw most of the officers - men with the power of life and death over hundreds of their fellows - manoeuvred like pathetic puppets by the worst kind of women, sewers of shame, hideous, vile, ravaged, but full of airs and graces and the same grotesque poses one sees in film stars (ah! the female spy must have a fine time in the French army!). And now and then I would say to one of these men: "How could you?" And he would answer: "There's no one else; I have to take what I can find." And I would say: "Marooned on a desert island, with no other woman in sight, I'd rather make love to a Great Ant-Eater than to one of those pretentious bitches, however ravishing." If I'd had my way in one of those colonial outposts, I'd have had them all deported or clapped into jail. I'd let my men go with native women, with men, with kids, with donkeys, with the leaf of the prickly pear, [The raquette of the prickly pear, much appreciated in the wilds of Africa (Author's note).] anything but those women. The harm they do in our colonies is unbelievable.'

She saw that he was full of a sacred fire, and remembered reading in her history books how the revolutionaries, during the Terror, killed for the sake of virtue. Nevertheless she approved. Then, when Costals started joking again, she said she would go and make tea: such eloquence deserved it.

'Have you any idea how to make tea?'

'You don't know me.'

'Come on, then, I'll teach you. And you'll see the cats playing the cello.'

'Do your cats really play the cello?' he asked, for everything always seemed possible to him.

'No, but they stick a paw straight up in the air when they're washing, and then they look as though they're playing the cello.'

'That image doesn't seem quite accurate to me,' he said, like the honest craftsman he was in the art of writing.

He followed her into the kitchen. The cats had preceded them, but they were not playing the cello. The black one must have had cold paws, for she had covered them with her tail. While the grey one doubtless had a cold tail, for she had placed her paws upon it. The black one opened her eyes as they came in. The grey wondered whether to do the same, then kept them closed, to show her contempt. A deep silence reigned in the kitchen, punctuated by the disproportionately loud tick- tock of a huge alarm-clock, which emphasized the silence instead of breaking it. The silence was even deeper here than in the drawing-room, for the kitchen overlooked the inner courtyard and the whole building on that side was wearing its Sunday look, meaning that it looked uninhabited. The kitchen windows, open on other days to disgorge the wail of gramophones and the chatter of maids, were closed. The drawn curtains were marked at the level of the hasp of the window-bolt with a dark patch which showed they had been pulled back over it all week and gave them the special crumpled look of housemaids' Sunday dresses.

Solange put a kettle on the stove, and Costals picked up a volume of the Bibliothèque Rose entitled The Holidays, which was lying on the table. Solange said that she had lent it to the cook's daughter, who had come up from the country to spend a few days with her mother.

'The Comtesse de Ségur! You can't imagine how well this book fits in with what I was thinking about you a moment ago. Of course, the "model little girl" is you! "Marguerite de Rosebourg" is you! All my childhood comes back to me with this little red book, and this time you're in it. How delightful!'

Standing, they turned over the pages of the book which lay before them on the kitchen table.

'The holidays were drawing to a close; the children loved each other more and more,' Costals read. 'Isn't it charming! I feel that you and I, too, love each other more and more.'

'Oh, yes,' she said childishly, turning her face towards him. Then she leaned her head against his, as people are supposed to do when they are reading the same book. He pushed the curtain to, lest anyone should see them. The room became a little darker. Solange read:

'Marguerite threw herself into her father's arms, and he kissed her so hard that her cheeks became quite crimson.'

They laughed, for one day he had remarked that her face was all flushed with his kisses. And they kissed madly.

'The divine Comtesse!' he exclaimed. 'Her books breathe the very soul of the nobility. They make one drink to the dregs the bitter draught of low birth. All the good characters have titles, all the bad ones haven't. At least one knows where one is. Ah, ha! Here's a sentence which seems to concern someone I know: "I shall now ask Sophie to explain to us how the accident happened".'

'Is it me that sentence is supposed to concern?'

'Dear Rosebourg, wasn't there ever, in your girlish life, a little accident?'

'Which one?' she asked, and he laughed, charmed by her innocence.

The water began to sing in the kettle. Solange was about to take it off the stove, but he stopped her.

'Let the water sing its little song; you can see it's enjoying it. It seems to me that I can hear a thousand different noises in this room which at first seemed so quiet, in the same way as one gradually begins to make things out in the dark as one's eyes get used to it. Can't you hear lots of tiny noises round you?'

'Why, yes!'

'What do you mean, "yes"? The cheek of it! Only writers are allowed to have any imagination. You deserve to be put to the test: tell me, please, what are the voices you profess to hear so clearly?'

He put his face in his hands. She said:

'There's the noise of the tap dripping into the sink - a dull, muffled sound. There's the noise of the water dripping from the bain-marie into the metal pan below - a quick, sharp sound.' ('The bain-marie!' he thought. 'Oh, ho! isn't she knowledgeable!') 'There's the noise of the water spitting from the kettle-spout on to the stove - like a locomotive getting up steam. There's the noise of the steam lifting the lid with something like a big sigh of contentment...'

Smiling into the palms of his hands which still covered his face, he repeated: '... with a big sigh of contentment....'

'All these noises occur at regular intervals. But then there are the free-lance noises. Can you hear the little tap-tapping of the chair on the tiles? That's the black cat scratching herself. The table's creaking: it's as though it were stretching its legs, lazily, because it's Sunday. In fact it's as though these noises only exist on Sundays, as if all the household things were having a day off. And the alarm-clock beats time for the whole little orchestra, as potbellied and self-important as a ballet-master from the commedia dell'arte.'

'Well, well, old girl!' said Costals, lifting his face. 'This is certainly a day of revelations. Where do you get it all from? The gift of observation and the gift of imagery: the two fundamental gifts of the craft of writing, you have them both. And to think that I had quite made up my mind that you were totally lacking in imagination.... Oh! here's something else....'

Catching a few drops from the tap in her palm, the girl sprayed them over the hot-plate of the stove, where they evaporated with the rustle of a silk dress. She said:

'They're running, running, as if to escape their impending

evaporation ... '

Costals watched them with the look people have when they stare into the fire.

'Yes, like soldiers running, running before being blown to smithereens by exploding shells. How they hate to disappear! And it's you who thought that up!' She made as if to stop. He implored her: 'Please kill a few more for me....'

Again she scattered the tiny drops. And again she stopped. 'More! I could go on forever watching them vanish into oblivion.'

'One would think you enjoyed it.'

'It reminds me of the remark made by a general in Darius's army in the middle of a battle. Every time one of his men fell, he said: "One more fool the less." It's true he was a philosopher-general - a breed that shouldn't be encouraged.'

Leaning over the table, she flicked through the book in the red and gold binding. 'I'm looking for a sentence in The Holidays which always used to move me when I was a little girl ... '

In the silence, the genie of dripping water, the genie of boiling water, the genie of fire in the stove - a fire that never went out, as in the most ancient myths - the genie of the motionless cats and even the genie of this melancholy day, this strange winter day in the heart of summer, re-created the familiar world of Costals' early childhood, with its cats, its nursery rhymes, its kettle, its Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, its musical boxes, its New Year almanacs, Humpty Dumpty and La Tour prends garde, Cadichon and Kitty Darling, all the magic fairyland of Old France and Old England adapted for the edification of rather strait-laced little boys. And it was she, the most silent genie of them all, even when she spoke, it was this unobtrusive Cinderella ('If I were to disappear for a week, I don't believe my parents would notice, I take up so little room in the flat'), it was she who, with a wave of her wand, had reawakened this universe for him. It was this stranger who had reopened his nursery door and given him back the savour of his past.

'There!' she exclaimed, 'I've found it! You know, the sentence I found so moving when I was a little girl. Paul says to Sophie: "So you had forgotten me?" And she answers: "Forgotten you, no, but you were asleep in my heart and I dared not wake you." '

Costals glanced at the book and read the sentence himself. Why did he feel it was somehow familiar? He blinked in an effort to remember. Suddenly it came back to him, and a shiver ran through him. Long ago, his mother had said to him about those very lines exactly the same thing that Solange was saying now: 'When I was little this sentence touched me deeply. I used to whisper it to myself over and over again....'

He had always been happy to talk of his mother to Solange. But this time.... To think that, at a distance of so many years, his mother and this young girl had been moved by the same words! He said so to Solange, without comment: his heart was gripped by something too strong for words. It seemed to him as if some mysterious sign had descended upon her.

'What about the nightmare of the Maréchal de Ségur in the haunted house! Could it have frightened a boy? It used to terrify me ... '

Silently they read the story together. Costals reached the place where the Marshal, as the spectre puts the point of its dagger to his breast, kisses the Star of the Holy Ghost on the ribbon of the Order and the spectre, seeing this gesture, spares his life. He reached that passage, and then a strange thing happened: his eyes filled with tears, and he began to tremble.

Trembling, and his eyes full of tears, he said:

'When I was a child and came to this passage in the book, the tears would come to my eyes as they have today. I cried because the Marshal had been saved for being brave. And because the ghost was not too wicked to be moved by his courage. And I too, like the ghost, am not so wicked that I can't still cry, even now. And I owe this to you! You have transformed me into what is best in me. You have brought me back into the atmosphere of my family, to the days when I was a good person, living among good people. Whereas now I live among literary men, and have become a humbug and a rake. What would my life be worth, but for the time I spent in the war? I should never have been a decent person, except when I was a child.' He bent down and placed his forehead on the open book. 'I'm doing as you do when you switch off the light, so that you may no longer see this face of mine, this man's face with all its unpunished crimes.'

Standing against the sink, she was stroking his hair. He took her other hand and clasped it in his - so warm, like a handful of sand. Then he raised his head. He felt a terrible urge to tell her the truth about himself. It was an urge that he felt fairly frequently. It was nearly always into base souls that he cast this truth, for there it was more likely to disappear. But it could be cast into a pure soul; there was no rule against it. So he said to her:

'If a certain lode in me were to be followed up, an unbroken succession of good actions would be found. If another, a succession of horrors. Not petty horrors, judged by this code or that - according to local customs - but really hideous things which the universal conscience can never forgive. Yet if I had not done these dreadful things, what an abyss of despair I should be in today, and above all tomorrow, when I am old. It is not from a desire for self-abasement that I accuse myself before you. It is because I want to see things as they are, and for you, too, to see them as they are, without flinching, because that is what is good.... No, no,' he said, his eyes blurred, sensing that she wanted to speak, 'let me surrender to this spirit that sways within me. Let me be what I am!' he exclaimed passionately. 'What was I saying? Ah, yes, the lodes.... Well, sometimes, these lodes run parallel, but sometimes they cross, and when they do they interweave in arabesques, twining playfully about each other. And sometimes, too, it happens that they dissolve into each other, the best and the worst blended together, indistinguishable from one another. And in the evil I do there is a part I like and a part I dislike, just as in the good I do there is a part that I enjoy and a part that leaves me cold.' (One of the cats sneezed.) 'Certainly I enjoy evil, but I think I enjoy good even more intensely. However, I'm not so sure about that.... Do you remember greeting me one day with the question: "How's your morale today?" And I replied: "My morale is fine, but so's my immorale." [The pun works better in French, where the words are le moral and l'immoral (Translator's note).] That's what you must understand. Beware of preferring your own image of me to the reality. You must take me with all my "outbuildings", the stables and the latrines. However that may be, it is this pleasure in goodness which you have reawakened in me. And what you must know is this: that I've enjoyed and will go on enjoying the harm I have done and will do to others, but that never - and I say it in all solemnity - never will I enjoy the harm I may do to you.'

He slid on to his knees on the tiled floor, trembling all over with the effort of resisting the pleasure he would have liked to give her by asking her to marry him. As she was half-sitting on the edge of the sink with one foot dangling, he kissed the hem of her skirt, then removed her grey suede shoe, and taking her foot in his hands, pressed it to his lips at the spot where the stocking had a small darn. Often, he had kissed her face on the places where her features were a little defective, thinking that, while in her perfection she belonged to all men, in her imperfections she belonged to him alone. Now he kissed the darn in her stocking because it introduced an unexpected hint of poverty into his idea of her, a faint possibility that the apparent affluence in which she lived might not be altogether genuine; and the thought that he would one day wrong her seemed to him more odious than ever. And the knowledge, underlying all his other feelings, that she was a little unwell today, added new warmth to these feelings and brought them to the boil, as the flame nearby had brought the water to the boil.

'You,' he said at last, 'you, so quiet and good, as though to appease the Fates. It's strange, I wish you well. What a mysterious thing it is to really wish someone well! What is essential is that you should always be happy. Once you are out of my hands, of course, because as long as we're together ... I so much want to keep the damage I shall do you to a minimum ... Don't love me! Don't love me!' he exclaimed vehemently. 'It's the only chance you have of not being unhappy because of me. Ah, yes, there's another: you must realize that I'm mad. I'm not only mad, but I'm mad as well.' (He felt her toes moving beneath his lips; at the same time, in spite of the intoxication of the moment, it struck him that her foot was rather thin, and he would have preferred it to be a bit sturdier.) 'Marguerite de Rosebourg,' he said, raising his head, 'I ask your pardon for the future. It is the divine part of my soul (though I don't believe in God, I have no reason not to believe in him), it is the divine part of my soul that asks your pardon in advance for whatever harm I may do you; and I ask you this while mentally kissing the glittering Star of the Holy Ghost which I, too, wear invisibly on my heart. Remember this well, Rosebourg: I shall do you harm, but the harm I do you will give me no pleasure ... Am I boring you?' he asked, seeing the grey cat giving a jaw-splitting yawn. And, because of this ludicrous association of ideas, his laughing self was reawakened and took over once again. Throughout this entire speech, it was as though he had been swept now right, now left by opposing gusts of wind.

He straightened up, and then, standing in front of him, she rested her forearms against his chest, either from some immemorial girlish instinct, or because she had seen it done in films. She had not raised him up when he was kneeling. She had not wept when he wept; the time had not yet come when he would know how to make her cry. With a confidence that nothing, then, could have shaken, she had listened to him as one listens to a child babbling in a dream. She said: 'I know you will never do anything to hurt me.' He was disturbed to think that she knew him so little, and said to himself: 'What can I do against such trustfulness?' Meanwhile the sky had cleared, she had opened the window (canaries were chirping in a cage which had just been put out), and their long embrace was visible to the outside world. He thought of this, but did not close the window, as if something new had occurred which gave them a right to embrace publicly. Thus they remained, merged with each other like the sky and the sea on certain days when the horizon is no longer visible in a great, smooth, even splendour. Then they parted, well pleased with each other.

That night, after the five hours they had spent talking with passionate truthfulness and sincerity, and with no caresses (he despised the very thought of them) - all of which was new in their relationship - Costals was unable to sleep. The esteem he felt for her kept him awake. This esteem had created in his body a tension of a wholly virile kind which he had not experienced during their chaste hours in the kitchen and which was not, even now, accompanied by the faintest lustful image.

'The Précieuses,' he thought, 'used to distinguish "tenderness based on esteem". [Le Tendre sur estime - from la carte du Tendre in Mlle de Scudéry's novel Clélie (Translator's note).] This is a case of tension based on esteem.' Till then he had never suspected that a feeling of a purely moral order could have such an effect, and he was greatly astonished.

He was perfectly aware that he had treated Solange that day as though he were engaged to her, and that it was impossible for her not to have noticed it. For the first time he envisaged the possibility of being weak enough some day to bestride the nuptial Hippogriff with her if she should ever decide to confess to such a desire. He knew for certain that it would be the purest folly. He knew that marriage - of which he had always said, in the words of Don Quixote: 'It is impossible that I should ever conceive of being married, not even to the Phoenix' - would wreck his future: as a writer, because of the obligations, the nervous wear and tear, the need for money, the time-wasting it would involve; and as a man, because his independence was for Costals a necessity as absolute as the air which kept him alive. The Hippogriff, once straddled, could only lead him to Hades. But the idea of marrying Solange was an abyss that had suddenly opened before him and might suck, him down.

Supposing the marriage did take place, it was inevitable that a day would come when he would have to get divorced, both to save his work and to save his soul. But if Solange had done him no wrong (and he was sure she would not have), and if she refused to divorce him, how could he regain his freedom? All night long this prospect weighed him down like an incubus. At last he realized that the only solution would be to murder her. Not to murder her openly, and be condemned, for that would place him in a situation where he would be unable to continue his work and pursue his love-life. But to murder her in such a way that he would not be detected. For instance, by toppling her over the rails of a ship. Or by taking her out to sea in a dinghy. He had already thought it all out in other circumstances.

Of course, killing her would be a hideous crime. But what if there were no other way of recovering his manhood? 'Am I then a monster? No, I'm just like everyone else. Sometimes better than others, sometimes worse. I'm like seven people out of ten. And if seven people out of ten are "monsters", there can be no such thing as a monster. It may seem strange that, on one and the same day, I should not only love this girl enough to consider marrying her, but that I should also contemplate murdering her - not for any jealous motive, but simply because she would be in my way. But many other things in men's souls are equally strange. Of course, since it's the idea of marriage, and it alone, that is responsible for fathering this homicide plan, the simplest thing would be not to marry her. Alas, it isn't as simple as that. It's like an abyss sucking me down.'

He had thought that the night would dissipate these musings like evil phantoms. And, indeed, when he awoke, the possibility of marriage had lost a great deal of its substance. Not enough, however, to prevent him from taking an immediate precautionary measure, painful though it was.

He was due that day or the next to send to a monthly review a long story about a man who poisons someone for fear that he will 'talk'. All the emotions through which the man passes before committing the deed, and the technique employed, were minutely described over some sixty pages. It was a piece of documentary evidence which, should Costals ever fall under suspicion, would tell fearfully against him. 'A man capable of thinking up a murder with such hallucinatory precision cannot be far from committing it; he has already almost committed it in spirit.' He could just hear counsel for the prosecution! Regretfully Costals wrote to the editor of the review to say that he was unable to deliver the promised story.

At the same time he wrote to Andrée, for he felt sorry for her because he was happy.

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

Pierre Costals

Paris

21 June 1927

Dear Mademoiselle,

A small cousin of mine, [Costals' bastard son.] sweet and open-hearted if something of a rascal (thanks to his father who's quite impossible), was out on an excursion one day when he suddenly decided to telephone his father. 'Hullo, is that you, papa?' 'Yes, what's the matter?' 'Nothing, except that I'm happy and enjoying myself, and I just wanted to let you know.'

Yesterday I was happy. Happy in a kitchen. And, my goodwill having been awakened as a result of this happiness, I wanted to 'let you know', and also to ask how you were. Tell me briefly (not more than two pages). I have an idea you've been writing to me lately, but I confess I don't remember what you said in your letters; I must only have read the opening sentences. I won't ask whether you're happy, as I know it isn't your fate to be happy. But still, how's it going?

So long. You can't imagine how benign I feel at the moment. 'Opportunity not to be missed.'

C.

I had never seen the inside of a kitchen before. It's an astonishing place; all sorts of possibilities. And to think that it was there all the time!

If this novel conformed to the rules of the genre as laid down in France, the scene in the kitchen between Costals and Solange would have been placed at the end. Everybody would have been delighted: the pundits because, in a novel constructed in the French manner, that is to say a logically constructed novel, the culminating scene must come at the end, and the moralists because this scene seems to foreshadow a union between the principal characters. And thus the novel, by ending on a vista of blue sky, would have been edifying from beginning to end, for French novels, like Christian souls, always preserve the possibility of redeeming themselves in extremis.

But life, which knows nothing of living, foolishly presumes to ignore the conventions of the French novel. In the story we are here relating, as it really happened, that scene in the kitchen, in which Costals and his sweetheart discovered together some estimable areas of their souls, was indeed a summit, but with all the drawbacks of summits. For, the summit having been reached, one must perforce descend. That scene had no aftermath.

When they next met, Solange was taciturn, almost morose. Perhaps she had her reasons. Perhaps she had none. Perhaps, even, she was no different from her usual self, but they had climbed too high. A multitude of small signs made him doubt whether she loved him deeply. Her face did not light up at the sight of him.... A fortnight had elapsed, and she still hadn't had the snap-shots she had taken of him developed ... Whereas so many women overwhelmed him with solicitude, there was never anything of the kind from her.... Once she said to him: 'Neither you nor I are infatuated with each other. That's a sign of the solidity of our attachment.' The 'neither you' was an echo of what he himself had said to her about his not being in love with her. But the 'nor I' seemed a bit chilly.

He thought: 'She's like a shaded lamp. The light is there all right, but it lacks radiance.' And indeed, as soon as they were apart from each other, it was as if Solange's personality, after all rather frail, was, as it were, swallowed up by that of Costals. When he was with her, he believed in her integrity. When she was absent, all that was tortuous in his nature began to ferment again. Distrustful as a prince and always prone to believe that others wished him as much harm as he felt capable of doing them, he had unwittingly substituted his own turbulent spirit for that of the girl, and soon found himself confronted by a detached, blurred image of Solange, which was no more than a projection of himself. He had re-created her in his own image.

He had once asked her: 'What did you think of the way I made love to you that first evening in the Bois?' She had answered that she had been extremely surprised, though not shocked, and that the sensation had been disagreeable. He was inclined to exaggerate her physical coldness, and comparing the poor quality of her responsiveness to that of, say, Guiguite or certain others, he sighed; for sexual enjoyment, he could only give her five out of twenty. And he consoled himself with theories, all deriving from that tedious habit he had of drawing a sharp dividing line between the sexes: 'Men only love with the heart when they have first desired with the senses. With women it's the opposite: first they love with the heart, and from thence flows desire. Ugly men are loved, ugly women are not. A woman in love doesn't mind if her lover hasn't shaved for two days, whereas no man would kiss a bearded woman.'

At other times, this coldness in Solange did not displease him. It provided him with an excuse, opening the door through which he too would one day escape to undertake the divine conquest of some new little partner. Had she remained the Solange of 'Kitchen Sunday', he might eventually have married her. But if she were the first to show signs of wanting to break it off, then he would break it off himself with total indifference. The only person he ever missed was his son, and in any case nobody is irreplaceable. Hence one of the most significant traits in his character was that he was almost devoid of jealousy, which he characterized as a 'shopgirl's sentiment'. Whether the girl fell madly in love with him, or whether she threw him over, made no difference to him at all. He would adapt himself to either contingency with the same promptness and the same contentment: more passionate as she became more passionate, more forgetful if she chose to forget him. Such was the amplitude of his inner keyboard, and his mastery over it, that he could draw from it at will whatever he wanted.

Nevertheless, prepared as he was to believe that their liaison was on the wane, he decided that it would be unfair to her to postpone the regularization of their position any longer. The state of demi-vierge could not forever satisfy a soul with a thirst for the absolute. The time had come to bring Mlle Dandillot into a more clearly defined category.

With this end in view, they were at his flat one evening, in the room which he called 'the tomb of the unknown woman', when suddenly....

Who's that ringing at my door

Said the fair young la-a-ady

Yes, who, well after half past nine? ... The servant was out. He saw her start up suddenly from the bed, her eyes wide open, and tried to calm her down. An electric sign outside threw splashes of red on to her arms and shoulders, while the glow from the lights of the city, shining in bands through the slats of the shutters, streaked her face with light and darkness as if she were behind the bars of a prison (this figurative prison was her love for him, little though he realized it). The doorbell rang again, and then a third time, with insistence. She slipped out of bed and hurried to the bathroom.

He followed her, and found her getting dressed. He begged her not to. But she was shaken. A minute went by, while she sat, half-dressed, on a chair. And suddenly the bell rang again, and fists began to pound on the door of the flat.

This time Costals was worried. Solange was now fully dressed. There was no one there but a respectably attired young damsel, whose parents must be aware that she often visited him. But he did not think of this: he was simply a frightened man who has heard fists pounding on a door behind which he is in bed with a girl.

Meanwhile the banging had stopped. He tiptoed into the hall, to make sure no one was waiting behind the door. There, on the floor, lay a visiting card. Andrée!

'Your letter touched me so much that I felt we must talk things over and get our bearings at the earliest opportunity; so I caught the first train. I know you're at home, because the windows of one of your rooms are lit up. But never mind ... Please write to me express at the address below, tomorrow if possible.'

So this woman wasn't content with pestering him from a distance. She had to ring his bell at half past nine at night, and bang on his door like a drayman, and watch his windows like a spy. She, whom he did not love, had to disturb him in what he did love.

He told Solange that it was only 'some imbecile of a friend', but when he asked her if she wanted to call it a day, and she pleaded her shattered nerves, he said to her:

'Don't apologize. You'd hear bells ringing and fists banging the whole time ... Even I, after nine years of peace, I can't hear a knock on the door without being reminded of machine-guns. Let's finish the evening in the Bois. Tomorrow I'll pick you up at a quarter to four in front of your house, and we'll go to my country place.'

This was what he called a garden studio which he owned, off the boulevard du Port-Royal, where they sometimes went.

Then he wrote an express letter to Andrée, the Angel of Treachery reading over his shoulder.

Dear Andrée (it was the first time in five years he had called her by her Christian name):

I am so looking forward to seeing you again! If I could have guessed that it was you just now, I would of course have opened up, even though I was in night attire; but so lonely! Come tomorrow, 25th June, at four-thirty, to 96, boulevard du Port-Royal, and ring three times. It's a little 'folly' I've had there for some years. We shall be undisturbed.

Yours,

C.

p.s. In writing to you I am behaving treacherously to another woman. Sweet treachery.

They went out. The stars were dancing about like motes in a sunbeam. He stopped the taxi at a post-office, and handed the express letter to Solange.

'You post it, just to please me. You may read the address. You see it's to a woman....'

She gave him an anxious, questioning look.

'It's a woman I'm punishing.'

'What are you punishing her for?'

'For not loving her.'

Back in his flat, he wrote in his notebook: 'Here on my balcony, at a quarter to twelve, I savour to the full the exquisite tang of treachery. It is such a pleasurable state that I wonder how one can ever relinquish it without some grave reason. Above the town, the sky glows like heated iron. An emerald breeze gently fans my face.'

Next day, at four, Costals and Solange arrived at his Port-Royal studio. Situated at the end of a small garden, this studio was like every other studio, and so not worth describing (the bachelor apartment in all its horror). There was, however, one thing peculiar to it: a number of show-cards, which Costals had had made following an American fashion then becoming fairly widespread in France, were lying about on the furniture. One of them bore this inscription:

LADIES!

NEVER OFFER GENTLEMEN MORE THAN THEY ASK FOR

Another:

THIS GENTLEMAN DOES NOT MARRY

And another:

THIS GENTLEMAN NEVER RETURNS LETTERS

It was not in awfully good taste, but youth will have its fling. And the highest moral altitudes are all the more pleasurable if one comes down to earth occasionally. [Untranslatable pun here. The French is pied-à-terre, = 'feet on the ground' and also 'bachelor flat' (Translator's note).]

'None of this is meant for you,' Costals said to Solange. 'Don't worry, I shall give you back your letters. And now, follow me.'

At one end of the studio was a staircase leading to a tiny loggia, which Costals called the dovecot because, perched high as it was, it did bear some resemblance to a dovecot, and because human doves did nestle there at times. He also sometimes called it his columbarium, by virtue of an old saw according to which funereal thoughts stimulate pleasure, though he himself had little need of such stimulants.

'Well, my pet, no more nonsense; now's the time for you to take the plunge. On this bed, shortly, you will become a woman. So you'd better get a good eyeful of the décor, if what they say is true, that the act still has some importance for a girl in spite of everything. And it has! A moment like that is like an oil-stain that will spread over a woman's whole life. So try and do it properly. For the time being, though, the only thing I ask is that you should stay here and keep mum. In a few minutes, I shall have a visitor downstairs. You see this curtain? Behind it you'll hear everything, and see everything too, if you draw it aside a little, without being seen. Goodbye for now. If you get restless, you'll find plenty of books on morals lying around. Here, for instance: Louis Ménard's La Morale avant les Philosophes. You'll see the progress morality has made since then. Splendid chaps, the Philosophes'.'

He went downstairs and settled in an armchair. For a moment, his eyes vacant, he wondered how he would tackle the scene with Andrée. Then, with the touch of arrogance that woke in him at times, he decided that such a question was not worth his bothering about, that Andrée did not deserve to have a set speech prepared for her, and he made it a point of honour not to think about her any more. He flicked through a magazine and thought of Solange, hidden and yet present, like God perhaps ... Whereupon he plunged into a sort of lucid confusion, was seized with a gust of spirituality, and composed some lines, which he jotted down:

O God! Hide then yourself but in appearance.

Not in reality.

And when you withdraw deep into your silence.

Listen to me.

At four thirty-five, Andrée had still not arrived. At twenty to five still nobody. He was glad she was late, as it was further justification for the cruelty he was about to inflict on her. The fact was that he would cheerfully have suffered insults, dishonour, desertion, the loss of all his money; but he could not bear to be kept waiting. He always told his women, from their very first meeting: 'The chief qualification of a woman in love is punctuality. Everything else is secondary.' He had told Solange, too. He had a notebook in which he kept a record of the number of minutes his girl-friends kept him waiting, and when the total reached five hours, he broke with them - at least in principle. Not without warning them three times, at the end of two, three and four hours, in accordance with an old Arab precept: 'Warn the snake three times before you kill it.' To date, after six weeks, Solange's total only came to one hour seven minutes. A very decent average.

At a quarter to five, the bell rang and Andrée appeared. 'Ah! there you are, my dear Mademoiselle. The burnt child still risks the fire, eh?' On shaking hands with Costals, she held his for a long time, which the writer found far from agreeable. Mlle Hacquebaut, who was usually content with a dab of powder and a touch of lipstick, had today really made herself beautiful, but in a Saint-Léonardesque style: glaring red lips and irregular blotches of dark powder. Her legs were bare, which could have been explained by the heat, though the real explanation lay elsewhere. Her face looked parched and emaciated, like that of a literary gentleman who has had to wait too long for a good review (a plant without water). And there were dark rings under her eyes such as Costals had never seen there before: blue, purple, glossy, huge, spreading out like a fan, or the wake of a boat, nearly up to the temples - terrifying in the broad light of day. He thought she must have developed a taste for solitary practices.

She glanced round the room and read the show-cards.

'No, dear Mademoiselle, you are not really in a house of sin. The worst that ever happens is that I occasionally shut my cat up in here with some tom when she's on heat. But one or other of them always seems to lack interest. The tom, usually. Isn't nature odd? Some day I must shut the tom up here with a mouse. It might sharpen his desire.'

'Yes, his desire to eat her up, after torturing her for hours. And you would be watching them through the window, gloating. I can see it all!'

'What a lurid image you have of me,' he said with disgust.

Still, he had her there in front of him, completely at his mercy, and he wondered what would be the best way of making her suffer. For a sort of chemical reaction had taken place in him since the day before. For nearly five years he had restrained himself from wounding her, for five years he had been waiting for the present moment. All that pity, that kindness, that forbearance had been transmuted by last night's irruption into an element which was chemically their opposite: cruelty. Like milk changed into blood. 'Milk or blood, it's all the same. I love both milk and blood, like the manes of antiquity.' And all the effort that had gone into his benevolence now went to reinforce his cruelty. 'I felt heroic, and that's a feeling I dislike.' Now he could give rein to that other self that had been stifled so long, now he could drop the weight he had been holding up for five years. The strength to make her suffer began to wake and stretch itself within him, and he watched the girl as a wrestler measures up his opponent, wondering what sort of hold to try on her. 'She once wrote to me, paraphrasing Cleopatra's words about Antony, in Shakespeare: "For thy bounty, there is no winter in't." Why, in the first place, should I show myself bountiful to her? Don't know. And then, why should there be no winter in my bounty? Winter's a very fine season, when you look at it in relation to the others. Blessed are those who blow hot and cold together. If the souls of the just are like good trees and good pastures, as the Gospel says, they must love winter as well as summer, drought as well as plenty, darkness as well as light: it needs a little of everything to make a man. All the seasons exist in me, one after another. I am a revolving cosmos that presents every point of its surface to the sun, one after another. One after another! Always one after another! Now she'll see what it costs, five years of pity from a man like me.'

'I see you have bare feet,' he said nonchalantly. 'In Algiers, when young Frenchmen of the upper classes want to seduce a girl who also belongs to the upper classes, they take her by car to the forest of Bainem. There, if she refuses, they wait until nightfall, then take her shoes and jump into the car. She gets back as best she can, barefoot. The forest of Bainem is twelve kilometres from Algiers.'

'Poor things!'

'Well, it teaches them to stand on their own feet, no pun intended. We must defend ourselves, mustn't we?'

'Defend yourselves! Poor helpless males! Either defending themselves against women who refuse, or defending themselves against women who throw themselves at their heads. But I,' she said (with sudden volubility, rushing the words to the point of stammering, as though all of a sudden she had started rushing down a slope), 'whatever you may have thought, I never threw myself at your head: I never begged; on the contrary I offered. You refused. Of course, to be loved takes away part of one's freedom. But so does everything that has to do with life. By simply going on living, you accept the tyranny of time and space, the weather, the need to eat and sleep ... '

'My entire life is based on one thing: getting rid of everything that isn't essential to me.'

'If you really had to be afraid of something, you could have chosen something else to be afraid of besides love - mine, at any rate. But however that may be, you can't say I've forced myself on you. I went out of your life in silence, and so I have remained. Shall I tell you? I was utterly fed up with you. With you, and with this wretched love that has never fed upon anything but itself. And then, just as I imagined you must be thinking: "Now she's dead all right, and she'll never stir again," you wrote to me, you shouted "encore" to bring me back on stage, as if you had enjoyed my little tragi-comic act. Oh! you know how to keep women in suspense all right. Why did I come? First of all, to show you I wasn't sulking. And then because, in spite of everything I wrote, I hadn't given up. The only way you could have made me give you up would have been to tell me you didn't love me. But that you've never done. Not once, in four years and nine months. Not once. You've always run away, but you've never really broken off. And then, after running away, you return to the attack with redoubled vigour.' ('My head! My head!' thought Costals, putting a hand to his head in the gesture of Achilles tearing his hair.) 'I came here in order to hear these words from you, if that is what I am to hear. To hear them from your own lips. Whatever happens, this abscess must be lanced.'

'Well, we'll see about that,' he said cheerfully, not yet clear as to what he was going to say or do.

From her spotless legs, her made-up face, he guessed she must have prepared herself with minute care. He could also guess why. Yet the seam of her dress had come unstitched in places, the lace edge of her petticoat, showing at her throat, might have been cleaner, and her nails - pointed and varnished - retained a thin streak of black under the artificial pink, which made him wonder whether she thought black fingernails an additional attraction, as negro women do their lip- plates, or a measure of hygiene like the dirt on Arab babies which their mothers preserve religiously because it is a guarantee of good health. Slatternly people, in their occasional attempts at cleanliness, always overlook some detail that betrays them. And it is the misfortune of women that men can bear negligence in a man but loathe it in a woman.

Nevertheless, all this time, Costals had been smiling at her, and smiling so naturally that he was not even aware of it. He smiled at her (a) because he had a natural gaiety which expressed itself in that way, a kind of artless vitality, like one of those electric currents, innocently blue, but deadly; (b) because he was grateful to her for the pleasure he was about to derive from making her suffer; and (c) because, in spite of everything, he still rather liked her. (Through all their debates and discussions he had never stopped liking her, and that was no doubt one of the reasons why he tormented her.)

When he had taken a good look at her, Costals shifted a vase of flowers on the table in such a way that his face was hidden from the woman who loved him. She moved her chair sideways so that she could see him again. Once more he shifted the vase.

'Why don't you want me to see you?'

'Just to annoy you,' he said gaily. 'But there, I'll be nice.' He pushed the vase aside.

'I've really been an awful fool, haven't I?' said Andrée. 'If men only knew how stupid women can be, they'd pity them instead of torturing them.'

'Women keep on begging until one gives them something. But one can give them pretty well anything. Pity, for instance. In any case, men do give it to you, though without realizing it. They call their pity love. On the whole, what brings man and woman together is pity far more than love. How could one fail to pity women when one sees what they are? One doesn't pity an old man: he has reached the end of his cycle, he has had his day. One doesn't pity a child: its helplessness is but momentary, the future belongs to it. But a woman in her prime, at the peak of her development, look at her! Woman would never have conceived herself to be man's equal, if man hadn't told her she was, out of "niceness".'

'Sometimes, it seems, this pity turns into desire.'

'Of course. Everything changes into everything else. What people call "love", "hate", "indifference", "pity", are only momentary phases in one and the same feeling. And we must thank God that pity is only a momentary phase. Otherwise it would annihilate us. We should escape from the enslavement of love only to enslave ourselves to pity. One can make people do anything by exciting them to pity. Do you know one can die of one's pity? Consequently, everything that is done out of pity turns out badly, except perhaps what is done out of pity for greatness, and you won't find that sort of pity every day. Half the doomed marriages in the world are marriages in which one or the other has married out of pity. When I was wounded during the war, the more the civilians at railway stations pitied me, the more I despised them. I felt their pity put them so utterly in my power! I could have got them to sign cheques or hand over their daughters, anything I wanted, and all this without deserving it, or putting on an act. It was revolting! Still, one might as well take advantage of it, and it seems to me that now, if I coveted other worldly goods than those I already possess, I should be less inclined to acquire them by exploiting the stupidity or the vanity or the greed of my fellow-men than by exploiting their pity.'

A butterfly flew into the room through the open window and (ignoring Andrée) fluttered around Costals as though asking to be stroked. But it is not easy to stroke a butterfly.

'I'm beginning to understand,' Andrée said slowly. 'The only feeling you have ever had for me is pity. The only feelings you ever have for women are desire, irritation and pity - never love. So you arrogate to yourself the right to pity women! Do you realize how ridiculously nineteenth-century you are? "Poor unfortunate" women! Michelet! Oh, no! please, not your pity! I've had enough of those life-belts of yours that hit one on the head and send one under. Please don't throw any more. Women don't need your pity. You're the one who should be pitied.'

'Why? Because I don't love you?'

'Because you love nobody. You have no wife, no home, no children, no object in life, no faith. And perhaps it's because you're ashamed of all that that you come and huddle close to those who do love - that you call them back to you, as if you were one of them. And you're not, oh no, you're not! A leper, that's what you are!'

'Yes, it's exactly as I said: because I don't love you. But really, Andrée Hacquebaut, take a look at me: do I look like an unhappy man?'

'It's a mask, a grimace.'

'The grimace of the literary man is intended to make him appear unhappy. They all want to look like Pascal. "M. Thingummy's Pascalian anguish." There are two certain recipes for admission to the Academy: a book on Racine, and a book on Pascal."

'You admitted it all to me, don't you remember: "I lie all the time"?'

'I remember very well. I said that in order to give you a false idea of myself. And besides, what I say to you is of no importance. It's in their work that you must look for men like me, not in what they tell you.'

'One has only to look at your photograph in this week's Vie des Lettres to see that you're not happy.'

'One has only to look at my photograph in this week's Vie des Lettres to know that the photographer had disturbed and irritated me. Come, come, my dear girl, this is a perfect example of reaction 227a.'

'I don't want to know what reaction 227a is. It's sure to be something unpleasant as usual.... What did you mean?'

'I'll tell you - it's quite nice, really. As you probably know, all women react in the same way to a given stimulus. There's nothing mysterious about women. Men have led them to believe they were mysterious, partly out of chivalry and partly as a bait, because they desire them. And of course the women fall for it, and even improve on it. It's always the same: at first sight, in a gathering of women, when you see them all saying the same things, laughing at the same things, etc., you feel that they form a kind of interchangeable substance. Then if you get to know one of them and develop a warmer feeling for her, she begins to appear very different from the others, the others can tell you nothing about her, she is an enigma to you, and so she will remain until you have conquered her; for it was desire that made you believe all this. Once conquered, she soon appears exactly like the others again. So one sees that in reality all women's reactions are automatic and can be foretold in advance. These reactions can be classified, and that is what I have done, identifying them by numbers. Reaction 227a is the classic reaction whereby a woman, because she is unhappy, tries to convince the man she loves that he too is unhappy. Not only because she wants to comfort him and "mother" him, but because it exasperates her to see the man happy, and happy without deriving his happiness from her. Men too, of course, often exhibit reaction 227a, but in them it arises exclusively from desire. And then nearly all Catholics, both men and women, also have a similar reaction: they want to convince unbelievers that their situation is desperate. In that category, the reaction is numbered 79PC. PC stands for "practising Catholic" as opposed to the non-practising variety.'

'I don't know what women can have done to you to make you speak of them in such terms. They must have made you suffer dreadfully. Oh, of course, I forgot - I mustn't say that! It's reaction 227a. You just wait, though: one day you'll be rid of women for good. I've often wondered what you'll be like when you're old. Well, you won't be much to look at. I could tell you exactly what wrinkles you'll have: I can already see the first traces of them, like the light pencil strokes with which a painter begins a sketch. It's true, there are lines on your forehead which weren't there three months ago ... '

He began to laugh, delighted by her naïve rudeness, and feeling slightly attracted towards her. He wondered which of his different selves to bring into play. After all, had Solange not been there, he would not have minded 'taking' Andrée. 'The nape of her neck isn't too bad. But is it enough? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. But even so!' For the first time, he felt a sort of desire for her, more especially, perhaps, because of the rings under her eyes. Perhaps also because he found her repulsive: 'The strong alone relish horror.' He watched a fly in the ash-tray on the table in front of him, which had been quietly feeding on the ash and cigarette ends for three minutes with as much apparent enjoyment as if it had been jam - so drunk with ash that one could have picked it up with one's fingers. So it was with him: everything was much of a muchness. This sudden upheaval of all his feelings, of his whole policy towards this girl over the past five years, would have had its comic side. He felt no hatred towards her, merely indifference with if anything a certain liking, and from this indifference anything might emerge. He did not mind making her deliriously happy: why not? She deserved it. He did not mind making her deliriously unhappy: she deserved that too. It was just as rational to make her suffer in order to compensate for all the unwarranted good he had done her, as to make her happy in order to compensate for all the unwarranted harm he had done her. And in any case, was there any need to behave rationally at all? Everything came easily and spontaneously to him, just as it did when he sat down at his desk in front of a blank sheet of paper. Costals' inhumanity did not arise from an inability to experience human emotions, but rather from his ability to experience them all equally, and at will, as if all he needed to do was to press the appropriate button. There are those who rebel against the arbitrary nature of the laws that govern human lives; others are not even aware of it. Costals was aware of it, but rather than suffer from it, he chose instead to worship it. For his whole existence was governed by this one thought: since the world offers so many reasons for joy, only a fool would choose to suffer (since suffering has to be paid for in this world and is unrewarded in the next). After having suffered for some years from seeing the decline of France, he had decided to enjoy this decline (for patriotism, not being inborn, can be lost as easily as it is acquired). He had reacted in the same way towards social injustice, and in general to the whole problem of evil. 'If I were to suffer because of all the evil in the world, my life would be a torment, and therefore an absurdity. So let's enjoy that too.'

He debated for a moment whether to arrange a meeting with the young woman next day in order to pleasure her? But would he be able to recapture the feeling he now had for her? Suddenly, Andrée's ridiculous remark came back to him: 'You've no idea what a woman's will-power can do,' and at once the problem was settled; for there still remained all the reasons he had had for the past five years against going to bed with her, with the added irritation of remarks such as this. Nevertheless he no longer felt the same desire to torture her. The idea of staging a melodramatic cat-and-mouse act ultimately repelled him as being too facile and vulgar. He decided, therefore, to bring matters to an end without more ado. 'Forgive this interruption, but it's now five thirty. I must warn you that my landlady is calling at six o'clock. If there's anything you particularly want to say to me ….'

'But isn't it you, Costals, who have something to say to me?'

'Me? What would I want to say to you?' He saw Andrée's face harden in an instant, like the faces of those women who, after swaggering into the police-station with their tawdry jewellery, are told by the superintendent that he will have to detain them. His good genius tapped him on the shoulder: 'Don't be unkind.' 'Why not? I'll be nice to the other one in a moment.' 'What about this one?' 'Another time.'

'Your attitude towards me is a perpetual insult, and there are times when I wonder how I ever managed to put up with it.... '

'I've often wondered about that myself. But it's surprising what women will put up with from a man.... '

'Of course, when they're in love. But you're only interested in abusing your power. The life of a man like you is dreadful, monstrous!'

'A writer worthy of the name is always a monster.'

'Taking advantage of certain people and thwarting the others. Never in tune with other people. Destroying everything in the germ. Your life is one long series of abortions - your own, and those you inflict on others. Have you forgotten what you once wrote to me? "It's too easy to make women unhappy. I leave that to the gigolos"?'

'That "once" was a long time ago. It was at the time when you yourself wrote to me: "A girl is never the first to tire of platonic love." Besides, you're intelligent enough for it to be worth while making you unhappy. You can make use of your suffering.'

'No, no, don't you believe it! I'm not intelligent enough.'

'But to suffer because one loves: isn't that a kind of happiness? What if your suffering ceased? Wouldn't you miss it?'

'It's easy for you to talk.'

'I don't know, it's the sort of thing women say.'

Now she was afraid of him, with a sort of animal fear, the fear one has of a madman when one is locked in the same room with him and has seen a murderous glint in his eyes. Frantically she sought to placate him.

'Please don't try to be cruel, Costals. It doesn't come naturally to you - you have to force yourself.' (She was trying to persuade him that he was kind, just as other women tried to persuade him that he was 'a Christian at heart'.) 'Is having loved you my crime?'

'Why yes! '

'Why no!' she said vehemently. 'Why must you take revenge on me? I've never done you any harm, and I've suffered a great deal from you. My anger was only a form of inverted misery. I paid for it as I paid for my sulks - which you didn't even notice. I beg you not to destroy this pitiful peace of mind so painfully acquired after three months of struggles and tears. I said to you once: "Rather than this silence and this uncertainty, bludgeon me until I have the strength to escape from you." Now, I say: "No, for pity's sake, spare me these blows." What would I have left of you, if you were no longer even kind to me?'

That she was afraid of him gave Costals no pleasure. All he wanted was to be able to make her suffer with a clear conscience.

'You admitted the other day that your love was not up to much, since you preferred your happiness to mine. For once, I ask you to prefer my happiness. Let me make you suffer. Then I shall love in you the pain I have caused. In this way I shall become part of you, and so love you. For five years you have given me the pleasure of resisting you; now give me the pleasure of being cruel to you. Women always refuse to recognize the degree of falsehood, calculation, weariness and charity in the love men bear them. With me you will see it all. And it will do you good! It will teach you something about life. You see, the important thing is not to let life stagnate. Life is always kind to the virile.'

'But who said I was virile? Is it my business to be virile? I'm a woman, damn it, a woman, a woman!'

'Still, women have a sure way of preventing themselves from suffering.'

'What?'

'Looking at themselves in a mirror when they're unhappy. They'd change their expression at once. And there's another recipe for automatically putting an end to your suffering. That is to try and imagine what you will be like in five years' time. You know perfectly well that, in five years' time, you will have ceased to love me, and that the whole of this episode will seem to you as ludicrous as the items they print in the newspapers under the heading "A Hundred Years Ago". A new sand-hill piles up and buries the old one. Just put yourself in the place of Andrée Hacquebaut at thirty-five. It only needs a little imagination.'

She was about to answer - to explode - when a sort of centipede appeared on the table and began to saunter nonchalantly around. She had a horror of such creatures.

'Kill that ghastly thing!'

'Why? It hasn't done me any harm.'

'What about me? Have I done you any harm?'

She crushed the insect with a newspaper. He gave her a nasty look.

'Mademoiselle Hacquebaut, you exhaust me. The other day I was in a kitchen with a little girl who made me very happy. Being happy, I wanted you to be happy too, and that is why I wrote to you. Last night, at half past nine, you came and banged on my door like a drayman. I was with that same little girl: everything had been arranged so that I should make a woman of her that night. And you dislocated the whole thing. However, since you had come because of me, I did not want your journey to have been in vain, and I made this appointment with you. We might have had a good hour and a half in which to talk pleasantly, if you had not contrived to turn up a quarter of an hour late. Now I really don't know where all this is getting us.'

'What are you after? Are you trying to make me so sick of you that I shall leave you in peace? So that's why you brought me back! To tell me of all your filthy goings-on with a scullery-maid! It's just as I always said: you're incapable of loving your equals.... '

'I'm not interested in equality in love because it's the child that I look for in a woman. I can't feel either desire or tenderness for a woman who does not remind me of a child.'

'That way you'll end up in gaol as a satyr.'

'Satyriasis is only an over-developed form of masculinity.'

'And so this is your "goodwill" - the goodwill you spoke about in your letter! This moral trap you set for me, carefully prepared as you prepare everything.... Well, did you or did you not emerge from your peaceful existence to write to me: "Opportunity not to be missed"?'

'That was a joke.'

'When Nero hurled himself at one of his courtiers with a dagger, and missed, he used to laugh and say it was a joke.'

'Oh God! Have we got to Nero now?' He heaved an exasperated sigh, pressing his fingers against one of his eyelids. 'I can't help it if I like joking, can I? Life has infinite charm as soon as you stop taking it seriously. But you women are all the same; you always think I'm joking when I'm not, and that I'm not joking when I am.'

'Why won't you admit that what you wanted to do was to watch the effect of your refined tortures on me minute by minute, to watch my thoughts and feelings struggling inside me, just as you might watch ants or Martians devouring each other while you, with your horror of getting involved, keep well away from it all. You like to have me within reach, as a cannibal chief keeps his favourite white man, cutting himself a slice from time to time.... Oh, yes, it's a splendid thing, your pity for women! What would it be like if you hadn't any? The pity one feels for a chicken just before wringing its neck.'

'I admit that, on occasion, I've behaved like a bit of a charlatan towards you. But not now. A while ago, yes, I wanted to make you suffer, and I even asked you to allow me to do so. But not now. At this moment, I feel very sympathetic towards you.'

Then she saw something which seemed to her extraordinary. She saw an expression both deep and solemn appear in Costals' eyes, and the word 'fraternal', that once she had loved to repeat to herself in thinking of him, rose to her lips as the one word which could describe what she felt towards him at that moment. But the expression quickly faded.

'Do you believe I could ever be generous towards you?' he asked, wishing to give her a false hope.

'I can no longer believe in you or in anything that comes from you. You have deceived me too often, wilfully misled me. Oh, men, men! Pits of horror and mystery and utter inconsistency as opposed to women, even the least stupid and the least affectionate of whom can do nothing but love, can do nothing but spend their lives returning good for evil!'

'Perhaps rather less is demanded of them. As for men's inconsistency. ... Men are more inconsistent than women because they're more intelligent.'

'Oh, you and your intelligence! All I say is this: if, as you pretend, you have the smallest spark of feeling for me, then save me. Save me, Costals. To you it means nothing, to me it means life itself. And surely I have a right to live!'

She was only a few inches away from him, and her eyelids were now closed. She stood thus, with lowered lids, like someone expecting a blow - a little wraith-like, with her great hollow eyes, and burning with the desire to abandon herself. The only sound was the faint patter of sparrows' feet on the sky-light. Then, as Costals said nothing (and although she had not seen him raise his eyebrows when she said 'Surely I have a right to live', as if to say: 'Is it so important?') she moved away a few steps, her head bowed, saying in an odd voice: 'I'm sorry, I've got a speck of dust in my eye.' She turned to the wall and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, silently (no snuffling). Costals waited for her to stop crying, endless though it seemed. 'There's still time,' he thought. 'One word, and I could make her madly happy.' But he said nothing, and she came back to the table. Then he took a step towards her. Suddenly his eyes fell on Andrée's right hand, and he saw what he had not seen before: while all her other nails were long and pointed, the nail of the middle finger of her right hand was cut short. He looked up at the dark rings under the girl's eyes, and his eyelids flickered with the gust of desire that swept over him. But it was too late.

'Did you break your nail?'

'Oh no,' she said, 'it's nothing.' And quickly she closed her fist. Her head was bowed.

'Off you go now, my dear. I think we've come to the end of what we have to say to each other.'

He thought she might be armed, and was going to kill him, or at least slap his face, and in order to be able to ward off the blow, he moved still closer to her, as modern bull-fighters stick close to the bull's flank in order to be 'inside' a blow from its horns. She raised her head, looked surprised, and stared at him motionless, with her bruised eyes. He realized meanwhile that she did not intend to kill him, that the idea had not even crossed her mind, and he thought: 'Really, these Frenchwomen!'

'Costals, I shall probably never see you again. I just want you to answer one question: are you aware of what you're doing?'

'What, me? That's a good one. If I weren't aware, I wouldn't be guilty.'

'What do you mean by that? Am I to understand that you want to be guilty?'

Without answering, he took her gently by the arm, and opening the door, escorted her along the short garden path to the door that led into the avenue. (There was a wing-shaped cloud floating in front of them.) 'Shall I kiss her on the forehead before throwing her out?' The reasons for and against such a gesture were equally balanced. The door-bell had been out of order for some time: it was not supposed to ring when the door was opened from the inside, but in fact, about every other time, it did. 'If it rings, I shall kiss her.' He opened the door. Silence. A twittering of birds, weaving a trellis of song above their heads. She went away.

He closed the door. He had an intuition that she would come back, that she would knock, that something would happen. But no, nothing: he had never had any luck with his intuitions. Back in the studio, he listened a moment longer, then went upstairs to the columbarium.

'Well, my little one, what did you think of all that?'

Solange was still standing behind the curtain in the attitude she had adopted for eavesdropping. And she looked at Costals with perplexed and feverish eyes. Her cheeks were flushed, too, as when he switched on the light after covering her with kisses for hours (that face of hers, a little swollen by his kisses), although today he had only kissed her three or four times, and that an hour and a half ago. And her hair was somewhat wild, because she had not wetted it that morning.

'Well,' he asked again, 'what did you think of that little scene? A real performance, eh?'

'I wish I hadn't seen it. When you made me read some of that woman's letters, I felt sorry for her. But after seeing that, I have no pity left.'

When he had got her to read some of Andrée's letters, she had been shocked by what she considered a lack of delicacy on his part, although he had not revealed the name of his correspondent. She had told him so, and his reply was: 'I'm taking the hat away.'

['To return to the conduct of the Comte de Guiche, the secretary also told me that, being present one evening at the Queen's card- table where the princesses and duchesses are seated around the Queen while the others remain standing, the Count became aware that the hand of a lady, his mistress, was busy in a place which modesty forbids me to name and which he was covering with his hat. Observing that the lady's head was averted, he maliciously raised his hat. Everyone present began to laugh and whisper, and I leave you to imagine the confusion into which the poor creature was thrown ...

'He played similar tricks upon ladies daily, and yet they continued to seek his company.' - Primi Visconti: Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV.]

'What do you mean?'

'You'll be told when you're a big girl.'

Now again she was shocked, out of some obscure sexual solidarity, that he had made her a witness to the humiliation of one of her kind. But such was her faith in him that it never occurred to her to wonder: 'Will this happen to me one day?'

'It does one good to see you again. To see a woman who still lives in the world of reality. It's true, you're one of the few women I know who isn't crazy. Literary men attract crazy women as a lump of rotting meat attracts flies. We're landed with every kind of loneliness and repression: they want food for their dreams! You're the exception that proves the rule, and as an exception I love you.'

'But then why bother to reply to them?'

Ah, well! When I see flies on a piece of meat, I say to myself: "Everyone has to eat".'

He had taken her in his arms, inhaling the warmth and freshness of her face and sliding a hand under her shoulder-strap (he was a real terror with shoulder-straps: he had only to look at them for them to snap), hungry to get back at last to something he really desired, and with the same ardour as if he were returning to her after a long absence; and he was indeed returning from a distant country, from the nether regions where dwelt the people who did not attract him. And it was as though he were about to give voice to the sort of little strangled yaps with which a dog will greet the return of its master, be he good or bad. He said to her:

'I bring you my cruelty while it is still warm. This cruelty is my tenderness for you; they are one and the same thing. Kind? Cruel? It's all the same. As one quenches one's thirst with a cigarette. Water would refresh you, and the cigarette burns, yet they're the same thing. Don't try to understand. You saw that girl? There are masses and masses of them around! All the women I've refused because I didn't find them attractive. Drown the lot of them, that's all they deserve - like Carrier's executions in Nantes. And in fact that's how it usually finishes: rrrop... I open the trapdoor. Quite seriously, what she ought to do now is commit suicide, so that I'm really rid of her. I showed you that little episode so that you should see what happens to women I don't care for. There's a girl who started from nothing, who brought herself up entirely on her own in the worst possible conditions, who is cultivated, sensitive, intelligent, extremely gifted, and who has been in love with me for five years. If I weighed her merits against yours, yours would be non-existent. But I don't love her. I've never given her anything, never kissed her, never held her hand. Because I don't love her. You, on the other hand, come along, you attract me, and I give you everything: my attention, my affection, my sexual vigour, my intellect. Remember that, if one day you have reason to complain of me, which you surely will. You have had everything, for no good reason. There's no reason why I should have given everything to you rather than to others, no reason for such a preference or such a partiality. Where did I read that line that always runs through my head when I think of you?

I know not why 'twas you I chose.

What are you? A little thing like so many others, a dewdrop in the meadow. You might have had all the "negative qualities" in the world: do you think that would have stopped me? All you had to do was please me, and you couldn't help that. Picked out almost at random. That's how life goes - everything a matter of chance. Why this rather than that? In reality, there is no reason, or what reason there is is absolutely unimportant. For you, everything; for the others, nil. There's a terrible injustice there, and that is what I like about it. Not that I don't love justice too; I enjoy them both in turn. I had to tell you all this. In any case, you know that I enjoy telling you unpleasant things. It's part of my love for you.'

She listened without really understanding, with a certain bewilderment that was natural enough. But she belonged to a world where writers were thought of as 'literary chaps, not to be taken too seriously'. As for him, he was glad that she did not answer, for whatever she had said would doubtless have been very different from what he himself thought. He went on:

'There are so many worlds that are foreign to you. The world of knowledge. The world of justice. The world of suffering. The world of responsibility. You do not even suspect their existence. And I am only aware of them in flashes. A rocket soars, lights them up for a moment, then they are plunged in darkness once more. My darkness.

'Yet I devote time and attention to you, I give you part of my substance, there are times when I speak to you as if I were speaking to some unknown world. How many of my words have reached their target? What a lot of wasted shots! Am I right, or am I wrong? A little girl. A little twenty-year-old bourgeois Parisian girl. There are those who will say: "So that's what you spend your time on! When the social structure ... When whole nations.... When empires ... Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" And there are others who will say: "This little soul is every bit as important as the soul of an entire nation. All the suffering caused throughout the world by the war weighs no more than the tears of this chit of a girl. If there was nothing else in your life but the fact that you treated her lovingly, you would have fulfilled your human role here below, you would have worked the tiny human plot that is allotted to each of us." Which of these two viewpoints is the right one? A vulgar and meaningless question. Both of them are right. You must immerse yourself in one of them until you have exhausted it, and then do the same with the other. They're two aspects of a single truth. Fancy writers tell us that truth is a diamond, but what they never stop to consider is how many facets this diamond may show. And now, quiet! Don't try to answer. There's no need for you to understand, as there's no need for me to know that you haven't understood.'

He went and closed the shutters, [The columbarium overlooked the gardens of a convent (of which there were many in the district). The convent bells could be heard, and the nuns could be seen from the windows. The author has refrained from exploiting the too obvious contrasts.] drew the curtains, and modestly turned over a little card from a press-cutting agency which bore the legend 'WE SEE ALL' in large letters. His soul was still smouldering, as if under the influence of some life-giving spirit: this delectable brew was his cruelty to Andrée. He flung Solange, fully dressed, on to the bed, and straightened her legs out. From then on, he was like an apache trying to pin a man to the ground. Usually he dared not squeeze her too hard for fear of hurting her: she was so young! Now for the first time he was brutal with her, and although this was partly from necessity, because she struggled, it was also calculated, for he was determined to leave her with an unforgettable memory. She screamed, 'No! No!' with her mouth wide open and her head lolling from side to side, and he drank in her breath which no longer had the odour he knew but an odour which came from deeper down, as though her cries drew it up from the depths of her being. He could keep her head still only by seizing her tongue between his teeth and clenching them when she tried to move. And with every limb he systematically manhandled this thing which was Mlle Dandillot. Suddenly everything became easy and he let himself sink into a new sensation. She closed her eyes, and her plaints ceased. Meanwhile he was absorbed in his sensation, mediocre though it seemed. It gave him no more than an intellectual satisfaction: 'Well, that's done!' And he sniffed vaguely at this woman's face, as a lion, tearing chunks off the meat it holds between its paws, stops now and then to lick it.

With one of the handkerchiefs embroidered for him by Andrée Hacquebaut, he wiped Solange's forehead and the curve of her nostrils, so divinely moist. Her head, having slipped between the pillows, was now tilted even further back, so that the long, pale curve of her neck and throat assumed more prominence than the face itself, on which there appeared a look of such complete surrender that he pressed her eyelids closed in alarm. Her lips were parted a little, disclosing the small teeth like those of a sheep's head on a butcher's stall. There are three smiles that have something in common: the smile of a corpse, the smile of a gratified woman, and the smile of a decapitated beast.

He scrutinized her thus for a while, attentively. He was trying to differentiate her, to see in what way she was more than a mere body, more than an instrument for his caresses, more than a mirror in which to observe his own pleasure.

He stretched himself out at her side. His soul, already clouded with intimations of sadness, took flight and hovered in realms remote from her. It was the primordial moment when man asks, as in the Gospel: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' The primordial moment of pity for women. Outside, the sky must have clouded over, for the room was now almost dark. He had visions of flabby, white-skinned women, women of infinite depravity, who lie in one's arms at nightfall as the lights spring up one by one around the city, and who say: 'Look ... there's a light... ' and whom one goes on holding, out of pity, making them believe that one loves them, out of pity. This memory brought back others: the whole of his life opened out like a peacock's tail, and all of it, past and future, was dotted with faces like the golden circles on a peacock's tail. He felt pity for this young creature alive at his side, her face nestling in the hollow of his left shoulder, where so many faces had lain. (If that shoulder had been a photographic plate, how many superimposed faces would have been visible there, and what a hideous monster the composite face that eventually appeared.... ) He felt pity for her for having placed herself in hands such as his (and yet, had he detected the slightest little ruse or merely precaution on her part, to protect herself, he would have held it against her). He felt pity for her because he did not love her more, could not find more reasons for loving her - and because for him she was but one among many, whereas for her he was the only one - and because of what she believed he was giving her, when in fact it was impossible for him to give it. He thought: 'One spends one's youth loving people one cannot possess fully (through shyness), and one's maturity loving people one cannot possess fully (through satiety).'

One of his arms lay under Solange's head, but his face and body were turned away from her. There was a moment when he betrayed her so cruelly in his thoughts that he put out his hand to seek hers and comfort her, as if she must have guessed what was going on inside him (and also because, now that he no longer expected anything from Solange, he felt he must be doubly kind to her as though to counteract the suspension of his love). She turned and, without a word, kissed him on the cheek - still the same childish kisses, in spite of all that had happened. She had emerged from her stillness to do this, as a solitary wave rises above a calm sea. A cry burst from his heart: 'She can suffer because of me, but I cannot suffer because of her. I love her, yet it is not in her power to make me suffer. This game must end, this abominable one-sided game, so harmful to the weaker of us.' Then a voice rose: 'You say you love her, yet she cannot make you suffer: therefore you do not love her.' And he answered: 'Why must I always be lumped together with other people! I love her but she cannot make me suffer, because I am not like everybody else. I am not so easily hurt.' He was suddenly seized with a passion for truth that was either dazzling light or cloudy obfuscation, either a glory or a vice (one of his women had called it his 'catastrophic honesty'); he wanted to say to her: 'Little one, my darling little one, I had better warn you now: I do not love you enough. You too will have to stand aside for someone else. The day will come when I shall have even forgotten your face. I am of the wandering race of men. The day will come when I shall love other women, different women. Perhaps it has happened already!' (this was not true). 'Perhaps already I have stopped loving you ... Perhaps I have never loved you at all, my darling child...." But he knew that she was like all the rest, that she too, like the great ones of the earth, lived and fed almost exclusively on lies, and would soon die if the lies were to cease, and that Truth, anyway, is ipso facto reprehensible and punishable by law since, as everyone knows, she goes about naked. He said nothing, but squeezed her hand more tightly. 'The main thing is that she should be happy.' Then, with her face buried in his neck, she made a cooing noise which it would be feeble to describe as being like the cooing of a dove, for it literally was the cooing of a dove. He asked her what it meant. She answered, 'It means I'm happy,' in the same far-away voice, as of another self, the ghost of the little girl she had once been, speaking from the depths of her subconscious where it had sunk long ago.

Then he remembered that there had been other women beside whom, lying thus after the act, he had not felt the same impulse to escape - others beside whom at such moments he had thought: 'I could die quite happily, like this. Now I really wouldn't mind dying, like this.' But lying there beside Solange, he did not say this to himself; no, he did not say to himself that he was ready to die.

'The main thing is that she should be happy.' Once again, his lucid mind laid bare the underlying meaning of the words. And he saw that it hardly differed at all from what he had felt for many, many others, of the most diverse kinds (and what does it matter how a person behaves towards those he loves; his behaviour towards the rest is what really counts). He remembered the emotion he had felt on reading the words of that splendid old fossil Captain Hurluret in Les Gaîtés de l'Escadron, when he is eventually retired: 'I've been forty years in the service, and the only thing in all that time that really counts for me is the fellows I've stopped making fools of themselves and getting into trouble, the fellows for whom barrack-room life has been a little more tolerable thanks to me. And if, later on, there are some of them who remember their Captain and say: "He wasn't a bad sort, after all," I shall have had my reward.' On reading this, Costals had raised his head from the book. It had struck a deep chord in him, and he thought: 'I am the same sort of chap as Hurluret. Of course, there are other things in me, but I'm Hurluret as well.' And now he realized that underlying his words about Solange, his wish for her 'to be happy', was something not so very different from what he had felt towards his men during the war: 'Are the men happy? Is there anything wrong?' - or at home towards the servants, always going out of his way to see that they got their fair share of pleasure in this world - or towards the hired native in the colonies, getting up in the middle of the night to give him an extra blanket because he had heard him cough in his sleep - or towards the almost unknown vagrant he had sheltered under his roof as a guest, and with whom he identified himself through the mere fact of this hospitality. And so it was for all that race of men and women encountered by chance, to whom he had given more than any other man would have given in his place - given not for the sake of 'principle', not because he believed that good was preferable to evil - given without even any preconceived ideas about the world, for he had come to the conclusion long since that no definition holds water, that 'the people' are not this or that, that 'natives' or 'women' or 'Frenchmen' are not this or that, that all is in everything, that the good are also bad and the bad also good - given, finally, without the least thought that it might be counted to his credit somewhere, in the hearts of these men and women, who had promptly forgotten him, or in the eyes of public opinion, which knew nothing of his actions, either before those human tribunals where the riff-raff dispense injustice, or before that supreme tribunal in which he did not believe and of which all he could say was that if it existed, and if one day he were to appear before it (as he no doubt would, having always lived without giving much heed to the Law), hundreds of people would come and bear witness in his favour. And he saw that there, too, Solange Dandillot was one of a crowd, and he pitied her for not being more clearly set apart.

He lay there, no longer thinking about her. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked, a little alarmed by his silent daydreaming. 'About you.' A slight, very slight and tenuous thread of boredom pierced his consciousness. Then he thought: 'One day I shall put that image of her teeth, like those of a decapitated sheep, in one of my books. I use her!' At the thought that he made use of Solange, his throat tightened as if he were about to cry. But suddenly another thought leapt up like a dolphin out of a calm sea: 'I've been told often enough that I was wrong, "criminal" even, in not taking a girl who offered herself to me. Nature, society, public opinion, are you satisfied now? Well? I bet I still haven't got it right.' Amused by this thought, he was encouraged to say some things which he found a bit difficult. He sat up, and leaning over her, said with a smile: 'Well, my little Dandillot, now you're my mistress! You see the way things happen ... Now see if you can get away from me.'

She frowned a little, and he smoothed out the furrows with his thumb.

'You said "no" when it happened, so your honour is safe. . . . There's another thing, rather less agreeable. Do you know what a woman does when she ... '

He gave her some pharmaceutical advice in a whisper. He would have liked the room to be darker still, as dark as night. Several times he repeated: 'I'm ashamed to have to tell you these things.... ' But it was not 'these things', or having to say them, which made him feel ashamed: he knew that there was nothing shameful about them, that on the contrary they were beneficent and therefore moral. But he was ashamed of having said them so many times before. Eventually she got up without saying a word, and disappeared into the next room.

He sat down in an armchair. From the bathroom came the familiar sounds of the different water-pipes. 'Now she's doing this, now she's doing that...." The almost identical similarity between this moment and hundreds of others he had been through plunged his soul in melancholy. 'For her, it's something so new, so surprising.... For me it's all so stale.' His melancholy would have been less had his pleasure been really spectacular. But far from it; and he was well aware that Solange had derived no more pleasure from the act than he had.

She came back, and with her hands on the arms of his chair, leaned over him, compassionately, in a very 'womanly' gesture; they were like two castaways flung up together on the shore. But so completely did she seem to share his sadness that this sadness vanished. He went and sat on the divan, and made her sit beside him. Then he said:

'Yes, all this is very painful. And yet, when I showed you that woman just now, although it was indeed for the reasons I explained, it was also in order to show you what becomes of a girl who doesn't do the necessary when she should. You see, there's only one way of loving women, and that's by making love to them. There's only one way of doing them good, and that's by taking them in one's arms. Incense needs warmth in order to give out its perfume; women too need that particular warmth to give out theirs. All the rest - friendship, esteem, intellectual sympathy - is an illusion, without love, and a cruel illusion, too. For illusions are the cruel things: with realities one can always get by. You remember the words of St Paul: "The prudence of the flesh is the death of the soul." I know many unsatisfactory marriages where the trouble is entirely due to the husband's "respect" for the wife: a wife should be treated like a mistress, and not just in fits and starts but all the time; whether it's easy or not is irrelevant. That silly little get-together we had just now disappointed you, no doubt, as it did me; but it takes six months for a young Frenchwoman to learn how to be properly excited. You've only got to touch an Italian or a Spanish girl and she practically swoons; but French girls are slow starters and it's the devil of a job to give them any pleasure: I usually reckon six months to get things right. Perhaps some harm may come from my having taken you; but since you love me, it would have been just as hurtful - to you - if I had refrained. And in any case you're twenty- one. Of course I don't mean it's the autumn of a woman's life, but all the same, the way things are going now.... Why, in this year's Miss World beauty competition, the age-limit was twenty-two ... Come, my beauty, let time work for you. The day will come when you will sense my desire from afar, and will welcome it. We shall be attuned to each other like a pair of runners in a three-mile race - both working hand in glove. We shall speak to one another in our silences. You will want what I want, I shall want what you want. So you'll no longer want darkness when you are in my arms; you will want broad daylight, the better to see me with, and you will see me ...  What will keep me going when I am old? The books I have written and the pleasure I have given women.'

She stroked his hair, then clasped her hands archwise over his head and rested her forehead against his chest, bowing so low that all he could see was her hair, in a gesture of utter submission.

They went out. An old man was sitting on a bench feeding the birds, and she made a detour so as not to frighten them away. In the streets, a few radiant faces were almost engulfed by the repulsive, virulent magma of the unloved and the unloving (not to mention the notorious ugliness of the Parisians). And he was filled, for the hundredth time and yet as freshly as ever, with that regal sensation of walking side by side, as though her legitimate owner, with a woman who attracts stares and almost shouts of admiration. She still addressed him as vous, though oblivious of the delicate pleasure he derived from being thus authorized to say vous in return. With this vous, Costals was able to deny the intimacy of their relationship, to create, alongside the reality, another order of things that belied it.

From time to time he put his hand on her waist, for a second only, as if to make sure that she was still beside him. But soon she put her arm through his. It was only the second time she had done so, the first having been on the night of their great misunderstanding. On both occasions, it was after having seen him troubled: he was touched by this. Soon, however, he began to feel uncomfortable. For the fact was that ever since he had first gone out with a woman he loved at the age of nineteen, he had always obstinately refused to keep in step with his female companions; he found it ridiculous and humiliating for a man. So they jolted along for another fifty yards, and it seemed to him painfully symbolic that a man could not walk straight because the woman who loved him, and whom he loved, was holding his arm. Finally it was she who, breaking step as soldiers do on the march, fell into rhythm with her lover. He noticed this and was pleased. Soon, however, it wasn't enough for him. That weight on his arm seemed like a chain. The very gesture with which, poor child, she had thought to bring them closer together, had only made him feel impatience and scorn at being coupled. He took advantage of a traffic jam, as they were crossing a street, to detach himself gently. And then, having regained his freedom, he felt a wave of tenderness towards her.

She was dining with friends in the centre of town. They passed travel posters showing Algerian belly-dancers (for the benefit of French tourists) shoeshine boys (for the benefit of British tourists), all the symbols of that devilish human invention, travel, which for inconvenience, exhaustion, danger, time-wasting and nervous wear and tear has no rival except war (the only difference being that travel costs you the earth whereas at least one is paid for going to war). What they inspired in Costals was not so much a desire to be sea-sick in Solange's company as an urge to make a great splash on her behalf, which, now that she had given herself, would no longer look as though he were trying to buy her (this feeling comprised a mixture of delicacy and vulgarity, as is so often the case with questions of money): he could feel the banknotes quivering in his wallet like thoroughbreds at the starting-gate. He said to her:

'You know, old thing, I like squandering money on women; it's one of the things I pride myself on. When I am old and poverty-stricken, with only a pension of eight hundred francs granted me by the Society of Literature and the proceeds of the subscription launched for me in the Figaro to live on, I like to imagine that all the money I ever spent on the women I loved will be reconstituted somewhere in tangible form and that I shall depart this world satisfied with what I have done, my eyes fixed on that mountain of gold - which, if you'll forgive the expression, I shall call "the gold of my loins". This is why I regret having spent so little on you when we were out together. I get the impression that I'm out with a decent woman, and that's a sensation I don't like at all.' (Since when this note of insolence with her? Wasn't it since ...  Ah, wretched males, even the best of them! ) 'Listen: those are bank-notes, made to be changed into happiness; and that's something I know all about, for I won't deny I've had my whack at God's creation. Do you want to come away with me somewhere for a couple of months? I say two months, because that's just about the time it takes to get through a good love affair, but it might be longer - until one of us has had enough.' ('One of us' was a charming euphemism. He knew perfectly well that he was always the first to break off.) 'Anywhere you like. Persia. Or Egypt. Or Transylvania. Or Pennsylvania. Or Mount Ararat. And I really mean it: you name the place and off we go. In my life as in my art, I'm ready for anything: what's difficult is to really want something, but this time I somehow believe I do. And so it's all right, because I love my desires. I have the impression that God has given you parents who want your happiness above everything else. You will come back armed with two months' happiness: a splendid weapon to face the future with. You will then be admirably placed for marrying. You are no longer a virgin - though, taking one of those linguistic liberties which are the privilege of great writers, I shall continue to call you a girl, for I am too fond of youth to resign myself to using the word "woman" unless I really have to: it sounds so old and pompous - you are no longer a virgin, but from what I know of men, and if you have any wit at all, your husband won't even notice it. Besides, even if he does, he won't say a word: we're not savages in France! Then, either he'll make you happy and you won't regret me, which is what I very much hope; or else you'll be unhappy, and then I shan't be far away. We'll get you a divorce if need be, and go back to good old Ararat. This trip can either remain a secret as far as you're concerned, or be made public. In the latter case, it will redound to your eternal credit. You never bother about your own glory, so one has to look after it for you. But it can also be kept very secret. I've been on a dozen honeymoons in my life, and nothing has ever leaked out. And I would go to gaol sooner than give away a woman I loved. All in all it's a plan against which no objection, social, moral or otherwise, can hold water. Of course there are always those who will say: "Sir, you're a revolting cad" - to which I would reply: "Far from being a revolting cad, I'm a spirit of the air. Of course it's not your element, etc...." You see, when one wants to give pleasure to somebody, one mustn't look too far ahead, or bother too much about the consequences. When one wants to give pleasure to somebody, it's the same as when one wants to produce a great work of literature - it must be done with a kind of studied insouciance: because if you thought about it too long you'd never do it at all ... '

For a moment he dreamed of seeing the beauty of the world with her, unveiling it to her, becoming merged with her as part of that beauty. Then his day-dream disintegrated, wandered, took another path. And he realized that though he did want to go on such a journey, he wanted to go alone. And it was true that, when he remembered all the wonderful places he had seen - every one of which he had visited at least twice, once alone and once with someone he loved - or when he wanted to use them in his books, it was always the time when he had travelled alone that came to his mind most vividly, most magically and most potently. For it is a major law of nature that we are no longer entirely one when we are two. If God said 'It is not good that man should live alone', it was because he was afraid of the solitary man. And so he weakened him by providing him with a mate, in order to have him at his mercy.

But he quickly repelled the sirens of solitude: 'After all, whatever I made of it would be for her. To give pleasure to someone who deserves it is not to be despised …'

Under an archway he pulled her towards him. His lips hovered above her face and eventually came to rest on one of her eyelids, where they remained for what seemed an eternity.

As they were about to part, he said to her:

'You know, one day I'm going to put in one of my books an image that occurred to me about your teeth - "like those of a decapitated sheep".'

'How horrible!'

'But it's true. And so it has to be said. You don't mind my making use of you in my books, do you?'

'Not at all. On the contrary, I'm glad to be useful to you in your work.'

'Well said. . . . You're not the first, mind you. . . . But still, well said. . . . Now I shall be able to love you even more than I do already.'

He gazed at her fondly. But just then an expression crossed her face which spoiled her prettiness. And it struck him that if ever he allowed himself to be finally caught, and married her, it would again be out of pity. And he was afraid of his Pity …

Back in his studio, he was tidying up the bed when he saw traces of blood on the top sheet. He reflected that the sheet would go to the laundry, whereas fifteen years earlier he would have kept it as it was, as a souvenir. He felt a pang as he realized once again that he was not sufficiently open-hearted towards her. As though to make up for this, when he went to bed he searched for Mlle Dandillot's blood-stains on the sheet and placed them against his heart. And he fell asleep feeling somehow protected by the affection he felt towards her.

During the days that followed, Costals awaited some sign of life from Andrée: a letter, a telegram or a visit.... The concierge, the servant, everyone was warned - a little ridiculously - to bar her passage. Ah, if only he could have had her deported to the Island of Dogs near Constantinople, or to some other equally God-forsaken spot! But nothing happened.

'Perhaps she's killed herself.' The thought filled him with profound satisfaction.

It is a peculiarity of most young girls to wish to show their parents to the man they love, even when these parents are total idiots who will alienate him at once. Costals was invited to lunch at the Dandillots'.

The advent of 'the family' invariably provoked three reflexes in Costals. Terror at the threat of the Hippogriff: 'I know what they're after!' A feeling of ridicule, this being for him a basic element in the concept of the family. And animosity, for he could not but detest all parents, who represented the potential enemy. On this occasion, these reflexes combined to put him in a state of excitement to which the thought of the risk he was running and the ordeal to be overcome contributed greatly.

Solange had sought to make the prospect more alluring by saying: 'You'll see, my parents are very likeable.' 'Likeable to whom?' he thought to himself. 'To her? What do I care! To me? How does she know?' It reminded him of the people who tell you on their invitation-cards, by way of encouragement, what you will be given to eat or drink: 'Tea, Sherry, etc.' (The vulgarity of European manners compared to those of 'savages' - the Chinese, the Arabs etc.)

Mme Dandillot had the dimensions of a horse and the aspect of a policeman. To reconcile the two, let us say that she resembled a police horse. She was a head taller than her husband and Costals. To his horror, Costals recognized in her a caricature of her daughter. The same nose, though misshapen, the same lips, though colourless, the same expression, though deadened. The resemblance could not be said to be frightful, since it was natural; it was nonetheless startling: 'At fifty, my mistress will look a similar fright. In fifteen years' time she will be as plump as a partridge already. It's a warning from heaven; there's not a moment to lose.' He was appalled to think that Mme Dandillot knew all about their liaison and that perhaps, in certain çircumstances, she had dictated Solange's behaviour. The thought that Solange was incapable of lying oppressed him now like sultry weather.

M. Dandillot, on the other hand, had an appearance of such nobility that no one would ever have taken him for a Frenchman. Close-shaven, and with hair as thick as a young man's, though nearly white, he reminded one a little of the 'family Doctor' as seen in advertisements for patent medicines. His smile, which was delightful, revealed a row of perfect, gleaming teeth. But all his features seemed to be drawn with pain. Clearly he was a doomed man. At table, M. Dandillot said nothing except for a few polite words.

It has often been said that nothing reveals a man's character more than his home. The Dandillots' interior bespoke an absence of taste rare even for their social background and for Paris. A few quite handsome objects stood cheek by jowl with a mass of vulgar and pretentious junk - inexcusable for people in their circumstances: it was all fairly opulent-looking. Costals could have understood a bachelor engaged upon some great work putting up with such surroundings out of indifference to externals and contempt for them. But a 'worldly' family, and this ravishing girl! That Solange had not compelled her family to have a decent-looking home, that she could tolerate this obscene décor, told heavily against her: there must be something of the same inferior quality in her that enabled her to feel at home in it all. And it seemed to him even more serious that she should have no hesitation in showing it to him, no suspicion of the uneasiness it might cause him, or what it might make him feel about her.

Mme Dandillot said that her daughter had never had a day's illness ('She's beginning to boost her wares'), and that she did not care for scent or jewellery. When Costals said he did not much care for them either, she simpered: 'Another thing you have in common.' ('She's already treating us as if we were engaged, blast her!') She also sang her husband's praises, presumably so that Costals should not think she had married a corpse. If one were to believe her, M. Dandillot had more or less created French sport. He had run various sports clubs, encouraged the young, been 'a man of action'. Costals choked back the retorts that rose to his lips: that action is like an itch: you scratch, and that's all; that the only action worthy of the name is inside oneself; that all men of action, when you press them about it, can ultimately think of nothing to say, so little justification can they find for it, etc.

Solange, her nose in her plate, said not a word. She was embarrassed beyond belief to see Costals in the midst of her family. Embarrassment hardened her features, gave her a sly, ill-natured expression. What family life can do to people! An angel of sweetness transformed into a femme fatale. Anyone who saw Solange now for the first time could not have helped thinking: 'She's a perfect bitch. Beware!'

Costals and Mme Dandillot talked about nothing for an hour. In order to be sure of pleasing the writer, and also to avoid saying anything stupid, Mme Dandillot would repeat, after a suitable interval, precisely what Costals himself said. Costals having expressed the view, over the hors d'oeuvres, that 'journalism does not prevent a real writer from getting on with his work', Mme Dandillot declared with an air of wisdom over the coffee, as if it were a truth which Costals needed to be convinced of: 'You know it's quite possible to produce a good book and also write for newspapers.' Costals felt more and more ridiculous, and humiliated at the idea that he was here as a possible fiancé. A fiancé! A 'son-in-law'! Braggart though he was, he could not shake off this feeling of humiliation.

He looked at these people and despised them for not looking after their daughter better. 'Whether out of vanity, or immorality, or calculation, or irresponsibility, they have let her go out with a man like me, and I find it hard to believe that they don't know I sleep with her. Perhaps they think I'll marry her, but how do they know? A girl who was obviously cut out to be a virgin, who was the personification of the chaste young girl, and they don't do anything to protect her against herself, the swine. No religion, no tradition, no education, no self-respect, no backbone. My role is to attack, I know, but it's up to society to defend itself! Yet whenever I try to conquer people's bodies, or trouble people's minds and spirits, it's always the same: no defences! Soft as putty everywhere. I play my game, but they don't play theirs!' From then on, the thought of having parents-in-law so lacking in decorum made the possibility that he might one day allow himself to be drawn into marrying Solange even more remote than ever. Nevertheless it must be noted that had the Dandillots been high-minded people who would never have let their daughter go out alone with him, he would have railed against both them and her, and would promptly have discarded her with a jibe against prudery. Despising them for being high-minded, despising them for not being so, he held them as though in a vice, and Solange with them. He would screw it tight the day he stopped loving her. The machinery was ready.

After lunch, a visitor was announced. Mme Dandillot and Solange went to entertain her in the drawing-room. M. Dandillot asked Costals to join him in his study. Costals thought: 'If he says: "I entrust my daughter to your care" (he felt a lump in his throat), I shall reply: "She will be like a little sister to me." It's not a phrase that commits me in any way. For as my mistress she's like a little sister to me.'

In his study, M. Dandillot let himself sink into a low armchair. He suddenly seemed tiny, like a fly shrivelling up just before it dies. The outline of his emaciated thighs was visible inside the trouser legs. We shall refrain from describing the study, for we know that novel-readers always skip the descriptions.

'Monsieur Costals,' he said, 'I am not the sort of person you think me. If I hardly spoke at lunch it was because I have been eating my meals with Mme Dandillot for thirty-one years, and we have said all we had to say to each other. I have lost the habit of talking, or rather I've acquired the habit of talking to myself in my room. As for you, I prefer to talk to you alone, as I want to talk to you seriously. However, there's something about you that bothers me a little, and I should like to get it off my chest before I start talking about myself. May I speak with absolute frankness?'

'You can always try, and we shall see,' said Costals, who this time could feel the baleful Hippogriff literally breathing down his neck.

'Now, now!' said M. Dandillot with a smile, pretending to see it as a joke. 'I owe it to the man who wrote that great book' (he pointed to one of Costals' books which was lying on a table nearby) 'to be absolutely frank. Well, here goes: why do you wear that?'

He pointed to the red rosette of the Legion of Honour in Costals' buttonhole.

'I don't like making myself conspicuous. If I had refused ...'

He was about to add: '... I should have appeared to be making a great deal of fuss about it,' but stopped short, sensing that he was about to put his foot in it.

'Well, if you had refused? I'd like to show you something.'

Solange's father rose, took a sheaf of papers out of a drawer, and handed Costals a cutting from the Indépendant de N—, dated July 1923. The headline read: Our fellow-citizen, Charles Dandillot, refuses the Legion of Honour. A lyrical, or rather cautiously lyrical, editorial introduction was followed by the letter written by M. Dandillot to the unfortunate custodian of the scarlet flood.

Sir,

I understand that you wish to propose me for the Legion of Honour.

I have dedicated my life unostentatiously to the youth of France. I did not do so in the hope of a reward which must be shared with all and sundry.

Furthermore, I am now fifty-seven. Allow me, dear sir, to express one wish: that in future the Government will employ men better qualified to select the people who have done something for their country.

Believe me, etc. …

Costals saw in this letter the resentment of a man who had missed being decorated at thirty, and nothing more. 'As a way of thanking a man who has had a kind thought, it's not too badly put together.' The fact that M. Dandillot had communicated his masterpiece to the Indépendant de N— also seemed rather significant. M. Dandillot then embarked on a lecture about 'purity'. Costals knew this one well, having delivered it himself on occasion. His real opinion on the subject of honours was that they belonged to the category of things designated by Epictetus as 'indifferent'. But it was obvious from this letter that M. Dandillot attached great importance to honours.

While the latter was searching through the folder, Costals had cast an author's eye on the cover of his book (writers throw surreptitious glances at their names in print much as pretty women - or women who think themselves pretty - glance at their faces in mirrors) and noticed that hardly more than a dozen pages of the 'great book' had been cut. It is true, of course, that one can perfectly well 'place' an author after having read only a dozen pages by him.

When he had finished his lecture on 'purity', M. Dandillot said: 'Has Solange told you that I haven't long to live? It's not absolutely definite, but I'm fairly certain of it.'

'Mlle Dandillot has never said anything of the kind.'

'I shall be dead within a month. The end of all illusions!'

'For me, death will be the end of all reality.'

'For me, the end of all illusions. I'm going to die at the age of sixty-one. And for a man who has been living for the past thirty years in accordance with certain natural principles which could reasonably have been expected to promote both youthfulness and longevity, it's a bit of a fiasco. Sixty- one! The age at which everyone dies. And yet, think of it: for over thirty years I've lived with all my windows open, never touched alcohol, never smoked. For over thirty years, do you hear, not a drop of hot or even lukewarm water has ever touched my face or body, even when I was out of sorts. For over thirty years, I've been up at six every morning doing my exercises naked. And only a year ago I was camping in the mountains, walking twenty-five miles a day with a rucksack on my back like a young man, my head bare to the sun and the rain. Even if my face is lined, my body, up to a month ago, was still that of a young man.... Even now,' he added, pointing to his stomach, 'you mustn't think I have a paunch. I have to wear a flannel belt, and that accounts for the thickness. Actually I have a very slim waist. In short, I've lived a natural life: you realize what that means, natural? And in spite of all this to end up dying at sixty-one, at the mere threshold of old age. When heaps of people who have lived the softest, most artificial lives, go on living into their seventies and eighties. So now I say to myself: it wasn't worth it, I've been had.'

Costals, too, felt that it hadn't been worth it. He remembered the words of the Scripture: 'I shall suffer the same fate as the foolish. Why then was I more wise?' He said:

'The main thing is to know whether it was a sacrifice for you to give up wine, tobacco, etc...

'Often, yes. Particularly getting up at six. But I was determined to conquer myself. If I had had to struggle for my livelihood and that of my children, I should have told myself that the effort was not wasted. But no, I've always lived on my private means. If I have struggled, it has only been against myself, a kind of luxury. And now I tell myself: I've taken all that trouble for nothing. You see, Monsieur Costals, there's no point in being brave about life. And yet I feel obliged to go on, to see it through to the end.'

He threw back his hair with a sudden jerk of the head - the gesture of a young boy, or a horse tossing its mane.

'Why see it through to the end?'

Am I to betray the ideals of thirty years? Am I to deny everything I have stood for? I know too many people who would have a good laugh, or should I say a nasty laugh? To everyone who came near me I presented the image of a certain type of man. It is my duty to maintain that image to the end, even if I was mistaken. Look, my eyes are dead, my heart is dead, my spirit is dead. I know what would buck me up: champagne. But how could I possibly ask for it? It would look as though I were ratting on the whole of my past life. No, I refuse to be a deserter.'

'What an aberration of conscience!' thought Costals. 'That's how one turns into a living lie, when one imagines one is "pure".'

'I'm going to die,' M. Dandillot went on, 'but if I make the slightest allusion to the fact, I'm told I'm an alarmist. But hush....'

There was a noise in the next room. M. Dandillot said: 'Walls have ears, you know....' His expression was that of a child caught red-handed. When the noise had stopped, he went on:

'Yes, I'm going to die, and they expect me to be cheerful. I have to pretend that I don't know I'm dying, so that my family can go on enjoying themselves with a clear conscience.

When I'm at my last gasp, I shall have to say something memorable that my family can pass on to future generations. What about you? Will you make a historic remark on your death-bed?'

'I trust I shall preserve some decorum on my death-bed, and that means no historic remarks. If I were positively compelled to say something, I think I should ask the public's forgiveness for not having expressed more satisfactorily what was in my heart....'

'You're a public figure, that makes it different. I thought I had the right to stop acting now, after thirty years of it - the right to three weeks' sincerity before I vanish from this world. But on the contrary, the farce has only just begun, and it will soon be in full swing! Yesterday the doctor came, and he had to give me a very painful injection. I was longing to complain, just to hear them say "Be brave", so that I could shout back at them: "Be brave? Why should I? When I've hardly an ounce of energy left, because I've spent it too lavishly in the service of others, I'm expected to use it up putting on an act for your benefit. This corpse of mine must buckle to and step out smartly so that you should all feel better and not have to despise me. Well, go on, despise me then! What difference will it make to me where I'm going?" That's what I should have liked to shout at them. Instead of which, I acted the Roman, the man of iron - not a sign of fear, not a moan. And while they were admiring me (at least I suppose they were) I was despising myself for my absurd heroism.'

'And so,' said Costals, 'you lie to yourself, and worse still, you do it to impress others.'

'What do I care about the opinion of others! Perhaps if they'd shown some gratitude for the example I gave. But all they did was treat me as a lunatic. "Dandillot never eats tinned food because it's not natural ... Take off your scarf when you see Dandillot, otherwise he'll pitch into you: don't you know he breaks the ice to go for a swim in winter?" My wife laughs at me openly. Solange pretends to take my ideas seriously, but I know she only does it out of kindness. My son used to do the opposite of what he knew to be my principles, on purpose, simply to annoy me. So the results have been negative all along the line. Not only have I set an example which nobody followed, but it's also possible that the example was not worth setting. And yet, it might all have been very different if, like you, I had written something.... Ah, yes, you've nothing to worry about!'

It occurred to Costals that the world would believe that M. Dandillot had died of cancer, but perhaps in reality he was dying from not having received the recognition he felt to be his due. As lamps need oil, so men need a certain amount of admiration. When they are not sufficiently admired, they die. The only way of softening the last days of M. Dandillot would have been to flatter his vanity. Costals was touched, too, to see the old man so naïvely, or so nobly, envying the achievement of a writer of thirty-four. The tragedy of not being able to express oneself suddenly struck him as being quite horrible.

M. Dandillot spoke warmly of Costals' future: 'You'll get everything you want, etc....' But there was a sting in the tail: 'Nevertheless, in spite of all this, your standing with the public is not what it ought to be. I don't know whether you're aware of the fact....'

'He's embittered,' thought Costals, 'so he's determined that I should have reason to feel embittered too. It would console him a bit. And yet he's obviously well disposed towards me. Ah, well! One mustn't expect too much of people.'

The whole thing seemed to him all the more exquisite for the fact, of which he was still firmly convinced, that M. Dandillot had never read more than ten pages of his work.

The writer went on:

'My dear sir, you must not think that your lessons have been in vain. You are giving me one this very minute which confirms my own way of thinking: that it's madness to restrain oneself except for the most powerful reasons.'

Moribund though he was, M. Dandillot was still sufficiently alive to contradict himself madly, which is the essence of life itself. The conclusion Costals had drawn was not at all to his liking. He protested:

'Everything that's good in the world was born of restraint.'

'I don't believe a word of it!' said Costals sharply, thinking to himself: 'That's the sort of tawdry platitude with which poor old humanity tries to justify all its sweat and tears.'

'Let me go on believing so, at least,' said M. Dandillot. 'If everything I've done has been in vain, let me feel at least that I rose above myself in doing it.'

It was then that Costals realized the extent of the old man's defeat. And he felt a great surge of pity towards him.

It occurred to him that Seneca had written more or less what M. Dandillot had just said. He told him so. But at the mention of Seneca, M. Dandillot burst out angrily:

'Don't talk to me about those humbugs! I used to fill up whole exercise-books with quotations from the moralists: I'll make a bonfire of them all before I die. Where did I read that splendid expression the other day: "a dunghill of philosophies"?' [Panaït Istrati (Author's note).] Really Monsieur Costals, you as a literary man must admit that you need a typist who can copy a manuscript intelligently more than you need a new conception of the universe. Those charlatans! I love life, I get nothing but enjoyment from it, and yet I'm supposed to be pleased at the prospect of leaving it forever! Doctors probe my inside, and I'm supposed to find the pain enjoyable! I've known old men who talked with serenity of their approaching end, who, knowing that death was imminent, continued to go about their business as if nothing was the matter. Well, they were all blockheads, idiots. Intelligent people are afraid, paralysed by fear. Those scoundrels of philosophers should be locked up in padded cells if they believe what they say. And if they're just laughing at us, they should be made to laugh on the other side of their faces. Yes, I'm surprised no emperor ever thought of exterminating the whole brood of philosophers at one fell swoop, on the same grounds as the early Christians.'

'For a dying man,' thought Costals, 'he seems a bit worked up. But perhaps it does happen that way.'

M. Dandillot closed his eyes for a moment with an expression of intense fatigue. 'That's what comes of walking twenty-five miles a day at the age of sixty,' Costals said to himself. 'Alas! One can't use up one's energy with impunity. But one mustn't say so. We must go on playing boy-scouts!' His eyes still closed, M. Dandillot raised his forearms and let them fall on the arms of his chair in a gesture of resignation and sadness.

'What I want is sleep. But Mme Dandillot and Solange keep waking me up to give me medicaments. The medicaments don't help, and sleep does; but no matter, I must be robbed of sleep because of the medicaments. Right up to the very end, one must behave according to what's "done", and not according to reality.'

Costals, who had imagined that this lunch was a trap set by the nuptial Hippogriff, and that M. Dandillot had got him behind closed doors in order to enumerate his daughter's assets, was more and more surprised to see that there was never any mention of her, or rather that M. Dandillot included her in the group - his 'family' - of which he spoke with such lack of warmth. And he began to think that Mme Dandillot alone knew what was happening between himself and Solange. Either she accepted it, because it gratified her pride, and looked no further, in which case the Dandillots were rather odd people. Or else she wanted to give their liaison the flavour of an engagement, for the sake of appearances, but just the flavour, not the reality. Or she had made up her mind to see the thing through to the end. But in any case it looked as though M. Dandillot had been left out. And this was quite natural, since he would soon be dead.

M. Dandillot opened his eyes again, and with a vague motion of the hand (at about the level of the books) which seemed to take in everything in the room, said:

'What do I care about all this! Mere trifles to help the living to kill time. Now my eyes are open, and it's all lies. The clock shows the wrong time, because it's stopped. The barometer is out of order. That Corot there is a fake. I won't talk about the books. Everything is false, and yet it's so much a part of the atmosphere we breathe that, as soon as we discover what a fraud it is, we die, as drug-addicts do when deprived of their drugs.'

Suddenly he sat up straight, as though pulling himself together.

'I am grateful to you for two things. For not having tried to delude me about my condition. And for not having tried to console me. You see, if anything could console me, it's the thought that I'm dying a natural death, that I'm not dying for a "cause" … '

Costals did not answer. M. Dandillot added:

'It's quite possible, though, that my death may be other than a natural death. I've something there' (he pointed to a cupboard) 'that will hasten the end, if the pain proves too much for me to bear. Two tubes of veronal. Dissolve, drink, and it's all over.'

'Yes, but supposing the dose isn't strong enough and you recover - think what hell your family would give you!'

'Do you think so?' M. Dandillot said with a small, childlike smile. 'Nonsense, with veronal there isn't a chance of recovering.'

'Why not use a revolver?' said Costals, adding, with a grin: 'Afraid you'll harm the family's reputation?'

'Yes, because of Solange. Besides, revolvers kick, and there's a chance of missing.'

'Not if you aim at the bone just below the temple. No, the real risk is that the gun might jam. I know all about that. Filthy guns. Worse than anything - false security. If one really wants to kill someone, give me a good knife any time. No one has ever found anything better.'

'Since I can't kill myself with a knife, I'll stick to veronal. Do you think it's cowardly to kill oneself?'

'The people who call it cowardly are those who are too cowardly to do it themselves.'

'That's exactly what I think.'

There was a silence, as if they were both aware of having exhausted a subject. Then M. Dandillot went on:

'I've spent forty years doing things I didn't enjoy, and doing them of my own free will. As a young man I sweated over law-books in spite of my wretched memory, although both my family and I knew quite well that I would only be a lawyer for appearance' sake, and only for a year or two. I married without love, or self-interest, or any particular taste for marriage. I had children because my wife wanted them: I don't mind telling you that Solange was not at all welcome.

I took a flat in Paris, although I loved nature and solitude, because it was "the thing to do". I went on taking the waters year after year, long after I'd satisfied myself that they did me not the slightest good. I did all this without any good reason, simply because everyone round me was doing the same, or because I was told I ought to do it. And now I'm going to die without knowing why I've led a life which I disliked, when there was a time when I could have made for myself a life I would have enjoyed. Isn't that odd?'

'Not at all. Men let themselves be dragged into things: it's the rule. Men live according to chance: it's the rule.'

Suddenly the door opened. Mme Dandillot appeared, and addressing her husband, said:

'I came in to see whether you needed anything.'

'No, thank you.'

'Don't you want the window open wider? You of all people!'

'No, the noise, tires me.'

'I see your bottle of Eau de Cologne is empty. I'll send out for another.'

'No, Eau de Cologne's too cold … '

'We can't heat up Eau de Cologne, I'm afraid. Well, I'll leave you to it.'

For a few moments, Costals and M. Dandillot remained silent. There could be no doubt that Mme Dandillot, behind the door, had heard all or part of their last few remarks.

M. Dandillot resumed in a lower voice:

'If only I could go to a nursing-home! If only I could see new surroundings, new faces, before I die, instead of those I've been seeing for thirty years. But it's a dream: even that is forbidden me. Do you know the only occupation I find tolerable in my present condition? Burning my correspondence. Forty-five years of correspondence. If one added up all the hours one has spent writing letters or doing other equally futile jobs, one would find one had wasted years of one's life. You are still young, so I'll give you a word of advice: never answer letters, or only very rarely. Not only will it not do you any harm, but people won't even hold it against you: they'll soon get used to it. As for me, by destroying my correspondence I'm saying no to the whole of my past life. And I find pleasure in doing so, and also in depriving Mme Dandillot of the pleasure she would have in rummaging through my affairs. . . . It's odd that I should talk like this to someone I don't know.'

This way of casting one's innermost secrets into the void was familiar to Costals: more than once he had done the same with Solange. Unwittingly M. Dandillot was returning the mysterious trust he had had in the girl; and the thought made him ponder.

'My wife,' M. Dandillot continued, 'my wife's religion is that of the average Frenchwoman: she doesn't practise, she doesn't take the sacraments, but she goes to Mass on Sundays. Solange claims to be an unbeliever, but goes to Mass with her mother, and would be upset if she missed it. But Solange doesn't really know.... You know her: she's still in bud. As for me I've always been a pagan. You can't love nature as I do and Jesus Christ at the same time. Besides, we have an infallible proof that Christianity was inferior to the great pagan philosophies: the fact that it triumphed. Everyone knows the kind of things and people who triumph' (with an embittered smile). 'It isn't that I don't admire Christ's teachings. Any religion will always redeem itself from ridicule by charity. But St Paul ruined everything. And so, one of the firmest tenets of my moral code was: not to have a priest at my death-bed. This is still my intention, needless to say. But after the inner upheaval I have recently undergone, I must confess that this "gesture" seems to me less significant than it did. And you, Monsieur Costals, may one ask where you stand in regard to religion?'

'I'm an "old Christian", an old Christian de sangre azul. But of course I have no faith and I don't practise.'

'Ah! I'm very glad. I couldn't shake hands altogether honestly with a man I knew to be a believer, whatever his religion. Here, give me your hand, will you?' (He clasped it firmly.) 'Well, now, in spite of that, do you intend to have a Christian burial?'

'I should like my body to be carried straight from my death-bed to the paupers' grave, and buried there not too deep, so that the dogs can dig it up and eat it.'

'Splendid. But what about the priest? Would you see a priest if you were about to die?'

'It depends. If I were dying in the bosom of my family I think I would. For two reasons. To please those around me at little cost to myself, since they would ardently wish it. And to be left in peace. It must be horrible to be pestered and persecuted at such a time, when all one wants is to be left in peace. Shall I tell you exactly what I think of this particular manifestation of religion? It has no importance whatsoever, and to struggle against it is to give it an importance it doesn't deserve. But if I were to die far from home - which is my dearest wish - if no one mentioned priests, I should certainly not call for one.'

'You're probably right. "It's of no importance": that's about the long and the short of it. Take this room, for instance: everything is in order, everything classified, labelled, easy to find. Well, if I had been untidy, what difference would it make now? Another example: I've always bought things of the very best quality, on principle. Yet a fifteen-hundred-franc suit or a seven-hundred-franc suit both fray at the cuffs after the same number of months. So that one needs a new suit just as frequently, whichever one buys. Which means that it's really of no importance whether a suit is good or bad, just as it's of no importance whether a man is good or bad.'

M. Dandillot pressed his right wrist against the bridge of his nose, between the eyes, as though to filter the light which he found so tiring in spite of the fact that the shutters were three-quarters closed, and his magnificent hand hung limp alongside his cheek.

'I used to worship the sun,' he said. 'I believed it cured everything. I believed that whatever was wrong with one - pneumonia, an ulcer, a broken leg - one had only to lie in the sun to be cured. Yes, I believed this, from the bottom of my heart: it was pure fetishism. And I taught the same thing to hundreds of youngsters. And now, whenever the sky is the least bit bright it hurts me. I can't bear it any more. If I went out I would stay in the shade. (To think that I may never again see a cloudy sky!) Is there, then, one truth for the living and another for the dying? I was intoxicated by the beauty of the world and its creatures, quite disinterestedly, I may say, for I was never a womanizer. Now every living thing seems to me offensive, and I feel ready to hate them all. I've given up reading the newspapers. What do I care about all that, since I'm leaving it? My wife wants to take me out for a drive in the Bois. Well, I refuse. I don't want to see the beauty of the world any more, since I shall soon be unable to enjoy it. It would hurt me, and I don't want to be hurt.'

'It's strange that your reaction to light should be exactly the opposite to that of the dying Goethe.'

There you go again with your great men,' said M. Dandillot impatiently. 'What do I care about Goethe! Let him die as he wishes: no one can set me an example any more. Goethe also began to study natural history at the age of seventy-five, and one's supposed to think how admirable. Well, I'm with Montaigne: "What a foolish thing is an abecedarian old man!"'

Costals was a little shocked. Out of conformity he had hypnotized himself into believing that Goethe was one of the great beacons of the human spirit, though in his heart of hearts he considered him grossly overrated.

At that moment Solange came into the room, the lady visitor having departed. And Costals experienced the odd sensation of finding the presence of someone he loved importunate.

As M. Dandillot made no move to send his daughter away, Costals took his leave after a few moments. In the hall, he ran into Mme Dandillot:

'I can't understand what's the matter with my husband. He groans when he gets out of bed. He groans when he puts on his trousers. You'd think he was doing it on purpose. And yet he's a man who has had a great deal of character all his life.'

'You can't understand what's the matter with him? The matter, dear lady, is that he's dying.'

'In the first place, thank heaven, it's not at all certain. And even if he does believe his life is in danger, isn't that just the moment for him to show his mettle? When can he show it, if not in times of stress? But do you know what he said to the doctor yesterday? "Don't hurt me, doctor." "But you won't feel a thing ..." "Yes, yes, I know how you doctors talk. Well, I don't want to be hurt, do you hear me! Let others put up with suffering if they like, I won't!" It's rather painful for those who love him to hear him talk like that in front of strangers.'

Costals mumbled something and left. 'So,' he thought, 'he brings me here so that he can unburden himself, and he lies! He'll be dead within a month, and he lies! God, what a bunch!'

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Cabourg

30 June 1927

Read this or not, as you please. This letter, which will be my last, is simply to tell you that I know.

Crushed by you, with a temperature of 101 degrees - the fever of grief, nothing else [Pure invention. She had no fever but, because of her 'emotional upset', a boil on the thigh.] - on the point of becoming seriously ill or going mad, I had to have an immediate change of air and came to stay with a friend in Cabourg. At the Casino here I met a whole group of women writers and poets, and among them Baroness Fléchier.

'Costals?' she said. 'Not only has he never held a woman in his arms, but never in his life has he even desired one! He admitted it to me himself.' [See first volume]

Then she talked about Proust. I plunged into Proust, whom I had never read before. What a revelation! The scales dropped from my eyes. It's all blindingly clear. M. de Charlus is you! ...

It's all there, everything! You love strength - like him. You go for long walks - like him. You don't wear rings - like him. All the details tally, everything speaks against you. The other day in your studio, you wore a shirt with an open collar. And then there was the time you drew my attention to your big, square-toed English shoes such as nobody wears in Paris. You mentioned your delicate feet! In fact it was an affectation of virility, an alibi.

And the contradictions in your attitude towards me! The same 'inconsistency' we find in M. de Charlus. And your ups and downs. 'The very ups and downs of his relations with me,' as Proust writes of Charlus.

You said to me in the avenue Marceau: 'See how much I trust you. I talk to you as I would to a man.' You bet!

And that 'delicacy of feeling that men so rarely show'. One can deny you all sorts of things, but never delicacy of feeling.

Again, you once said to me that young men were fools. Charlus says it too. 'What impresses us about this man's (Charlus') face is a certain touching delicacy, a certain grace, an unaffected friendliness....' Just as I used to say to everyone about you: 'He's so natural and friendly.' Fool that I was! It's absolutely frightful to be plunged into this underworld. It has changed my whole vision of the world.

And what was it you said about your character Christine in Fragility? 'I transformed myself into Christine.' Those half-admissions, which Proust also draws attention to! You reminded me of Flaubert's remark: 'Madame Bovary is me.' But Flaubert was obviously a pansy: he never married, there was only one woman in his life, and above all there's that phrase in Salammbô about certain Carthaginian troops whose 'friendships' made them more courageous, so it seems. (At that rate, I'd rather have an army of cowards.)

And your complete lack of jealousy, which you have often spoken to me about and which you describe as 'an almost sublime common sense'. That cannot be called manly. Jealousy is one of the basic characteristics of the male.

Now I understand why you did not find me more desirable. And to think of the tortures I went through, the time I spent staring at myself in the mirror! Now I understand why you did not need me. Of course, you were half woman yourself!

You, Costals, possessed but not possessing! Dominated but not dominating! Seeking in love the same self-abasement that we women seek. The very thought of it sickens me. You have befouled the face of the earth for me, after having filled it with radiance.

Since I knew nothing about this form of debauchery, and the ladies in the Casino knew nothing about it either, judging by the questions they asked one another, I overcame my nausea and consulted a medical dictionary (Labarthe's) which I found in my friend's library. I discovered that members of this infamous sect 'paint their faces'. And I've been racking my brain trying to remember whether that fresh complexion of yours … And the thought that you might be strolling along the boulevards with 'a handkerchief, a flower or some needlework' in your hand, as Labarthe puts it … And to think that I had my copy of Fragility bound in green morocco, now that I know that green is the favourite colour, the symbol by which these creatures recognize each other! Oh no! it's too frightful! It's stifling me, it's killing me …

I have shut the dictionary, and I won't bother with any more documentary evidence. Even if these descriptions are a bit fanciful, they are quite enough for me and I shall stop there. You may well say that women refuse to face reality, that they are always burying their heads in the sand, etc. Well, have it your own way, but for me it's all very simple: there are a certain number of horrible things in the world which I prefer not to know about. My dignity as a woman, and eventually as a wife and mother, forbids it: I should be sullied forever. Let the world do as it likes - I personally have the right to ignore as much of it as I please.

For five years now you have prevented me from marrying. Because of you my youth has been wasted - in fact my whole life has been wasted, for youth is all that counts in a woman's life. And wasted for whom? For the wretched creature you are! Can you imagine the tragedy of a woman who has made one of these people the very incarnation of manhood, and who suddenly, one day, has this revelation? And you haven't even the merit of being original, for there are heaps and heaps of them, and you're nothing but a pathetic snob, a slave of decadentism and putrefaction, a mere hanger-on of the Gides and the Prousts, those imbeciles, rotten to the core with intellectualism, sterility, aestheticism, instead of honestly fulfilling their duty as men, men who are useful to others and to their country … And not only did I love that, but I also loved its work! And since your whole attitude both towards me and towards society is totally insincere, your work must be the same. I can no longer believe a single word you have written. Your work is mere empty rhetoric, a monument of bad literature. If there were a spark of honesty left in you, you would break your pen in pieces. The only thing left for you to do is to creep into your hole in silence, pursued by the jeers of normal men and healthy women.

The love I had for you, I have given to another. You have no right to it, for one does not accept a love of which one knows oneself to be unworthy, one has no right to cultivate the friendship of a pure and chaste young woman when elsewhere. ... My letters were addressed to a semblance of a person. I demand that you return them to me: they have fallen into your hands by mistake. And I am ashamed of them. What I loved was the man behind your work, the man of your false creation. It is as if I had given myself in the dark to someone I thought I knew, and at dawn discovered that I had been caressing some nameless creature, some half-man, some hideous hermaphrodite.... Are you aware that this kind of horror could lead one to suicide? Are you aware of that?

But in this tragedy of mine, I have one consolation. The thought of what I have escaped. When I think, when I think that I might have been touched by you! Whereas now I could not bear you to touch my hand, even with gloves on. Yes, to think what I have escaped!

I despise you.

Wednesday

I don't want you to take me for a dupe, but nor do I want you to think me cruel. I want you to read what I wrote to you yesterday, but I don't want it to be your last impression of me.

I am writing to you with infinite sadness. But it is not for myself that I feel sad, today, it is for you. Ah! times have changed indeed! You have pitied me enough, now it is my turn to pity you. You loved me, let us say, like a sister; I feel today that I might come to love you with the compassion and forgiveness of a mother, and that makes me more serene.

Yes, how sad it must be to be a monster! It makes one's heart bleed. I beg you to try and extricate yourself if there is still time. You are unhappy, and no doubt it was because you were unhappy that you took refuge in these refinements of vice. And now you are doubly unhappy; though perhaps you are not entirely guilty. I implore you, in the name of all that is sacred in the world, in the name of our memories (for you did love me, after all; only you could not, for obvious reasons, go all the way, could you?), abandon the path you are on. If ever my letters meant anything to you, if ever they helped you, made you ponder, please consider this one seriously: it is a solemn adjuration. Drag yourself up from this Abyss. Get back to the world of real humanity. Become a man again!

If only for the sake of your talent as a writer. To think that you have never held a woman in your arms! How can you not feel that you are incomplete, that your whole outlook on the world is falsified thereby, and your art so much the poorer?

When one is ill, one looks after oneself. But one must have the will to be cured. You must acquire that will.

This very morning, I had a talk with one of the doctors here. He told me there were various kinds of treatment, both physical and moral, for gentlemen of the Charlus type. I enclose herewith the names of some Parisian psychiatrists who have apparently effected such cures. Put yourself in the hands of one of them. But first and foremost say to yourself, and repeat it, sometimes even aloud, after taking a slow, deep breath: 'I want to become a man.'

These recent events, though they have shattered me, have brought me back to religion. God at least does not let one down. You know that I had more or less given up practising. But for the past five days, I have started going to church again daily. I no longer say, as in the past: 'O God, make me happy.' Now I pray for you. And I shall continue to pray for you until you are saved.

Farewell. I forgive you. Believe in my immense pity.

A.H.

to Armand Pailhès

Toulouse

Pierre Costals

Paris

My dear Pailhès,

Epigraph to this letter; the words of the Scripture: 'A woman's love is more to be feared than a man's hatred.'

Object of this letter: A man's rage finds vent in violence. A woman's rage finds vent in stupidity. It is this second point we shall now demonstrate.

I am sending you, duly 'registered', [A pun in the original: recommander = 'to register' (a letter) and to recommend' (Translator's note).] a document which seems to me quite remarkable. You can return it to me when I have the pleasure of seeing you in Toulouse ten days from now.

A woman rejected because she is not attractive enough welcomes with transports of delight an absurd allegation by an old literary crone about the man who has 'insulted' her. The allegation justifies her in her own eyes by convincing her that it was not because of her looks that she was rebuffed, and at the same time avenges her by showing her 'insulter' in an 'infamous' light. In other words, she is shown the portrait of a person unknown, who in no wise resembles the insulter, except, shall we say, that they both have two eyes, one nose, etc., perhaps even the same colour of hair. Blinded by her passion, she recognizes the portrait as that of her insulter; if she were before a judge, she would take an oath on it. But it is not enough for her to execrate him; she has been pitied, so she must pity in her turn: her scorn is transmuted into pity. And finally, since in spite of all this she still loves, and since reality, by deceiving her hopes, has thrown her back into darkness, she begins to pray for her insulter, and is thus enabled to crown her triumph by congratulating herself on her magnanimity, and perhaps to pursue her relations with the insulter, without damaging her self-respect, by means of biweekly letters twelve pages long in which she will continue to talk to him about himself under cover of the supreme Being. For, on the labels of cages in zoos, the males are indicated by an arrow, which means that they pierce the hearts of women, and the females are indicated by a cross, which means that they take refuge in the Crucifix.

The case of Andrée is all the more extraordinary for the fact that Andrée is a very intelligent woman - really somebody.

You know my ideas about the automatism of female reactions. All the reactions you will find here have long been classified and described. The reaction which causes a rejected woman to accuse her 'insulter' of being a M. de Charlus is No 174. The reaction whereby an unhappy woman tries to convince the man she loves that he is unhappy too is No 227a. The reaction whereby a desperate woman turns to Christianity is No 89. The reaction whereby a desperate woman pretends she is ill in a final attempt to arouse in her lover that 'pity for women' which they long for and disapprove of at the same time is No 214. This last, it must be admitted, is no more than adumbrated in the case of Andrée. And it must also be admitted that one of the most typical reactions. No 175, whereby a rejected woman accuses her 'insulter' of sexual impotence, has not yet manifested itself here. In spite of this lacuna, there is in Andrée's graph something so classical and so pure, in a word, so perfect - in its vulgarity - that the mind derives from it an equally perfect satisfaction, a satisfaction as delicious as it is possible for any sensation to be: the sort of satisfaction astronomers must feel when they contemplate the acrobatics of the stars. I can also see myself as the chemist who, having put two solutions in a test-tube, watches the vicissitudes of the combination; knows what the final result will be, though the layman does not, and knows that it will be very unexpected for the layman; and at last sees these elements assume precisely the form, the colour and the density which nature intended. But the most splendid thing of all is that the curve of Andrée's progress, classical though it is, is at the same time absurd. There is in it, at one and the same time, something both baffling and foreseeable. And in this it is the quintessence of nature itself. Andrée is not afraid to write that the fact of having recognized me in M. de Charlus has 'transformed her vision of the universe.' I daresay my own vision of the universe, if I had one, would be transformed for less.... To remain in the same key, and since nothing less than the universe is in question, I may say that the Cabourg letter inclines me to believe that a celestial economy really exists, - which up to now, pace the priests and pace Voltaire, I had been rather inclined to doubt.

All this might also provoke a few reflections on the lack of psychological understanding in women, which I have always found rather striking. Most of them are quite out of touch with reality. If one cared to go back over the whole of Andrée's behaviour one would see that time after time she makes the grossest blunders, with a regularity that is as startling as it is baffling. She believes she's pretty, she believes I love her, she believes I have no children, she believes I'm M. de Charlus, she believes I'm unhappy, etc. You'd think it was something to do with a bet. And I repeat, Andrée is a woman of almost exceptional intelligence. You will say, perhaps: 'It isn't women who lack perception, it's women in love.' But since they're always in love!

Mistaken about what men are and what they think, women are also mistaken about the way to go about winning them. A woman maddens you by coming into your room while you are working, or by giving you little presents, or badgering you too often, or bringing along her friends, who are not yours. You are on good enough terms with her to speak out frankly. Well, she stops for a while, and then starts again. A woman delights you by her lack of affectation. You tell her so again and again and you castigate all affected women. Well, sooner or later she herself begins to get coquettish and indulge in little wiles. All women without exception spoil their chances with you by their inexhaustible demands for money, and the time comes when the pleasure you derived from them has been poisoned at the source; and so you break with them. Demanding nothing, they would have had everything, one would have been so touched. But no, they can't help it: you might almost think there was something that forced them to be so clumsy.

And just as women deceive themselves about their men, they deceive themselves about their children (girls or boys, though much more so with boys, of course). That 'maternal instinct' we hear so much about is nothing but a fraud. No mother ever knows what goes on in the mind of her child, nor what ought to be done for it. I could write a book on the subject, composed entirely of 'true stories', a few of which were provided by my own mother, for there are exceptions to everything. Any man who dares to look life in the face, whether he be a moralist, a doctor, a teacher (religious or lay), or a psychiatrist, will tell you so. But they will only tell you privately. They will never say so in front of a woman, or in public. They would never print it either, being far too frightened of public opinion which is created by women. Even the great Tolstoy himself said to Gorki: 'When my body is halfway into the grave, I shall say what I really think about women, and quickly slam down the tombstone over my head!' To my knowledge, Herbert Spencer alone had the courage to write: 'A mother's intervention is often more harmful than her complete abstention would have been.'

And grown-up sons, too, are well aware of their mothers' delusions about them, their profound lack of understanding. But they too will never say so; they will hardly admit it to themselves. They are sorry for their mothers: always this pity for women.

As for me, I have a son, and he is what I love most in the whole world. That is why I was determined to protect him from motherhood. I arranged that his mother should have absolutely no rights over him. And I put him in charge of a woman who is not his mother; he stands a better chance that way. As you know, the 'maternal instinct' of cats does not always prevent them from devouring their young. There's a terrifying symbol there for you: I may well have preserved my son from being eaten up.

Such, dear friend, are my reactions to Andrée's little effort, on the purely general plane. On the personal plane, I find it almost unbearably funny. I almost feel inspired to do a burlesque commentary on the whole thing. For instance: Andrée says that in loving me she took me for someone else. But that's quite commonplace: when you kiss a cat, you think you've kissed a cat; well, if you look closer, you find you've kissed a flea. And so on … This kind of thing doesn't get one very far, but I feel madly inclined to go on: the absurdity of it all is intoxicating.

I never had much faith in Andrée's friendship for me, because I knew she was in love with me. I pretended to believe in her friendship, in the same way that, as a writer, I pretend to believe in the demonstrations of friendship of some of my confrères, even though I know they hate me like poison. And now, how am I to behave towards her? I might have been able to put up with her insults: there is something in me that rather enjoys being insulted, ['My self-esteem has always increased in direct proportion to the damage I was doing to my reputation.' - Saint-Simon] like that famous shark Alain Gerbault writes about, which, while being eaten up by all sorts of other fishes, 'seemed not in the least to resent being torn to pieces'. What I cannot stand is her stupidity. I love and venerate, in a truly religious spirit, stupidity in pretty women, so long as it is sweet and passive. But the braying stupidity of an ugly woman, no thanks. (Incidentally, have you noticed how her stupidity, born of her anger, has affected her style - 'decadentism', a capital A for 'abyss', etc. - she who nearly always wrote so naturally and powerfully? And the intoxication with which she writes the word 'pansy'! It's obvious that she learnt it only yesterday, and wants to show how up-to-date she is. Just as Brunet, at the age of four, when one taught him a new word that caught his fancy, would go round bawling it out for a whole afternoon.) Now it's my turn to write Andrée a similar letter, fifteen pages long, in which I shall tell her exactly what I've thought of her from the beginning.

But it isn't only stupidity. If I were eighteen and Andrée the first woman I'd come across, I might have said to myself: 'This is what love must be like. It's bound automatically to turn into something squalid. It's the nature of things.' But I can't think that any longer: I've seen so many women and girls who, disappointed, abandoned, even betrayed, have managed to retain their dignity (not to mention their critical faculties) and have gone on wishing their tormentors well.

So, no forgiveness. And besides, I've had enough of forgiving all the time. A fifteen-page letter.

This episode prompts three further observations.

The first is that I have never been insulted by a pretty woman; always by ugly ones. When some unknown woman writes me an insulting letter, I know she is ugly.

The second is that the sublime Andrée seems cut out to be a literary critic, by which I mean a Parisian literary critic, vintage 1927. The way in which, in identifying me with Charlus, she 'proves' that an object which is black, as black as ink, is white, as white as chalk, shows how well she is qualified for such a role. She would put her pen to delightful articles in which she would demonstrate how some purely lyrical novel was in fact a work of realism, or how some obviously euphoric writer was really a manic-depressive; she would show how Morand is a Baudelairean, Giraudoux a proletarian writer, etc. And she would soon be widely esteemed, since the important thing for a critic (I mean a critic in Paris in 1927) is not to write the truth but to write something that has not been written before; not to possess a sound judgement, but simply to concoct pieces which will be 'taken up' in other journals.

And thirdly. You know how fond I am of secrecy, and of covering up my tracks. The Arabs, who are experts in this form of sport, maintain that the lion obliterates his with his tail; and it is said that one of their sultans had his horse shod back to front. 'Hide your life as the cat hides its excrement,' says the Egyptian proverb. Let us be clear about this: the secrecy I like is not the kind of secrecy practised by the majority of people, but the kind that deepens the more one confesses and shows off. Next to the 'aristocratic' pleasure of displeasing, of which, God knows, I have amply availed myself, there is the pleasure of being taken for something one is not, provided that it is a little to one's discredit. I do not know whether this pleasure can be called aristocratic, but it titillates me. Well, the maenad of Saint-Léonard has given me an idea: I would not swear that some day or other I might not include a Charlus in my collection of masks. Nothing could be simpler: I would merely have to start abusing women from the intellectual point of view, and the public is so obtuse - and moreover so ignorant of my carefully concealed liaisons - that it will inevitably deduce that I despise them from the carnal point of view. And then ... then my horizons broaden. Can you understand how? Can't you see how much less distrust I shall arouse in parents, how much easier my parthenomachy will become, if I am classified as 'a gentleman who does not care for women'? Indeed, Andrée may well have injected a new dose of happiness into my life. This woman I rejected may well be worth twenty to me. God grant that she may hear of it some day!

I conclude, my dear Pailhès, by sending you my warmest greetings, and a quotation from Juvenal: 'A woman's resentment is implacable when humiliation spurs on her hatred.'

C.

All the same!

For fifteen years, to have been transfused with the power of women as an organ is with air, and to have reverberated with it; one's travels, one's comings and goings, one's disappearances, one's long 'literary silences', everything that appeared inexplicable in one's life, all that to have had no other cause but the erratic race of women; to have spewed forth the world (how often!) in everything that was not love; to have sacrificed everything but one's art to one's private life, and that private life to have been exclusively devoted to love; to have suffered, more often than not, only from the suffering one was forced to inflict on women, or rather on young girls, for every adventure with a young girl that does not end in marriage is doomed to end in suffering and unhappiness; to have had one's whole life constricted, weakened, slowed down by a constant preoccupation with not hurting them; to be unable to read the words 'little girl ' without feeling in one's throat the first spasms of tears; to be unable to hear a girl admit to having failed her bachot without longing to worship her; to be unable to see a spelling mistake in a letter from an unknown girl without kissing it - and then to be taken for a M. de Charlus by an intelligent, cultured, perceptive woman who has the whole of one's work at her finger-tips. Mind you, it is not the Charlus thing that frightens me. 'What we call unnatural is merely unusual' (Montaigne). The 'unnatural' is nature itself, as a torpedo-boat destroyer is no more and no less than a torpedo-boat. The silly woman talks of my 'Abyss'; but our abysses are elsewhere. No, what frightens me is the darkness that divides one soul from another. In spite of all appearances, she has never understood me in the least, since she could be so utterly mistaken about me. And I haven't understood her in the least, since never, never, would I have believed her capable of being so mistaken. Baudelaire was right: there's nothing that is not based on misunderstanding. I knew it, but how one forgets, or rather how the mind forgets! Forgetting is so essential to it that the mind might well say: I forget, therefore I am.

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

(Please forward)

Pierre Costals

Paris

3 July, 1927

Well, dear Mademoiselle, that was quite a letter you sent me! But what of it! My gratitude to you still has the upper hand: a man who professes to study the human heart cannot but rejoice at not having missed that. For five years you have given me your friendship. You are giving to me still by withdrawing it.

I think we have nothing more to say to each other for the time being. But I know you: doubtless you will come back to me one day. And I know myself too: doubtless I shall welcome you as if nothing had happened. However, let us not rush things. You must need a breather.

Please rest assured of my warmest regard. I follow your various moods with interest.

C.

p.s. I am sending you by the same post the book on Cosima Wagner which you told me you wanted to read in one of your letters last winter and which I've just discovered by chance on a second-hand bookstall.

to M. Pierre Costals

Paris

Madame Blancmesnil

Avranches (Manche)

2 July 1927

My name will mean nothing to you, but the name Thérèse Pantevin possibly may.

Do you remember these words: 'Should I ignore those cries? I haven't the heart to.... Perhaps there are forces in you that might be consecrated.... ' And then: 'On Saturday next at 6 p.m. I shall have pity on you.' Then a month's silence, which you probably did not even notice: what did Thérèse Pantevin matter to you? For you this correspondence was merely a game. But what you must know is the result of your little game, and the reason for this silence: three weeks ago my unfortunate cousin was taken into the lunatic asylum at Avranches. Will she ever come out again?

Thérèse Pantevin, the daughter of well-to-do farmers, full of bestial pride ever since her childhood, thought herself a genius because of her teaching certificate. I too have my teaching certificate. Do not therefore imagine I am envious. Envious of a poor madwoman! Lazy, scornful of manual work, bigoted, full of absurd intellectual pretensions - how she despised us! Shutting herself up with her repressions in her farm at La Paluelle; and then discovering the works of Costals. Costals, the one and only man capable of understanding her! She breaks with her friends, with her dearest pupils, everything, in order to read you and meditate on your work for days on end in her room, poring over all the photographs of you which she had cut out of the newspapers, and which were found on her. ... Finally she writes to you....

And you who, even though you are young and know nothing about life, in spite of all your pretensions (I have only read one of your books, but that was enough to make me detest you), you, who cannot after all have been so blind as not to guess my cousin's mental state from her letters, instead of throwing these letters into the waste-paper basket, you answer them, you add fuel to the fire. Vanity or sadism - what other motive could have prompted you? You were safe, you knew perfectly well that the little peasant-girl with her hair pulled back from her temples (she had sent you a photograph) would never come up from the depths of the country to pester you in your marble halls and that in any case, even if she had the impertinence to do so, you would have had her thrown out by your flunkeys.

In April, she leaves home to catch a train to Paris to see you. Her mother stops her in time and locks her up. In May she escapes again: we have to have her arrested at Vire by the gendarmerie. She flung herself on her knees in front of them and said: 'Let me see him for just five minutes and then you can arrest me!' They were obliged to keep her in prison for the night until we came to fetch her. Then, in June, she has a fit of hysteria.... That, Monsieur Costals, is what you have done.

And then there is the poor, wretched mother who has had to sell her farm to pay for her daughter's keep and who, at the age of sixty and more, has undertaken to read all the books of Pierre Costals in order to find out what sort of man is responsible for the ruin of her daughter and herself.

And now, Mr Great Writer (!), now that I have forced you into an awareness of your responsibility in all this, what do you propose to do about it? In case there is a shred of humanity left in you, which I doubt, I should like to point out that your victim's boarding fees at the asylum are 15,000 francs a year. If you should feel it your duty to contribute towards them, you could deal directly with me. I would hand over whatever you sent me to Mme Pantevin, who is hardly capable of dealing with such matters herself. If, on the other hand, you choose not to reply, we have your letters to Thérèse Pantevin and we shall know what steps to take.

Antoinette Blancmesnil

Written by Costals on a blank page of this letter:

'For you this correspondence was merely a game.' Played with Andrée, yes, sometimes. With Th. Pantevin, never. The opposite of a game. Put her on her guard against confusing the sacred and the profane. Snubbed her so that she would take against me. Urged her, not to enter a convent, which would have been presumptuous of me, but to go and see a priest who might help her to discover herself. Tried to give her the impression that she was a real person (which indeed she was). Simply and solely pity. Pity all along the line, without an atom of malevolence. Pity, sympathy, understanding and respect.

Imprudence? Agreed. But every contact with another human being is imprudence.

The imprudence of generosity - that's more like it. Any action undertaken out of pure generosity always turns back upon its author as automatically as a boomerang returns to the man who threw it. Without exception. Anyone subject to generous impulses can, as a matter of course, and in advance, be classified as a victim.

This being so, the tragedy is not that the Pantevin affair should have earned me such a letter: that was but the logical consequence of the premises. The drama, the tragedy, is that Thérèse Pantevin is very probably not mad at all. She has been put away at twenty-five because she was in touch with the higher regions of the spirit: being different, she was envied, that is to say hated. Thérèse Pantevin has been put away by the people she lived among for having been superior to them.

And what do I care even if she was mad, seeing she was suffering!

If I believed in God, I would pray for her.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

8 July 1927

Dear Costals,

I no longer know where I am with you, and I no longer know what you are, and I am writing to tell you so, although I am well aware how much I must lower myself in your eyes with these eternal 'last letters'. As if it wasn't enough to be crushed by you in Paris, I had to go through it again with that revelation in Cabourg. And now, this: in my indignation I wrote to several acquaintances in Paris, people in the know. I asked them why they had never warned me about you, and they wrote back calling Baroness Fléchier a lunatic and telling me that 'nothing could be more grotesque than to believe such nonsense'. So now I no longer know what to think. There are still moments when I believe that the woman was telling the truth, but they may simply be the moments when my suffering is too great. At other times I doubt. I suppose this uncertainty must be pleasing to one who once wrote to me that he liked nothing better than 'the fringe of uncertainty where one thing merges into another.'

However, something new has happened to sustain me. I am no longer the thirty-year-old spinster whom no man had ever taken in his arms, to whom no man had ever said: 'My little one.' Now I too have my joys, [Pure invention. This 'man' who was supposed to be part of Andrée's life did not exist (Author's note).] which are just as good as yours, whatever they may be (oh! this frenzy to know what sort of pleasures you enjoy... ). Now I have other friends besides you, and they don't invite me to second-rate restaurants. So you needn't despise me unduly any more. Nevertheless you must know that even if I get married, that night of love I asked from you will always remain a hope for me. My life will never stir again until you yourself make a move. If you are not what I thought you were in Cabourg, if you should realize one day that I mean something to you, that you want me in your life, body and soul, that I am as irreplaceable to you as you are to me, if I should ever seem worth the perturbations and anxieties that love inevitably entails for the man who loves a woman and considers her worth it all, then send for me and I shall be yours, whatever man I may belong to at the time and whatever the ties that bind me to him.

Good-bye. I have loved you very very much, and I love you still. As for you, nothing can alter the fact that you allowed yourself to be loved. I feel that if I heard you being attacked as I did the other night in the Casino at Cabourg, I could not and would not endure it at any cost. However cruelly you have wounded me, there is something between us which can never be lost or destroyed. And then, perhaps my name will live on in the character you will draw from me in that novel you promised me. [Pure invention. Costals never promised her anything of the kind (Author's note).]

A. H.

But to think that some day, perhaps, you will marry! If you were to marry a rich woman, I could at least console myself with the thought that she was giving you something I could never have given you. But if you should marry a woman no richer than I am! It's enough to drive one mad!

This letter remained unanswered.

'There is something divine in serious illnesses.' Saint-Cyran.

Costals received a note from M. Dandillot saying that he would like to see him two days later, at four: 'We shall be alone.' In the same way the daughter had said: 'Do come, we shall be alone.' What it is to belong to a family! Whereas many dying people write in a firmer, better-formed hand than usual, because they make it a point of honour to do so (as a drunk man will try to indulge in the refinements of calligraphy), M. Dandillot's handwriting was falling apart, and meandered all over the place: a corpse of a hand, preceding the other corpse. His letter was written in pencil.

M. Dandillot was now confined to his room. As Costals entered, a male nurse came out - a man with the sort of face one would not care to meet in a dark wood at night. The first thing M. Dandillot said was: 'Isn't there a bit of a sick-room smell in here? I get them to burn aromatic paper, but I don't know whether.... The only real dignity, you see, is health. And God knows I used to be a healthy man. But now!' His voice had become a little shrill, and weak, like the voice of a man who hardly speaks anymore, who no longer has the strength, and who has anyway lost interest in the sounds he emits. His eyes seemed to be veiled by leukoma. He was unshaven, and proceeded to explain why:

'I've done enough for people. Why should I shave for them? Why should I be nice to them? I see now that one should never try to do good to people one doesn't love. Nothing requires more naturalness and spontaneity than doing good. There too I went wrong by forcing myself. And besides, the good we do is poisoned by the fact that we do it the wrong way.'

'One should never try to do good to people one doesn't love,' Costals repeated to himself, thinking of Andrée.

Costals had realized from their first meeting that M. Dandillot was only interested in himself, and he liked him for it. But now that death was drawing near, he saw him shrink even further into himself. He had always thought it natural for old men to be selfish. How the devil could they love the world after having endured it for a life-time?

'My oldest friend has just left,' M. Dandillot said, unconsciously picking up Costals' train of thought. 'We've been cronies for fifty years. Do you know what we talked about? For a quarter of an hour he described his plans for a trip to Egypt, India and Ceylon, going into ecstasies about all the wonderful things he'd see. He spent the next quarter of an hour asking me for letters of introduction for his son. And for the last five minutes - the last five minutes of our friendship, since I shall be dead by the time he returns from his trip - he scolded me very severely for living in a room with the shutters closed. That's what a man says to the friend of half a century who is on the point of death.'

'It's simply lack of imagination.'

In a dense cone of sound, the piercing cries of the swallows came surging in from the trees in the avenue.

'And the veronal?'

'Always ready.'

'You'll never take it. We once had an old cat at home, who developed an incurable sore by scratching himself. So we had him put to sleep. Then my mother felt remorseful. "Even with his sore he might still have enjoyed a few happy hours." When you're on the point of swallowing your veronal, you'll say to yourself: "Perhaps I might still enjoy a few happy hours".'

'I haven't taken the poison yet because the pain isn't bad enough. What I feel most of all is tired. Tired! And do you know what makes me so tired? It's having done too much good all my life, having obliged too many people. I was destroying my correspondence the other day. And do you know, I sometimes went through ten or fifteen letters in succession and every one of them was a request for some favour or other or to thank me for a favour I had done. And if you allow that only one person in two ever thanks you for something you've done, it will give you some idea of the number of people I've obliged - and for what, ye gods? Remember this, Monsieur Costals: the people we help never deserve it.'

'I'm lucky enough not to be obliging, so I'm not a good judge. But how a man of your calibre...? Only fools are hurt by ingratitude. Isn't generosity just another way of saying "Return to sender"?'

'What makes me tired is not the ingratitude with which my generosity has been repaid, it's the generosity itself. So futile! Such a waste of time! Ah! Be selfish, Monsieur Costals.'

'But I am.'

'Well then, the world is yours.'

Then M. Dandillot went on to say that he was so tired that he would be glad to die. He expounded, as if it were his own, Mechnikov's theory that a man dies only because he wants to. He proclaimed: 'I hate people who are afraid of death, like the Pascals, etc...." Costals was glad to find him in this frame of mind, since it relieved him of the necessity to put on a solemn face.

'That said, I wonder why I've lived at all,' M. Dandillot concluded with a gloomy stare.

'You've lived because you could not do otherwise,' said Costals impatiently. 'Nearly all men's lives are corrupted by the need to justify their existence. Women are less subject to this infirmity.'

'If I had been happy, I shouldn't feel the need to justify my existence: it would justify itself. But I have not been happy, and I've discovered that that is why I'm dying at sixty-one, instead of seventy or seventy-five as I should logically have done with the principles on which my life has been based. Can you realize what it means to have lived for forty years without ever meeting an intelligent person? And I'm so tired of people who aren't intelligent       '

'It takes a lot of searching to find an intelligent person       '

'And now I meet you, just as I'm about to die!'

'It's better that way. We should never have got on together.'

'Why not?' M. Dandillot asked, shyly.

'Because I should have grown tired of you.'

'How can you say such a thing to me?' M. Dandillot said, flabbergasted.

'Because I know you won't understand.'

'Yes, I'm stupid, aren't I? And boring too.' (A terrifying expression of bitterness spread over his face.) 'Boring ... people have made it plain to me often enough. I should have loved to know whether my wife really thought me an imbecile, or whether she merely pretended to, just to be disagreeable. It's true that I actually do become an imbecile when I'm with her.'

'Haven't you become more intelligent since you've been ill?'

'Yes, I think more.'

'If you'll forgive me, I don't believe you really think. Not real thinking. I myself don't really think. I've often tried to see things clearly, but the time goes by and I still don't understand a thing.'

'You consider that I think like an amateur, isn't that it? My family have always looked on me as an amateur. If I'd had a job of some kind, it would have been different. For ten or twelve years now, they've made a habit of ignoring what I say. It would be impossible to climb back up that kind of slippery slope even if there were still time. Even if the Minister came in person to decorate me in this armchair, they wouldn't understand. Did I show you the letter I wrote to the Minister refusing the Legion of Honour?' (With a scornful emphasis on 'Legion of Honour'.)

'Yes, you did.'

'Forgive me, my memory goes at times,' he said with an absent stare. 'Did I tell you the story about the man who was prepared to sacrifice ten years of his life for the sake of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour?'

Costals shook his head.

'A friend of mine has a brother aged seventy-two. This brother is unhappy because he considers that, according to the promotion schedule, he should have had the Grand Cross a couple of years ago. My friend said to him jokingly one day: "I believe you'd rather die in a year but be promoted at once than live another ten years without it." "Of course I would," the brother answered, without a smile. Isn't life wonderful?'

'It is. I couldn't have done better if I'd created the world myself.'

M. Dandillot smiled, under the impression that Costals was being blasphemous. He did not realize that Costals was in fact very fond of Catholicism. Then he frowned in an effort to re-focus his eyes, which had grown vacant again, and which now wandered from one object to another until they finally came to rest on a drawer of his filing-cabinet.

'Would you be kind enough to get that drawer out? It contains all the correspondence I had with my mother when I was a young man. I should like to give it to you. We'll make a parcel of it. If someone comes in and asks you what it is, you can say that it's press-cuttings about physical culture.'

'Someone!' Costals was still rather surprised at the way M. Dandillot 'annulled' his daughter, as it were, passed her over in silence, or let it be understood that she was one of the people he despised. And just as he had been irritated by Solange's irruption into the room the other day while he was talking to her father, he was now forced to the conclusion that any reference to her would have lowered the tone of their conversation. She seemed so unimportant compared to the kind of preoccupation with which he and M. Dandillot were absorbed; even more, she seemed unimportant compared to M. Dandillot himself.

'This is the second time we've met, and yet you want to give me your mother's letters!'

'Who else can one trust if one doesn't trust strangers?'

'Give them to me some other day.'

'There may not be another day.'

'Of course there will!'

'So you really think I may live a bit longer?' said M. Dandillot, his face brightening, although not so long before he had professed himself happy to die.

M. Dandillot then asked for paper and string and began to parcel up the letters. They kept slipping from his fingers; he could scarcely move without dropping something or other.

'Everything falls ... everything falls …

Things run away from me.

They can sense the corpse.'

And as Costals drew nearer to him to help him with the parcel, he said:

'I should be glad if you would tell me frankly whether my breath smells. I've changed so much since I've been ill. I looked quite a different man six months ago, you know. People thought I was only fifty-three or fifty-four.'

Among the letters, Costals noticed some press-cuttings. They were reports of social functions dating back to 1890, and M. Dandillot's name had been underlined in red pencil. He had repudiated his worldly phase to the extent of ostentatiously selling his evening clothes, and yet his vanity was such that he had kept these pathetic accounts of provincial parties for forty years, simply because his name was printed there. Ah, nature had indeed erred in refusing M. Dandillot the gift of expression. He was born to be a man of letters.

'What is your motive for giving me these letters? Am I to destroy them? Am I to keep them without reading them - in which case, what's the point? Am I to read them, and if so, on what grounds?'

'I'm giving them to the novelist. Read them, and you may find things that are of use to you in your novels.'

'Well, well! what a bunch!' thought Costals once again, rather flabbergasted in spite of himself. 'I knew of course that there were female readers one had never met in one's life who sent one whole notebooks in which they described their conjugal life in the most intimate detail "in case it could be of some use". But a man! And what would the late Mme Dandillot have had to say about it all? Would she have been pleased to know that her letters to her son would eventually be handed over to a stranger - for after all, I am a stranger to him - to be "made use of"? Humanity? A swarm of thoughtless idiots.'

M. Dandillot's hand went up to his forehead.

Those swallows,' he said, 'what a din they make! Swallows, sunlight, everything that's good exhausts me. Just now there was a workman singing on the landing: you may have noticed that the staircase is being painted. You can't imagine how true his voice was, and I thought to myself. "He's in overalls, he doesn't wash, he's coarse and vulgar, and yet his voice is so pure, so tuneful … A voice from another world".'

'And that voice tired you too?'

'No.'

'I had the impression from the way you began that you were about to tell me that the workman's singing tired you like everything else...."

'I'm sorry: I can't remember how I began. These gaps in my memory.'

He began to fiddle with the medicine bottles on the table beside his armchair.

'In fact you don't know whether the workman's song pained you or pleased you, any more than you know whether you really welcome death, as you said earlier on, or whether it horrifies you, as you have also given me to understand. You find it both horrifying and acceptable, simultaneously. Just as the workman's song simultaneously exhausted you and did you good.'

'I don't know,' said M. Dandillot, like a schoolboy who has been asked which way the Gulf Stream flows. Before saying this he had clenched his fists (the nails must have dug into his palms) as though he were making an effort to pull himself together.

'I was wondering why I liked you,' said Costals with a sidelong glance at a pattern on the carpet. 'Now I know. It's because you are like me. And you gave me your mother's letters, because you know that I'm like you: I've only this moment realized it.... O God! give him eternal life!' he added in a passionate murmur, his eyes on the carpet. M. Dandillot gave a start:

'What did you say? So you believe, then! ...'

'Me, believe!' hissed Costals with withering scorn. 'The words just came to my lips. It doesn't mean a thing.'

'The last time, you fortified me in my unbelief. And now you throw everything into doubt again. And at this late stage - when I am so weak! Men, like nations, never stop declining from the moment they start hearing about God. I can't help it if the moral dregs of mankind cannot do without religion. But you, if you have a religion, at least you should be ashamed of it and keep it dark.'

'You are about to die. Could you not concern yourself with something more important than God? You told me just now that you used to be a healthy man. A healthy man doesn't bother about God.'

'But it was you who … You pretend to be an atheist and you think about God all the time.'

'What you say is simply ludicrous. I might have expected some such cheap psychological commonplace from you.'

'How you enjoy insulting me!' said M. Dandillot in a milder voice and with even a friendly gleam in his eyes.

'Yes, I like being rude to you. It's because you often say things which exasperate me. Here you are, on the verge of death, trying to brush up your conception of life, like a schoolboy mugging up his syllabus three days before the exams. But don't worry: even if I enjoy insulting you, it doesn't in the least affect my feeling for you.'

'I'm not worried. You don't worry me at all. Does that surprise you? But why do you despise me?'

'I have a right to, if I despise myself, as I in fact do. Just as I have a right to kill if I don't mind being killed myself.'

'You mustn't despise human nature so. You know it has some admirable virtues.'

'I despise it in its virtues too.'

'Why are you smiling?'

'Because I can see myself in the mirror,' replied Costals, who had just caught his own reflection in the mirror and found it amusing.

'My exams! That's exactly it,' said M. Dandillot, smiling a little in his turn. 'Will I pass or fail my entrance to paradise? Whichever way it goes, eternity is now opening out in front of me. You, I imagine, even if you believed, would distrust an eternity that hadn't been tailor-made for you....'

He was still fingering the bottles and tubes of pills on his table. One of the bottles fell.

'What I distrust above all is eternity as such. If God existed, he would by definition be intelligent, and in that case he would never have created anything permanent.'

'There's a brand-new proof of his non-existence.'

'I always thought "proofs" of God's existence were the last word in human stupidity, but I see that those of his nonexistence can go even further.'

'No matter, I like your proof.'

'And I prefer dry port,' said Costals, hoping that M. Dandillot would offer him a glass. Perspiration was soaking through his shirt and moistening his face as though he had just emerged from a river. Life was oozing from his body, shamelessly, in this liquid form.

'Is it true. Monsieur Costals, is it really true that it was only a figure of speech?'

'I swear it. It would take too long to explain … '

It was on the tip of his tongue to say: 'In three weeks' time you'll be a dead man. Why should I bother to explain anything to you? My passions alone interest me.' He did not say it, but mentally turned away from him as the Greek gods turned away from corpses. And at the same time he had a horrible sensation of loving what was doomed in this man.

'Tell me you believe in nothing,' said M. Dandillot, convulsively seizing him by the hand.

'I believe in nothing. And it's because I believe in nothing that I'm happy.'

'The happiness of the man without God! Thank you,' said M. Dandillot, looking him in the eyes with an unbearable expression of gratitude. 'Oh! those swallows! Why swallows in July? It's in September that they congregate before migrating. But everything's at sixes and sevens, isn't it? You do agree with me, don't you?' he insisted. 'There are no laws governing the world. I find the thought so comforting.'

He was silent. But soon his face, which had relaxed, began to express discomfort. In a few seconds, he was deathly pale, and sweat broke out all over his forehead.

'Are you going to die?' Costals asked softly.

'No, but please ring the bell, quickly! I must go to the lavatory, at once. Yes, I'm subject to these ... Everything's going slack inside me ... Please go away. I'm so sorry. And don't forget the letters … '

Costals rang the bell, then went to the door and called the nurse, and as soon as he arrived, slipped away quietly. 'How much longer will he last?' he thought, feeling as exhausted as the dying man. 'When will I be able to stop suffering on his account, and to tell myself that it really is too late?' In the avenue, he sank on to a bench, and fanned himself with his hat. Then he lit a cigarette. 'He never even offered me a cigarette, on the pretext that he was dying.' Above him, the swallows still clamoured shrilly.

He opened one of the bundles of letters. He read the first ten, skimmed through the next twenty (there were well over a hundred). They were a cross-section of what is supposed to be the most sacred thing in the world: the trusting, tender relationship between a mother and her son. A cross-section of human love, in its purest and least questionable form. And yet the whole thing was triteness itself, not to say inanity; it was nothing, nothing, nothing. There was a drain-hole nearby. Costals tied up the letters and threw down the drain the love between Mme Dandillot and her son.

A week later, on the 15th of July, by means of a telegram from Solange delivered poste restante, Toulouse, Costals learnt of the death of M. Dandillot.

A natural death? Or had he taken the veronal? Presumably a natural death. In any case the question was totally irrelevant. He was dead: that was all there was to it.

For a long time he wandered aimlessly through the streets, holding the telegram in his hand. He felt limp all over; anyone could have jostled him without fear of reprisal. Soon his eyes were wet with tears. 'I bet there isn't a passer-by who doesn't think it's because a woman has let me down.'

He continued his conversation with M. Dandillot: 'Here I am weeping over you who, egotist that you were, probably never shed a tear over anyone. And yet you tried to give me a taste for the future, a future that you knew you would never see.'

In the restaurant, he was unable to eat. He sat there gloomily, unable to hide his grief: 'People must think I've got money troubles.' But he was thankful to be in Toulouse on the day of the funeral. Nothing on earth would have induced him to get mixed up with that sort of mummery.

Back at his hotel, he wanted to write to Solange and her mother. But he found himself writing 'Mons ..." on the envelope. So he took another envelope and wrote on it: 'Monsieur Charles Dandillot' and the address, and he kept this envelope in front of him. The thought that he would never have to write this name again brought the tears back to his eyes. 'Why weep for a man after he is dead? It's during his life, and for his life, that one should weep. It's better to be dead than to be only half-alive.' He remembered the tears he had shed, some years earlier, over the death of a great writer, tears that would subside for an hour and then burst out afresh as if their source had meanwhile been replenished, so much so that eventually his mother had observed testily: 'You didn't cry like that when your father died.' And he savoured to the full the words that now sprang to his lips: 'Never again will I make friends, because one suffers too much when one loses them.' They were the self-same words old ladies use when their little doggies pass away (but then, was M. Dandillot his friend?). He decided to send merely a telegram to Solange and her mother. They did not interest him.

In bed, incapable of sleeping, he jerked his leg up and down over the sheet in an incessant movement, like a dying horse pawing the ground. An immense community of suffering linked him with those dying horses, an immense chain stretching between him and them.

After a while he remembered something that had struck him in a letter from his son. One of Brunet's school-mates had just died of meningitis, and the child wrote: 'I feel awfully sad, but let us hope I shall get over it.' Costals, too, hoped that he would soon get over it. 'It's nature that has wounded me, and it's nature, too, that will heal me through oblivion. The day will come when I shall feel as indifferent to M. Dandillot's death as to the memory of his daughter. Since for the very same reason that I am weeping today I shall have ceased to weep tomorrow, then my weeping today is merely a game.'

At four in the morning Costals woke up and thought: 'A girl living alone with her mother is almost bound to fall. A boy likewise. So powerless is the mother, unless her power is evil. But Solange has already fallen. How stupid; M. Dandillot died for nothing.' He went back to sleep.

to Pierre Costals

Poste restante, Toulouse

Solange Dandillot

Paris

18 July 1927

Why this silence, nothing but that telegram to my mother, did you not promise when you left to write to me within three days? and can you not feel that I am all the time on tenterhooks waiting for the next post?

This intolerable existence has now lasted five days, I beg of you, put an end to it. I implore you to come to my help. I'm at the end of my tether.

Or else it means that you have gone away for good and are going to abandon me. Then you must say so, it's better than not knowing.

All my love.

Your

Rosebourg

I am enclosing a stamped addressed envelope with some paper inside, if you don't feel like writing, you only need to write your name on the paper, nothing more, and I shall know that you are not abandoning me.

My poor papa was buried this morning. What a void it has left for us! I shall write again to tell you how he died. We were so glad that he agreed to see a priest.

Costals' Note-Book

Well! So much for cold little Rosebourg!

With her letter in my hand, I wandered through the crowds, my eyes on the ground and biting my lips with emotion.

So she too, in her turn has begun to howl like a beast, to screech like a cat locked in a cellar. She too has gone mad in her turn. It took Andrée four years to go mad. G. R. one. Undstein six. Claire one. But she has gone mad in two months. That's what comes of being a quiet little thing.

As Andrée's desperation subsides, hers begins to rise. Always these female lamentations, this music of flutes and tears that accompanies me all through my life.

(Her punctuation is inexcusable.)

Like the sorcerer's apprentice, I have unleashed this virgin love, this wild element of which I am no longer the master. At the Opéra-Comique, she was well behind me. Then she gained and gained, moving much faster than I, and caught up with me, and has now overtaken me. I have the feeling, almost, that she is starting again when I've only just arrived.

Is there, perhaps, some slight exaggeration in her letter? As I, at the age of sixteen, used to date my love letters two in the morning when they were written at two in the afternoon. This sudden outburst is so surprising! Had Solange been a little more 'demonstrative' with me, such a suspicion would never occur to me. Perhaps the poor child is paying now for having been so discreet and reserved. How unfair that would be. But what can I do about it?

I accept her love.

I agree to enter into the world of duty.

Sweet duty, since I love her. But duty all the same, and duty has never suited me.

However, I accept this love. With respect. With gravity - that intermittent gravity of mine which, in spite of everything, always comes into play when it is needed, if only at the eleventh hour. With ... the word escapes me; I meant to convey that her love does not displease me, that I do more than accept it: I welcome it.

And now, another matter.

Her indifference to her father's death! That postscript. She thinks of nothing but me, and I feel ashamed for both of us.

And yet she's a nice girl. Of course, fathers are not made to be loved by their children. Such is nature, and Brunet, tomorrow, with all his niceness … But getting used to nature is always a painful process. We always expect it to be the extraordinary that takes us aback, when in fact it is the ordinary that is so terrifying.

Whenever I have visited the recently bereaved widow or orphan of someone I was more or less indifferent to, I have felt that I was more deeply moved - more sincerely moved - than was necessary: I seemed to be teaching them a lesson. It was always they who were the first to change the subject.

to Solange Dandillot

Paris

Pierre Costals

Toulouse

20 July 1927

Peace, my child. Peace, peace, peace everlasting to little girls. Why all this frenzy? An artichoke is always cool and collected.

You ask for reassurance: I give it to you. Peace, my darling little girl. Peace in the present. Peace in the future, as far ahead as it will please you to want me in that future. Total and absolute peace. Gaiety and serenity of mind in trust and in peace.

I have held you against my heart at the peak of my solitude, and you were alone there also, yet protected. You may remain there as long as you wish; I shall not go away from you. I love you, and what is rarer, I love the attachment you have for me. I shall never leave you until you have left me.

I have heard it said that a woman in a situation such as this should be put to the test. I do not put what I love to the test.

I have heard it said that one loses a woman by loving her too much, that an affectation of coldness, from time to time, brings better results. And so on. I shall play no such tricks with you. No tricks at all. I am not one of those people who see love as a battle; it is a notion I abhor. Let love be truly love - that is, let it be peace - or let it not exist at all.

Why this terror of my absence? What more could my presence bring you? You are here, silly one, did you not know? In the daytime, like a little shadow, you glide quietly by my side. At night I go to sleep with you in my arms.

And my body thinks of you too. It wakes in the night and reaches towards you, as a dog stretches out its neck asking for a drink.

I have followed up your preoccupations in the order in which they appear in your letter. I have spoken first of you and me. Now a word about your father.

I do not know whether you loved your father, but I met him twice and loved him. I do not know whether you respected your father, but I met him twice and respected him. I had the impression that he was someone superior to you.

You think of no one but me, and yet you hardly know me. The casual way in which you refer to your father's death in your letter shocked me, although I understand it; exactly that: I understand it and am shocked by it. Granted, you are 'in love'. But I would have you know that love is not an excuse, but an aggravation. Precisely like drunkenness, which the insane justice of men treats as an extenuating circumstance, when it is an aggravating circumstance.

Must I be the one to make you realize what sort of man your father was?

I want you to be the person you ought to be. And you ought not to be altogether the person who wrote that letter.

There now, my little one, I send you my fondest love. Other men, perhaps, will love you more than I do. I love you as much as I can love you. I cannot do more.

C.

The punctuation of your letter is inexcusable.

to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

Paris

Pierre Costals

Toulouse

20 July 1927

Dear Guiguite,

Two whole months since we last met, and since I last wrote to you.

When I discovered the angel you know of, my first reaction was to drop you: one fancy drives out another. I gathered in my scattered affections from right and left in order to concentrate them all upon my angel and to make them into something powerful, like heat concentrated in a burning-glass. This adventure gripped me; I was full of it. In reality I was disregarding not only my own nature, but nature itself. Nature accumulates, and a well-endowed man does so too; in him, as in nature, there is room for everything. My angel is what she is; you are something else, and that is enough to make me want you as well. And so I trust that in your kindness you will see fit to resume your place among my delights.

Of course, as you remember, I had intended that we should eventually get together again. But I thought that would be when I had grown tired of the angel. Quite the contrary, my feeling towards her has never been so serious, so deep, and so strong: affection, supported by the twin pillars of esteem and desire. And it is on the tide of a great uprush of feeling that I have for her at the moment (as a result of a note received from her yesterday) that I am reverting to my natural instinct and the guiding principle in accordance with which I cannot have only one woman in my life.

Besides this, I love intelligence. And that is why, whatever my team of the moment, I must always have a Jewish mistress in the batch. She helps me to put up with the others.

I shall be in Paris on the 25th. Come on Tuesday, the 26th, the feast of St Barnabas, at 8 p.m., to Port-Royal. We'll have dinner, and afterwards you shall see what you shall see.

Goodbye, my dear; I stroke you with my hands, and even send you a kiss, for, as you know, my sensuality is of the tender kind. You, too, are a very sweet girl, and that is why my affection for you is so real. But get ready to make me happy, for I badly want to be. Thinking of you, I feel a spasm of fuliginous joy, comparable to the transports of the mystics or the final spurt of a flame. And lastly, after such a dose of the sublime, I yearn for a love that is not disinterested.

C.

to Mademoiselle du Peyron de Larchant

Cannes

('to be given to Brunet')

Pierre Costals

Toulouse

20 June 1927

My pet,

I do not like doing things behind your back; what's more, I cannot. I must tell you therefore that I wrote to Mlle du P. five days ago asking her whether by any chance you mightn't have done something really naughty, and begging her to tell me the whole truth. She answered that there had been nothing out of the ordinary run of your day-to-day tomfooleries.

Now this is why I wrote to her. Not a day passes without my thinking of you at length, and the time I spend thinking of you is always the best part of the day, however good the rest of it may be. But this time it was a dream. I dreamt that, taking advantage of a moment when the chest of drawers in Mlle du P.'s room was unlocked, you poked inside it and took out some money. And this dream was so striking, so plausible, so coherent from beginning to end, that I could not help wondering whether it might not be a mysterious warning, and so wrote the letter.

This dream made a profound, almost overwhelming impression on me. I felt more forcibly than ever before what a terrible blow it would be for me if I were no longer able to think well of you.

There are several people for whom I feel a certain affection. But this affection, sincere though it is, goes only so far and no further. Like a motor-car which one knows has only so much horse-power in its belly. The affection which I feel for you, on the other hand, knows no obstacles, never reaches a limit. It belongs to another, infinitely higher category.

The affection I feel towards those other people does not preclude my being able to do without them, my being able to tease them, or wound them even, or see them in distress without suffering from it or doing anything to relieve them. The affection I feel for you would preclude all that. Not once in my life has it occurred to me to try to upset you, or to let you be upset when it was in my power to prevent it, or even to keep you waiting for a pleasure which it was possible for me to grant you at once. For this belongs to another, infinitely higher category.

When I emerge from the atmosphere generated by those persons and return to yours, everything, with you, seems so simple. That is because I really love you and nothing is simpler than loving, just as nothing simplifies things more.

Nevertheless, my affection for you is not altogether unassailable. The affection I feel for the various other people is at the mercy of those people themselves, who may cease to deserve it, but also at the mercy of my moods, my lassitude, the exigencies of my work and my need for independence. The affection I feel for you is at the mercy of you alone - by which I mean that in one eventuality only could it weaken: if you became unworthy of it.

It's a sort of miracle: for fourteen years (or let's say eight - since the age 'of reason'), I have never had anything to reproach you with, you have never done anything to offend me. I observe it all, as one observes the perilous feats of an acrobat, thinking: 'If only he can hold on to the end!' And I say to you, with all the force at my command: change, since in nature everything must change, and at your age especially one may change utterly within a fortnight; change, but in your essence remain what you are. Let there be a solid, steadfast nucleus in your nebula (ask Mlle du P. to explain what a nebula is; I would do so myself, only it bores me stiff, and I'd be at a bit of a loss to do so anyway). As you know, I allow you considerable scope for your idiocies, more so than any other father would allow his son; that is because, in my opinion, they do not affect what is really important. But in matters of importance do, I beg you, be on your guard. What I want passionately is to reach the point where it would be inconceivable that I should have any anxiety on your account, as regards your intrinsic quality; a point where you would represent complete calm and complete security to me; and that another living creature besides myself should represent complete calm and complete security to me is the most extraordinary thing I can imagine, since in effect it hardly belongs to this world. But it must be given to me, and by you and you alone: no one else means anything to me. You are the only person who has permanently engaged my affections, which are not easily engaged by other people. In fact, you are the only person I love, since the word can only be applied to that feeling which strictly extends to infinity, from which infinite demands can be made, with no more trouble than there would be in asking for water from the sea. Were the feeling I have for you to collapse or merely to fissure, it would mean the collapse or fissuring of the whole of myself. It would shatter me.

When one truly loves someone, there is no need to tell him so: that can be left to inferior people. And as you know, I never do tell you. But that dream frightened me, and I felt the need to set something of it down for you on paper. Keep it (this may be asking a lot), and let us now move on to the absurd business of your bike... .[ The rest of this letter has no bearing on our story (Author's note).]

to M. Jacques Picard [Costals' manservant.]

chez M. Pierre Costals

avenue Henri-Martin

Paris

Mlle Marcelle Prié

Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs

Paris

20 July 1927

Jacquot,

I am here in the café like last Sunday, alone of course, since you have deserted me. I've been waiting for you for six days. What does your silence mean, love? If you didn't want to see me again, then why did you call me back? So you were just making fun of me, were you? I'm not having you throw me over like this, my boy. We've got to meet again, do you hear. Come on Tuesday at 10 p.m.

Do you know when I first realized you had had enough of me? In the Underground, coming back from the boxing match. I wanted to kiss you and you kept turning your face away. So I said to you: 'Don't you love me any more, then?' 'Yes, but don't kiss me like that in the Underground. It's not right.' 'Are you ashamed?' 'Yes, I'm ashamed.' It was plain enough.

Please be straight with me. I'm the victim of my passion for you. I wanted to love you, to guide you a bit in life. You're twenty and I'm twenty-five, but really the different in our ages is much bigger than that. Oh! I would have been prepared to do without marriage, since you didn't want it, but we could have been together, or just met on Sundays; it would have been better than nothing. Now you don't want it any more. You're free! But you'll regret it later. Your youth would have been all my happiness. But you never understood me, and now it hurts more than ever, my heart bleeds with loneliness and with all this waiting and not being able to make you see. Honestly, Jacques, do come one last time, and then I'll leave you to do exactly as you please.

If you can't come tomorrow, I'll wait for you all week till Sunday.

I kiss those eyes I used to love.

Marcelle

This letter remained unanswered.

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